Executive director's note

Answering the assault on public school governance

Recently, I had occasion to take part in a panel discussion at the annual conference of the National Conference of State Legislatures, held in Boston. The unfortunate and provocative title of the panel was “Bye Bye, School Boards?”

The main speakers at the session were Brown University professor Kenneth Wong and a member of the Boston School Committee, Elizabeth Reilinger. The moderator of the panel, a legislator from New Mexico (who shall remain nameless), kicked off the discussion by repeating the old joke about God first creating idiots, liking what He did, and then creating school boards. A great way to start. I, of course, had to correct her; she had attributed the line to Benjamin Franklin when it was, of course, Mark Twain, who coined the adage. I figured that if I’m going to be insulted, the moderator might as well get it right.

Dr. Reilinger was very impressive in relaying the recent history of the challenges in the Boston Public School system. Up until around 1990, the governing board had become quite dysfunctional, having run through five superintendents in five years. After a series of studies and with voter approval, the Boston School Committee became a body appointed by the mayor, after broad consultation with community representatives. They hired a highly regarded superintendent, Tom Paysant, who ran the district with great success for 11 years. Test scores improved (marginally) and the chaos in the district was brought under control. However, they are still facing a persistent achievement gap among minority students.

Professor Wong presented findings from several years of research that he and his colleagues have done, concluding that some form of mayoral takeover of school districts, especially in urban areas, is necessary and desirable. I have tangled with Dr. Wong on a couple of other occasions, most notably when he was brought in as a presenter before the Joint Commission on Governance for the Los Angeles Unified School District, created by the LAUSD Board of Education and the Los Angeles City Council. I’d been a member of that commission, so I was well positioned to question a number of the findings that Dr. Wong presented to the NCSL conference.

The room was packed with legislators from all over the country. At first, I wondered if they were there because they were trying to find justification for ideas on mayoral takeovers that they were considering for themselves. However, as they warmed up to my good-natured ribbing of the moderator for messing up the Twain quote, I realized that they were just as likely to be there trying to find strong arguments against supporting mayoral takeovers in their states. I was warmly applauded for what I thought was a ringing defense of the public schools in this country and the model of governance that has been the hallmark of our work for hundreds of years.

I pointed out that the “rules of engagement” that had been adopted by the Boston School Committee were virtually identical to the Professional Governance Standards used by the California School Boards Association in all of our training programs, variations of which can be found on the Web sites of nearly every state school board association in the country, as well as the National School Boards Association’s. I was able to demonstrate that our emphasis on creating effective “governance teams” with boards and superintendents was the key to successful school districts and that, more and more, scholarly work is demonstrating the connection between governance and student achievement.

But, perhaps more importantly, I was able to make the point that all this talk about the governance of the public schools in this country overlooks the truly hard work of 1) understanding the underlying causes of academic failure and 2) working to compensate for the challenges that are faced by real kids in real schools and communities.

Professor Wong had some statistics that asserted a correlation between some forms of mayoral control of schools and student achievement. But, as I learned in graduate school, correlations do not necessarily translate into causative conclusions.

I told the group that there were plenty of studies showing causative connections to student achievement—both internal and external.

The highest internal causative factor in academic success—bar none—is the impact of a highly qualified teacher in the classroom. However, particularly in a collective bargaining environment, most of the newest, least experienced teachers are to be found in these challenging classrooms, while the senior teachers are more likely to exercise their rights under transfer and seniority to move to a less challenging school. Do all senior teachers do this? Of course not. Is it always about money? No, it is not. But there is enough evidence to suggest that public policy-makers have to continue to concentrate on incentives and other factors to attract the best teachers to the classrooms where the kids need them the most.

So, what is the highest external causative factor? It is—and always has been—poverty. Many public commentators assert that schools fail because it’s OK to blame a cause out of our direct control and that, if we just raised the bar of expectations, these kids would somehow overcome their disadvantages and succeed. That’s total nonsense, of course. Much has to be done in our schools to compensate for the challenges of the outside world that kids bring with them to the schoolhouse door. But if mayors and other municipal leaders really wanted to make an impact on their local schools, they would partner with the schools to develop support systems for kids that help them overcome those challenges. Addressing the issues of poverty and community safety is much harder work than it might appear, and the headlines aren’t very sexy. But there are plenty of examples of where this kind of partnership has worked, the most exciting of which in California can be found in San Francisco.
This line of conversation seemed to resonate with the crowd of legislators in the room. It certainly was borne out by the fact that most of the follow-up questions on these and other matters were mostly directed to me, and were very positive and supportive.

Unfortunately, no legislators from California were in the room to hear it. Several were expected to attend the NCSL conference, but their travel money had been cut off because the state budget had not yet been passed back in Sacramento.

Maybe CSBA should have paid their way. They might have learned something. After all, some of our folks in California sure are enamored of finding new ways of taking over school districts and inventing new ways to “improve” our schools. As Mark Twain also said: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”