Strengthening School Boards on the Front Lines of the Culture Wars
Despite the epic tribalism that has divided the nation, school board elections have been, until recently, relatively safe from partisan politics. Nearly half of American school boards are still nonpartisan.
Now, the nationalization of American politics, which has so polarized the country, is also infecting school boards. During the last two years, mask mandates and mostly unfounded fears of “critical race theory” infiltrating classroom curricula have made school boards the latest culture-war battlegrounds.
Some state legislatures also want to ratchet up partisanship in school-board elections. In October, Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature approved a bill that could turn school board races across the state into partisan contests. Beginning next year, when half of Tennessee’s school board races will be held, local political parties may put forward slates of school board candidates. Currently, in Tennessee and over 3/4ths of the states, school board candidates run without a party affiliation.
In Florida, Republicans are laying the groundwork for a referendum next November that would require school board candidates to run as either Democrats or Republicans. A similar bill has recently been put forward in Arizona.
At the same time, what the University of Chicago historian Kathleen Belew has termed the “White Power Movement” is targeting school boards, bringing its “brand of menacing politics to the local level.” Extremist groups, such as the Proud Boys, have become a regular presence at school-board meetings, often threatening local members over issues of school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, and history and social studies curricula. Last year also saw over 90 school board recall efforts against 235 board members -- nearly three times higher than any other year in a decade. A particularly contentious recall and school board election in the Mequon-Thiensville suburban district outside of Milwaukee was backed by well-funded conservatives (of course, not all are spearheaded by right-wing groups).
School boards, the last bastion of local democracy, need to be strengthened not just because they must handle the mounting challenges facing public schools, but also because they are the training-wheels of our much-beleaguered democracy. While school boards -- with 44% women and 28% Black or Latino members -- are far more diverse than the U.S. Congress, over half of public school children today are minorities, increasing the importance of boards that better reflect the needs of their constituents. (Indeed, some of the backlash against teaching lessons on race, including the controversial 1619 Project that centers the history and legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans, have occurred in districts with sizeable minority populations, but all-white school boards.)
The fight over an effort to cover up a controversial 1930s-era mural of George Washington at a San Francisco high school demonstrates that political pressure can come from all quarters. Indeed, long before the Proud Boys invaded local school-board meetings, billionaire philanthropists channeled hundreds-of-millions of dollars into national organizations that sought to undermine public schools and school boards far from the philanthropists’ own districts. Some of the money went to oust school board members who supported public schools, rather than charters. The philanthropists also supported state- and mayoral-takeovers aimed at reforming under-performing districts. Yet, takeovers “had the most negative effects on black communities,” writes Domingo Morel, a Rutgers University political scientist in Takeover. Among takeover districts, states abolished elected school boards in 33% of majority-Black districts versus just 4% of majority-white districts.
School boards must be strengthened, particularly at this time when COVID, economic instability, and inequality are amplifying the culture wars. Passing laws to bring school-board elections on-cycle with presidential and congressional elections and lowering the voting age would increase voter participation and attract more diverse local candidates. Improving the know-how of school-board members and their communication with local communities and ensuring the safety of school-board members at contentious meetings would make boards more resilient against the outsider agendas of myriad ideological groups.
A key challenge to turnout in school-board elections is that they are typically held during off-years -- the odd-numbered years, rather than the even-numbered years of presidential and midterm congressional elections. Originally intended to keep education above the political fray, off-cycle elections, instead, depress turnout, and shift power to those “best organized and well resourced”, says Morel -- including philanthropists and unions. In Michigan, for example, turnout for off-cycle school-board elections in 2000 was under 8% of registered voters, compared to a typical turnout of about 65% during presidential elections. As recently as 2019, only 10 states aligned municipal races with presidential and congressional-midterm elections.
Off-cycle elections have serious consequences, especially for low-income and minority voters. Such elections reduce minority representation in municipal governments, for example. Meanwhile, low turnout in state elections -- a hallmark of off-cycle voting -- leads to tax and welfare policies that favor the wealthy.
To strengthen small-d democracy in local elections, lawmakers should follow the lead of Nevada and Phoenix, which recently shifted to on-cycle election calendars, and California and Arizona, which are requiring cities with low turnout to adopt on-cycle calendars.
Shifting election calendars may seem like a Sisyphean task, but voters are increasingly favoring strengthening local democracy and ending an era in which large Black-majority districts often remain under the thumb of state or mayoral control. The timing may be right to make this shift now. In November, Bostonians voted overwhelmingly in support of a nonbinding ballot measure for shifting from an appointed school board to an elected one. Meanwhile, Chicago is phasing in an elected school board -- the first in the city’s history. (New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg seized control of the public schools, remains under mayoral control at least until mid-year when the issue again comes before the NY state legislature, which is unlikely to strip mayoral control from the first Black mayor to have that power.)
Changing election calendars would have the added benefits of increasing minority school-board representation and narrowing the achievement gap between Black and white students, which “tends to be larger” in districts with sizeable minority populations, but mostly-white boards. One reason for this finding may be that these school-board members, many of whom do not have children, face less “political pressure” in the districts where the “gaps are largest.”
In addition, localities should lower the voting age -- especially for school-board elections -- following the example of states like California and Maryland. In Takoma Park, MD, the first U.S. city to allow 16-year-olds to vote, nearly half of registered voters between 16 and 18 turned out to vote in 2013, when the law went into effect, compared to just one in 10 adults. Nationwide, at least 15 states now allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries where the general election will be held by the time they reach 18.
High school seniors (and juniors) also should be allowed to represent their classmates on school boards -- a practice now permitted in dozens of districts from Virginia to California. Especially in poor cities, where up-to-date textbooks are scarce and fund-raisers pay for basic supplies, students have a special stake -- and valuable perspective -- on resource-allocation and education decisions. In Oakland, for example, student representatives helped focus the board’s attention on improving credit-recovery programs, which help students who have fallen behind complete the classes they need to graduate. They also advocated for expanding the health-education curriculum to include sexting.
Expanding the electorate and school-board participation represents a vital opportunity to deepen democratic participation among ordinary citizens and to “develop the intellectual muscles to be effective community members,” as Jack Schneider, an education-leadership professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, puts it.
School boards also need more professional development. While most districts require some training for new members, school board associations should reinforce such sessions -- Massachusetts serves as an excellent model -- with targeted training on budgeting, data analysis, and strategies that promote communication and collaboration with superintendents and constituents, as well as how to avoid micromanagement. Further, paying boards would both encourage members to make time for such training, and bring in younger and more diverse school-board candidates.
Finally, school boards must strengthen their defenses against disruptive outsider groups like the Proud Boys. While open-meetings laws for school board gatherings help ensure that the public is informed of the actions of its government, school boards need to take a more pro-active stance against potential disruptors. For example, school boards could help foster informal networks among a range of local civic groups from teachers unions to parent groups who could share information about local threats and notify key constituents and law enforcement.
When the school board in New Hanover County, N.C., with 25,000 students in the district, recently prepared to hold a vote on whether to extend a mask mandate -- a state requirement -- the school board president knew she had to be prepared for an appearance of the Proud Boys. She had tracked reports of their activities closely. She had also hired a security firm to provide security during school board meetings. After a contentious meeting, which included the presence of five Proud Boys who clapped and cheered when anti-mask speakers took to the floor, the school board remained uncowed; at the end of the two-hour hearing, they voted to extend the mandate. Schools boards should be prepared to carry out the foundational purpose of public education -- to oversee school systems that nurture engaged and productive members of our Democracy.
About the Author:
Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg Professor of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY. She is the author of four books, most recently After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, The New Press, 2018. She wrote “Media Capture and the Corporate Education-Reform Philanthropies,” a chapter in Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms, and Governments Control the News, Columbia Univ. Press, 2021. She also writes an education column for Bloomberg Opinion. A former staff writer and editor at U.S. News & World Report and Business Week, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine and The Harvard Business Review among others.