Date:
Location:
Join CEPR Visiting Research Fellow Scott Levy, who will be presenting arguments from the current draft of his book on school boards, Why School Boards Matter, to be published by MIT Press. Please bring your lunch; coffee, tee, and cookies will be provided.
About the Presenter:
Scott Levy is a Visiting Research Fellow at HGSE/CEPR and a former Senior Research Fellow at HKS. He is dedicated to public education and children's health. He is an elected public school board member in Westchester County, NY and currently serves as President of the Westchester-Putnam School Boards Association. He served on the NYS Regional Task Force for Reopening Schools and the Lower Hudson Education Coalition Steering Committee. Scott is the Chairman of Blythedale Children’s Hospital and former Executive Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Scott has spoken at many convenings of school board members, superintendents, and teachers across the country and has published articles in Education Next, The Washington Post, and EdSurge.
Scott spent most of his career as an investment banker advising corporate boards and management teams. Currently, he is a Partner at Lynrock Lake, LP, serves on the board of a digital health company, and is an Investment Advisory Committee member of the NYS School Boards Association.
Scott is a Director of the Harvard Alumni Association.
About the Presentation:
Not long ago, school boards were thought of as obscure bastions of local democracy conducting the mundane business of district governance. More recently, across red and blue states alike, we’ve witnessed a series of battles in the boardroom. For example, a contentious school board meeting in Virginia on pronoun policy and critical race theory led to an arrest and a trespassing summons. In Pennsylvania, a school board member received a message calling her a “treasonous pedophile”. The message told her to “grow eyes in the back of your head…you’re going down”.
- Why have school boardrooms become battlegrounds?
- Should we rethink the role of school boards in our governance ecosystem?
- How can we work with school boards to improve public education?
As a former Wall Street investment banker turned public education advocate, I challenge the notion that we need more centralized control to drive accountability and excellence. Instead, we need to understand and elevate the importance of the school board. A well-functioning school board can make a district, and a dysfunctional school board can break a district. School boards are the vital organ for education decision-making, and they are uniquely positioned to improve public education in America.