Frederick Hess, National School Boards Association
2002
The prolific Frederick Hess of the University of Virginia authored this 40-page paper for the National School Boards Association. It's full of data drawn from a 2001 survey of school board members in large, medium-sized and small districts. Indeed, one of the report's more useful contributions is its presentation of survey results in those sub-categories. And Hess finds some tantalizing differences between school-board service in large and small districts. Some are predictable, such as greater board-level concern with discipline and violence issues in large school systems, as well as far more of board members' time being consumed by school system business. (Two-thirds of large-district board members say they spend more than 25 hours a month on board business and a quarter say they spend more than 70 hours monthly. In small districts, these figures are minuscule.) Other findings are fairly obvious when you think about them, such as wider availability of various sorts of school choices for students and families in the larger districts. Some findings are disturbing, such as the fact that few board members feel the need of greater training in various aspects of their duties or the issues they're facing. The report contains plenty of demographic information about board members, as well as data on the extent of school boards' fiscal independence-generally quite high-from their municipality. Finally, there's information on board elections-turnout, degree of competitiveness (not very), the role of money in campaigns (greater in the larger districts). Hess doesn't draw any startling conclusions from any of this, but it's a welcome data source for those who would like to know more about how U.S. public schools-at least the traditional, district-based kind-are governed. You can download a PDF copy from http://www.nsba.org/bookreports/SBDawn21stCent.pdf.
