Happiness Tuesdays

“Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.” ― Robert M. Pirsig

School boards in recent years have become the focal point of many heated, high-profile debates, on everything from pandemic-era mask policies to debates about LGBTQ+ students’ rights.

In some places, once-quiet board rooms became centers of conflict, at times upending meetings and leading boards to change how they interact with the public.

School boards are one of the most integral parts of K-12 districts, but how much do we really know about who serves on them and how they get there? How much controversy do they really deal with, and how much influence do school board members actually have over school district operations?

School boards are in charge of signing off on curricula, approving schedules, and negotiating employee labor contracts. They are also tasked with hiring and overseeing superintendents, passing budgets, and setting policies.

In recent years, as some boards have experienced an uptick in political conflicts at meetings and in elections, some education researchers have set out to add to a growing pool of knowledge about who tends to serve on school boards and the elections that gain them a seat at the table. Their findings have touched on boards’ demographic makeup, how competitive school board races are, and the difference teachers’ union endorsements can make.

They’ve also attempted to figure out just how typical those increasingly charged school board meetings that have dominated headlines really are.

Here are six things we know about school boards based on research from the past five years.

Incumbent school board members almost always win when they run for reelection

When sitting school board members choose to run for reelection, they win their contests more than 80% of the time, according to a June 2025 study by researchers at Ohio State and Emory universities. The researchers analyzed more than 50,000 races across 16 states and found that more than one-third of the races they observed were uncontested.

Despite incumbents’ high success rates, there is still turnover on school boards. It’s largely attributable to incumbents’ decisions not to run again, rather than election defeats.

Turnover and incumbent reelection rates were similar across districts, regardless of their size or location, local poverty rates, and whether the area had robust local media, the report said.

Student performance largely isn’t a factor in school board turnover

The June 2025 report from the Ohio State and Emory researchers showed that lower student achievement did not predict more electoral competition for board seats, incumbent retirements, or turnover on the local school board.

Voters don’t appear to be persuaded to replace incumbent school board members, even when students’ academic performance doesn’t meet their expectations, the report said. The concept that voters react to elected officials’ performance is known as “retrospective voting,” one of the report’s authors said. But such behavior requires choices, and the fact that so many school board races go uncontested suggests voters may have less influence over school board composition than commonly believed, the report’s authors said.

Instead, most school board turnover is attributable to incumbents deciding to resign.

Electing educators is associated with increased teacher pay

Electing current or retired educators to local school boards often results in a pay bump for teachers, but does not correlate with higher student achievement or high school graduation rates, according to a 2023 study published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

Generally, teachers cannot serve on a school board in the district where they work due to potential conflicts of interest. But educators who live in a different district from where they’re employed can serve on their local school board. Retired educators can also run and serve.

While electing more current and former educators—classroom teachers, principals, superintendents, or other administrators—to school boards leads to an average teacher pay increase of approximately 2 percent for each educator elected, there’s little evidence that having more board members with education backgrounds leads to better student performance in core subjects like reading and math, the study said.

The study was conducted in California, using a combination of candidate information from election filings and publicly available data about school district spending and students’ standardized test scores between 1996 and 2015 to determine what happened when more educators were elected to local boards. Eighteen percent of school board members in their analysis were current and former educators.

Teachers’ unions’ endorsements are very influential

Even as a growing number of political groups and advocacy organizations attempt to influence school board elections, an endorsement from the local teachers’ union might be the most powerful boost of all for school board candidates.

A 2023 study from researchers at Boston College and Ohio State found that a candidate who’s endorsed by the local teachers’ union wins their election nearly three-quarters of the time.

The union endorsement was more influential than other endorsements—such as those from business leaders or local newspapers—as well as a candidate’s promise to focus on student achievement or an incumbent’s track record boosting it.

Voters in the study were also more likely to support school board candidates who had children of their own, especially if they were enrolled in the public school system. Candidates who had children enrolled in private schools were still preferred over candidates who did not have any children.

Educators who run for school board positions are 40% more likely to report being endorsed by teachers’ unions than members from other professional backgrounds, according to the 2023 report in the American Economic Journal.

The authors of that report added that teachers’ unions often make concerted efforts to encourage current and former educators to run for school board seats, supporting the authors’ conclusion “that school boards are potentially an important causal channel through which teachers’ unions exert influence.”

School board members are still mostly white even though the student population is increasingly diverse

Nearly 90 percent of school board members are white, according to a 2020 EdWeek Research Center survey of board members, despite the majority of American public school students being children of color.

However, only 15% of board members surveyed said the fact their board makeup doesn’t fully reflect student demographics is a “major problem.”

A 2020 survey by School Board Partners found that school boards are nearly 40% whiter than the students they serve. Six percent identify as LGBTQ compared with 16% of students, and board members are less likely to have disabilities: 9% of board members said they have one or more disabilities compared with 14% of the school population.

White board members are also more likely than members of color to serve as board presidents, the report said.

A 2017 study that examined middle and high schools in Florida found that districts with diverse school boards have lower rates of school suspensions for all students, and that disparities in suspension rates between minority and white students are lower overall in those districts.

School board meetings are generally civil, but tensions can flare

Most of the time, school board meetings are relatively civil, and most of the high-conflict meetings in recent years occurred in a small number of communities, researchers found in a June 2025 analysis of thousands of board meetings.

But most boards experience some kind of conflict at some point, one of the report’s authors said, and, generally, board meetings have gotten more tense recently.

The highest-conflict period documented in the researchers’ dataset—which included videos from about 100,000 meetings from 1,600 districts in 48 states between 2010 and 2023—was the second half of 2021, when districts saw increased tensions over claims they were teaching critical race theory and exposing students to inappropriate books, and during debates about pandemic masking policies.

For most districts, less than a quarter of meetings were deemed high-conflict, and much of that conflict centered on local issues rather than national politics.

Still, some districts—usually those in urban or suburban areas—have experienced increased conflict due to national political issues, like LGBTQ+ students’ rights, and board meetings have, at times, dissolved into shouting matches, sometimes prompting arrests and the cancellation of meetings altogether.

Some districts have invested in increased security for school board meetings, adding security guards or metal detectors, or cutting down on the time allocated for public comments.

Politics & Governance

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