School Districts, History and Development

The American public school district is a unit of local government with authority over education in a community or other geographic area. A district derives its power from a statutory delegation of the state legislature, and it is responsible for developing, implementing, and evaluating all aspects of the local educational program. As such, school districts can be seen as an arm of state government established to ensure the rights and privileges of a free education to its people. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics from 2001, there are almost 15,000 local school districts in the nation—ranging in number from a single school district in Hawaii to nearly 1,200 districts in Texas.

Under the U.S. Constitution and pursuant to its reserved-powers clause, education is a responsibility left to the states primarily. Because they are political entities of the state, created for the express purpose of helping the state discharge this responsibility, each state legislature has the authority to create, modify, or abolish local school districts unless otherwise restrained by its state constitution. State control over each local district is exercised through a policy-making agency (usually known as the state board or state department of education), while federal influence is experienced both through direct grants for specific purposes (e.g., No Child Left Behind) and through the Supreme Court's interpretations of various local school district practices and effects. State legislators are hesitant to change existing district boundaries and structures without voter approval in the governmental unit, but local school districts often find themselves caught in a legal and political crossfire between federal court orders and local community desires not in sympathy with such orders.

The local school district is a descendant of the “common” (public elementary) school movement that dominated the nineteenth century. Whether viewed as charity schools that developed in the cities of the industrial northeast, the ad hoc town schools of colonial New England, one-room schoolhouses of the agricultural Midwest, or the southern schools run initially by the parish vestry and church wardens, each prototype of the common school contributed in some way to the modern notion of the local school district.

Through various acts in the colonial states—such as those enacted in Connecticut in 1776 and Massachusetts in 1789—granting the right to elect school trustees, levy taxes, and select a teacher, a district system of education came to be established. Common school reformers later moved to force the consolidation of small school units into larger standardized town systems, hoping to lessen sectarian religious practices in the schools. (In some states during this “city unification” period in the 1840s and 1850s, legislation to encourage consolidation would pass, then be repealed as the dominant political party changed, then passed again over a period of years.) In the southern states, where the county was traditionally viewed as the local unit of government, it was likewise adopted as the unit of school control. In the more sparsely populated Midwest and West, district organization was suited to the geographic needs of the region: When some number of families lived near enough together to make organization possible, they were permitted by early state laws in those regions to come together and form a school district—no matter how irregular the boundaries.

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