Who is making Wisconsin school district policy? Hint: it’s not really school boards
“Wisconsin is a local control state.” That sentence pops up again and again in DPI guidance and in decisions by Wisconsin state courts. It stands for the idea that, in Wisconsin, democratically-elected local school boards are responsible for making decisions and adopting policies that determine how schools will be run and what students will learn.
Because Wisconsin is in theory a local-control state, many of the state laws that govern schools don’t tell schools exactly how to handle a challenge or issue. Instead, the state law articulates a general goal or standard, and then leaves it to individual school districts to adopt policies that define how they will meet that goal or standard.
For example, the Wisconsin student anti-discrimination statute states that pupil discrimination is prohibited, and then directs school boards to develop written policies and procedures to implement the prohibition against discrimination. Wisconsin’s curriculum statute doesn’t prescribe what is to be taught at what grade level; instead, it simply instructs school districts that they must develop and maintain a written curriculum plan for certain key academic subjects. Wisconsin’s expulsion statute doesn’t specify when a student should or should not be expelled. Instead, it identifies broad categories of conduct for which a student may be expelled, and leaves it to the school board to determine whether “the interest of the school demands the pupil’s expulsion.”
The theory underlying this legal framework is that local school boards know their communities well and are best positioned to make decisions that reflect local priorities, values and needs.
But school boards don’t really write policy. Instead, the overwhelming majority of school districts in the state purchase policy in the form of pre-written templates from an organization called Neola. Neola gives school districts some choice as to which templates to purchase, but it discourages districts from incorporating their own district-specific provisions into Neola’s template language. Most of the districts that don’t purchase policy from Neola rely on a similar policy-boilerplate service offered by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, or WASB. WASB charges an hourly consulting fee to school boards that want to tailor its standard policy templates to their individual district needs.
Thus, even though state law is built on the assumption that local school boards will craft local school policy, most school policy in the state isn’t local at all. It’s generic and purchased from outside sources.
What does this mean for students, educators, and local communities? Here is a bare-bones list of issues I’ve seen arise from this not-so-local approach to policymaking. I’ll discuss each of these issues in a lot more detail in upcoming posts.
School boards are much less responsive to community advocacy for policy change.
School leaders don’t know the policies well or understand what they require, so they often implement the policies incorrectly.
The policies are so generic that they don’t give clear guidance about how the schools are to be run–resulting in more reactive and ad hoc decisionmaking by school leaders.
Schools are less transparent, because many of the real decisions about how things will operate are made off the books and not formalized in district policy manuals.
Policies are written in confusing legalese that’s tough for families and community members to understand and follow.
A lot of power gets handed from school boards and administrators to school district lawyers, who make decisions based only on legal compliance and not on educational best practices.
Policy errors and omissions are reproduced statewide.
Check out my Youtube channel for guidance about how to access and evaluate your district’s policy manual.
And reach out to me if you’d like to talk about how your district’s policy manual is or isn’t working for your district.
