How The Power of Local Public Education Officials Effects Outcomes

I hate reading publications where the average number of syllables is over 3, but I managed to make it through.

Reconstructing Local Governance in American Public Education: Politics, Policy, and Process


What do you think about how one's local public school administration fits into this scheme of things?

I have highlighted a few points below.

"The political tradition of local school governance predates the existence of the United States. Yet the most prominent methods for selecting local authorities have evolved considerably from their colonial origins in response to the changing political climate of the nation, constituent demands, and legislative innovation."

"local officials hold significant power that constrains the principal-agent hierarchies forged by vertical divisions in the federal system (Chubb 1985; Peterson, Rabe, and Wong 1986)."

"For those local school districts with recurrent patterns of fiscal, managerial, and academic failure, twenty states transferred governance authority from local school boards to contracted management teams with the legal approval of the chief state school officer and state board of education. On the other hand, thirty-nine states authorized the creation of charter schools with limited bureaucratic constraints and regulatory oversight to introduce market-driven competition as an alternative to traditional public schooling and reshape the political incentives of school board members (Hill, Pierce, and Guthrie 1997)."

The States that started it all:

"The passage of governance reform began with the state takeover of Newark Public Schools in New Jersey and Pike County School District in Kentucky. To fully explain the competitive legal context for different reform strategies, we create two independent models of the diffusion process for state takeover reform and charter school legislation."

Money speaks:

"While the national government may signal preferences to state legislatures using several different mechanisms, the availability of federal funding is among the most influential determinants of policy innovation."

"In 1994, one major goal when national lawmakers reauthorized federal spending was dual endorsement of charter school laws and state takeover as a reform strategy."

States can't borrow as much as the federal government, which means the federal government has expansive borrowing capacity - wow how is that playing out today!?.:

"The annual budgetary process is (sic "in"?)many state legislatures regularly elicits the most divisive confrontations in American government due to the considerable level of state expenditures for social welfare programs and electoral constraints on state revenue collections. Without the expansive borrowing capacity of the federal government, state lawmakers cannot invest their political capital in expensive reform proposals during budgetary years characterized by fiscal insolvency. At the same time, local interests are well-positioned to maintain current governance arrangements when an overall budgetary crisis shifts public attention toward statewide fiscal stability rather than an interconnected network of local governmental activities during the limited duration of state legislative sessions."

"In contrast, we hypothesize the opposite relationship for states’ adoption of charter school laws because policy entrepreneurs have consistently framed the creation of privately-operated charter schools as a market-oriented, efficient policy option in statehouse deliberations(Hassel 1999; Mintrom 2003)."

"First, how do state bureaucratic institutions respond to an unprecedented level of public and private demands from governors, business leaders, constituents, and interest groups without the reinforcement of a competitive electoral process? And, in the broader consideration of state policymaking, when are elected lawmakers willing to challenge the political and economic constraints of divided localism in order to pursue localized governance reform?"

So, what do you think?