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Slight return – Why America has done such a poor job of keeping schools open https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/01/19/why-america-has-done-such-a-poor-job-of-keeping-schools-open
The tagline says it all:
"How a cocktail of knee-jerk partisanship, local control & Donald Trump have conspired against school-age children"
"How a cocktail of knee-jerk partisanship, local control & Donald Trump have conspired against school-age children"
"'Hyper-decentralised' governance of American schools has long given an advantage to its unions, [Brown's Hartney] thinks, because they find it easier to make wild demands of district leaders..."
Reducing decentralization has been a topic of discussion over the decades, including this memorable 2008 piece from Matt Miller: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/01/first-kill-all-the-school-boards/306579/
New America's Kevin Carey explored the issue more recently, focused on segregation. https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/55/no-more-school-districts/
If it wasn't already obvious, the pandemic has made clear that local control as it currently operates is a massive failure.
The political forces that protect local control are many; that doesn't mean we can't think or talk about alternative governance that might be better.
The political forces that protect local control are many; that doesn't mean we can't think or talk about alternative governance that might be better.
