Why Not an Appointed School Board?

There are 70,000 students in our public schools, and most of us have been talking about director Pedro Garcia’s poor bedside manner or his elected board’s proclivity for divisiveness and concern with style over substance. “It drives me crazy,” one school board member said recently, expressing frustration at this state of affairs. None of it is helping to create more dynamic charter schools (See “Nashvillians of the Year,” Dec. 29), to tame the beast of the teachers’ union so that teacher tenure doesn’t rob kids of quality instruction, or to gird the system for aggressive improvement. It’s always been a recreational pastime to rail about the inefficacy of our school system’s representatives, which is a fair enough blood sport. But perhaps ginning up some ideas for how to improve the board, and thus the schools, would be more constructive than whining about its chronic deficiencies. And so, it occurs to us that maybe we should break up this elected school board stuff, let it go the way of The Mamas and the Papas. In 1992, the state legislature passed a bill uniformly creating appointed superintendents and elected school boards across Tennessee, a decision that, like Gov. Phil Bredesen’s employment of Dave Cooley, perhaps should be reconsidered. The mandate for elected school boards was really a domino-effect development, because what the legislature really wanted to do is free up superintendents from politics. They figured someone should be elected, and so it was the boards. The legislature had good intentions—as odd as that may seem—in that it wanted the school boards to be accountable to the public. But as it is, our nine elected members are overly concerned with political considerations like zone lines, with trying to micromanage their CEO, Pedro Garcia, or with scoring political points in the newspaper. The Planning Commission or the Metro Health Board, for example, can tackle tough community issues without feeling like they have to kowtow to particular constituencies. Unlike an elected school board, an appointed one would have a similar kind of freedom. What’s more, one former president of the National School Boards Association has pointed out that school board appointments, as opposed to elections, tend to produce “highly qualified” candidates with “the proper motives.” The hassle of raising money and the time-consuming nature of running door-to-door have nothing to do with school policy or education achievement and tend to be strong disincentives for serious, buttoned-down community members who would otherwise make productive, competent school board members. Right now, Nashville finds itself in a precarious situation. The school board is divided against both itself and its director, with neither the mayor nor the Metro Council as particularly strong political allies in what is clearly the city’s most important task. They’re riding on a deflating raft, and we’re not all that compelled to throw them a rope. Given our druthers, we’d like to see a new method for generating qualified candidates—and this whole school board class dismissed. Besides, the mayor proposes the education budget, the Metro Council has to appropriate it, so wouldn’t it make sense for the school board to have some accountability to the executive and legislative branches who hand over about 40 percent of Metro’s budget to the school system?