In the not too distant past, the centerpiece of every community in the nation was the "little red schoolhouse," the small building that was the symbol and substance of American commitment to mass public education. In many rural areas, the building had one room and one teacher for students of all ages; as recently as 1916, nearly one-third of the nation's 620,000 schools had only one room, and while today fewer than 1,000 one-room schools remain, they are a vivid reminder of a more bucolic past.

What has not changed is the school as community focal point. As the frontier receded, the school remained as a community center, meeting place and rallying point for local interests and activities of all kinds, not just education. Today, in almost every American community, schools are used during nonschool hours for a variety of activities -- meetings, handicraft classes for adults, senior citizen clubs, Cub Scout meetings, exercise classes, religious services and much more.

The idea of local control exerts a compelling hold on most Americans. In education, as in other walks of American life, the term means what it suggests: formal control is exercised locally, not by central government. In this regard, education is not alone.

The Constitution of the United States creates a federal system of government comprised of three broad layers -- national, state and local. The general theory underlying this complicated and sometimes overlapping network is that control of all government Functions should be as close to the individual citizen as Possible, and that each layer of government should do what it is best suited to do.

For example, the national government attends to matters of national defense, the money supply, international relations and other activities that are truly national in scope. The 50 state governments attend to those matters that they are best suited to deal with: state roads, highways and bridges; state courts and prisons; state colleges and universities, and the like. In turn, local government deals with those departments and activities which are uniquely local in character and scope, such as local courts, tax assessors, police departments and sanitation services. Historically, schools in the United States have been maintained by local government.

The roots of this tradition are found in two aspects of colonial American life -- one a practice of long standing, the other a habit of mind.

The practice was rudimentary education for the masses, a product of the religious pietism of the New World. Central to this particular religious experience was the belief that man may commune directly with God without the need for priestly intermediaries. Protestant pastors, to use modern terminology, facilitated the religious experience, but they did not create it.

In the Protestant traditions, then, it was essential that all communicants be able to read the Scriptures. Revealed word had to be accessible to the congregation as a whole. Thus, the first public school in America was established in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1645, authorized under the terms of a statute enacted by the colonial legislature. Education was not an indulgence; it was central to the Protestant experience.

The habit of mind important to understanding the role of education is a disposition to cooperate and collaborate. It is a product of the dual American commitment to liberty and equality. Men who are both free and equal respect one another and work together freely, as equals. In the original colonies, and later on the frontier, this idea was subject to the test of reality, and it was clear that it worked. Americans at the local level cooperated in most of what they did; raising roofs, making quilts, holding town meetings, participating in clubs and voluntary associations were the product of democratic cooperation and collaboration.

The great French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, was impressed, above all else in America, by this "passion for association." It was not the man on horseback that impressed de Tocqueville, but people working together in fraternal associations, clubs, committees, town meetings and, above all, self-government.

These twin commitments -- a commitment to learning for everyone and habits of collaboration and cooperation -- set the stage for the theory and practice of local control. To this day it is based on the belief that a free and equal people knows best its own self-interest and has the capacity, voluntarily, to cooperate and collaborate to secure it.

America's Founding Fathers reflected this multifaceted view of education, believing it to be vital to the life of the new nation.

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a free and equal people who would govern themselves and renounce the hereditary privilege of the Old World. A "natural aristocracy" of talent would arise and accomplishment would be limited only by the energy and discipline of the individual. While social classes would not disappear, the hereditary social class system would. Individuals would rise or fall on the basis of individual talent. Personal industry and enterprise would determine destiny.

Such a vision required mass education for its realization. The Founders were convinced that a free people could protect their freedom and enlarge its scope only if they were educated. Only if individuals are educated can they realize their potential.

But while Jefferson and the other framers of the U.S. Constitution thought that education was important, they also believed that education was a local responsibility, properly exercised and led by the community. Education was not to be imparted by central authority; it was to be acquired by the people themselves.

The Constitution is deliberately silent on the question of education. In that document omission was as important as commission, because the Tenth Amendment, known as the "Reserve Powers Clause," reserved for the states all powers not specifically the responsibility of federal government. As a consequence, the 50 states -- not the federal (U.S.) Government -- are responsible for education.

The constitutions of each of the 50 states do make explicit reference to education, and spell out the states' financial, organizational and pedagogical responsibilities in some detail. As a legal matter, then, local school districts are creatures of the state, and the powers they exercise are theirs because the states have deliberately delegated them to the local authority. And that which is delegated under state authority can also be taken away by the state.

Whereas states can force local school districts to respond to their policy directives, the United States Government has no such relationship with either states or school districts, at least in matters of curriculum, pedagogy or textbooks -- or standards for teachers or students. Only in those areas in which federal questions arise -- as in the case of citizens' civil rights -- is there any national government jurisdiction. Thus, if the rights of a racial minority are ignored at the local level, Washington Must step in.

This is what occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, in the throes of the civil rights movement, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that `separate but equal' school facilities for minorities were unconstitutional. The U.S. Government initiated a long-term process to enforce integration.

The national government's role was also expanded in the 1960s when president Lyndon B. Johnson, in his `Great Society,' determined that there was a broad national interest in subsidizing certain components of school life -- such as nutrition and early education -- for disadvantaged students. Washington made available to the states substantial funds for these purposes. With the funds came federal controls. Today, more than three decades later, a national debate centers on the degree of control from Washington that should accompany these grants.

With all this, however, fundamental education issues -- what is taught, who teaches, under what conditions and for what salary, how one measures what is learned, the terms and conditions of advancement and graduation, which textbooks are used and how they are adopted -- are all state and local questions.

Over the past 200 years, therefore, the different levels of government engaged in education have come to work together and cooperate. For example, in the case of education, the national government in Washington provides, on average, seven percent of the revenues received by local schools; state and local governments provide the rest. Nevertheless, local school districts jealously guard their prerogatives and privileges. In fact, so deeply embedded is support for local control that no constituency group favors abolishing it.

Whenever the national government adopts legislation that affects local schools, the legislative preamble invariably cites the importance of local control and the desirability of preserving it. A recent article on education in the quarterly journal The Public Interest noted, "that local control is a good thing is assumed.... Critics and dissenters are few and, perhaps, eccentric."

To further understand the importance of local control in American education in the 1990s, it is necessary briefly to sketch in the scope and scale of American primary and secondary education. Today nearly 46 million youngsters in 50 states attend schools that are organized into more than 14,000 independent school districts. While 14,000 may seem a large number, as recently as 1940 there were more than 117,000 school districts. Today, only Hawaii, the newest state, has a statewide school system. By way of contrast, California and Texas -- both populous -- have more than a thousand school districts apiece. Delaware and Nevada, which have smaller populations, have fewer than 25 districts each.

A century ago all the nation's school districts were small. Today 60 districts enroll more than 50,000 students each, and the biggest districts are truly enormous. New York City, for example, enrolls more than a million youngsters, and Los Angeles, the nation's second largest city, enrolls more than half a million.

Local boards of education oversee school districts. The members of local school boards, variously known as trustees or board members, are elected -- in the vast majority of cases -- by voters. In only a few cases are they appointed; when they are, the appointing power is an elected official.

At the state level, state boards of education oversee the activities of local school districts. In addition, each state has an educational administrative head, who may be called the chief state school officer, superintendent of public instruction or commissioner of education. In some cases the commissioner is elected, as in California or Florida; in other instances, the commissioner is appointed by the governor or the state board of education.

Whatever the selection process, state governments determine the ground rules for local school districts. They determine the number of days that schools will meet -- typically 180 days per year. They establish minimum state standards for licensing teachers and administrators; they identify a core curriculum; they may identify which textbooks should be used; and occasionally buy or print textbooks and distribute them. In addition, they usually set standards for issuing diplomas upon graduation.

But the most important power that the state wields is financial. Not until the late 19^th century were any state monies made available for education; the lion's share was always raised locally, typically by taxes levied on real property. An extreme example survives: In New Hampshire, one of the original 13 states, 95 percent of revenues for schools are raised locally.

Today, most states provide substantial revenues for local schools, and the type and amount of local tax levies are authorized by the state. A school system with a generous budget can devote more money to courses with small enrollments, such as advanced mathematics or difficult foreign languages, than can a school with a modest budget.

As a consequence, a state's threat to withhold money if a local school district refuses to abide by state law or rule is a potent incentive. For example, in 1985, the state of Texas adopted a "no pass, no play" rule. Under terms of this law, students cannot engage in extracurricular activities, such as sports or musical ensembles, if they do not maintain their grades. If a school district fails to comply, the local superintendent does not face jail; rather, his school district loses its state funds -- a catastrophe that would paralyze his schools.

While the formal authority of state boards of education and state commissioners appears to be great, all local school districts enjoy substantial autonomy and independence. They all develop budgets, establish pedagogical objectives, identify areas of curricular and extracurricular emphasis, adopt regulations and procedures, and hire and fire staff. Typically they are responsible for the design, construction and maintenance of their school buildings. Most deal directly with other special-purpose units of government as well as local, state and federal officials. If something goes wrong, the local school district and the superintendent, not the governor, are plaintiffs in lawsuits. And if weather conditions such as heavy snow or tornadoes are forecast, the local superintendent, not the mayor or governor, must decide whether to close school.

The habits of local control are still strong enough to exert a restraining impulse on state legislators and governors. In addition, there is a strong resurgence of interest in local control for pedagogical and professional reasons. Recent education research in the United States overwhelmingly supports the idea that decisions about pedagogy and certain elements of education content are best made locally. The research findings of sociologist James Coleman of the University of Chicago, who studied American public and private schools, confirm the work of Michael Rutter, who studied schools in England. Decisions about pedagogy and content are best made by the teachers, principals and families who make up the school. Working together, they establish the ethos of high standards and high expectations, something that cannot be done by fiat.

How-to-teach decisions are not suited to centralized orchestration and control; indeed, in the American tradition, many believe "what to teach" should also be decided locally -- reflecting, among other things, the significant regional variations in modern America. For example, two port-of-entry cities, New York and Los Angeles, house more than one million immigrants each. The enormous ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity of these youngsters alone requires locally tailored responses to their educational needs and interests.

Of equal importance in the modern history of local control is the emergence of strong local teachers' unions. Bargaining units represent teachers at the local level, where crucial decisions about salary, conditions of work, curriculum and staffing are made. So deeply ingrained is this process that there is no statewide bargaining; neither is there national bargaining, notwithstanding the fact that local unions are organized as part of both state and national associations.

The adage that "he who pays the piper calls the tune" is nowhere more true in American life than in education. When local communities raise most of the money for their local schools, they are strongly committed to local control and hostile to state or federal intervention. It is not surprising, then, that as the states have played a more active role in financing education over the past several decades, they have also begun to exert more state control over education, slowly but surely chipping away at the time-honored tradition of local control.

The 1980s brought the emergence in America of the "excellence" movement, a product of public concern that the schools have let academic standards slip. It provided another role for the national government. The most important event in this movement was the publication of A Nation At Risk, a report commissioned by the U.S. Secretary of Education. A panel of Americans from all walks of life asserted in the report that low education standards had reached crisis proportions. While the report was strongly worded, the general view it expressed was widely shared by the public at large and elected officials, particularly among state legislators and governors.

It is one thing to want to improve education, but quite another to do it successfully. The excellence movement has prompted most state legislatures to require local schools to meet higher standards of academic accomplishments. While this is a most attractive and desirable goal, it is very difficult to achieve by edict. For better or worse, students cannot simply be ordered to do better. Improved student performance is a dynamic process that takes place not just at the local government level, but at the level of the individual student. Incentives and disincentives, rewards and punishments, can be designed to change student behavior, but in the final analysis students must be responsible for their own conduct.

While local control, in some places and circumstances, is being challenged by state governments, either explicitly or implicitly, state control is still exercised through democratic processes. What the people do they can undo, and if history and experience are a reliable guide, the practice of local control, so deeply ingrained in the American experience, will endure.

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Denis P. Doyle is the co-author (with David T. Kearns) of Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make Our Schools Competitive (ICS Press, San Francisco, paperback, 1991), and co-author (with Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., William B. Johnston and Roger D. Semerad) of Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America's Public Schools (Dutton, New York, 1994).