Here's one for the school committee members

I've been attempting over on Twitter to share my education-related reading (#amreading is the hashtag, if you search for that and my handle), and right now, I'm reading High Stakes Reform: The Politics of Educational Accountability by Professor Kathryn McDermott of UMass Amherst. I'm in Chapter 3, which traces the evolution of educational accountability, and this passage (p. 37) made me laugh:

Administrative reformers also disliked small, local districts because they forced school administrators to engage with a broad, cross section of the public on school boards. According to the views embodied in Ellwood Patterson Cubberley's textbooks, school board members should be drawn from the elite of society relative few people had the appropriate outlook and skills for board service. If a state contained hundreds of small school districts, it would certainly run out of elites well before it ran out of school board seats to fill.