6 Local Control
The local control approach to public education is one with a long and storied history. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, public elementary and secondary education in the United States was primarily a local affair, operated and overseen by community leaders (Kaestle 1983) (Arnzen and Houston 2023). This local control has evolved from more informal community leaders making decisions to the establishment of democratically elected, nonpartisan local school boards holding these powers. States and the federal government assumed greater authority over education in the latter half of the twentieth century, bringing up the question of where the power of making decisions relating to public education should be held. Historically, the majority of the public has preferred highly localized decision making, which allows education systems to directly reflect the preferences of those in the community (Arnzen and Houston 2023). This allows parents to have more influence in what their children are learning based on their own and their communities’ values and priorities.
While this can be very positive, it can also exacerbate inequities in public schools. The issue of public school funding being related to tax dollar allocations has been a more widely publicized issue in conversations surrounding inequity in public education; I myself was a “school of choice kid,” obtaining my education from a nearby school district in which I did not live partially because the residents of the city were wealthier than those in my city and the school’s budget was much higher. The results of these differences in budgets even between schools within a few miles of each other were very apparent. Growing up just outside of Detroit, it was hard not to notice the vast change in infrastructure when crossing the official city limit line between Detroit and the far wealthier neighborhood of Grosse Pointe. While on the northern side of the boundary in Grosse Pointe the streets were lined with a Whole Foods, pristine landscaping, and well-preserved historic homes, you could literally stand on that line and turn around to see a seemingly completely different street—one instead lined with fast food chains, liquor stores, and crumbling homes with boarded up windows.
This stark contrast was perhaps even more evident between my experience with education and that of my high school friend who attended a Detroit Public School. While my participation in the Schools of Choice program allowed me to go to a high school with a courtyard, Chromebooks provided by the school, and socially conscious organizations like the Queer-Straight Alliance club, my friend witnessed two physical fights, one of which required an ambulance to be called to the school, just on her very first day of freshman year. Her teachers were paid far less than those in my district which was in some cases reflected by their enthusiasm, and she was never able to learn some of the content I was taught in my school because my projects required the use of personal laptops, a resource which wasn’t available at the time in her school.
While budget is obviously an important factor in public school inequality, so too can the local-control approach to curriculum. I will use an economics class to demonstrate this idea, though this is an incredibly simplistic example. If the local school board of a school decided to prioritize a longer gym class over an economics class for example, the students of this school would be at least slightly less-equipped to handle their finances post-graduation than a nearby school who decided to emphasize the economics program. Many of the students who lacked an education in economics likely built their families in the same area, and would now be adults voting for their school board members. These adults may now be more likely to vote for a candidate running for superintendent who boasts an approach to education prioritizing gym over economics, because these former students are familiar with this approach and may have felt they were successful so this approach must work. Now, their children also gained more of an education in gym than economics, and the cycle continues.
This may seem like a silly example, but what if we replaced economics with a more relevant subject to our discussion, say, a social studies unit on the history of Tribal Boarding Schools, and we replace gym class with a unit focusing on one of the sixty two battles of the Hundred Years’ War between France and Britain. If now-voting age former students had never been taught about the history of Tribal Boarding Schools themselves, of course they are not going to prioritize teaching this subject—they don’t know its importance because they have never learned it themselves. Perhaps a school board member would not even propose this unit be taught because none of the candidates running for these positions knew anything about this history at all. However, a nearby school district that perhaps had a superintendent with a wealth of knowledge on this subject decades ago may have long built in a unit on these histories, and graduates from this school district are all equipped with this knowledge.
Now let us say graduates from both schools must vote on whether to allocate part of the state’s budget to a project focused on helping survivors of these boarding schools. Graduates of the school who prioritized the Hundred Years’ War will know nothing about the subject, and thus will be more inclined to vote against the budget allocation or abstain from voting at all, while graduates from the school that has taught this history may better understand the importance of the project and support the bill. That is how the local-control approach can create a sort of endless loop of inequality and perpetuate ignorance in certain subjects. Without the ability of the state to come in and superimpose large-scale curriculum changes like that of the Since Time Immemorial curriculum, it is difficult for major progress to be made.