Dysfunctional School Boards: Part I
If you ask any teacher in Louisiana who has taught more than ten years what’s the worst thing to happen to the teaching profession, most of them will say Act I; the legislation that defines how teacher are evaluated using invalid student test scores and a Utopian scoring rubric that was designed to be a tool for teacher reflection and not a standard to be judged against.
What the general public doesn’t realize is that in addition to demeaning the teaching profession, Act I also stripped locally elected school boards of most of their power. When you understand the motivation behind these significant changes, you get a better understanding of what is happening in education.
State statute defines local school boards as a political subdivision of the State of Louisiana. The members of local school boards are democratically elected by the citizens of the school districts they represent. The changes made by Act I have limited the ability of individual board members, and the board as a whole, to effectively represent their constituents. Act I essentially reduces the local board to three responsibilities. 1.) Appoint a superintendent. 2.) Approve a budget. 3.) Make policy.
I’ll get more into those responsibilities later, but first I want to talk about why certain entities would want the power of boards limited. Education reform groups, which are largely comprised of subsets of business and industry, believe that local school boards are too political and get in the way of policies that support the wants and needs of business and industry. Their belief is that school districts should be run like corporations, or nonprofits that have a hands-off board of directors that hires an executive to run the organization, and that executive should be a business leader who can run the district like a business. In Continue reading: Dysfunctional School Boards: Part I – Educate Louisiana
