Early 20th century Progressive reformers established elected school boards as a means of shielding public school systems from the politics and patronage of corrupt city governments. Citizens, rather than political dons or their favored appointees, would govern the community's schools with the community's interests at heart. Today, however, elected school boards, especially in America's troubled cities, are just as apt to contribute to the school system's ills. They often resemble a dysfunctional family, composed of three unlovable types: 1) aspiring politicians for whom this is a rung on the ladder to higher office; 2) former employees of the school system with a score to settle; and 3) single-minded advocates of one dubious cause or another who yearn to use the public schools to impose their particular hang-up on all the kids in town. Local school boards exist largely to oversee the spending of funds drawn from local property taxes. In this sense, they are supposed to be the community's accountability mechanism, ensuring that school officials use locally generated resources wisely and responsibly. In this article, the authors present several trends that are rendering that role obsolete: (1) There is an increasing recognition that the funding system that school boards perpetuate results in unfair resource disparities between wealthy and poor school districts; (2) The standards and accountability movement is rendering the performance of individual schools transparent to parents and communities; and (3) The choice movement, including charter schools, magnet schools, vouchers, and outsourced school management, has shown everyone what it means to devolve authority from bureaucratic systems to individual schools and families. (Contains 2 figures.)