Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics. Edited by William G. Howell. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. 356p. $19.77.

In college and university towns across the United States, academics are regular fixtures on local public school boards. In search of a way to meet our civic duty, we seem to be drawn naturally to school boards more than other local public institutions. This is a guess, of course, and it is one of the few things one cannot find data on in this collection of essays on the work that has been done by and to school boards in the last decade. If the intuition that academics tend to romanticize local school boards is only half right, these rigorous, fine-grained essays on one area of education politics will intrigue more than just political scientists.