Last month, conservatives made major gains in school boards across Florida.
From Sarasota to Brevard to Clay, and even Miami-Dade County, conservatives won outright majorities. This shift was partly attributable to a groundswell of popular discontent with the cultural direction of public schools. It was also partly attributable to the entrance of new outside political actors, such as the 1776 Project PAC, Moms for Liberty, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. But all these factors may have proved insufficient if not for one thing: The election was held on a day that people actually turned out to vote.
Florida is one of only 13 states that hold school board elections on cycle, i.e., on the second Tuesday after the first Monday in November of an even year. In practice, when there are only two candidates, the school board elections are effectively decided on primary day. But voter turnout on primary day is far higher than, say, the second Tuesday in June when only school board or municipal elections are being held.
When elections are held makes a huge difference in how schools are governed. Boston University’s Michael Hartney made the striking, yet also commonsense, finding that when school board elections are held on cycle, the ideology of elected school board members more closely matches their median constituent. While Hartney’s finding primarily related to fiscal ideology, the same is almost certainly true for social values as well.
If you’ve been wondering how the culture of public education has drifted so far to the left, it certainly wasn’t by popular demand. Rather, it was the product of a woke ideology expanding outward from schools of education to the education establishment writ large, relatively insulated from the public oversight inherent in the democratic process.
This insulation was exactly why the early 20th century progressives moved school board elections off cycle in the first place. They believed that education was far too important to be left to the vicissitudes of the public. Rather, they argued, it ought properly to be the preserve of the experts like themselves.
The past century has given the lie to the special efficacy of expert-run public schools. And the conspicuous failures of the Obama-era progressive education technocrats helped give rise to a new kind of progressive, far less interested in matters of policy than in questions of social engineering. Experts who, whether they’re expert enough to realize it or not, now take their ideological marching orders from critical race theory. In short, much of the public education establishment, and certainly the teachers unions, have gone woke.
Whether this structural shift will affect what happens in classrooms will depend on the expectations set by school leaders. And those expectations will be set, in large part, by the school board. School board members who default to deferring to the woke education establishment will permit, if not encourage, all sorts of ideological excesses. School board members who take their governing mandate from the citizens who elected them will help ensure that schools meet citizens’ expectations.
Last year, state legislatures across the country passed critical race theory “bans” — which were, at their core, exercises in expectation setting. But all education is local. For legislators and governors who are concerned about preserving the traditional character of public education, the single most important measure they could take would be to pass and sign laws moving school board elections on cycle.
If they don’t, then all the well-justified sound and fury in reaction to critical race theory may end up signifying very little. So long as teachers unions are permitted to dominate low-turnout school board elections, public schools will be structurally responsive to their desires and their ideology. For some, the idea of moving school board elections on cycle might sound like it would make education too political. But as the president of the Los Angeles teachers union put it: “Education is political. People don’t want to say that, but it is. … It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. … They know the words insurrection and coup.”
If conservative lawmakers are comfortable with public schools being structurally beholden to fundamentally self-interested union cartels that traffic in critical race theory ideology, then they shouldn’t concern themselves with when school board elections are held. But if they want public schools to reflect the will and serve the interests of the public, then they should move school board elections on cycle.
Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America page.
