In the long struggle for standards-based improvement of public schools, local school boards have often been depicted as obstacles to reform or simply as irrelevant. Education advocates have devoted an enormous amount of energy to devising and debating different modes of selection for school boards, such as making them appointive or requiring city- or county-wide electoral districts to reduce conflict.

In an important new paper published by the Progressive Policy Institute, educational innovator Paul Hill of the University of Washington argues that fighting over modes of selection or limiting the right to vote for school board members misses the real problem with school boards: their focus and mission.

As Hill notes, school boards too often distract from education goals through inter-board conflicts, efforts to micromanage schools on behalf of "constituents," and involvement in patronage and contracting. Moroever, the state laws under which boards are organized often keep them from focusing on education improvement by imposing layers of bureaucracy based on earlier waves of attempted reforms.

While many school boards are sincerely committed to putting aside distractions and focusing on school performance, says Hill, there are three "traps" they must avoid. The "trap of accumulated entitlements" keeps them from overcoming demands for job security among employees and demands for funding for existing programs whether they work or not. The "trap of opaqueness" makes it difficult to measure the cost and effectiveness of school programs. And "the trap of false certainty" leads sponsors of particular educational approaches to over-sell their effectiveness and undermine measurement of their results.

Hill calls on states to change the laws governing school boards to make three basic changes in how school boards operate, and how they interact with schools:

1. Place decision-making near the child -- preferably in individual schools -- to account for differences in student populations and school staffing. As Hill puts it: "The school, not the classroom or the district, is the real delivery system for instruction. The school is what ensures, or fails to ensure, that students' learning accumulates over time and that students who are not learning in a particular situation get special attention."
2. Make all school board decisions about schools, and about their own operations, as strictly contingent on performance as possible. Boards should make everything from funding decisions to whether or not to close down a school and open a new one contingent on measuring results, and give schools the freedom to achieve results as they see fit so long as they do. Indeed, says Hill, states should make school boards themselves contingent on performance by creating alternative sources for chartering schools, or even competing school boards.
3. Avoid distractions by limiting school board responsibilities to the goal of ensuring there is a quality public school for every child, and assigning such functions as hiring and allocating funds to individual schools. Hill calls this "re-missioning" school boards, and responds to those who say it would make boards too weak by arguing: "They can use the one power they have -- to authorize a school to receive public funds -- to set basic performance requirements, encourage formation and dissolution of schools, and call attention to schools that consistently under-perform. That is a great deal of power, more than they now exercise. And it is applied to the main business of the public school system, not to patronage and other peripheral issues."

These changes would better empower frontline educators to educate, superintendents to manage, and parents to choose among public schools. Changing the focus and mission of school boards to educational performance will be encouraged as states implement the federal Leave No Child Behind Act that demands better results for disadvantaged kids -- and in fact, it may be the only way standards-and-accountability based public school reform can succeed.