School Boards, Public Schools, Democracy and Home Rule.

Over the past 3 years, Florida’s legislators have filed more than 100 bills that try to strip away the authority of the local officials you elected. From short term rentals to coral reef safe sunscreen, some state lawmakers seem to feel that they know what is better for your community than you do.

The Florida League of Cities has had enough and has launched an initiative “Building Stronger Cities,” designed to educate and engage citizen support of Home Rule in Florida. We encourage you to visit their website and educate yourself about the importance of Home Rule. Home Rule allows citizens and local governments to make decisions that are best for their own communities.

Florida School Boards would be wise to join in this Home Rule effort.

Just this week, Commissioner Corcoran notified Union County School District that the Florida Department of Education would be withholding their entire Teacher Salary Increase Allocation, the funding for Governor Ron DeSantis’ $500 million 2020 legislative priority, because they didn’t approve of Union County’s school board-approved salary distribution plan (personal communication). Such decisions should fall under the authority of “Home Rule.”

Such attacks on school board authority is nothing new. Florida’s School Boards have become used to the annual assault. Duly elected school boards stand in the way of the current trend towards privatization of public education dollars. In 2006, Marc Tucker, a leader of the standards-driven education reform movement and advocate for No Child Left Behind policies, sought to convince people that local control, through elected school board members, was “hobbling our schools.”

“What of school boards? In an ideal world, we would scrap them—especially in big cities, where most poor children live.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/01/first-kill-all-the-school-boards/306579/

Recent attacks on Florida school boards have been relentless. In Florida, school boards’ authority for Home Rule is granted by Article IX, Section 4(b) of the Florida Constitution: “The school board shall operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the school district and determine the rate of school district taxes within the limits prescribed herein.” It is this authority that has been seen as an impediment to the expansion of school choice and its free-market driven, privatization of public education.

Attacks on Home Rule of Florida’s public schools include:

• Constitution Revision Commission’s attempts to eliminate school board salaries and oversight of charter schools in their district.
• Unfunded mandates and increased micromanaging through compliance mandates.
• Repeated attempts to enact school board term limits.

The Covid crisis has amplified the State’s abuse of school board authority. For example:

• State mandated campus closures in mid March, in response to Covid, at which time the Florida Department of Education relieved school boards of their legal requirement to meet until June 30th.
• An Emergency order in July (2020-EO-06) which bypassed school boards completely from oversight of state required school reopening plans.
• Rejection of Hillsborough County School Board’s proposal to reopen its schools virtually during a Covid Surge in August.
• Insisting Miami Dade schools transition back to face to face learning 10 days earlier than their Board had initially approved.

Florida’s School Boards should follow the lead of the League of Cities and start advocating for Home Rule of our public schools, before they lose all authority.

For the record, there are only two ways Florida’s School Boards could lose their constitutional authority to “operate, control and supervise” our public schools: 1.) Constitutional Amendment approved by 60% of the voters or 2.) Give the authority away.

Currently, our school boards appear to be giving it away and that is bad for Home Rule, public schools and democracy.

In 2014, in a keynote speech before the California Charter Schools Association, charter school advocate and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings argued that the “fundamental problem” with public schools is that they are governed by elected local school boards and that elected school boards should be replaced by privately held corporations (charter school corporations) because they have “more stable governance.”

The California School Boards Association immediately responded:

The California School Boards Association (CSBA) would like to take the opportunity to provide Mr. Hastings with another perspective and set the record straight about the role and impact of local school boards.

Public oversight of local government is the foundation of American democracy. Nowhere is this more evident than in our public schools, where voters entrust boards of education with the education of our youth.

If Mr. Hastings thinks local school boards should be replaced, does he also believe that we should get rid of all other locally elected bodies, including city councils and county boards of supervisors? Does he not think that voters are capable of deciding who is best to represent and serve their best interests? We would beg to differ.

For more than 150 years, local school boards have been an integral feature of the California’s public education system and are widely regarded as the principal democratic body to represent citizens in local education decisions.

Local school boards have been described as the historic linchpin of American educational governance and their role is seen as crucial to sustaining participatory and representative government. In today’s pluralistic society, it’s important that individuals representing diverse viewpoints and experiences are elected to serve on school governing boards.

As Matt Haney, a board member of the San Francisco Unified School District, wrote in his recent op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News, “school boards exist because public schools belong to and are directly accountable to the communities they serve.”

To suggest that appointed boards, such as corporate boards and non-public boards that operate charter schools, are the answer would be a gross disservice to the communities local school board members are elected to represent and serve. It also goes against the democratic principles that our country was founded on.”

Josephine Lucey,  president of California School Boards Association, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/14/netflixs-reed-hastings-has-a-big-idea-kill-elected-school-boards/

We agree. School boards exist because public schools belong to and are directly accountable to the communities they serve. The role of local school boards is crucial to sustaining participatory and representative government. Florida school boards should not hand off the authority they have been granted by the Florida Constitution.

It is time to stand up for public education, Home Rule, and the democratic principles on which our country was founded.