The Problem with Local School Control

In her new book – The Age of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby grapples with the many causes of ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism in America.  I intend to write a complete review once i finish the book, but one issue she hits upon is the local control of schools in America. This is goes a long way to explaining why American elementary, middle, and high schools are inferior to schools in Europe:

“In Europe,the subject matter of science and history
lessons taught to children in all publicly supported schools has always
been determined by highly educated employees of central education
ministries. In America the image of an educated elite laying down
national guidelines for schools was and is a bête noire for those who
consider local control of education a right almost as sacred as any of
the rights enumerated in the Constitution.”

The result in America is drastically uneven quality and standards.  Then there are school boards who insist on introducing Creationism and Intelligence Design into the science curriculum. Local control is also financially inefficient: I live in a very poor, rural state – Maine – which has 300 school districts.  This means 300 school boards, three hundred district superintendents with the expensive bureaucracy, 300 school curricula and 300 transportation systems.  We are bankrupting ourselves without providing any discernible benefit to our school children.

Matt Miller discusses the issue in greater detail in his article First Kill All the School Boards.  Miller reminds us that the father of American public education, Horace Mann, was greatly influenced by his observations of the Prussian school system:

As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was
the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him.[…]Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The
results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be
sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the
kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann
returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of
his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and
cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most
important of all the functions of a government to chance.”

Today, German education is the responsibility of the individual states.  Local control is limited to the maintenance of the physical school structure and the employment of janitorial and secretarial staff.  Still, the results of the Pisa rankings have exposed some weaknesses in the German system, and have renewed calls for more federal control on standards and the quality of teaching.

Setting national standards, Miller concludes in his article, does not eliminate the need for local involvement:

Research in 46 countries by Ludger Woessmann of the University of
Munich has shown that setting clear external standards while granting
real discretion to schools in how to meet them is the most effective
way to run a system. We need to give schools one set of national
expectations, free educators and parents to collaborate locally in
whatever ways work, and get everything else out of the way.