The past couple of years have not been kind to our institutions.

Some institutions weathered the strains created by the pandemic better than others. Nevada’s hospitals, for example, have fared reasonably well and have largely avoided the capacity issues that are making headlines in other parts of the country. Conversely, Nevada’s unemployment insurance system famously collapsed under the weight of applicants who filed for assistance during the bleak first few months of the pandemic — this led to recurring death threats and, correspondingly, recurring changes in department leadership.

One institution that fared more poorly than most was Nevada’s system of elected school board trustees.

Even before the pandemic, it was clear to anyone paying attention that placing a bunch of clueless, semi-anonymous amateurs in charge of organizations with multimillion dollar budgets and an ever-expanding mandate to educate, feed, supervise and otherwise care for our children, all while adhering to a sprawling and frequently contradictory framework of state and federal funding and performance mandates, was a recipe for disaster. As I pointed out before the pandemic, Nevada’s school boards were, as often as not, populated with sexual harassers and wannabe mobsters. Those who weren’t obvious reprobates, meanwhile, struggled through a poor understanding of the laws Nevada’s public bodies operate under, frequently at taxpayer expense. The result was a consistently dysfunctional system of governance which did nothing to keep our schools from being among the worst in the nation.

Then came COVID-19, which added mandatory school closures, mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and an increasingly militant public.

Unsurprisingly, the same institutions filled with the same elected officials who couldn’t even competently fire superintendents without stumbling through some sort of bureaucratic slapstick routine found themselves utterly overwhelmed. Many trustees wisely decided the $250 to $750 per month they’re legally entitled to wasn’t worth the hostility and death threats they received once they took office. Others, like Washoe County’s Jacqueline Calvert, simply lost track of whether they still lived in their district or not. Consequently, many of Nevada’s school boards have faced a wave of resignations, vacancies, and outright institutional collapse. Due to Calvert’s resignation, for example, the Washoe County School Board is filling its third vacancy this year. Elko County, meanwhile, is functionally operating without an elected school board at all — five of its seven trustees resigned months ago and the last two board meetings were cancelled because of disorderly conduct and threats of violence.

Even where and when Nevada’s elected school boards are still fully staffed and nominally functional, however, they’re still failing to appropriately govern the institutions they’re responsible for. The Clark County School Board might lead the way in the state by successfully holding regular meetings and retaining its trustees, but it still repeatedly threatens to fire the district’s superintendent, provides employee health benefits through a mismanaged health plan, and governs a school district which is civilly liable for failing to meet federal education disability requirements. The Clark County School District, in other words, is not a well-run school district, and it strains the imagination to think of a way its elected board has somehow helped matters.

It would help if we stopped electing political and institutional amateurs to provide board-level oversight over one of the most important and expensive services our government provides to its citizens. Granted, it admittedly doesn’t take much skill to understand or provide meaningful oversight over what Esmeralda County’s seven teachers are doing in the rural district’s four schools, but, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, Clark County School District employs more than 30,000 full time employees, has a $3.5 billion budget, and serves nearly 330,000 students. That is not an organization any amateur, regardless of how well-meaning they might or might not be, can nor should be expected to provide useful oversight over.

***

Why do Nevadans elect school board trustees, anyway?

The short answer is the vast majority of Americans generally elect school board trustees, though there are a few notable exceptions. Turning Points: A History of American School Governance, an essay published within the Brookings Institution Press’ Who’s in Charge Here?: The Tangled Web of School Governance and Policy and authored by Michael W. Kirst, the longest serving president of California’s State Board of Education, helpfully explains how that happened:

Although few Americans realize it, the nation has long maintained one government for school — composed mainly of local and state boards of education and superintendents — and another for everything else. While the education government was strengthened particularly by school reforms adopted at the turn of the twentieth century, the two-government tradition dates back to 1826, when Massachusetts created a separate school committee divorced from the general government, a practice that spread nationally.

Originally, these local boards of education oversaw small, geographically limited districts that served a limited number of students who were, in turn, taught by untrained teachers who largely focused on religious instruction. As the 19th century developed, however, American public education became more institutionalized and less openly sectarian in character. “Normal schools” — post-secondary educational institutions which taught teachers the formal theory and practice of teaching — were first established in New England, then later spread throughout the country. Meanwhile, educational reformers, like Horace Mann, sought to create universal standards of education which could be equally applied across their states in “common schools.” Additionally, the importance of nonsectarian (non-religious, in other words) education grew increasingly obvious as the largely Protestant nation of the time struggled to integrate waves of Roman Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants within the fabric of American society.

This, incidentally, is the historical context within which Nevada constitutionally prohibited publicly funded sectarian instruction upon its statehood — a prohibition which was strengthened by the Blaine Amendment in 1880, which prohibited public spending for sectarian purposes more generally. These provisions would later serve as the basis of the ACLU’s legal challenge against Gov. Sandoval’s Educational Savings Account (ESA) program, which sought to provide state education funds directly to parents, which parents could spend on pre-approved educational expenses. The ESA program ultimately failed legal challenge, but not because a parent could theoretically use public funds to enroll their child in a private religious school — instead, it failed because the Legislature failed to properly appropriate funds for the program.

Kirst’s essay further explains:

By the time of the Civil War, the common school had become the mainstream of education in the United States, thriving in hundreds of thousands of school districts from Maine to Oregon, financed largely by public taxes and controlled by local trustees. Creating this system was an undertaking of immense magnitude — arguably the greatest institution-building success in American history — though the resulting structure was not uniform. 

The resulting structure was also not apolitical. Many school board members were appointed by local and regional politicians, frequently on the basis of political loyalty or, as the ACLU pointed out in Virginia, to intentionally keep people of color from having their interests represented. Where school board members were chosen by the electorate, however, the situation wasn’t much better. The hyper-localized educational system of the time produced endless subcommittees and teachers who were often hired and fired due to ward-level political intrigue instead of merit.

Reformers of the time fought to “take education out of politics” by centralizing school district administration away from ward-sized districts and towards city-wide or region-wide school districts — much like Nevada’s county-sized school districts. These larger districts, in turn, would have an easier time applying professional standards for administration and teaching, and would more routinely attract board members with industrial-scale professional and managerial experience (as these reforms took place during the early 20th century, this implicitly ceded control of these school districts to prosperous white male Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and all that entailed).

At this much, at least, the reformers were successful. The excesses of the decentralized ward-based spoils system of the 19th century were roundly defeated by the centralized and locally-controlled industrial-scale bureaucracies of the 20th century. Those, however, produced their own excesses — much as the 19th century’s ward-based system produced board trustees who were solely loyal to their ward-level political bosses, the 20th century’s more centralized and depoliticized systems produced school districts administered by superintendents who didn’t need to feign loyalty to anyone.

Unsurprisingly, giving blank checks to wise, well-trained and all-powerful local district superintendents didn’t lead to workplace harmony, nor did it uniformly produce positive educational outcomes. 

Brown v. Board of Education rubbed the nation’s nose in the intentional inability of Southern school systems to educate Black students. Meanwhile, Cold War-era fears of the success of the Soviet educational system, symbolized by the successful launch of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, encouraged greater national attention towards addressing the uneven educational outcomes experienced by America’s students — and provided rapidly expanding amounts of federal money, with accompanying federal regulations and oversight, to address them.

While this was occurring, parents and teachers also sought to disempower previously all-powerful superintendents and their intentionally unaccountable school boards. Teachers (frequently female) aggressively started to unionize in the 1950s, driven in no small part by the frustration created by the endless parade of (largely male) managers, assistants, coordinators, and department heads chosen by (almost exclusively male) superintendents to micromanage their classrooms. Parents and other community organizations, meanwhile, wanted to see curriculum in their classrooms which reflected the needs of their children — including multilingual educational programs, less draconian student suspension policies, and more direct community control of school boards.

Once again, the reformers were largely successful at what they set out to achieve. Federal control and oversight of local education through laws like the No Child Left Behind Act, and its Obama-era successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, has never been stronger. Parent advocacy groups and teachers, meanwhile, got more control over school boards — though, more often than not, by taking advantage of the fact most people don’t pay attention to school board elections. 

***

School boards have the fun job. They get to spend the money collected by municipal, county, state, and federal politicians on their behalf. At the same time, the very politicians responsible for collecting taxes for school districts get to wash their hands of the consequences — it’s the school board’s fault, not theirs, that taxpayer money isn’t spent wisely, after all. 

This is great if you’re a special interest group seeking to play Three-Card Monte with our children’s education by hiding responsibility in as many corners as humanly possible. It’s also great if you’re a politician hoping to attach a random social program to a school district’s docket like a Christmas tree ornament without any care or concern for how the program will affect the district’s operations. It’s less great if you’re a parent trying to figure out whose fault it is, exactly, for your child being unable to read at grade level, why your child’s classroom is falling apart, or why your child’s school isn’t even open in the first place.

That’s why, to address the disconnect between spending and educational outcomes (and electoral outcomes as well), many cities seized direct control over their school districts. Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York City, and the District of Columbia all switched to mayoral control of their school districts and converted them into regular government agencies. The results aren’t perfect — some people want to revert the District of Columbia back to electoral board control after some controversial reforms to the district’s teacher pay system — but at least citizens in those cities know whose office to barge into when there’s a problem with their schools. The same can’t be said in San Francisco, which, like Nevada, separates school boards from its municipal government — a disconnect which produced newsworthy dysfunction during the pandemic as the school district focused on renaming a third of its schools instead of putting forward a workable school reopening plan, then later sabotaged the city’s reopening plan, all while Mayor London Breed screamed impotently from the sidelines.

The situation isn’t any different here in Nevada. For years, Nevada’s legislators have tried in vain to make education another normal government program, one accountable to politicians voters might have a chance of recognizing on a ballot. In the last session, both Sen. Ben Kieckhefer (R-Reno) and Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson (D-Clark County) placed bills on the floor which sought to make school boards at least partially appointed by elected county and municipal officials. Though these bills were well-intentioned, and arguably a step in the right direction, they still would have preserved the dysfunction inherent in separating school boards (and school spending) from those responsible for raising their money.

What would help would be to reconnect political accountability with results. This isn’t done by blithely assuming that more names on our ballots means more democracy somehow. It’s done by remembering that ballots and elections are meant to achieve a specific objective — to give each voter a say in how our government’s institutions are run by identifying specific, recognizable people to hold accountable when they don’t do what we expect them to do. 

In states where school districts correspond to municipal boundaries, treating citywide school districts as city departments makes sense. Here in Nevada, our school districts match county boundaries, so, instead, it would make more sense to make our school districts part of our county governments instead. That way, perhaps, when county commissioners mishandle property tax rolls, they’ll be the ones who can be held directly accountable when they take money out of our schools to pay taxpayers back. 

Less facetiously, modern schools aren’t just school districts anymore. They’re school districts, health departments, and social service agencies. Half of them even have their own police forces. It’s time to manage them as a normal public service so teachers can do what they do best — teach — and social service staff can do what they do best, with everyone involved accountable to governments run by well known politicians nearer to the top of our ballots, instead of nameless amateurs picked at random at the bottom.

David Colborne was active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he blogged intermittently on his personal blog, ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate, and served on the executive committee for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered non-partisan voter, and the father of two sons. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].