this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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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.