In college and university towns across the United States, academics are regular fixtures on local public school boards. In search of a way to meet our civic duty, we seem to be drawn naturally to school boards more than other local public institutions. This is a guess, of course, and it is one of the few things one cannot find data on in this collection of essays on the work that has been done by and to school boards in the last decade. If the intuition that academics tend to romanticize local school boards is only half right, these rigorous, fine-grained essays on one area of education politics will intrigue more than just political scientists.

The essays in Besieged may also sober us up, as we hear how districts have increased in size, shrunk in number, and come under pressure, if not attack, from federal and state forces. The contributors are cautious about predicting the future, but the present they describe can only make those of us who still think of education policy as a province for citizen participation very nervous about what lies ahead.

In his introduction, William G. Howell summarizes the framework that holds things together: “This book … presents new empirical findings about who participates in school board politics, whose interests school boards serve, whether school boards can be trusted to faithfully implement policy directives from other branches of government, and what possibilities different government reforms hold.” (p. 20) The data, as Howell acknowledges, are at times drawn narrowly from particular populations. But they are also carefully culled and felicitously organized. Terry Moe's detailed treatment of teacher union participation in school board elections in California is a good example. Moe takes the reader, step by step, beyond platitudes about local politics to a careful analysis of which factors may and may not limit the prima facie influence that a powerful interest group like a teachers union may have on school board elections. The union's power is substantial but limited by local political culture and the stronger backbones that incumbents seem to develop. Democracy in education politics, he concludes, is still alive, if not as well as we might like it to be (p. 286).

One question raised by findings like these is whether what we find on and around local school boards is politics or civics. More specifically, William Campbell asks, in what ways does this particular place matter for different forms of participation? How do diversity, conflict, and commonality affect participation? His answer rests on a distinction between participation as a Madisonian conflict between competing interests (the kind of politics Moe focuses on) and a more Jeffersonian engagement in common work. Both forms are evident to different degrees in the data from 40 different communities on which he relies (p. 290).

Campbell's suggestive distinction between politics and civics is reprised by Joseph P. Viteritti in the first of the two concluding commentaries on the main essays in the collection. Viteritti uses it as a heuristic device to formulate interesting questions about several of the other contributions to the volume. Perhaps the dominant issue in education politics has been choice (as discussed, for example, in the fine essay on charter schools by Paul Teske, Mark Schneider, and Erin Cassese). As Viteritti says, poor and minority families may be more likely to participate in charter schools because they “understand that such engagement is a more productive use of their energy than politics, which tends to be controlled by stakeholders who do not represent their interests” (p. 319).

Two essays on the representation of minority interests on school boards and the participation of minorities in school board politics also reflect a tacit appreciation of this distinction between politics and civics. Melissa J. Marschall considers data on African American and Hispanic attitudes toward local school boards in four large cities, and Kenneth Meier and Eric Juenke focus on the experiences of Hispanics in Texas. From the former study, it appears that Hispanic electoral candidates for local school board seats have not benefited as much as blacks have from biracial coalitions. Both, however, seem to give school performances high marks where minority representation exists on the school board (p. 195). Meier and Juenke, comparing at-large and single-member districts, find that in Texas districts' “at-large elections are associated with fewer Hispanic school board members in districts where Hispanic representatives are significantly influenced by the type of election” (p. 223). This has played itself out at a substantive level in that minorities elected in at-large districts have been less effective in advancing minority hiring in the district.

We learn a lot from this collection about what school board members actually do these days, and it often has little directly to do with making decisions about educational policy. In the second concluding commentary, Jennifer L. Hochschild observes that most of a board's time is consumed by personnel decisions, budgets, labor relations, public relations, and framing responses to court orders and consent decrees (p. 324). Given these demands, it is perhaps no wonder that school boards have not been forces for greater egalitarian outcomes in student learning or more democratic citizen participation. Local school districts and their boards are not the autonomous democratic fora that some continue to imagine they are. As Robert Briffault writes in his opening essay, the institutions of local public education in our federal system are “creatures” of the state, acting as its “agent” with only the most provisional “delegated” powers (p. 28). New state finance reforms and teacher and student performance standards (in part driven by the federal No Child Left Behind Act) make local autonomy an even more limited affair (p. 52).

In a world in which full-blown military sieges are all too common, “besieged” may be a somewhat overstated way to describe the embattled state of local school boards. Nevertheless, if the authors of this collection are correct, it is hard to cherish much hope that school boards will be able to rise above the chores and challenges Hochschild lists in order to debate such policies as equality of educational opportunity in constructive, deliberative, and democratic ways.