Should school board elections be partisan?

Kendrick Lamar released the album “To Pimp a Butterfly” in 2015. It was the project that I never knew I had always been waiting for. The album cover was a surrealist provocation of unapologetic Black joy parading in front of the White House. Jazz and funk sounds formed around messages meant to make us question the sanctity of American politics. “Ain’t nothin’ new but a flu of new Demo-Crips and Re-Blood-icans/ Red state versus a blue state — which one you governin’?” laments Lamar on the song “Hood Politics.” Comparing the two major parties to violent rival street gangs, he suggests that partisan politics is a facade for territorial white-collar fights amid bipartisan Black working-class neglect.

The concern that partisan politics has a propensity to cover over bi-partisan neglect should be part of our conversation on the politics of school boards. Currently, four states require that school board members be elected through a partisan primary process. Another five allow districts the choice to opt in. This slight deviation from the nonpartisan norm hasn’t meant much. However, recent growth in the influence of partisan politics in school board elections has turned an outlier into a coal miner’s canary. So, I raise the question: Are partisan elections good for school boards?

It’s worth mentioning that, while education hasn’t been completely immune to partisan politics, party labels haven’t dominated. Some of the main education policy debates — testing accountability, school choice, curriculum standards — don’t fit neatly across partisan divides (Shapiro et al., 2021). We see, for example, the Democratic Party being home to both teachers unions and their sometimes-foes, the progressive reformers. Republicans oscillate between focusing on more efficient fiscal management of school districts and seeking more pathways for families to opt out of the school system for private options. Public education has been impressively immune to hyper-partisan politics.

So, why disrupt this with partisan elections?

Debating partisan elections

The idea of partisan school board elections has merit. It is a derivative of the argument for political parties more broadly. Essentially, political parties market public policies to voters (Aldrich, 2011). They do this by branding themselves as the political entity committed to turning those policy ideas into action. Their slate of policies brings voters into the fold regardless of their primary policy issues (Karol, 2009). They forge these policies by tapping into a general ideology: a commitment to small government, a vision of a broad social safety net (Noel, 2014).

This makes the voters’ job of choosing candidates much easier. Most Americans don’t have time to closely follow the nuances of every single policy debate. So, we rely on shortcuts (Zaller, 1992). If you’re team red, choose the one in the red jersey.

In fact, the party system makes politics easier for all involved. Candidates have a way to easily communicate to voters what types of ideas they stand for (Fiorina, 2002). Donors can decide which types of candidates align with their goals and interests (Aldrich, 2009). Party labels ease the process through which representatives form coalitions and move bills or resolutions through the legislative process (Cox & McCubbins, 1993). Everyone’s life is easier when we have political parties.

“Easy,” however, can often be the adversary of “good.” Parties make democracy easier, but they’re not inherently democratic. The main objective of a political party is to win elections (Dionne & Rapoport, 2022). You win elections by receiving more votes than the opposition. This creates pro-democracy incentives such as voter outreach, voter registration campaigns, and the maintenance of individual voting rights. It also creates anti-democratic incentives like targeted voter mobilization, voter suppression tactics, oversimplified political messaging, and negative campaign attacks.

Political parties are often at war, and under those conditions all is fair. That’s the concern with partisan school board elections. It’s the Demo-Crips versus Rep-Blood-icans in constant political combat, endangering communities along the way.

Why school board elections are nonpartisan

If this sounds like hyperbole, then revisit the reason we have nonpartisan school board elections in the first place. In the early 20th century, strong political parties were using school boards as patronage tools (Wirt & Kirst, 1997). Votes for a partisan school board candidate could be granted as a political favor to someone who wanted a cushy bureaucratic or administrative job. Partisan cronyism led to a mass entry of education leaders with no experience or expertise.

The Progressive Reforms of the 1920s helped to thwart that system. Reformers led the effort to remove partisan labels from local elections. For education in particular, they ignited the move toward a culture of school governance that “takes politics out of education.” Of course, you can never completely remove politics, but the reforms limited some of these underhanded tactics.

Education politics morphed into the politics of competing interest groups canopied under a larger debate over how to achieve racial and socioeconomic justice. Teachers unions pushed school boards in mostly Democratic cities to offer better wages (and at times weaker accountability measures). School boards in Southern, mostly Republican states made the most progress on school desegregation (Orfield & Yun, 1999). We didn’t solve all the problems in education, but we kept parties out and made progress.

The participation problem

The issue we didn’t solve (and that arguably worsened) was the political participation problem. Many of the reforms aiming to take politics out of education drove voters away as well. Reformers moved elections to odd years to sever them from big federal elections, when the machinery of partisan powers are at their peak. We saw the professionalization of the superintendent as the main policy bureaucrat (Wirt & Kirst, 1997). With the superintendency being an appointed position (selected by the elected school board), there was no direct electoral accountability over the most influential policy maker.

These things aren’t inherently bad. However, it may be that stable politics has come at the expense of active political participation. School district elections in urban cities draw voter turnout rates in the single digits (Schaffner, Rhodes, & La Raja, 2020). Partisan school board elections could change the level of voter participation. The question is, though, at what cost?

The recent and ongoing culture war shows us the risks of the tradeoff (Brezicha et al., 2023; Collins, 2023). As positions on race, gender, and sexuality have become attached to mainstream partisan cleavages, more people are talking about education policy. More journalists are writing about education. This attention is coming from both of the main ideological perspectives. The interest in school board elections has increased. It has transformed seemingly stale interest-group politics into the mania of partisan fandom (Houston, 2024).

But culture war politics have cared little about the primary function of education, which is student learning. There’s no indication that education is better off for being placed on the national radar alongside the typical darlings of the policy ball — the economy, health care, immigration, and crime. If anything, it has further complicated the work of a teaching profession that’s already under stress. It has driven out serious, experienced district and state leaders and replaced them with educational novices. Fighting back has had consequences. Collectively, districts have spent billions of dollars in operating costs because of the rise in violence (Rogers et al., 2024).

School board politics could benefit from being a more vibrant space, more of a political party. But we should be careful with empowering political parties.  

References

Aldrich, J. (2009). The invisible primary and its effects on democratic choice. PS: Political Science & Politics, 42 (1), 33-38.

Aldrich, J.H. (2011). Why parties? A second look. University of Chicago Press.

Brezicha, K.F., Arnzen, C.J., LoBue, A., Childs, J., Germain, E., Jenkins, D.A., & Douglass, S. (2023). Political polarization of educational politics and its implications for democratic education. Peabody Journal of Education, 98 (5), 467-471.

Collins, J.E. (2023). The politics of re-opening schools: Explaining public preferences reopening schools and public compliance with reopening orders during the COVID-19 pandemic. American Politics Research, 51 (2), 223-234.

Cox, G.W. & McCubbins, M.D. (1993). Legislative leviathan: Party government in the house (Vol. 23). University of California Press.

Dionne, E.J. & Rapoport, M. (2022). 100% democracy: The case for universal voting. The New Press.

Fiorina, M.P. (2002). Parties, participation, and representation in America: Old theories face new realities. In I. Katznelson & H.V. Milner (Eds.), Political science: The state of the discipline (pp. 511-541). Norton.

Houston, D.M. (2024). Polarization, partisan sorting, and the politics of education. American Educational Research Journal, 61 (3), 508-540.

Karol, D. (2009). Party position change in American politics: Coalition management. Cambridge University Press.

Noel, H. (2014). Political ideologies and political parties in America. Cambridge University Press.

Orfield, G. & Yun, J.T. (1999). Resegregation in American schools. UCLA Civil Rights Project.

Rogers, J., Shand, R., White, R., Kahne, J., with Stern, S., Castro, C., & Yoshimoto-Towery, A. (2024). The costs of conflict: The fiscal impact of culturally divisive conflict on public schools in the United States. UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. School of Education.

Schaffner, B.F., Rhodes, J.H., & La Raja, R.J. (2020). Hometown inequality: Race, class, and representation in American local politics. Cambridge University Press.

Shapiro, R.Y., Kilibarda, A., Sinozich, S., & McClellan, O. (2021). American public opinion and partisan conflict: Education’s exceptionalism. In M.R. West & L. Woessmann (Eds.), Public opinion and the political economy of education policy around the world, (pp. 141-174). MIT Press.

Wirt, F.M. & Kirst, M.W. (1997). The political dynamics of American education. McCutchan Publishing Corporation. Zaller, J.R. (1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion. Cambridge University Press.

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This article appears in the December 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 4, pp. 50-51.