Governing in Putnam County — Locally: School districts

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“LeMay ready to take reins at North Putnam.”

This Nov. 21, 2023, front-page headline leads me to school districts (called “school corporations” in the state of Indiana), one of several different kinds of local governments in Putnam County. I shall focus in what follows on several foundational elements of school districts, with the intention of digging deeper in a later column or columns.

As noted in my earlier piece, municipalities are general-purpose, bottom-up, do-not-cover-the-map units of local governments. In direct contrast, school districts are (1) special-purpose, (2) top-down units of local government that (3) “cover the map.” Let me address each of these three elements in turn.

The “special-purpose” responsibility of school districts is to provide and govern public schools at the local level in 49 of the 50 states. The one exception is Hawaii, where public education is run by the state government.

School districts allocate resources to construct and maintain school buildings, and hire and pay (and sometimes fire) teachers, administrators and support staff (e.g., custodians, cafeteria workers, school bus drivers). Within state guidelines, school districts decide what to teach and not to teach. For example, what foreign languages should be taught and at what grade levels? Should “sex education” be taught, and, if so, how and at what grade levels? Districts also determine what extracurricular activities to offer. Should there be high school and middle school soccer teams? How many plays should the schools put on each school year? Should there be a robotics club? A chapter of the National Honor Society?

There are relatively few other functional areas in which local and state governments so actively share governing responsibility as they do in public schooling. In recent years, heated public school board meetings involving conflict between state mandates and a school district’s contrary policies have become a news media staple. These conflicts have included COVID pandemic issues (e.g., school closures and required wearing of masks), whether to expose students to elements of “critical race theory” in civics and social studies courses and how to handle sensitive matters arising from LBGTQ+ issues (e.g., toilets, showering facilities and eligibility to play on “boys” or “girls” sports teams).

Unlike municipalities, school districts are established by a top-down process. While people can certainly ask for the merger (or splitting) of existing school districts, what school districts exist (in Putnam County and elsewhere) is formally and ultimately a top-down state government decision.

Also unlike municipalities — but like counties and townships (more on counties and townships in later columns) — Indiana school districts cover the map. Every square inch of Putnam County lies in one of the county’s four districts: North Putnam, Greencastle, South Putnam or Cloverdale.

Indiana has 291 of the nation’s approximately 13,000 school districts. In each of these special-purpose local governments, the governing structure departs from the familiar three-branch “separation of powers” structure that characterizes U.S. national government and the 50 state governments.

At the top of the formal hierarchy of a school district is a school board whose members are usually elected by residents of the school district. In Putnam County, the North Putnam, South Putnam and Cloverdale school districts elect their school boards, as do nearly 90 percent of school districts nationwide. In contrast, the five members of the Greencastle school district are appointed, one of only roughly 10 school boards in the state with appointed members.

The recent appointment of Dustin LeMay to be the North Putnam superintendent, duly reported in the Banner Graphic, illustrates an important point. School districts employ chief executive officers called “superintendents,” who are appointed by school boards to manage the day-to-day operations of the district.

And just as school boards appoint superintendents, they can fire them as well. Indeed, appointing (and sometimes dismissing) superintendents is probably the single most important function of school boards, whose members are typically part-time and receive little or no pay.

School superintendents are formally the subordinates of their school boards and serve at their pleasure, more or less like any chief executive officer’s relationship with the relevant governing board. But superintendents almost always have more formal credentials in the field of education (masters or doctoral degrees), as well as more relevant experience and expertise, than their board members. In turn, a recurrent theme in literally decades of research by social scientists (and other observers) is that superintendents generally seem more powerful vis-à-vis their formal superiors, school boards, than their formally subordinate position would suggest.

Two additional points about superintendents are worth noting. To head their districts, school boards can appoint only individuals who have been licensed by the state to be superintendents. And, although about three-quarters of public school teachers in the U.S. are women, nearly three-quarters of school superintendents are men, though the proportion of women superintendents has been rising in the last few decades.

What do state governments do to constrain/shape what school districts do? Plenty.

State governments provide money—usually with strings attached; identify which individuals are eligible to be superintendents (as well as principals and teachers) by licensing them; establish requirements for different sorts of high school diplomas; and so forth.

Indiana State Sen. John Crane recently circulated a series of questions to his Putnam County constituents. Among other things, Sen. Crane asked whether the state should require school districts to hold back students who cannot demonstrate “basic reading skills” by the end of third grade and whether to change Indiana high school diploma requirements.

Let me close by making clear that the local governing of public education in the United States is highly unusual, even borderline unique. While a (very) few other countries (e.g., Canada) have units of local government with roles roughly similar to those of school districts in the United States, the vast majority of other countries (Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, etc.) have no such thing.

The French public education system was once so centralized that the French Minister for Education was said to have looked at his watch one day and commented along these lines: “It’s 1:15 p.m. on Wednesday of the fourth week of the school year. That means that right now first-graders across France are beginning to learn how to add two-and-two!”

Such strong national (or even state control) of public schooling is simply not consistent with the prominent and important role of school districts in governing public education in the United States.