OSU Associate Professor Vladimir Kogan: Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing
A recent article by Associate Professor Kogan is in sync with a bevy of voices challenging the efficacy of democratic control of school districts by elected boards of education. Typically, this is the rhetoric used by advocates of the privatization of the public common school system. Reed Hastings of Netflix has been on a rant against the board of education governance structure of schools for several years. The chorus of the opposition to boards of education seems to be expanding.
In the era when President Reagan’s defective Nation at Risk report was gaining national attention, the book Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools by John Chubbs and Terry Moe became embedded in the discussion of the future of the public common school system. In the book, Chubb and Moe argued that locally-elected boards (democratic control of school districts) often fail to carry out their core missions due to local politics that might be contrary to the needs of students. What they are saying is that federal and state officials, and profiteers are better-suited to determine student needs than locally-elected school board members.
The privatizers first cited the unions as the obstacle for better education; now, they blame boards of education. Their mission is to destroy public education. The pronouncement that boards of education stand in the way of improvement of education is just another tactic in their long-term strategy to eliminate the public common school system.
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