I used to believe that local school board elections were an effective tool for holding public schools accountable, but I don’t anymore.
On the surface, school board elections seem like they should serve an accountability role. The logic is straightforward: if school policies veer too far left or right, or if schools underperform, voters can replace the board. School board members, knowing they can be removed, enact representative and sensible policies to avoid this fate.
However, in practice, it doesn’t work this way.
One reason is that school board elections are usually held off-cycle, when voter turnout is low. This gives outsized influence to organized interest groups—namely teachers’ unions—even though they represent a small fraction of the population. There is clear evidence that teachers’ unions have great sway in school board elections. The result is that election outcomes reflect the will of a small segment of the population with high personal stakes.
This recently released study from the Annenberg Institute reinforces my skepticism about the value of democratic accountability. The authors analyzed data from over 50,000 school board elections across 16 states, including Missouri. They find that school board elections are often non-competitive. Over a third of elections are uncontested and, as in other elections (e.g., state and federal legislative elections), when incumbents run, they usually win (more than 80 percent of the time). Most school board turnover isn’t due to electoral defeat, but incumbents simply choosing not to run again.
The influence of interest groups like teachers’ unions likely contributes to these findings. Potential competitors for school board seats know that if they run against a union’s preferred candidate, they’ll lose. In the authors’ words, “if competitive races characterized by retrospective voting are indeed essential to the health of local democracy and public education, our results paint a grim picture.” (p. 4; note that “retrospective voting” is a political science term that means voters make decisions based on the past performance of the party or candidate in power.)
So, democratic accountability in education is not what we want it to be. Can it be fixed? I’m not optimistic, but one change that would help would be to move school board elections onto the same cycle as general elections. This would increase voter turnout and reduce the influence of interest groups, though the interest groups would fight such a change. It would also help if we had more transparent reporting about school performance. There is no denying that local voters are apathetic about schools, but maybe if voters in low-performing districts better understood school performance, they would be more inclined to act.
Even if changes like these help, democratic accountability is unlikely to become a powerful lever for change. This strengthens the case for investing in alternative approaches: market-based accountability, and even top-down accountability from the state.
