A Public Choice Theory of School Board Member Behavior

Abstract

The study of educational governance has suffered by being insufficiently concerned with axiomatic-deductive theories. It is behind the times. The theory presented in this paper should move things forward. A public choice theory of school board member behavior makes two major contributions to the study of school governance. First, it provides a theoretical framework for microanalyses of school governance, that is, the focus is on each actor and each school district rather than on aggregates of abstract data. Secondly, the theory has the potential to greatly increase the power to predict behavior and events in school governance. A framework for understanding and predicting the micro, as well as the macro, events of school governance is needed. The theory of school governance proposed in this paper provides such a framework.