Elected School Boards Research Cited

At a Chicago School Board meeting, board president David Vitale gestures to a speaker who is addressing the board, while two other board members are looking on at the interaction.

This week, the Baltimore Sun issued a clarion call for Baltimore voters to demand an elected school board. In their op-ed, the Sun cited Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education (CEJE) research on the need for elected school boards in urban districts as evidence of the need for greater civic participation in the school district.

"A recent study by the University of Illinois at Chicago found little evidence that appointed boards get better results than elected ones. More importantly, what these researchers did find is that appointed boards often lead to a loss of both community participation and "broader involvement in the democratic process." We see the real-life results of that, right here in Baltimore, not just in the last election, but also in nearly every election in recent memory."

Read the full op-ed.

Read the report from CEJE.