In 1932, Louis Brandeis famously remarked, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Indeed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most social welfare innovations, like public education, emerged largely on the state level. Beginning in the 1930s, though, as activists successfully pushed the federal government to solve the nation's pressing problems—from eradicating poverty and providing workers’ rights during the Great Depression to ending racial discrimination in schools after World War II—reformers clashed with the American legacy of “local control.” Campbell Scribner shows us in The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy, however, that the growing influence of state governments on locally administered public education emerged as a spectacularly contentious political conflict during the same era.
Scribner's study uses a “representative sample” of school districts to document developments across the United States, but features Wisconsin as the exemplar of these trends (p. 10). He argues that the citizens of rural school districts forged a de facto coalition with suburban school families to defend local prerogative against teacher unionization, demands for higher property taxes, and professional control over controversial curriculum. Ironically, however, these conservatives ended up pushing for both greater state authority and individual choice to achieve their goals. The result was the worst of both worlds. The locally elected school board, the most purely democratic institution in the United States in Scribner's view, ended up with less control over its personnel, less ability to ensure a common education, and less freedom to tax its own residents, while clearly defined boundaries all but assured unequal per-pupil spending and education inequality across district lines.
Scribner begins his account by showing how suburban and rural districts attempted to resist state-ordered consolidation (the former did so more effectively than the latter). In spite of conflict between rural and suburban people in the “exurbs” caused by an influx of suburbanites seeking greener pastures in the postwar era, the two groups together, by the 1970s, “made small town schools … a crucible for new forms of conservatism and new approaches to educational policy” (p. 74).
Rural and suburban people attempted to slow state power by taking on teacher unions. In Scribner's view, unions represented greater state control since teachers’ labor rights came from the states, many of which in the 1960s and 1970s empowered teachers to collectively bargain. His chapter on teacher unions, “The Struggle for Status,” will be remembered as one of the book's two most lasting contributions. Scribner rightly asserts that historians have neglected the bare-knuckle conflicts that often developed between teachers and school boards in small districts like Hortonville, Wisconsin, in 1974. That teacher strike represented perhaps the single bitterest in the nation during the long era of teacher strikes from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Scribner argues that conflict in small districts featured its own dynamic, “occur[ing] immediately after a community experienced school consolidation or an influx of suburban growth” (p. 84). (Hortonville, for instance, had experienced both). The school board in Hortonville succeeded in firing the entire teaching force during the strike, and in 1976 the US Supreme Court upheld the board's prerogative to do so. Nonetheless, Scribner asserts that, overall, small school districts lost at the hands of collective bargaining; teachers, through collective contracts, forced districts to spend more money and gained more control over curriculum. The result: “More than any other factor, it was the sudden success of teacher unions that made conservatives abandon local control as a means of ensuring the public good in education” (p. 93).
Taxation and education spending, Scribner argues, also forced conservatives to abandon the principle of local control. Civil rights campaigns—buttressed by lawsuits like Serrano v. Priest (1971)—led to calls for progressive aid formulas in many states to equalize funding across school districts and, in some cases, to restrict local prerogative vis-à-vis property taxes. Nominal federal court victories protected states’ rights to their own funding schemes but ultimately did less to protect local control from states. “The principle of local taxation enshrined in San Antonio v. Rodriguez [1973],” Scribner argues, “became worthless when decoupled from democratic participation and voters’ ability to limit expenditures. Local control was no match for the phalanx of certified assessors, unionized faculty, school administrators, and state officials using state power to push and pull school budgets higher” (p. 118). This insight represents crucial background in explaining the wave of tax revolts that began in California in 1978, and Scribner's assessment of this phenomenon represents this book's second vital contribution. Indeed, The Fight for Local Control both locates the tax revolt's origins in jurisdictional disputes over education and shows how conservatives who initially opposed state control of schools instead strengthened it in order to limit local obligations to raise taxes.
In two final chapters, Scribner connects local control to the rise of the “culture wars” in the 1970s, explaining that activists pushed for local prerogative in opposing the modern pedagogy and curricular choices of teachers but ended up using state-level machinery to expand homeschooling rights to opt out of public education entirely. These developments too served to further erode local control.
The Fight for Local Control causes one to ask important questions about the nature of American democracy. The study, for instance, highlights the notion that while many Americans have historically expected democratic governance, they have also often had much lower expectations for a democratic workplace, especially for professionals like teachers.
In the communities Scribner examines, teacher unions represented just another outside group on par with think tanks and corporate foundations. If school boards have historically represented the quintessence of democracy, however, so have trade unions. During the era of this study, union members elected their own leaders, just as local citizens elected school boards. Elected union leaders made decisions democratically, as did school boards. Locals typically associated with state and national federations, but so did school boards. During the Hortonville strike, though, many local people viewed the teacher union—affiliated with the Wisconsin Education Association Council—as beholden to a “special interest.” Locals did not seem to characterize the school board this way, in spite of its affiliation with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. The latter, as Adam Mertz's research on the strike (Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 2015) has shown, provided crucial support during the strike, and even filed an amicus brief against the union in the Supreme Court case, but does not merit a mention in Scribner's account. This double standard leads to the question: Why have those Americans pushing so hard for local, democratic control of schools regarded teacher organizations as adversaries instead of natural allies in cause of a common project?
Answering this question, in my view, is crucial to understanding what schools have been and should be. An excellent book forces the reader into such thorny terrain, and Scribner's important and meticulously researched study clearly does that. In sum, his brilliantly argued book should seriously interest this journal's readers, and its careful and accessible prose also makes it suitable for advanced undergraduates in both history and education policy programs.
