With prominent critics labeling them irrelevant and big-city mayors looking to take them over, the nation's local school boards have seen better times. But what's really the matter with the nearly 15,000 boards, scholars who met here this month say, is that they are understudied. Though local boards have governed American schools for more than 200 years, researchers know little about how the 95,000 citizens who sit on school boards do their jobs, apart from a brief spurt in the 1960s and 1970s when such studies were more in vogue. Yet, current research gaps notwithstanding, many experts say the job of school boards is being redefined, and weakened, by changes taking place at the national, state, and local levels. Those changes include sweeping federal legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act, the growth in the proportion of school funds coming from state coffers, and the trend toward mayoral takeovers of urban school systems. This article discusses the evidence supporting the idea that school boards do, in fact, matter.