Educational Politics and
Local Governance
Local Governance
This refers to how people use power, influence, and authority to affect instructional and curricular practices within a school or school system.
What is Educational Politics?
Comprehensive school-reform legislation requiring all Kentucky schools to form school-based management councils with authority to set policies in eight areas (1990).
What is the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA)?
Money given by a state to its cities and towns to provide essential services, including the operation of public schools.
What is State Aid?
A set of guidelines that defines appropriate behavior for professionals.
What is a code of ethics?
Freedom, granted by the First Amendment to the Constitution, to express one’s beliefs.
What is freedom of expression?
These people are influenced most by the five dimensions of educational politics.
Who are teachers?
Takeover of a chronically low-achieving school or district by the state.
What is State Takeover?
At a local level, most funding for schools comes from these.
What are property taxes?
Problem situations in which an ethical response is difficult to determine; that is, no single response can be called right or wrong.
What are ethical dilemmas?
A 1974 law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, granting parents of students under 18 and students over 18 the right to examine their school records.
What is the Buckley Amendment?
Agencies at the local level that have the authority to operate schools in a district.
What are local school districts?
The highest educational agency in a state; charged with regulating the state’s system of education.
What is the state board of education?
Funds allocated to parents that they may use to purchase education for their children from public or private schools in the area.
What is a voucher system?
A set of specific guidelines that must be followed to protect individuals from arbitrary, capricious treatment by those in authority.
What is due process?
The process of searching an individual and/or his or her property if that person is suspected of an illegal act; reasonable or probable cause to suspect the individual must be present.
What is search and seizure?
The primary governing body of a local school district.
What is a School Board?
The chief administrator of a state department of education and head of the state board of education, often called the commissioner of education or superintendent of public instruction.
Who is the chief state school officer?
Umbrella term for reform initiatives that seek to run public schools as private enterprises.
What is the privatization movement?
The right of teachers to teach, free from external constraint, censorship, or interference.
What is academic freedom?
Physical punishment applied to a student by a school employee as a disciplinary measure.
What is corporal punishment?
The chief administrator of a school district.
Who is the Superintendant?
A 1944 federal law that provides veterans with payments for tuition and room and board at colleges and universities and special schools; formally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act.
What is the G.I. Bill of Rights?
A form of federal aid given directly to the states, which a state or local education agency may spend as it wishes with few limitations.
What is block grants?
Teachers are required by law to report this.
What is child abuse?
Liability for injury that results from the failure of a teacher, school, or school district to provide a student with adequate instruction, guidance, counseling, and/or supervision.
What is educational malpractice?