Recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of nationally organized school reform interest groups like StudentsFirst. While historically active at the state and federal levels, these organizations are increasingly involving themselves in local school board elections by recruiting candidates, making donations, and offering policy advice. However,…

Findings from a historical case study that analyzed a school board decision making process during a crisis situation are presented in this paper. Criminal allegations made against the superintendent of a midwestern school system in 1984 created a crisis for the board of education. The superintendent of schools was charged with third degree sexual…

To prevent policy-making from being fragmented into a series of ad hoc and disjointed decisions, it is important to be as clear as possible about the policy-making framework within which decision-making is to operate. School boards that aspire toward enhancing their policy-making function are here provided with a basic structure for policy-making.…

The American school board is on trial. The most common accusations are that school boards are irrelevant, unresponsive, provincial, and therefore obsolete. School boards will not meet this challenge if they continue to tolerate certain common obstacles to effective policy-making. New horizons can be reached if boards and their administrators can…

The most important responsibility of every school board is to set goals for the school system. A study of goals should be conducted every few years; the process is continual. It is important that the committee chosen by the board to assist in setting goals be truly representative of the total community. All areas of the curriculum should be…

This paper contains two sections, each with a different author, that address the need to increase the effective role of school boards in public school governance. Section 1, by David K. Wiles, argues that most school boards are becoming increasingly irrelevant in educational policymaking and offers a radical alternative to the present arrangement…

This historiographical case study of the Scottsdale School District in Arizona examined the degree to which school governance was democratic and tested the proposition that policy change at the district level occurs in response to community demands as evidenced by policymakers' Chapter 2 addresses three categories of administrative discipline…

Decision-making in general and policy decisions in particular are the prime responsibility of school boards because policies are control mechanisms by which trustees assert local control. Policy decisions differ from others in their concern with values and purposes and the legitimization of the organization to society at large. Additionally, they…

The question of who develops and adopts the rules and regulations to implement educational policies is at the center of the role controversy between boards of education and superintendents. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the demarcations between policy-making and administrative roles. Certain assumptions about board and superintendent…

The control exerted by boards of education may be described by measuring what is controlled, what types of control are used, and at what level control is exerted. A model designed to measure these factors was tested in a random sample of 21 British Columbia school boards. The major findings revealed that school board decisions tended to…

Considering the issue of whether or not school boards should have separate staffs, three models are presented: a "two-hat" concept of metropolitan governance; a separate staff operating on a needs basis; and, the "federal model" with legislative, judicial, and administrative branches. These models raise two political questions: In routine,…

This paper presents the findings of a single case study of a particular board of education's decision-making process in a crisis situation, and explores interpretation of those findings from two theoretical perspectives. The crisis resulted from the charges against and conviction of the superintendent for a sexual assault on a 17-year-old female…

This paper examines the role of the school board as a player in school "restructuring." Defining restructuring as the transformation of schools into equitable learning environments, this paper examines whether school boards have a leadership role in restructuring. Data were derived from a literature review, a questionnaire of individual board…

Findings of a study that examined the responses of local school board members in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Nebraska to the National Goals for Education (NGE) are presented in this paper. A survey mailed to 718 local school board members in July 1991 obtained 298 responses, a 42 percent response rate. The respondents assigned a higher priority to…

The understanding of the political behavior of school boards can be advanced by conducting factor analysis of the voting records of trustees. While the application of these methods is generally appropriate, differences in subject matter highlight the problem of inferring political theory from numerical data. In this paper, several different…