School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy

"A vitally important, cogently written analysis by an extremely knowledgeable author who is currently living his subject as a school board president (an all too rare reality among contemporary education policy `experts')."---Michael D. Usdan, Senior Fellow, The Institute for Educational Leadership

Local school boards in the United States spend almost $600 billion of the public's money and employ millions of Americans. They have a prime role, along with the home, in shaping the future for the country's youth. Yet the 14,000 boards of education are obscure and most people have not the vaguest notion of how they operate and what impact they have. School Boards in America aims to provide a wide audience---educators and college students, board members, policymakers, parents and other taxpayers, and just about anyone interested in public affairs---with an inside view that will forever affect the ways in which they look at public schools and how they are governed.

Gene I. Maeroff is a senior fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he was the founding director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media. He was previously a senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is also an elected member of a school board in central New Jersey. This is the fourth of his books that Palgrave Macmillan has published since 1998. In the 1970s and 1980s, Maeroff was on the staff of The New York Times, where he was national education correspondent. Altogether, he has written, co-written, edited, and co-edited 14 books. www.genemaeroff.com