Share this article

 Email

 Print

 

Republish this article

The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.

More
Society & Culture

Project recreates Shakespeare’s social network

For ill pets, survey suggests when to let go

Designated drivers: One-third still drink

How wine got to France 2500 years ago

‘True believers’ get ahead at work

Does online dating lead to a happier marriage?

Map shows where entrepreneurs thrive in US

‘Boys will be boys,’ but not so in Asia

Fewer tweets as Twitter followers grow?

The public believes that all three levels of government—local, state, and federal—should be involved in education policy and that local officials should be in charge of day-to-day operations of the schools, says Rebecca Jacobsen, lead researcher on the project.

Jacobsen, assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, and doctoral student Andrew Saultz analyzed some 40 years of public surveys involving education. Their analysis, in Public Opinion Quarterly, comes as federal education initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have led many policy advocates to focus on federal control of schools.

But Jacobsen says it’s a mistake to discount the popularity of local school boards. There are more than 90,000 locally elected school board members serving on nearly 15,000 school boards in the United States.

“A lot of policymakers today think they can just go around the local boards; that the federal government can create a policy that goes directly to the schools or works around the existing institutions,” Jacobsen says. “But that’s not going to work in the long run, because local control is not dead. People still feel it plays an important role.”

When it comes to policy decisions related to equitable funding and standards across all schools, the public favors state and federal government control, Jacobsen says.

“At the national level we want schools to be relatively equitably funded, and we want schools to teach relatively the same topics and make sure kids have access to the same types of curriculum,” she says.

But the public also believes local officials should be in charge of “running schools” or “improving schools,” write the researchers. These findings are particularly powerful, Jacobsen says, given that national policy discussions have criticized local control and steps have been taken to diminish local decision-making ability through policy changes.

“Some argue that local school governance is a ‘dinosaur’ that needs to be replaced, but local leaders are going to be the ones implementing these federal policies,” Jacobsen says.

“So if they’re going to have a major hand in how these policies get shaped at the local level, then we better pay attention to their resources, their capabilities, and not just dismiss them.”

More news from Michigan State University: http://news.msu.edu/