Local School Boards Under Review: Their Role and Effectiveness in Relation to Students' Academic Achievement. Report No. 56

摘要

This report provides a review of literature published in the past two decades on the role and effectiveness of school boards. Though school boards are but one component of school district leadership--the superintendent and other district administrators and staff constituting the other main components--school boards are the focus of this review because they have a distinct role and have been understudied. The report is organized into five major sections. First, a brief history of school boards is presented, and then their current state is described. The charge that school boards are outmoded and should be eliminated cannot be addressed adequately without an understanding of how they have evolved and currently function. Next, school boards and educational governance reforms are examined in order to describe the larger context in which school boards operate and to explore how school boards have been, and might be, reformed in the future. In a separate section, characteristics of effective school boards that have been identified by school board experts are described. Because qualitative and quantitative research on school boards is limited, the final section is devoted to discussion of research limitations and future directions.