By Dave Backer, author of As Public as Possible
Organizers in New York City have been calling for an elected school board, and Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected Mayor, announced his support for the idea during his campaign. Activists say that opening the body up to elections would be more democratic and thus make it more accountable. The right and center are pushing back.
Over the last few years, big cities like Chicago have considered and made the switch from appointed to elected boards. In Montclair, NJ voters overwhelmingly chose to have an elected school board a few years ago. It’s a controversial topic, lots of people have lots of feelings about it—why does it strike such a chord?
Most school boards in the country today are elected, but this hasn’t always been the case. Appointed school boards are a governance strategy that takes education policy power away from groups like teachers unions and facilitates a transition to non-profit and for-profit firms. Mayoral control in the most recent era, starting with Boston in 1992, was part of the larger effort to break up networks of influence that had formed during the 1940-1970 period. Of course, there’s a risk of moneyed interests winning school board elections, but there’s also the possibility of labor fighting back even harder. Democratic socialists were recently elected to school boards in Hamden, Connecticut, for instance, and democratic socialists–not to mention other varieties of leftists–have held school board positions throughout US history.
Over the years, we can see the push-pull of this issue. Mayors were very involved in education in the early 20th century, as the Gilded Age saw wealthy elites wresting power over education away from more community-based and worker-led organizations as industrialization and urbanization took hold.
There’s a simple way to understand this dynamic: there’s a class struggle between capital and labor when it comes to school boards. Whereas elected school boards have been associated with labor (majoritarian, community-oriented, ‘machine politics’), appointed and mayoral-control gets associated with capital (elites, business leaders, philanthropists, ‘reform’).
A report published in 2013, by the Center for American Progress and the Broad Foundation, is a case in point. Here you have arch-neoliberal organizations arguing for mayoral control. It’s conservatives and neoliberals who want to take control of the city’s school governance. Mayors in New Jersey gunning for appointed boards in the 1990s immediately pointed to teachers’ unions having too much influence, for example.
Neoliberal education reformers are on their heels now. After several decades of power, what do they have to show for their efforts in urban education? Confusion, frustration, and corruption. Even if you’re pro-market reform, you’re tired of what’s been happening. The energy is swinging left on this question as we see in Chicago and Montclair, and now New York City.
The thing is, everyone can use a school board election to advance their own goals. If progressives and socialists organized it, the school board could also reflect their tendencies. So, part of making sure that the board doesn’t get captured by conservatives and neoliberals is organizing (which worked in Long Island and Connecticut).
Research indicates that having an elected vs. appointed board of education doesn’t have an impact on educational outcomes. More troublingly, these reviews show there’s no real increase in accountability, either. The data point that does seem to matter is district size. This makes sense: smaller districts mean more accessibility to leadership and fewer students to take care of. As an example, the Twin Cities have four school districts, and it’s one of the most cooperative regions in the country in terms of resources. But that decision should be made by a body elected by the people it’s meant to serve.
What we see from history is that school board elections are better for the diverse working class because it makes decision-makers accountable to constituencies, although what really matters in terms of outcomes is responsiveness and decentralization.
Luckily, New York City’s is a district of districts. The city has upwards of 35 unique school districts, each with its own superintendent and school board equivalent (known as community education councils). The structures for more community control are in place the city, the question is whether Mayor Mamdani’s administration will return power to these communities and open up public education to the public itself.
