School boards are fighting for their survival. Almost everything that they do is subject to regulations handed down from city councils, state boards of education, legislatures, and courts. As recent mayoral and state takeovers in such cities as Baltimore, Chicago, and New York make abundantly clear, school boards that do not fulfill the expectations of other political players may be stripped of what few independent powers they still retain. Teachers unions exert growing influence over board decision-making processes. And with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government has aggressively inserted itself into matters of local education governance. B esieged is the first full-length volume in many years to systematically examine the politics that surround school boards. A group of highly renowned scholars, relying on both careful case studies and quantitative analyses, examine how school boards fare when they interact with their political superiors, teachers unions, and the public. For the most part, the picture that emerges is sobering: while school boards perform certain administrative functions quite well, the political pressures they face undermine their capacity to institute the wide-ranging school reforms that many voters and local leaders are currently demanding.

A significant factor for many people deciding where to live is the quality of the local school district, with superior schools creating a price premium for housing. The result is a “race to the top,” as all school districts attempt to improve their performance in order to attract homebuyers. Given the importance of school districts to the daily lives of children and families, it is surprising that their evolution has not received much attention. In this provocative book, William Fischel argues that the historical development of school districts reflects Americans’ desire to make their communities attractive to outsiders. The result has been a standardized, interchangeable system of education not overly demanding for either students or teachers, one that involved parents and local voters in its governance and finance. Innovative in its focus on bottom-up processes generated by individual behaviors rather than top-down decisions by bureaucrats, Making the Grade provides a new perspective on education reform that emphasizes how public schools form the basis for the localized social capital in American towns and cities.

Leading international scholars consider changes and developments in school government practice in the United States, Canada, England and Wales, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, France, West Germany, Italy, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Each chapter looks at the introduction or reform of councils at school level designed to secure the involvement in decision-making of parents, teachers, students and the local community. Essential reading for everyone involved in educational administration this informative book will also be of interest to researchers of comparative education, the politics of education and participatory developments in the field.

The governing and financing of public education is everywhere a complex undertaking. The 1960s was for Ontario a vital decade in education, when the structure of local school boards, provincial and federal financing and control, the provision of academic and vocational systems, and the Department of Education itself were all reconsidered and changed to attain greater efficiency and opportunity throughout the province. This is a detailed case study in intergovernmental relations focusing on provincial-local relations in education. It offers a perceptive insight into the nature of the political system in Ontario by presenting a clear and straightforward analysis of the formulation, content, and impact of provincial policy upon the provision of public education by local school boards. The text is divided into five parts. The first part is an analysis of the provincial-local context within which the policies of the provincial government were developed. The second deals with the Ontario Foundation Tax Plan, a programme of grants from the province to the school boards. Part III is an analysis of two policies developed in a federal-provincial context: capital grants for the construction of vocational schools and the Ontario Education Capital Aid Corporation. Part IV examines three policies affecting the structure of educational government in Ontario: the consolidation of school districts in 1965, the reorganization of the Department of Education, and the further consolidation of school districts in 1969 into county units. In knitting together the highlights of the study, Part V pays special attention to the complex but revealing interrelationship between problems, policies, and the intergovernmental political system of Ontario, and shows how problems were resolved, ameliorated, or even exaggerated by the combined effect of the provincial and federal-provincial programmes. The focus then shifts to the years 1969 and 1970 to demonstrate the changed nature of provincial policy emerging from within an apparently changed context of provincial-local relations. Throughout the study the author`s detailed knowledge and thorough understanding of the policies and processes of the educational system are evident. He presents a mine of statistical information combined with a remarkably keen and concise analysis of the administrative process. This study will be of great interest to educators, administrators, and students of intergovernmental relations.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.

Throughout the twentieth century, local control of school districts was one of the most contentious issues in American politics. As state and federal regulation attempted to standardize public schools, conservatives defended local prerogative as a bulwark of democratic values. Yet their commitment to those values was shifting and selective. In The Fight for Local Control, Campbell F. Scribner demonstrates how, in the decades after World War II, suburban communities appropriated legacies of rural education to assert their political autonomy and in the process radically changed educational law. Scribner's account unfolds on the metropolitan fringe, where rapid suburbanization overlapped with the consolidation of thousands of small rural schools. Rural residents initially clashed with their new neighbors, but by the 1960s the groups had rallied to resist government oversight. What began as residual opposition to school consolidation would transform into campaigns against race-based busing, unionized teachers, tax equalization, and secular curriculum. In case after case, suburban conservatives carved out new rights for local autonomy, stifling equal educational opportunity. Yet Scribner also provides insight into why many conservatives have since abandoned localism for policies that stress school choice and federal accountability. In the 1970s, as new battles arose over unions, textbooks, and taxes, districts on the rural-suburban fringe became the first to assert individual choice in the form of school vouchers, religious exemptions, and a marketplace model of education. At the same time, they began to embrace tax limitation and standardized testing, policies that checked educational bureaucracy but bypassed local school boards. The effect, Scribner concludes, has been to reinforce inequalities between districts while weakening participatory government within them, keeping the worst aspects of local control in place while forfeiting its virtues.