Who controls education in the US?

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If you think about it, the utilitarian approach we take in the USA towards education has lots of unintended consequences.  On the face of it, local schools are governed by a school board.  Who populates these school boards?  It is left up to the local residents, but one would expect that, ideally, there would be wide representation from parents, a lawyer or two, some teachers, or at least a couple of members with beyond the average level of education.

Unfortunately, though, in times of economic stress, the knee-jerk reaction of any community seems to be to hand the problems over to whom?  Businessmen.  Businessmen are supposed to be adept at cutting costs and making any operation efficient.  In actual fact, businessmen are trained to encourage others to increase their spending, and meanwhile to cut their own costs.

This general reliance on business to solve all problems does not always work.  One consequence of giving a bunch of bottom-liners control over school budgets is that they tend to cut out all programs that they perceive not to have utilitarian value.  Businessmen become the ultimate arbiters of which components in the curriculum have value.

In many of the poorer districts, this means cutting out arts, music and drama.  (Somehow athletics programs survive, because businessmen are often former meatheads.)

The Government, meanwhile, encourages this bottom-line approach to education.  They insist on high performance in measurability-friendly areas such as mathematics and literacy, which local school districts interpret as requiring additional staffing in those areas, and reductions in other areas.

I am not calling for reductions in mathematics and reading budgets, but just balance among all areas.  The bloated budgets of football programs could probably do with less; football is notoriously highly expensive, for very little return.  I suspect that sports such as tennis and roller-hockey require far less equipment (but I could be wrong).

I strongly believe in the value of a band program.  While playing in a band (even if the schmucks consider music boring) might not lead directly to a job, it fosters many skills and attitudes that are often helpful in many jobs and careers, skills that I do not even have names for, in addition to building concentration, a cooperative spirit, maintaining sustained interest in a project, an appreciation of the interrelatedness of things.

Luckily for everyone, in some localities, there are businessmen who have an appreciation of the arts, and who resist those who tend to consider The Arts as discretionary spending.  But these are in the minority.

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