The Democratic Deficit in Local Education Governance

• In Event: Who Represents Whom in Local Elections

Abstract

The American public school system is unusual in the extent to which control over important policies — including graduation standards, curriculum, and school discipline — is decentralized to the local level, with thousands of independently elected school boards shaping many aspects of the education provided in public schools. Debates over proposed education reforms often focus on the desirability of such local control.

In this paper, we contribute to these debates by providing new evidence on how effectively local elections align the incentives of school board members with the interests of the students educated in local public schools. Specifically, we combine administrative records on the demographic composition of students educated in California, Illinois, New York, Oklahoma, and Ohio public and charter schools with new data on the backgrounds of voters who elect the governing bodies of each school district to evaluate one important dimension of local democracy. Our analysis reveals a striking democratic deficit: On dimensions of race and socioeconomic status — dimensions that correspond to the most pronounced gaps in achievement among American public school students — voters who play a pivotal role in shaping local education policy look very different from the students that their local public schools actually educate. Specifically, we show that most heavily minority districts (in terms of the racial and ethnic composition of students) are governed by school board members chosen by majority-white electorates. After documenting this deficit, we show that it has tangible implications for local policy and the quality of education that students receive. Specifically, we show that local voter composition is an important predictor of the racial diversity of the teacher workforce in public schools, holding student composition constant, and comparing only districts that hire teachers from the same labor market. We also find that districts with the greatest “democratic deficits” are also ones where the racial achievement gaps are largest and from which charter schools disproportionately draw their enrollees.

Authors

• Vladimir Kogan, Ohio State University

• Stephane Lavertu, Ohio State University

• Zachary F. Peskowitz, Emory University