School Board Elections in the Era of Nationalization

• In Event: School Boards, Choice, and Participation

Abstract

Over the last several years, school boards have increasingly become a battleground for culture wars including fights over mask mandates, curriculum control, Critical Race Theory, and LGBTQ inclusion. This has put a lot of focus on who is serving on the school board. Who is serving can matter greatly in the types of policies that the board pursues. But as school boards have focused on more nationa lized issues and increased pressure of the job, it is likely that who is willing to run for this position is changing. We have created a data set of individual school board members across 13 states from 2019 to 2023 to understand how the pandemic as well as the nationalization of school boards has impacted who is serving on school boards. We identify trends in recent school board elections in these states and test to see what factors influence election outcomes. Using data from several election cycles, we test to see if more candidates are running, if there has been any change to incumbency advantage, and if there has been any changes to gender and racial balance of candidates. Because state level policies regarding elections play such a large role in elections, we test to see if state level factors, such as timing of the election and partisan versus non-partisan affiliation of school board members influences these outcomes.

Authors

• Karin Kitchens, Virginia Tech

• Megan Goldberg, Cornell College