The dialectic of school board elections
Organizers in Philadelphia have been exploring if/how to make the city's Board of Education an elected body. Right now, the BOE members are appointed by the mayor. Activists say that opening the body up to elections would be more democratic and thus make the body more accountable. What should we think about this?
Philly's not the only one asking this question. At this moment, big cities like Chicago are considering the switch from appointed to elected boards. In Montclair, NJ voters overwhelmingly chose to have an elected school board this year. (Nashville is actually considering the opposite, switching from elected to appointed.) New Jersey has an interesting history of this dynamic of going back and forth between elected and appointed boards in several cities.
Yanneli Llamas reviews the question in her student thesis focusing on a proposal out of Nevada, pointing to Kenneth Wong's decades-long research focus on mayoral involvement in school governance. Wong has written about the cases of Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC, Boston and Chicago. He gives some important perspective in a 2011 article reflecting on that transition too, which is really interesting for socialists looking at this issue.
Dialected school boards
Appointed school boards are a governance strategy that takes education policy power away from groups like teachers unions and facilities a classic neoliberal 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. Researcher and organizer Pauline Lipman says this is a tactic of accumulation by dispossession.
Going further back in history you can see the push-pull of this issue, Wong shows. Mayors were super involved in education in the early 20th century, which is interesting because the Gilded Age c. 1890 saw wealthy elites wresting power over education away from more community-based and worker-led organizations c. 1870 as industrialization and urbanization took hold.
All this is to say that there's a dialectic in the elected vs. appointed school board question. That dialectic maps pretty well to the class struggle between capital and labor. 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').
Wong's 2013 report, brought to you by the Center and American Progress and the Broad Foundation, is a case in point. Here you have arch-neoliberal organizations arguing for mayoral control. Nashville too. 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. So the class struggle thesis checks out there too (what happened in Trenton and Elizabeth are helpful examples, something I'm looking at more).
Otis Hackney, Philly's Chief Education Officer, is against an elected school board. This raised my eyebrows since I didn't get neolib vibes from him, but I can understand: his position and office were created when Philly's elected school board was dissolved. There'd certainly be changes to the Mayor's Office of Education (MOE) if the switch did happen.
The Hackney exception here is a perfect case of unevenness. The categories of labor/capital and class struggle are abstract and there are no guarantees. You have to look at your terrain to see how things are actually playing out.
It's elected!
Neoliberal education reformers are on their heels. After several decades of hegemony, 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. The energy is swinging left on this question as we see in Chicago and Montclair. The recent Montclair vote is a good case study. In 2009, the elected school board vote lost 57-43. This time it was 2:1 in favor.
Most school boards in the country are elected. We know that mayoral control is generally a capital-friendly policy. Of course there's a risk of capital winning school board elections (and Philly's conservatives are interested in having an elected board too, see below), but there's also the possibility of labor fighting back even harder. Democratic socialists were recently elected to school boards on Long Island and Hamden, Connecticut, and democratic socialists--not to mention other varieties of leftists--have held school board positions throughout history.
This is good, politically at least. So how do we get an elected school board in Philly? And how do we do this to make sure capital doesn't get a leg up? Hackney notes that it requires changing the city charter and state law. That's true. And in each of these cases, we're seeing some odd things.
I've heard rumors that state senator Anthony Hardy Williams is trying to sidle up to the Our City Our Schools coalition on this issue, proposing that he could use his state senate seat to advance legislation to make this policy a reality. He's a charter school supporter and far from championing working class issues. His move is interesting because Paul Prescod--socialist, teacher, and organizer--is challenging him in the next primary cycle a socialist. Word is that Prescod has raised a lot of money, so maybe Williams is scrambling.
But there's another counter-intuitive person support this policy. Conservative city councilman David Oh wants an elected school board, proposing legislation to amend the city charter. One has to wonder why a conservative is interested in this policy. The press release for his legislation notes that the Board can authorize charter schools and set policy. Given that Oh's party and political tendency is in the margins, it's in his interests to create a situation that at least opens the possibility for his own tendency to have more power in the city. Charter schools' star is sinking so maybe he thinks he can help resuscitate it.
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, eg). Politically, I don't see a socialist case against an elected school board. We should support elections. But also we should keep a few things in mind.
Elect, abolish, deconsolidate?
Educationally, the student thesis reviewing the literature found that having an elected vs. appointed board of education doesn't have an impact on educational outcomes. I keep seeing that written in articles about this issue. More troublingly, Yanneli Llamas's review shows there's no real increase in accountability either.
She actually finds that district size correlates better with increases in accountability and outcomes. This makes sense: smaller districts mean more accessibility to leadership and fewer students to take care of. She recommends deconsolidation over elected school boards. In fact, the Twin Cities have four school districts, and it's one of the most cooperative regions in the country in terms of resources.
Given what I've said about the dialectic, I would recommend that socialists favor an elected school board. It's a labor-friendly structure historically. But in these conversations we should say that the purpose of having an elected board should be to abolish the SDP as it is and deconsolidate it into multiple districts. Former Mayor and School Board President Richardson Dilworth proposed this policy and I think we could be aiming towards that to make things actually democratic and change them radically for Philly's parents, students, and education community.