Partisanship and Professionalization
School board decision-making in the midst of a pandemic
Karin Kitchens (Virginia Tech) & Megan Goldberg (Cornell College)
Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, school board operations - and the elections to those positions - have received increased attention nationally and locally. As we realized the central role school boards were playing in the political landscape, we wanted to better understand how school boards were responding to both the pandemic and being increasingly in the political spotlight. We conducted a large-scale survey of school board members in multiple states during the summer of 2021. In open-ended responses on the survey, school board members highlighted their frustration with the politicization of the pandemic. One member wrote: “Political messaging made things more difficult.” Another member wrote, “It seemed to me that the governor was re- acting to political pressure. I preferred safety first” while another stated “All the governing bodies need to get on the same page. THIS IS NOT POLITICAL!!! We have a responsibility to educate children, and in that process their safety while under our care has to be #1.” In speaking directly with school board members in one-on-one interviews, we received the same message: decisions should be about children’s health and education and nothing else. However, we observed in the survey results again and again that a member’s partisanship shaped the decision-making process, including who to trust and who should be making the decisions.
For the survey, we collected data and contact information for the vast majority of every school board member in 13 states. In the process, we identified 10,486 board members to survey. Of those, 788 members finished at least 50 percent of the survey. Our survey asked about member’s demographics, political preferences, their plans for future office, and their perspective on the politics of their constituents. Finally, we asked a series of questions about how they individually consider different sources and influences on their decision making.
In identifying who is serving on school boards, we found that most board members are highly educated, with 54% having an advanced degree of some kind. Board members tend to older than the general population, with 70% over the age of 50. Sixty-four percent of members reported incomes over $100,000. Interestingly, 21.9% of board members do not have children, while another 2.5% have children enrolled in a different district than they represent. Most members, 78.6%, are not part of a teacher’s union. In terms of self-identified gender, approximately half of the sample identified as women. The vast majority of the school board members identified as white (80.4%) with 7% identified as Black and 8.5% in a different race category. Because most school board elections are nonpartisan, we often do not know as much about the political composition of school boards. However, our survey asked members to report their partisan identification. Figure 1 shows the distribution of partisanship among school board members in the sample. The sample of school board members skews slightly Democratic. Most notably, the sample shows a distribution consistent with polarization; the most common answers were “strong Democrat” or “strong Republican.”
Figure 1: Partisanship of School Board Members
In determining who they trusted to provide information, school board members placed higher levels of trust with non-partisan government boards, with County Health Boards being the most trusted. Figure 2 shows who school board members trusted, or did not trust for information. But how school board members identified in terms of partisanship mattered in who they trusted to tell them information. If the other party was in power at the state level, the school board members from opposing parties had less trust in that source. In states that have a Democrat for a governor, members who identify as Democrat have the greatest trust in this source. But the overall trust declines for a Democrat member who has a Republican governor. The reverse is true for Republican school board members. We observed this for state legislatures, state boards of education, and even state departments of health.
Figure 2: Trust in Sources
Note: The most trusted source was County Health Boards, and the least trusted source was political parties.
We also find partisan differences in both how members see the role of the board in determining policy. We asked, when there is a conflict between what you think is best and what the people in your district want, do you think you should follow your own conscience or follow what the people in your district want? Both Independents and Republicans reporting going with conscience at higher rates than Democrats, who reported going with what their district wants. Members who identified as Republican were also more likely to say that board members should be responsible for developing re-opening plans as opposed to health professionals. When asked about how school board members should receive health data, Republicans were more likely to prefer to reach own conclusions about the data than Democrats.
While we clearly observe patterns of polarized, partisan behavior in decision-making by school board members, the issue of nationalization is more complex. Members consistently rated county (or local) health boards as the most trusted source, and the vast majority of school board members interviewed indicated a close working relationship with their local health boards. As school boards have moved to the forefront of national conflict in culture war issues around the pandemic, LGBTQ+ rights, and race, board members are increasingly weighing in on issues that are polarizing along party lines. The nationalization of issues school boards are dealing with has several implications. But perhaps one of the most important implications is that nationalization fundamentally goes against the purpose of local school boards. School boards were designed to be responsive to the issues facing a community. Because these are mostly unpaid positions, the increased demands and politicization of the position will likely affect who is willing to serve as school board members in the future. It is an open question if these trends will change who serves on school boards in the future and what that means for school boards.
Karin E. Kitchens is an assistant professor in the political science department at Virginia Tech.
Megan Goldberg is an assistant professor of American Politics at Cornell College.