Why I'm Giving Up on School Boards - education - Brief Article

School Administrator, Feb, 1998 by Lee M. Silver

So why does America cling to a medieval system of delivering public education? There's the same inertia--some would say arrogance--that has prevented America from joining the rest of the world in using the metric system. And millions of parents think they know how their children should be educated (even though most would never presume to know how their children should be medicated).

What would happen if all local school boards were abolished and, instead, a committee of professional educators were hired at the state level to oversee all districts within that state? The answer is crystal clear. There isn't a single thing school boards do well. On the contrary, what they do more often than not is to get in the way of school district administrators who are usually perfectly able to run the schools by themselves. Without school boards, schools and the children who attend them would be much better off.

Lee Silver is author of Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World, published by Avon Books. He is a professor in the department of molecular biology at Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544-1014.