It is Time to Reform School Boards
School board meetings across the country have become the breeding ground for heated politicized debates. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
Amid the clamor of shouting voices and pointed fingers in school boardrooms across the country, someone sits quietly in the back, forgotten—the student. Once an environment for cordial and constructive discourse and community engagement, school board meetings have since become a breeding ground for heated politicized debates that distract from the primary focus on how to better support students and meet their diverse needs. The spaces where educational directions are decided have lost focus and regressed into arenas of conflict, leaving behind teachers and students.
Heated debates on book bans, critical race theory, and LGTBQ+ rights have consumed hours of time at public meetings and dominated rhetoric in school board races across the country. While these may seem like important discussions for schools to have, the debates have morphed into harmful political attacks that target marginalized groups and inclusive curricula.
While many of the most controversial issues that school boards have faced lately are connected to broader positions taken by political movements associated with one of the major political parties, they can often leave lasting and intractable divisions in a community. The increasingly divisive and polarizing climate of school board meetings has left scars in communities, undermined confidence in public education, and created an unsafe learning environment for students who need the most support. Reforms are necessary not only to help heal the deep divisions festering in this country but also to restore and strengthen the process by which members of a community can work together on changes that help improve educational services available to students.
A 2023 survey by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy Education and Access of 467 school superintendents revealed that this sort of conflict has financial ramifications, too. Researchers estimated that districts across the country spent $3.2 billion in the 2022-23 school year responding to “culturally divisive conflicts,” with the majority of this expense resting on the shoulders of districts with high levels of conflict.
To get a fuller understanding of the situation, researchers conducted long-form interviews with a smaller pool of superintendents. In these interviews, superintendents described evening meetings stretching into early-morning hours and harassment campaigns that caused severe emotional stress to staff, parents, and even some students.
The length of school board meetings has grown substantially, too. Much of the time is taken up by speakers deriding issues of indoctrination even when the district utilizes state-approved curriculum.
These are not isolated incidents. In the UCLA study, another superintendent said that following a school incident that went viral on many national conservative news organizations, her office received hundreds of calls and messages on social media that were full of hate.
Given the improbability of an end to these political and ideological conflicts anytime soon, it is necessary to address these challenges with a different approach. A multifaceted reform of school board governance may be the only way to get education back on track with a student-focused mindset to local education policy development.
While it is difficult to track where exactly the rise in political polarization in the United States is coming from, one theory points towards a lack of voter engagement. The fewer people that are a part of the electoral process, the less likely it is for school districts to have adequate representation. Small, but vocal opposition tends to seize control of one or more seats when there is less interest in these races which switches the balance of the board itself.
Despite the minimal to nonexistent eligibility requirements for school board members, these elected officials take on some of the most demanding and important responsibilities in a community. However, elections for these vital roles tend to be decided by a fraction of the jurisdiction's population. An abysmal 5% to 10% of registered voters participate in school board elections, according to 2020 research from the National School Boards Association. Even when voters show up to the polls, many will skip school board races because of a lack of information on those running or even that fact that candidates often appear at the bottom or on the back of their ballots. In Los Angeles County, only 8.7% of eligible voters participated in the 2019 school board election and in a school district in Iowa, 498 voted (10.05%) in the 2017 race.
School board races are often decided during off-cycle elections (those that occur in the spring or during an odd numbered year) which are further characterized by low voter turnout. Data from a 2022 report by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative think tank, suggests that moving school board elections from off-cycle to on-cycle years would not only make it easier to vote and raise voter participation but would also save taxpayer dollars, increase government accountability, reduce the power of special interest groups, and elect a school board better representative of their constituents demographically and on policy preference.
Currently, only thirteen states mandate on-cycle elections for school board members. An important first step in reforming America’s school boards is to ensure that school board elections are no longer held during the off-cycle. This will cause a shift in voter participation and will strengthen representation of the school board itself. Additionally, encouraging more participation in school board elections helps ensure more accountability to the broader community.
Election-cycle reform only scratches the surface of the problem. Beyond shifting the timing of school board elections, we must also shift the voter pool itself by expanding it to include those who the board directly serves—the students.
In November 2024, teens in two California school districts were granted suffrage in their local school board races. According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, about 1,000 Oakland and Berkeley high school students were authorized to vote in their school board elections. While the measures for the voting initiative passed a few years back, it took a while to work out the mechanics. Youth voting happened for the first time in November with great turnout.
This reform recognizes that teenagers possess the maturity and personal stake in the education system to make informed decisions. Many of the schools aligned in-class instruction with the new policy by providing additional aid and lessons to students who were confused with the registration process and why their vote mattered. These changes track empirical studies that suggest early voting habits can lead to lifelong civic engagement. By empowering students with the right to vote, school boards become more accountable to the needs and perspectives of the youth they serve. Moreover, including younger voters can shift the focus of elections toward issues that genuinely impact educational quality, potentially reducing the influence of external political agendas.
Alongside election reforms set to ensure that school boards are more representative and attuned to the needs of students and the community, further guardrails are necessary to ensure elected board members have the tools to effectively communicate with the larger community.
The current governance structure of school boards is incredibly simplistic. Most school boards are composed of publicly elected members, typically ranging from three to ten individuals depending on the size of the district. These boards appoint a superintendent who oversees the day-to-day operations of public schools within a district including the hiring of administration.
While this current model of governance works well for upper management, it often fails to support the needs of the whole community. The system of policy deliberations and decision-making in a public board meeting setting rewards people who shout the loudest with precious time and attention, and are often impacted further by conflicting external motivations of politicians and passionate advocates. The stakeholders who rely on the district’s services, specifically students and their families, and those who directly provide those services, including teachers and other school staff, frequently lack effective tools to influence the viewpoint of the board. Without a bridge to close this gap, and guardrails in place to ensure the system functions effectively, these groups are forced to advocate through protests, recall efforts, and strikes—actions that inadvertently harm students by cutting into precious instructional time and disrupting the educational environment.
An ideal way to create more opportunities for constructive policy development outside of the charged atmosphere of a board meeting is through the use of an independent advisory group commonly referred to as a “citizens’ assembly.” This body, composed of community members from all walks of life recognizes that everyone can have something to offer.
The most important aspect of an assembly is that representatives are randomly selected from the community through sortition. Similar to how juries are selected, the idea is to reach those who do not have heavy political investments in the outcome by engaging a true cross-section of the community. Citizens’ assemblies are designed to allow the participants ample time to grapple with the complex and controversial issues in a setting that supports consensus building. Members use meeting times to study, deliberate and provide recommendations on any policy issue on behalf of the larger public. The random selection process for participants often leads to people on different ends of the spectrum finding themselves working on proposed solutions together. By encouraging a diverse group to take the time to sit down and carefully evaluate various policy options, a citizens’ assembly helps build trust among its members which is critical to finding the common ground necessary for identifying consensus positions.
The decisions agreed upon by a citizens’ assembly would be advocated for and presented to the board, ultimately bridging a gap of trust and creating a level of confidence that often doesn’t exist in solutions that are arrived at without a citizens’ assembly on controversial issues.
Studies by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) count 600 examples of successfully functioning citizens’ assemblies in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, Chile, Mongolia, Japan and beyond that demonstrate exciting potential to produce real change in the United States as well. Additional research from the OECD shows that it is a common experience of assembly members to awaken a sense of political efficacy.
School board members have a lot to deal with and often do not have the time to examine evidence thoroughly and provide deliberative analysis of the policies and actions that best support the unique needs of their district. In districts where the board is split, issues can become more contentious than necessary, making it even harder to find consensus. Citizens’ assemblies are a simple yet radical way to improve our school board system. They improve trust and accountability in board-community relations, and imbue the process with more deliberate analysis, understanding, and participation from the larger community.
As the divide between political parties grows, polarizing issues will continue to seep into school board meetings and erode precious educational resources, time, and attention from where they are needed most. By aligning elections with general voting cycles, extending voting rights to some high school students and incorporating impartial citizens’ assemblies, schools may have a chance to overcome the current barriers to effective governance, and once again become the environments for constructive discourse that facilitate student success.
Ethan Machado (CC ’27) is a staff writer from Sacramento California. Ethan is pursuing a degree in political and economics. He can be reached at eam2312@columbia.edu.