this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
763 points (99.4% liked)
Not The Onion
21141 readers
1428 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
how else are you suppose to select school board members? should they be appointed by the town/county or something?
In a sane world, by ability and competence
How do you assess that exactly? What are the qualifications or objective measurements of competence as a school board member?
And furthermore, according to whom? your personal assessment in particular?
There isn't a single right answer to that and I'm not going to suggest there is.
How any organisation operates, be that public or private, is down to the culture of the organisation, and culture comes from people, process, motivation, legislation, and a whole bunch of factors.
If an organisation has a clear mission, is held organisationally accountable in appropriate ways to that mission and makes people feel professionally enriched and valuable, it will attract competent people. And importantly, an organisation full of competent and principled individuals will attract other competent individuals.
On the flip side, if an organisation is subject to decades of mismanagement, has very poor oversight, doesn't reward people for being good at their jobs and in fact rewards the wrong behaviours then exactly the opposite will happen. People who are competent at what they do will either leave or be crushed down, while those who know how to play the bootlicking game will be raised up, and this type of organisation again becomes self-perpetuating.
None of this happens overnight, in either direction. Failure can take years or decades, and so can the reverse.
The issue is that it's self-referential. The org itself gets to define what is good management or bad. Outsides parties, have no say.
And that's how local school boars work. They are local politics and they have very little external oversight, if any at all. Sort of criminal acts, like a board member embezzling school funds, that violate state law, there isn't really much criteria over which they can be held accountable, other than winning votes from their local voters.
I live in Boston. I can harp all I want about a local school board in TN, but the only power I have is over my own local school board here, where I can vote. And man the candidates we have... are usually a mix of nutbags and slightly less nutbags. School board elections tend to attract weirdos more than sensible people, IME.
Better that people vote for metrics than candidates I would suggest, and measure against those. If we gotta vote for questions too, so be it.
As defined by our able and competent political leaders? Ha ha ha.
By merit??
So your general point is a concern. Who can you trust to make the judgement. But that doesn't mean you should just toss up your hands either. As was pointed out, tests of various sorts could be done and the results presented to the voters so that they have more to go on than the number of lawn signd they have seen for a person. The write ups in the guides are nearly pointless. They can say anything they want in there. For a person running for reelection, their voting record would be nice to give voters easy access to. There are lots of ways to present the voters with objective information so that they can choose based on thier preferences. But none of that happens today.
it's a democratically elected position.
the judgement is the judgement voters of that district.
do you vote in your own local school board elections? I do, and yeah you vote based on the person's policy stated positions. however, just because I do that, doesn't mean lots of candidates I don't vote for, don't get elected and push policies I don't agree with... because they get more votes than the candidates I vote for did.
Also, why do you assume that the voters in this school district, don't want this guy? He may very well be who they think is best for the job. If you don't live in this district... you don't get to vote for the school board there.
As a voter, I have found that there is a significant lacking of useful information to make a decision on. I put in a fair bit of effort and often feel like I have nowhere near enough. And that is how the politicians want it. That way the majority of voters to have very little information of substance to go on. That way they can win on charisma. And they don't have to do anything positive for the voters to move up. They just have to please the political powers in the area to get endorsements, campaign help, and straight up donations so they can move to the next level. But when it comes to school boards. Most won't move to the next level. But they take advantage of the way the system is set up to get elected. They probably even believe that their opinions are the will of the voter, when the voter barely knows anything about their real opinions.