Who Should Control Education Now? Revisiting Preferences for Local Control in Educational Decision Making

• In Event: The Political Polarization of Educational Politics and Its Implications for Democratic Education

Abstract

Since the Progressive Era, most school districts have been governed by local, democratically elected, nonpartisan school boards. Scholars have argued that the public has historically preferred local control of schools (Hochschild & Scott, 1988) and still does (Jacobsen & Saultz, 2012). However, educational issues have become increasingly contested at higher levels of government as battles are fought in state and federal venues and along partisan lines. Our primary objectives are to understand if the age-old preferences for local control of schooling have shifted in response to the recent battles over school responses to COVID-19 and schools’ roles in combating systemic racism. We also seek to explore if attitudes toward school governance have become swept up in the partisan polarization that characterizes much of American politics today (Shapiro et al., 2021).
Using data from Education Next’s annual survey on education policy and governance, we track public opinion on this issue from 2015 to 2022. We disaggregate our results by party identification and parental status to explore if attitudes have polarized across one or both dimensions. We also employ a novel survey experiment to help us understand the extent to which invoking schools’ responses to the pandemic or to debates over teaching about systemic racism influences these positions.
We find that the public’s preference for local control is not as deeply held as the conventional wisdom would suggest—but this change predates the recent turbulence in education politics. In fact, when asked about the optimal distribution of educational funding (Figure 1) and decision-making authority (Figure 2). As seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2, local government is never the most preferred option (though preferences for state and federal influence are only slightly higher). Our results also show that preferences exhibit only narrowly increasing partisan differences; however, the increase in the partisan divide is notably larger among parents of young children. We additionally show that Democrats—but not Republicans—have been acutely sensitive to the party in power in Washington, favoring local decision-making more when Republicans controlled the Presidency and Congress. Finally, we observe some evidence that prompting individuals to consider schools’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic causes them to gravitate toward local control of education.
The relative unpopularity of local control leads us to conclude that the era of local supremacy in education may be ending. Put plainly, public support for local control is less dominant and ubiquitous than the prevailing narrative suggests. The results of the survey experiment also raise the potential for partisan identity to shape support for local control. While both Democrats and Republicans were more likely to support local control after being primed to think of school responses to COVID-19, we attribute this response to the variation in local response corresponded closely to the partisan composition of the community (Hartney & Finger, 2021; Grossmann et al., 2021).

Authors

• Cameron J. Arnzen, Brown University

• David Houston, George Mason University