Journalists should remind readers how school boards are meant to operate and how they affect student learning — not just focus on controversies and politics.
By Michael R. Ford, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
The last few years I have had the pleasure of speaking to education reporters from around the country on the topic of school boards.
I’m always happy to share what I have learned from over a decade of academic research on these governing bodies.
Media paying attention to school boards is quite the change.
When I wrote my dissertation on school board governance over a decade ago, the most common question I received was, “Why?”
Why would anyone care about school boards, especially those outside of large urban areas?
And indeed, calls from journalists were few and far between during those earlier years.
The failure to cover what school boards actually do created an information gap that feeds the confusion regarding the role of school boards.
However, the recent increase in media coverage about school boards hasn’t been as constructive as it could have been.
Based on what I’ve seen, most journalism about school boards over the past couple of years has missed the point. It focuses on the big shiny objects like a board flipping, or Moms for Liberty, or book bans, or a few high-profile urban districts — the politics of school boards — without much mention of what they actually do and how they can matter.
Too much of recent school board coverage feeds a narrative that school boards are strictly political bodies and are only relevant come election time.
I wish journalists would find a way to cover the function and value that school boards provide to students along with the controversies and conflicts. Doing both would provide valuable context for their readers.
The recent increase in media coverage about school boards hasn’t been as constructive as it could have been.
Editor’s note: This is the latest in The Grade’s series on improving coverage of school boards. See here, here, here, and here for other pieces.
School board governance can and does impact student outcomes. A body of peer-reviewed research that I conducted, along with others, demonstrates how.
For example, in a national study I found a link between board conflict, productivity, and district graduation rates. When boards coalesce around common definitions of accountability, minimize role confusion between themselves and their superintendent, and minimize relationship conflict, student test scores increase. But such findings are not what most reporters want to talk about.
Most often, I’m asked about changes in governing structures in large districts like Chicago, the growing involvement of partisan political parties in school board elections, culture war issues like book bans, new interest groups like Moms for Liberty, and the flipping of political majorities on school boards.
To be fair, all of these topics are newsworthy. However, they are not the most important story of the American school board. They are dramatic outliers and political distractions that have little to do with school systems and student learning on aggregate.
The reform in Chicago, like the 2007 mayoral takeover of the Washington, D.C., school board or the recent state takeover of Houston schools, are extreme outliers that have very little relevance to most school boards. Culture war issues and the flipping of school boards are interesting political stories around election time, but they are far from widespread and do not tell the public much about school boards or student learning.
Indeed, the school board recall efforts and ideological challenges are particularly meaningless in terms of how most school systems work. As I have seen time and time again, a candidate runs for school board based on a culture war issue, gets elected, and immediately becomes isolated from the rest of their board. Their extreme positions get people fired up, but ultimately have little impact on outcomes aside from being a distraction. But I have yet to see many follow-up stories about what happens after a culture war candidate wins a school board seat.
School board recall efforts and ideological challenges are particularly meaningless in terms of how most school systems work.
Again, I am not suggesting these topics are not interesting or newsworthy. I am suggesting that it is a disservice to focus solely on the exception rather than the rule.
When is the last time you have read a news story about what school boards actually do? When is the last time you read a story about the link between school board governance and student outcomes? When I speak to reporters about anything school-board related I will bring up the public information gap around school boards and share the academic research.
By and large, reporters listen politely and at times express interest, but ultimately they do not address the research in their stories.
There are obvious reasons reporters do not cover the tasks of school boards.
Covering the real work of school boards usually requires a beat reporter with specific knowledge of education governance or a willingness to learn — a luxury most news organizations do not possess. The places where reporter capacity does exist, like in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., are the same places whose school boards are atypical. These are the same types of outlier situations that attract attention from national education reporters. Lastly, the growing body of journalists primarily focused on education research, a welcome development, are focused on randomized control studies. While important, it leaves research on topics that are highly contextual and not conducive to experimental research, like school board governance, ignored.
The lack of journalistic attention has a real cost. Think tanks with ideological preferences, opinion journalism, and reactive social media content dominate the public discourse around school boards. National media amplifies these conflicts.
It follows that the discourse contributes to school board candidates running, and sometimes winning, based on national wedge issues fully disconnected from the job of governing. When candidates and their supporters have no clear conception of the role of a school board, they get frustrated by the inability to make progress on campaign issues divorced from reality. Media feeds into the problem by asking whether school boards matter, and should they be democratically elected, which misses the point entirely. With over 13,000 school boards, many will be effective, some will not, and the issues they face will be as diverse as the communities they serve.
By and large, reporters listen politely and at times express interest, but ultimately they do not address the research in their stories.
So what should journalists be covering?
Foremost, they should be explaining the role of a school board. A school board sets policies for the district based on student needs and community values, approves a budget based on those needs and values, hires and evaluates (and dismisses as needed) the superintendent tasked with operationalizing their policy preferences, and serves as a bridge between the community and district operational leadership. A school board is not in charge of operations. When school board candidates run on book bans, firing specific teachers, or changing student lesson plans, reporters need to explain that that is the operational role of the superintendent, not the governance role of the board.
Journalists should also be covering what makes a school board successful. School board governance is like a game of telephone. When a board can articulate their policy direction clearly to the superintendent, the superintendent can implement it at the building and classroom level. If they cannot articulate that direction, there will either be policy paralysis where nothing changes, chaos where policy changes day-to-day, or a superintendent who takes on the governance role in the absence of direction from their democratically elected bosses.
Or consider the role of partisanship on school boards. Most stories focus on why partisanship is growing, but few if any focus on the impacts of growing partisanship on school board outcomes.The research is clear that board deliberation leading to a clear policy directive to the superintendent can improve student outcomes. Conflict that does not lead to a clear policy directive, i.e., partisan or relationship conflict, hurts student outcomes.
When I see a story about book bans, I wish reporters would focus on the difference between governance and operations. Explain that running a school library is an operational task, which means that candidates pushing an operational issue are undermining the superintendent.
Ultimately, school board governance, when done well, is a foundational step to ensuring that district operations can meet the needs of students and lead to better student outcomes (however a school board chooses to define success). A dysfunctional board cannot set that foundation.
That simple conclusion, one supported in detail by academic research, should inform how media covers the renewed interest in school boards. It is not as exciting as culture wars and atypical governance reforms in a handful of urban districts, but it is the real story of the American school board.
Michael Ford is a Professor of Public Administration and Director of the Whitburn Center for Governance and Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed academic articles related to education governance, school boards, and public management (see www.MichaelRFord.com for a full listing). He is on Twitter/X at @fordm10.
Previously from The Grade
What if school board races don’t really matter the way we think they do?
‘The backlash was the story’; an insider looks back at school culture wars coverage
What happens when education reporters write about politics?
Covering school extremism
The culture war is the easy, less important story
An expert journalist’s guide to covering book bans
Demand concrete examples & avoid ‘emotionalism’: How to cover culture war stories
Other resources
School board elections in the US: What research shows. (Journalist’s Resource)
