Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 8, 1992 TAG: 9202100204
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TOOTHLESS, TAXLESS SCHOOL BOARDS
SMALLER classes? More pre-school programs? Expanded academic curricula? Tutors and mentors? Help for underfunded schools in poor localities? Nutrition and day-care programs?Perish the thought. That stuff takes money. Besides, the General Assembly is busy improving Virginia's schools in other ways.
Why, just this week, the House of Delegates agreed to let voters of each locality decide whether they want to elect their school boards.
Understand, the boards under the House version couldn't really do very much. The other part, about giving elected boards their own taxing authority, somehow got lost in the shuffle.
(In the Senate, where the House bill is now going, Democrat Clancy Holland of Virginia Beach has proposed a constitutional amendment tying elected boards to taxing authority. Wouldn't you know it: Many lawmakers see his proposal - the only way to justify elected school boards - as a ploy by elected-board opponents to cripple the effort!)
Alas, this is how things are these days. Shift the blame; fuzz the accountability.
The president blames Congress; Congress blames the president; the public, insistent on electing a president of one party and a Congress of the other, blames the system.
If you're a Virginia Democrat, blame Republican presidents for the state's economic troubles. If you're a Virginia Republican, blame Democratic governors for same. If you're the current governor, propose a plan to overcome financial disparities in school funding - but don't accept the responsibility of offering a way to pay for it. If you're in the Republican opposition, blame the governor for spending cutbacks - meanwhile pledging your undying devotion to holding the line on taxes.
The idea of elected but fiscally powerless school boards is an idea whose time at last may have come, because - on a couple of levels - it fits so well this jive du jour.
For legislators, the idea provides a way to support something people seem to want, elected boards, without the kind of talk, about taxing authority, that people seem to find painful. That the former to have substantive meaning must involve the latter is beside the point, which is about the forms and illusions of accountability rather than accountability itself.
And in the localities opting for them, tax-toothless elected school boards would serve the zeitgeist by creating a new forum for finger-pointing and fault-shifting. Elected board members, secure in the knowledge that it isn't they who set local tax rates, can blame school ills on the parsimony of city councils and county boards of supervisors. Council members and supervisors, if they have their wits about them, will fight back by blaming budget pressures on school-board profligacy.
In such battles of the blame-throwers, victory goes to those who can cast aspersions - and shift and escape accountability - most credibly. Elected boards without taxing authority should provide, in these times, an excellent schooling for the politically ambitious. The same can't be said of their effect on the schooling of Virginia's young people.