Introduction and summary
If you cannot name a member of your local school board, you are not alone. Even though school board members are the nation’s largest group of elected officials,1 their role in shaping education remains opaque for many parents, educators, and voters.2
More than 82,000 school board members in the United States3 make important decisions about school districts’ budgets, curriculum, and leadership every day. Yet school board elections are plagued by low voter turnout,4 sometimes as low as 5 to 10 percent.5 Uncontested seats and vacancies are also common:6 A Ballotpedia study of more than 5,400 school board elections in 2023 found that about 53 percent of school board seats were uncontested.7
It is time to do better. This report lays out five reasons why every voter should participate in their local school board elections8 and discusses how policy can encourage inclusive elections and form school boards that truly reflect and serve their communities.
Read a summary
1. Every vote is incredibly powerful in local elections such as school board elections
While it is easy to get swept up in the fervor of presidential elections every four years, local elections, such as school board elections, also deserve attention. School board members make important decisions that affect students, parents, and the broader community each day.
Although some school board members are appointed, “over 97 [percent] of local school board members are elected.”9 In fact, the largest group of elected officials in the country are school board members.10
Despite this, voter turnout in school board elections is extremely low, often only 5 to 10 percent.11 For example, in Delaware in 2023, no school board district election had voter turnout greater than 10 percent, and most school district elections in the state recorded voter turnout well below 5 percent.12
The fact that voter turnout is low and that school board election districts are smaller in size than state or federal elections means that each vote cast is incredibly powerful, as they are often decided by small margins. For example, the Center for American Progress analyzed results for school board elections in the commonwealth of Virginia in 2023. Of the 404 seats up for election, more than one-third were decided by fewer than 500 votes13 and more than 80 percent were decided by fewer than 2,000 votes.14
Critical decisions affecting communities are being made daily at the local level. The individuals who vote in these elections are helping shape those decisions.
2. School boards make important decisions about public schools
School board members oversee the educational resources of more than 50 million public school students.15 Typically, school boards are responsible for selecting district leadership and overseeing their performance; budgets and funding allocations; which schools children will attend based on their address, also known as attendance zone boundaries and feeder patterns; as well as important policy decisions about curriculum, instruction, and course offerings.16 When electing school board members, communities should consider who is qualified to make these decisions and has the appropriate expertise, including expertise derived from lived experience of racial and educational inequities, to make such influential decisions.
Research into the impact of school boundaries has demonstrated time and again that boundaries are too often set up in ways that exacerbate racial inequity, excluding low-income students and students of color from high-performing public schools17 and maintaining and enforcing school segregation by race—even though doing so is ostensibly against the law.18 As a result, the nation’s schools have become increasingly more segregated over the past 30 years, despite the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case. The proportion of schools that are intensely segregated has nearly tripled, and there has been an increase in double segregation by both race and poverty.19
When schools are segregated, low-income students and students of color tend to get fewer resources. They are taught by the least experienced and least educated teachers, and they have less challenging curriculum offerings and fewer opportunities for advanced coursework.20 In part due to this type of chronic disinvestment, whether a student comes from a low-income family matters less for their educational outcomes than whether they attend a school with a high concentration of students from low-income families.21 Often lost in this discussion is the fact that white and affluent children also benefit from racially and socioeconomically integrated schools, which make them more comfortable working and learning across lines of difference and more likely to make the cross-race friendships that are associated with positive views of other racial groups through adulthood; there may even be a benefit to their leadership abilities, empathy, and problem-solving skills.22
School board members, in their role as approvers of attendance zone boundaries, have a lot of power to reverse the current trend of school resegregation. But to do so, districts need school board members who put equity at the center of their decision-making and deeply understand the harms of school segregation. This may not be easy, as affluent white parents often push back against redrawing of school boundaries that privilege their children.23
School boards also serve as the approvers of annual district budgets. As approvers, school boards are given the responsibility of deciding which programs should be funded and at what level. These budget decisions ultimately decide how many staff members can be hired and retained, which after-school and extracurricular programs are funded, and even which curricula and course offerings are available to which students.24 When school board members lack skills and expertise in budgeting and are unaware of the impacts these cuts can have, they are at risk of making decisions that greatly affect local schools—especially amid current widespread budget cuts as pandemic relief dollars expire.25
In addition to decisions about funding and attendance zone boundaries, school boards often have the authority to approve curricula, usually after district leaders make a recommendation. While school boards should not be the primary party making curriculum decisions—something that is typically done by the superintendent and district office, ideally in consultation with educators—it is important to have school board members who have the appropriate expertise in how to choose high-quality, inclusive curricular materials and can provide meaningful input on the curriculum adoption process, purchase, and implementation, including any related professional development.26
A school board’s authority to hire district or school leadership can mean the difference between strong, equity-focused leadership with deep expertise in instructional quality for all students and a superintendent who is complacent about the status quo or even actively undermines equity. Conversely, a school board backed by special interest groups may decide to terminate a superintendent even when that superintendent has community support, as happened in a recent case in South Carolina.27 It is important to have school board members who reflect the community, including the breadth of perspectives within it, so that the will of a small minority does not negatively affect the education of students across the district.
The relationship between local school boards and charter schools
Voters with children attending charter schools—tuition-free schools of choice that are publicly funded but independently run and exempt from many of the state laws and regulations that govern traditional public schools28—should understand that local school board elections can affect charter schools as well. While local school boards do not have a say in state-level school choice programs, in many states they can hold some power over charter schools.29
In a majority of states, local school boards can authorize charter schools within their district boundaries.30 Authorizers are the entities that have the power to grant or deny charter applications, monitor their performance and ensure they are compliant with state laws, and terminate or not renew a charter school.31 In some states, school boards even have the authority to control charter school budgets.32 While operating decisions regarding curriculum, hiring, and other school policies are typically decided by individual charter schools,33 whether or not they are open and able to operate within a district can be the decision of a local school board.
3. Representation matters, but school boards do not look like the communities they serve
The average school board member is male, white, and high income with no children in school.34 While school board members’ intentions are noble—in a survey from the National School Boards Association, the most common response for why members initially ran for school board was “to ensure that our children’s schools are the best they can be”35—they are not at all representative of the diverse students and communities that are part of the nation’s more than 13,000 public school districts.36
Demographics of the average school board member
49%
with household incomes of more than $100,000
68%
with no children in school
Public school students are racially and ethnically diverse. Fifty-six percent of public school students are nonwhite, with 29 percent of students identifying as Hispanic and 15 percent identifying as Black, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.37 By contrast, not only are school boards disproportionately white, male, high-income, and comprised of older adults, but slightly less than one-third of school board members report that their occupation is education related.38 Taken together, this means that many school boards are composed of people who are not representative of the community they serve, do not have children attending school in the district they represent, and do not have professional expertise in education. However, they are making decisions that affect students and educators every day.
Representation on school boards and in policymaking matters. Research indicates that even just one member of a population of color on a school board can lead to increased investments in schools with large nonwhite student populations, as well as increases in nonwhite student academic performance—at no expense to white students’ performance.39
One of the reasons school boards do not better reflect their communities is low voter turnout and disparities in voter turnout in local elections. Even compared with other local elections, school board elections have very low turnout.40 And when voter turnout is lower, gaps in voter participation also tend to widen. For example, gaps in voter turnout by race, income, age, and more tend to be more pronounced in local elections than in presidential contests.41
As a result of discrimination, gerrymandering, and systemic disenfranchisement,42 there have long been gaps in voter turnout by race, and unfortunately recent research finds that these gaps are expanding.43 In the 2022 midterm elections, Black voter turnout was 16 percentage points lower than white voter turnout, and Latino voter turnout was nearly 22 percentage points lower than white voter turnout.44 Similarly, residents over the age of 65 who are also homeowners are a disproportionate share of voters in local elections, especially if those elections are held in “off-cycle” years—a year with no presidential election.45
Since school board members are disproportionately elected by older, white, affluent voters, they are likely to overweight this group’s policy preferences, both because they frequently share the voters’ identity46 and because the voters are an important constituency for the members’ reelection. Conversely, the voices of many Black, Latino, younger, and lower-income voters and community members are not heard in school board elections and subsequent policymaking as long as they are less likely to vote in school board elections. Increasing voter turnout can help ensure these groups are better represented and in turn, help students of all backgrounds have access to high-quality education. Indeed, research shows that school board elections with higher voter turnout are associated with higher academic performance for students in the district compared to those with lower voter turnout.47
School board elections with higher voter turnout are associated with higher academic performance for students in the district compared to those with lower voter turnout.
One straightforward way to improve turnout and reduce voter participation disparities is to sync local elections to presidential election years, which research shows increases participation significantly.48 Voting rights legislation and enforcement is a more complex issue but even more important for reducing voter turnout disparities. At the federal level, Congress can restore and bolster voter protections by passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.49 States can also pass their own state-level voting rights acts to protect voters from discriminatory voting policies50 and help voters defend against the unrepresentative election systems discussed below.
The election system itself can have a significant impact on representation. In 2022, nearly three-quarters of school board members were elected to at-large seats.51 At-large elections allow every voter in a jurisdiction to cast a vote for a candidate, regardless of where the voter lives within the jurisdiction. There are several ways to structure voting within at-large election systems, and the type of voting method used in an at-large election system can be the difference between minority groups having a meaningful voice or being completely drowned out.
Most at-large election systems in the United States use a winner-take-all system in which voters get to cast a vote for each seat up for election and whichever candidate receives the most votes is elected, even if the candidate receives less than 50 percent of the total votes cast. When used in multiwinner elections such as school board elections, the majority can effectively control all available seats, leaving less populous groups without any representation.52
Jurisdictions still using winner-take-all, at-large, multiwinner elections should transition to a more representative election system to help school board members better represent the communities they serve. One option is to transition to district-based elections, which divide a jurisdiction into geographic districts and allow each voter to only vote for the representatives for the district in which they live. While switching to district-based elections can help increase representation and may work well for some jurisdictions, they are not a one-size-fits-all remedy, as drawing districts can present its own equity concerns.53
Another option is to keep the at-large election format but switch from a “winner-take-all” voting system to an alternative voting method such as proportional ranked choice voting.54 Proportional ranked choice voting is a form of ranked choice voting that can be used when multiple candidates can win in an election, such as a city council or school board election. If voters use proportional ranked choice voting to elect their members, then voters each cast one vote for all the open seats and their votes are distributed according to their ranked preferences, making each vote more equal.55 This can help lead to a broader array of viewpoints on the board, as no one majority or plurality group can completely overtake every seat on the board.56
Jurisdictions still using winner-take-all, at-large, multiwinner elections should transition to a more representative election system to help school board members better represent the communities they serve.
Recruiting more diverse candidates to run for school board—especially those already active in the community or education sphere—is another way to make school boards better reflect their communities and community needs.
4. School board elections are testing grounds for major social issues
Despite the fact that more than 90 percent of school board members are elected in nonpartisan elections,57 school board elections have become a testing ground for some of the most contentious political and social issues in the country, including LGBTQI+ rights, public health precautions, and the importance of learning about and addressing racial discrimination in the nation’s past and present.58
National special interest groups are using school board elections to push their own agendas, rightly viewing school board elections as easier to influence than other political offices.59 Low voter turnout and a lack of qualified candidates,60 paired with the low monetary threshold needed to boost a candidate’s campaign,61 create an environment that can be manipulated by money, special interests, and extremists who do not represent the views of the broader community.
The ability of a small group of people to wrest control of a school board and exercise its power is dangerous. For instance, an unrepresentative far-right group that had recently elected its slate of candidates to a school board chose to focus on book bans instead of addressing the district’s major shortage of more than 100 teachers,62 an issue known to have serious impacts on student achievement and well-being.63 Similarly, groups have poured money into school board elections to try to restrict transgender and other LGTBQI+ rights,64 policy shifts which put children in danger since supportive school policies can significantly lower suicide risks.65
The decisions school boards make on these topics not only affect students, who will carry these lessons with them for the rest of their lives, but also the broader community. Individuals who choose not to participate in or pay attention to school board elections are leaving decisions about these important policies up to others who may not share their values or interests.
5. High-quality inclusive schools strengthen communities
Access to high-quality schools has long been associated with educational, social, and health benefits.66 The quality of public education affects many other factors of community success, including economic success, crime and safety, and the well-being and health of community members. For example, individuals who have access to quality K-12 education and graduate from high school are more likely to find gainful employment and be active and productive citizens than those who do not.67 These outcomes provide communitywide benefits as well, including lower rates of serious crimes and lower demands on the public health care system.68 When communities have high-quality public schools, they attract more families and businesses.69 High-quality public schools also increase property values,70 and ultimately, lead to a more educated and prosperous community. This is why it is important to ensure that the individuals elected to make decisions about local schools are knowledgeable about what it takes to create and maintain high-quality inclusive public schools.
Paying attention to local school board elections allows community members to hold the actors who govern local public schools accountable to meeting their expectations. This requires understanding and advocating for accountability levers that the community may use as a form of checks and balances.
Holding a local school board accountable can include many different actions, depending on local policies. It starts with showing up to the polls with an understanding of who the candidates are and what they stand for. But even once a school board member is elected, there are options for community members to continue to hold these officials accountable. These could include asking questions at school board meetings or submitting written questions or comments to better understand the actions of the board and demand that community needs are met.71
Most importantly, holding local school boards accountable requires community members to be knowledgeable about their local public schools and invested in their success. All community members, regardless of their relationship to the public school system, must realize the impacts the quality of public education will have on the betterment of their entire community. Increasing awareness of these elections, the individuals running for office, and their incumbents is vital to encouraging community involvement.
Conclusion
This month, as parents and students alike prepare for the start of a new school year with last-minute trips to the store to stock up on pencils, pens, and binders, voters should also prepare by equipping themselves with the best tool in helping ensure students have access to a high-quality, inclusive education: information about their local school board and its elections.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Weadé James, Jared Bass, Stasha Rhodes, and Ben Olinsky for their valuable insights and feedback. The authors would also like to thank Sophia Applegate for her thorough fact-checking and support throughout this report’s development.