In 1987, Jacqueline Danzberger described school boards as the forgotten
players. However, things have changed drastically for school boards over
the past few years. No longer are school boards the forgotten players in
school governance. Instead, school boards often find themselves in the
center of controversies stemming from the intrusion of political
partisanship into local governance structures which historically, and
for the purposes of sustained democratic educational governance, were
intentionally intended to be non-partisan elected boards. However, this
is where many school boards find themselves today. The chapters in this
volume address several key questions school board members are currently
facing as they struggle to protect some of our country's earliest
guardrails of democracy; local control of schools. To be sure, school
boards are no longer the forgotten players. Implications of this may be
wide reaching and therefore deserve room in the current literature on
educational governance.
Volume II of the Research on the Superintendency series highlights
recent research on school boards, local control, governance, and the
superintendency. Each chapter is briefly described and the chapters are
in a particular order that readers may wish to pay attention to as they
enjoy the book. The first three chapters deal with local control in both
rural and urban settings. The next two chapters are studies focused
mainly on school boards and how their roles have shifted over the years
followed by a chapter on the relationship between school boards and
their superintendents within a regulatory environment and the level of
stress it can bring to board members and superintendents. The final five
chapters describe recent superintendent research that is closely linked
to school governance or school board policies. We ask readers to
juxtapose lessons learned in those five chapters to the role of school
boards within the context of those chapters.
