This paper traces the evolution of school board member roles in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century, drawing on a wide range of scholarly literature. It examines how perceptions of school board functions shifted over time — from community-oriented, agrarian priorities in rural districts to modern accountability-driven governance frameworks. The paper also identifies the principal sources of tension between school board members and other educational stakeholders, including superintendents, teachers' unions, parents, and federal policymakers. Special attention is given to the distinctive pressures facing rural school boards, the impact of legislation such as No Child Left Behind, and structural issues including gender barriers in educational leadership and the debate over whether school boards should be reformed or eliminated.
The paper demonstrates strong thematic synthesis across a large body of literature. Rather than summarizing sources one by one, it organizes scholarship around recurring themes — such as the tension between policy-making and administration, the constraints of scarce resources, and the shifting definition of board accountability — and uses individual studies as evidence within those thematic frames. This is the hallmark of a well-constructed literature review.
The paper opens with a brief orienting introduction, then moves through two major sections. The first traces the historical development of school board roles from the agrarian 19th century through early 21st-century governance debates. The second catalogs the sources of tension between school boards and stakeholders, including superintendents, teachers' unions, parents, and government regulators. A brief chapter summary closes the paper. The reference list follows APA formatting conventions throughout.
This chapter traces the evolution of perceptions of the role of school board members over the past two centuries and examines how analyses of those perceptions also changed over time. This discussion is followed by an examination of the antecedents of tension for school board members in general and for rural school board members in particular in the United States, and how these tensions have been described and reported in the relevant literature. Finally, a summary of the research and important findings concerning the evolution of perceptions of school board member roles and sources of tension for school board members concludes the chapter.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the literature concerning perceptions of school board members and their roles generally included an overview of the historical origins and development of the role of school board members. Some researchers began their analyses as early as the 1600s, but most report that the origins of what can be generally regarded as the modern school board emerged during the late nineteenth century (McCloud & McKenzie, 1993). For example, van Alfen and Schmidt (2007) reported that "school boards have managed the affairs of local American education since 1642. The legacy of these boards is a public school system serving urban and rural youth across the nation, the only system in the world that seeks to provide all of a nation's children with an appropriate education" (p. 12).
These points were also made by Asen, Gurke, Conners, Solomon, and Gumm (2013), who advised that "even as federal mandates increasingly have shaped primary and secondary education in the United States, important policy decisions affecting the daily environment of a school are still made at the state and local levels" (p. 33). Notwithstanding the myriad educational directives from state and federal governments, it is the school board members themselves who serve as the local element of education policy making (Asen et al., 2013). Based on this disparity in school board decision-making authority, it is not possible to determine how or whether federal mandates will be implemented in a given school district in a standardized and consistent fashion. In this regard, Asen and his associates added that "local policy makers may or may not regard research as salient for district issues, and their understanding of what constitutes research or how it may inform local issues may differ from the purposes articulated by federal policy makers" (2013, p. 35).
The literature during the 1980s and 1990s also began focusing on the inevitable conflicts that result from stakeholders with different interests and views about the purpose of education and how best to deliver it. In some cases, researchers cite the growing tendency for school boards to pursue transparency in their operations, to promote open communications, and to clearly define their respective roles in the process (McCloud & McKenzie, 1994). During this period, though, school boards faced longstanding traditions and history that worked against these progressive educational strategies (McCloud & McKenzie, 1994).
While the relevant literature during this period also suggests that it would be disingenuous to make any generalized statements concerning the relationship between the country's 15,000-plus school boards and its schools, Kirst (1994) emphasized that "certain trends are pointing to a refocusing of [school board] roles" (p. 380). A fundamental constraint to the research during the 1990s was the overwhelming number of school boards (15,000+) and the number of school board members (nearly one hundred thousand), combined with inadequate technologies to evaluate how their respective roles were being refocused and reshaped as the new millennium approached. Indeed, during the 1980s and early 1990s, Kirst reported that "the research base is confined to the study of a single case, a few comparative cases, or some nonrepresentative sample chosen for a particular purpose" (1994, p. 381). Moreover, in a number of studies, the research during this period was limited to reviews of secondary data — which was frequently repeated from study to study — along with empirical observations and anecdotal accounts from the field, thereby limiting the validity and restricting the generalizability of the findings (Neuman, 2003).
There were other constraints to studies concerning school boards and their constituent members during the 1980s. The research methodologies used in the few studies of school board members in general, and of rural school board members in particular, were largely limited to self-assessments and various types of surveys, with only rare full-scale assessments being conducted (Kirst, 1994). For example, the research conducted by the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) for the period 1987 through 1990, covering 226 rural and small-town, suburban, and urban school boards, was an isolated example of a study that involved a large number of school boards (Kirst, 1994).
In sum, the relevant research during the 1980s and early 1990s was focused primarily on urban and large-city regions of the country, due in large part to media accounts of failing schools and rising violence in classrooms (Kirst, 1994). Not surprisingly, this singular focus on larger cities and suburban regions left a major gap in the body of knowledge concerning rural school boards and their members. In this regard, Kirst emphasized that "horror stories dominated the media, and special attention was paid to conflict and operational failures. As a result, we know the least about the most common type of school board — the board of small districts" (1994, p. 383).
A few authorities during the 1990s examined the origins of school boards in the United States and how increasingly scarce resources introduced tensions between boards and other stakeholders. For instance, a rare study concerning the origins of boards of small rural school districts was conducted by Theobald (1995), who reported primary evidence consisting of rural board members' statements during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century "to the effect that their intentions were always to save the district money, whether this meant hiring the cheapest teacher, buying the cheapest blackboard, crayons, or books, or repairing the schoolhouse only when it was necessary to keep it standing" (p. 37).
Notwithstanding this focus on cost savings at every turn, there was a corresponding effort to ensure that all available resources were used to their maximum advantage to provide high-quality educational services. Theobald adds that "there are other glimpses of real devotion to the benefits of formal schooling. Most often these came in the form of petitions presented to the board asking to extend the school term one more month or, as one clerk wrote, 'to have as much School as the money in the District would pay for'" (1995, p. 37). Despite this emphasis on spending scarce funds wisely, the literature shows that early rural school boards remained concerned with producing students capable of earning a living in the agricultural environment in which they lived. As Theobald emphasized, "what is culturally difficult for us to imagine now is that parents in the 19th- and early-20th-century rural Midwest generally wanted no more from the schooling provided for their children than [to] prepare them for productive lives in the immediate community" (p. 37).
By the fin de siècle, progressive reforms in urban regions of the country had improved the quality and quantity of educational services being offered to young learners, but the situation in most rural areas remained tied to these community-oriented ideals, thereby restricting opportunities for rural school districts (Theobald, 1995). Although this may appear short-sighted from a modern perspective, school board members of the era — many of whom were also farmers — simply established curriculum policies congruent with the needs of their own communities rather than those of larger cities, where major industries required a different skill set. As Theobald pointed out, "but more and better schooling in the rural Midwest brought no visible signs of enhanced opportunity. For the farmers who served on local boards of education, opportunity lay in the land, not away from it" (1995, p. 38).
In many cases, this pedagogical philosophy was not only accurate but pragmatically sound. Young people flocking to big cities not only frequently failed to achieve their professional goals but also became vulnerable to the vices available in cosmopolitan venues. Consequently, young people from rural regions needed the "four Rs" and little more for the purposes of their future on the farm. As Theobald noted, "from our present perspective, we have trouble comprehending how parents could prefer for their children a minimal education and life on the land to high school, college, and the chance to become a doctor, lawyer, or successful city business person" (1995, p. 97). The reality of the situation, however, was that opportunities in local rural communities demanded a far different skill set than the industries of the larger cities (Theobald, 1995).
In sum, the type of education that rural school boards wanted to provide their students depended on their perspectives of what their society needed from the schools (Theobald, 1995). As Theobald emphasized, "rural Midwest society was marked by various intolerances, the end result of which — when successfully applied to outsiders — left a small community of like-minded owners and tillers of the soil. That rural schools came to reflect these prejudices should not be surprising" (1995, p. 97). Modern observers must therefore recognize the challenges faced by these early school boards and understand how and why their policies emerged as they did (Theobald, 1995).
This chapter provided a description of the scholarly literature concerning the evolution of perceptions of the role of school board members in the United States as well as an examination of how these perceptions changed over time. An analysis of the sources of tension for school board members generally and for rural school board members specifically was followed by a discussion of how these tensions have been described and communicated in the literature.
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