Picking the Books Isn't Your Job — But Boards Keep Doing It Anyway
Last month, the Morrow County Local School District board in central Ohio voted 4-2 to remove three novels from the eighth-grade English Language Arts curriculum after a board member received a complaint from a constituent. The board took the action without a formal reconsideration process, without input from the district's curriculum committee, and without asking the superintendent to bring a recommendation. They simply voted. By the end of the week, the district's curriculum coordinator had submitted her resignation letter, citing "an inability to do professional work in an environment of board-level subject matter decisions."
This kind of story is playing out in school districts across Ohio and across the country with increasing frequency. And while the specific flashpoints vary — reading lists, diversity curricula, sex education frameworks, social-emotional learning programs — the underlying governance failure is always the same: a board that has confused its role with the role of professional educators. Boards set direction. They don't select novels. When they start selecting novels, something has gone structurally wrong.
The distinction matters more than it might appear. Effective school board governance is built on a specific theory of who is responsible for what. The board hires, evaluates, and if necessary fires a superintendent. That superintendent, in turn, is responsible for ensuring that the professional staff under her direction makes sound instructional decisions consistent with board-approved curriculum frameworks. When a board skips that chain — when it reaches past the superintendent, past the curriculum director, past the teachers, and directly into a classroom's book list — it doesn't just pick a different novel. It dismantles the entire accountability structure. The superintendent can no longer be held responsible for instructional quality if the board is making instructional decisions. Teachers lose clarity about whose professional judgment matters. And the board, ironically, becomes more exposed: having claimed ownership of a decision, it now owns whatever outcomes follow.
The pattern is particularly pronounced in Ohio this year. The state legislature passed a series of curriculum transparency bills in 2025 that, whatever their intent, gave political cover to board members who wanted to wade into instructional content. At least eleven Ohio districts have seen board motions on specific curriculum materials since January — up from three in the same period last year. In Licking County, a board majority directed the superintendent to pull a social studies unit on historical protest movements from the sixth-grade curriculum after it was described (inaccurately) in a social media post as "anti-American." The superintendent complied, noting in a memo to staff that the board had formally directed her to do so — preserving, at least, the paper trail that makes clear this was a governance decision, not a professional one. Not all superintendents are so careful, and not all boards make the distinction possible.
The antidote is not passivity. Boards have every right — and a genuine responsibility — to set clear expectations about what students should learn and to what standard. The board's role in curriculum is to define outcomes: graduation requirements, performance benchmarks, the values that should animate instructional programming. A board that says "we expect every third-grader to read grade-level text fluently" is doing governance. A board that says "we expect this particular anthology to be used in third grade" is doing something else. The best boards in Ohio — and there are some — have adopted explicit curriculum governance policies that describe exactly where the board's authority ends and the superintendent's begins. Those policies don't prevent conflict, but they make it possible to resolve conflict without dismantling professional accountability in the process.
This Week's Three Things
Ridgemont City Schools Wrote the Policy That Other Ohio Boards Wish They Had
When the Ohio curriculum transparency legislation passed last fall, most district boards responded in one of two ways: they either ignored it and hoped the controversy would pass, or they dove headfirst into materials review, convening special sessions to examine specific textbooks and instructional units. Ridgemont City Schools took a third path. Within six weeks of the legislation's effective date, the board had adopted a comprehensive Curriculum Governance Policy that delineated, in explicit and detailed language, exactly what decisions belong to the board and what decisions belong to the superintendent and professional staff.
The policy runs four pages — unusually long for board policy, and deliberately so. It defines the board's curriculum responsibilities in outcome terms: the board sets graduation requirements, adopts the district's academic vision statement, approves the high-level curriculum framework (the subjects taught and the standards applied), and monitors student achievement data against board-established benchmarks. Everything below those lines — specific materials, unit sequencing, instructional methodology, supplemental resources — is explicitly delegated to the superintendent, with the expectation that professional decisions will be consistent with board-approved frameworks. The policy includes a formal reconsideration process for community material challenges, with specific timelines and a committee composition requirement that includes more educators than community members, on the grounds that instructional judgment should anchor the review.
Perhaps more importantly, the board trained itself to use the policy. Superintendent Dr. Keisha Morrow reports that board members now regularly self-correct during meetings when discussion drifts toward specific materials. "We've had moments where a board member starts to go down a path about a specific program," she said in a recent interview with the Ohio School Boards Association, "and another member will literally say, 'Is that ours to decide?' And we stop and check the policy." That reflexive habit — asking whether a decision belongs to the board before taking it — is the behavioral outcome that policy is supposed to produce. Most boards never achieve it. Ridgemont has.
The results have been meaningful in ways beyond governance tidiness. Staff turnover in the curriculum department has been near zero since the policy was adopted. The district's instructional team reports that they are able to make evidence-based decisions on a normal professional timeline without fear that a board meeting will overturn their work. And when a community challenge to a health curriculum unit came in March, the reconsideration process absorbed the controversy, produced a recommendation, and delivered it to the board — which accepted the recommendation with minimal drama. For a policy issue that has destabilized dozens of Ohio districts this year, that counts as a significant operational success.
Board Involvement in Instructional Decisions Correlates With Lower Teacher Retention, Study Finds
A 2025 working paper from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania examined governance patterns in 214 mid-size school districts and found a statistically significant negative correlation between direct board involvement in instructional content decisions and teacher retention rates — particularly among experienced teachers in grades 4 through 8. Districts in the highest quartile for board curriculum involvement (measured by the frequency of board-level votes on specific instructional materials, programs, or course offerings) saw teacher retention rates roughly 7 percentage points lower than districts in the lowest quartile, even after controlling for compensation, district size, and community demographics. The effect was most pronounced among teachers with more than eight years of experience — the cohort whose institutional knowledge and classroom effectiveness most benefits students.
The researchers theorize that board micromanagement of curriculum undermines what they call "professional efficacy" — the sense among experienced educators that their expertise is recognized and that their professional judgments carry weight. When teachers perceive that the board, rather than professional educators, is making instructional decisions, their motivation to invest in the district declines. The paper notes that the effect was partially mediated by superintendent behavior: in districts where the superintendent actively buffered professional staff from board intrusion and maintained clear role boundaries even under political pressure, the retention impact was smaller. This suggests that strong executive leadership can partially compensate for weak governance structure — but it also creates dependence on a single individual's political courage rather than on durable institutional design.
For practitioners, the implications are direct. The cost of curriculum micromanagement is not only governance dysfunction — it's a measurable drag on the human capital that schools depend on most. Board members who view instructional involvement as constituent responsiveness should understand that the responsiveness has a price, and that price is often paid by the students least able to absorb the disruption of losing experienced teachers. The CPRE paper is available at cpre.org and is recommended reading for any board currently navigating pressure to involve itself in specific instructional content decisions.