The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which parents from Montgomery County, Maryland, challenged the public school system for the right to opt their young children out from exposure to books on LGBT themes.
The case appears, on the surface, to reverse long-standing views of the role of local government. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, defended not federal intervention to prevent discrimination but local governments’ rights to make their own rules. The plaintiffs in the case, a religiously diverse cultural traditionalist group of Muslim, Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox parents, are looking to the nation’s highest court to discipline their local school board.
Historically, it has been conservatives defending local government as a bulwark of democracy, while progressives looked to limit it. Indeed, arch-progressive Woodrow Wilson, in his prepresidency life as a political scientist, observed that Washington does not govern American communities but, rather, that “they govern themselves.” Wilson, of course, did much to change that.
But taking a closer look at Montgomery County, a jurisdiction of 1.1 million residents with a school system of 160,000, the 14th largest in the United States, reveals that the problem parents are facing lies squarely in the unusually large size. Montgomery County’s school governance is not local enough. It has just one elected school board that governs countywide, setting the rules for cities ranging from Silver Spring to Rockville to Gaithersburg, along with a large number of smaller towns with diverse demographics.
In many states, notably in “home-rule” states such as those of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, each of these municipalities would have its own school board and public school system, with the capacity to set its own rules and the discretion to set its own curricular policies.
Compare, for instance, Montgomery County, with its single, unitary school board, with the situation in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, a major suburban Boston area analogous to Montgomery’s relationship to metro Washington. Notwithstanding the fact that Norfolk has a smaller population, 787,000, it has 22 individual school districts. Although school choice discussion today focuses on the use of vouchers and the advent of charter schools, smaller, home-rule school systems are themselves a form of choice. As Charles Tiebout observed in his classic 1956 essay, A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures, municipalities compete for residents based on the market basket of public goods they offer. There is simply no such competition in Montgomery County when it comes to schools.
In metro Boston, this competition has served students well. In a 2000 paper, economist Caroline Hoxby asked, Does Competition Among Public Schools Serve Students and Taxpayers Well? Her answer was positive: “My results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater Tiebout choice have more productive public schools.”
But what’s at issue in the Montgomery County case is less about school quality and more about the rights of parents to choose a system with which they are culturally comfortable. The existence of individual, small school systems enables that by, in effect, magnifying the power of their vote.
Winning an at-large, or countywide, seat on the Montgomery County Board of Education in 2024 required 212,000 votes. Winning a seat on the elected School Committee in Brookline, Massachusetts, one of the nation’s top school systems, required just 5,400 votes in a town of some 60,000. Put another way, one’s vote simply carries more weight when it is one of a smaller number of total votes.
IS IT REALLY THE PERFECT TIME TO BOMB IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM?
As it happens, I was a longtime resident of Brookline, and when the school system pushed for an unpopular curricular change, dropping an Advanced Placement history course, popular opinion forced its restoration. This is far more difficult in an election in which hundreds of thousands of votes are cast, and in which special interests, such as Weingarten’s teachers union, are in a financial position to exercise disproportionate influence.
Simply put, if there were 20 school systems in Montgomery County rather than just one, it is far less likely that aggrieved parents would have had to take their cause to the Supreme Court. They could have employed public school choice — and the ballot box. There’s another solution to their problem: Break up the Montgomery County school system.