One reason why so many schools in the United States struggle to provide a high-quality education is that their core constituents - students and parents - have the least say in how they're run.
That's the argument made by Vladimir Kogan, a political science professor at The Ohio State University, in his new book "No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids."
In the book, Kogan says that the main concerns of most people who vote in local school board elections are not aligned with the academic needs of students. Most adults' interest in education focuses on partisan issues and other concerns tangential to what students learn.
"The interests of students and their families are often different than the interests of everyone else," Kogan said.
And evidence clearly shows that parents are a distinct minority of those who vote for school boards, according to research by Kogan.
Kogan analyzed data on voters who cast ballots in local school board elections in 11 large and mid-sized states. He found that across each of the states, voters with children in the average school board election account for between 20% and 35% of the electorate.
"In most school board elections, the vast majority of voters don't have children," Kogan said.
"That's not to say that parents and kids are the only stakeholders and they should get everything they want. But we should be concerned that their voices get drowned out by others whose first priority isn't always the education of kids."
One consequence of this is that student achievement does not seem to be a big concern of voters in school board elections.
In another study, Kogan and his colleagues found only very small differences in election outcomes between districts doing the best job improving student achievement and those at the very bottom.
If student achievement is not guiding voters, what is?
Kogan said that, increasingly, adults are following national partisan leaders on education policy. There have always been national issues that have had an impact on local school districts, from the teaching of evolution to school prayer, he said.
But the landscape has changed in the past few decades to make these national partisan issues "more problematic and troubling," he said.
One important issue is that the decline of local newspapers, once the primary source of information about local politics and schools, has left a void that has been filled by national cable news and social media.
"People used to hear about and discuss the local issues facing their schools, and that was different from community to community," Kogan said.
"Now these broad scale national conflicts are dominating the discussion and that has important consequences on where attention is focused in the day-to-day running of schools."
These conflicts can range from whether contentious topics are covered in history classes to what books are allowed in the school libraries. These controversies aren't just distractions.
In research Kogan conducted, he found that political controversies in local school districts hurt student performance on state exams, particularly in mathematics. The decline in achievement is roughly equivalent to 10 days of learning out of a standard 180-day school year.
And these negative impacts on learning persist at least four years after the controversy occurs. Learning disruption is particularly pronounced in the wake of controversies related to racial issues and the teaching of evolution, Kogan found.
"The more time you spend arguing about these political issues, the less time and resources are left for the core educational function of the schools," Kogan said.
"And so we are implicitly making a choice about what is important to us, and often deciding that the quality of education we provide is not the top priority."
What can be done to change these negative dynamics?
Kogan admits that his overarching idea is controversial: Give parents and children more say in how schools are governed, even if it means giving less power to others.
"We have to take seriously the possibility that we may need to have a little bit less democracy to have somewhat better schools. That tradeoff may be real and unavoidable," he said.
"Right now, students and parents are not adequately represented in the democratic process and we need to find ways to give them more power."
In the last chapter of the book, Kogan offers three reforms that he believes will help improve schools, even if they are not silver bullets that will fix everything.
The first reform is to schedule school board elections to be held at the same time as presidential and midterm elections. These elections have the largest turnout by far and also have been shown to increase the share of voters who are parents of school-aged children.
Secondly, Kogan recommends making good student academic performance more relevant and visible to voters. Schools should receive grades based on how much they improve student performance over the year, he said. Right now, schools are heavily rewarded for starting with high-achieving students, and can often earn high marks without improving learning.
Kogan's final recommendation is promoting school choice options to parents, which he knows is controversial. In the book, he wrote, "Doing school choice well is hard to pull off in the real world."
One of the biggest problems is overcoming strong incentives for school operators to selectively attract the highest-performing students or push out the most disadvantaged.
"When done well, school choice can improve education for everyone, not just the students who take advantage of these options. But the key is doing it well," he said.
Regardless of what reforms are tried in the future, "student outcomes should be our North Star," Kogan wrote. "Reforms should be judged by how they impact what students know and can do, not by how adults feel about them."
And that is why society should be willing to sacrifice some amount of democratic control if it could result in better outcomes for students, he said. That doesn't mean ending the roles of local voters.
"My argument is not that we should give up completely on local democratic control of schools, only that we should seriously consider sacrificing a little bit of it if a reform proposal that we expect to benefit students comes along," he wrote.
