Are School Boards Accountable?
By Bill Carlson
The California School Boards Association's (CSBA) Professional Governance Standards tell us that local school boards are entrusted by their diverse constituents "to uphold the Constitution, protect the public interest in schools and ensure that a high quality education is provided to each student." Most, if not all, of California's public school boards have fallen tragically short of at least two of these three goals during the past decade. But why? Who is accountable? For years I have pondered on multiple theories seeking causes for the chronic academic drain from California's public school classrooms. How did it come about? Where were the safeguards? The time-honored ethical mindsets adhered to by most school boards are among those theories that I question as being possible detriments to public schools. Newly elected school board members are encouraged to attend a basic training session on the Brown Act's Open Meeting Laws. The training, when I attended, also included instruction on proper mindset imperatives that new board members were expected to assimilate and other survival-skill information. I still recall my variance to two of the mindset imperatives. It is possible that either of the following could have facilitated the ten-year delay of badly needed curriculum revisions:
- Give your best arguments for or against any item posted on the board agenda but should the final vote not favor your position, support the majority decision anyway. "An essential quality of a good Board Member is a deep sense of loyalty to associates and to group decisions cooperatively reached." (Board Bylaw 9010)
- Support your administration.
These imperatives seem proper and ethical, and I favor supporting our administrators, especially when they are right. Currently, they are committed to restore research validated curriculum and teaching methods to all K-12 classrooms. But even good administrators can be bamboozled. Over the past decade nearly all public school administrators in California advised their school boards to adopt deeply flawed reading and math programs for students in elementary grades. Apparently without accountability, trusting school boards were misled by ill-advised administrators who had been misled by a risk-taking consortium of California's top educationists. Because of misinformation disseminated down by these risk-takers, inferior, unproven curriculum gained entrance into California's public school classrooms. Because school boards and their administrators trusted the risk-takers, many children suffered severe academic harm. This single poorly researched board decision forever changed the lives and careers of many children. By shutting out "new evidence" and closing debate, trusting board members were denied the benefit of validated, replicable research that would have rapidly condemned the tainted reading and math curriculum that they had approved. But, local boards held tight to their ill-fated decisions and continued to waste millions of tax dollars. Even now, some local classroom teachers, I am told, defiantly use outdated and/or defective curriculum that is no longer board approved. So, have culpable school boards or any major player who guides California's education conglomerate ever been held accountable for the inestimable damages caused by these bad decisions? Probably not. Do school boards now understand the crucial need for high-quality, replicable research to guard against future disasters? Perhaps a few do. Does Yucaipa's board? There's hope! Will the loyalty to group decisions mindset training ever be revised? Who knows. My theory remains intact.
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