‘Public Servants’ or Public Masters: Whom Does Your Local School Board Serve?
23rd June 2022
The Other McCain is on the case.
Most people don’t pay attention to school board elections, but the teachers and administrators do. Employees of the school system constitute an organized special interest, who can usually succeed in electing their chosen slate of board members — and, perhaps more importantly, they can prevent the election of any school board candidate who might disrupt the system. Thus, by controlling the school board, teachers and administrators can evade any effort to make them accountable to the public. Any parent who has ever complained about the policies and curricula of public schools knows how this works. In fact, it is largely erroneous to call them “public schools,” since they do not really belong to the public, but are rather controlled by the administrative bureaucracy, operating for the benefit of the employees, without regard to what parents actually want.