The state-local partnership in education

The terms of the partnership that governs American public education are currently undergoing their most rapid and profound transformation in over seventy years. The beginning of this century saw the emergence of a system administered by professional educators accountable in varying degrees to predominantly upper-middle-class community representatives composing school boards. The express purpose of the reformers who created the school boards was to cut them off from powerful political constituencies. As the school districts grew dramatically in size and the American population became increasingly mobile, the links between the school boards and their power bases became still more tenuous. When dissatisfaction with the schools brought the federal government, the states, education professionals, and a variety of interest groups and policy networks into the education policymaking arena, the school boards proved ill-equipped to assert their traditional authority.