29 Nov 2007, Peter J. Cistone
[This is an abstract of a paper given at the symposium School Board Research: Main Lines of Inquiry, in Des Moines, Iowa, September 14-15, 2007. This abstract provides an overview of the paper. The full paper is published in Relevancy and Revelation: The Future of School Board Governance, by Rowman and Littlefield, Spring 2008.]
The author provides a retrospective of school board research themes from the time of the 1975 school board symposium. The author includes major theoretical advances in school board research and concludes that there are few empirical works that extend governance models past those originally prior to the 1970s. The author concludes that further work is needed to better define variables in governance models but maintains the efficacy of elected school boards as one of the few remaining accessible democratic institutions in local communities.