A School Board With a New Shape

The newly restructured Washington, D. C., Board of Education, made up of five elected members and four appointed by Mayor Anthony Williams, is an experiment in mixed democracy and technocracy. If it succeeds, and there is no guarantee of that, the governing structure will interest other large urban school districts, including Los Angeles Unified.

Though the Washington public school system is only about 1/10th the size of the LAUSD, it too is largely minority, generally posts low albeit improving test scores and has high truancy and dropout rates. Both districts have had a high turnover in school superintendents in recent years and need to build new schools.

The new board won’t take office until January, and the appointees still require approval by the City Council. But, at first glance, the combination of elected and appointed members promises an interesting marriage of talents.

School board members charged with selecting a superintendent and setting policy for a big-city school district need to know as much about finance, management and school construction as they do about instruction. They need a range of expertise to ask the right questions and make the best decisions. Elected school board members--usually activists with some interest in schools or with larger political ambitions--do not easily provide such expertise.

The Washington mayor’s appointees are Roger Wilkins, a historian and civil rights expert; a legal scholar and expert on equal access to education; a specialist in student counseling and the education of children with disabilities, and an urban planner in charge of thousands of buildings for the U.S. General Services Administration. If confirmed by the City Council, they will join the five newly elected school board members.

The hybrid school board resulted from a narrowly approved June referendum that replaced an 11-member elected board. The elected board prevailed over such a steep decline of public education that Congress stripped it of most authority four years ago and put the schools essentially under federal control until January.

Of course, this model would not translate directly to Los Angeles for many reasons, including the lack of federal involvement here and the multiple cities and towns in the LAUSD. However, the Washington experiment, while in some ways a retreat from representative government, does reflect the need of large school districts for expertise at the top.

The success or failure of the Washington board should prove instructive for other districts in need of major reform.