Local Autonomy: A Fundamental Value

By Sheila Jordan

What lesson should we draw from the Oakland disaster of 2003? Should we strengthen local school boards, or should we take their powers away and micromanage local affairs from a central county office?

What lessons should we draw from the Oakland disaster? In my view, Oakland teaches that we need to strengthen local school boards and help them to keep tighter reins on their hired superintendents. If the Oakland school board had monitored the Oakland administration more closely, the killer deficit would never have occurred and Oakland schools would be self-governing today.

Instead of this sensible lesson, some people argue that local autonomy is outmoded and that fiscal management of all local districts should be taken over by the County Office of Education. They want the County Office to hire a great many more accountants, bookkeepers, and clerks who would basically micromanage the business of all 18 school districts in the county, as if the districts were so many branches of a central bank.

In my opinion, it's unfair to strip the other districts of their autonomy because of what Oakland did. You don't punish a whole class because of one bad student. I believe that local autonomy is essential if we want community involvement. We should be working for grassroots participation and smaller schools, instead of building a more powerful centralized bureaucracy. Our local elected school boards should have more authority, rather than less.

I am also concerned that if incompetent or corrupt persons got hold of this proposed county super-office, they could cause harm to our educational system on a countywide scale. What if the same people who bankrupted Oakland were to get hold of the County Office?

The county office, under my leadership, has been working to strengthen the internal management capabilities of the local districts. We have fully exercised our existing fiscal powers to intervene in troubled districts, and where we have intervened, we have succeeded. The recovery of the Hayward district is an outstanding example of effective support from our Office. The chief business officer of the San Leandro district recently commended our office as the most effective county office in the Bay Area. We offer regular classes and workshops for training district business officers and other administrators. We want to see all of the districts, including Oakland, thriving and moving forward under their own steam.

In the improved financial climate for education that most observers expect in the coming years, the proposal to sacrifice local autonomy, which might have had some resonance during the depths of the budget crisis of the past years, is completely out of place. It's the wrong solution in the wrong place at the wrong time. Local autonomy is alive and well. It's a fundamental value of educational governance in the United States, and I fully expect to see it grow stronger and more vibrant in the years ahead.