Ryan Boots, over at Edspresso.com, posted a remarkable article a couple of weeks ago. Going into the history of how school boards came to be, it documents how they were designed from the beginning to override the educational values of the parents and communities that they supposedly were to represent.
"... it really is quite inappropriate to talk about the local school board as a mechanism for local, democratic governance of schools. Their creators intended nothing of the kind, and their very makeup frustrates attempts to make schools more responsive to their communities. Worst of all, school boards by their very nature frustrate the creators' original vision of non-political control of schools."
The whole article, and a follow-up posted later, are well worth every would-be education reformer's attention.
