Small boards, big decisions: Who runs our schools?

Beth Schueler (00:00):

They actually make up the largest single group of elected officials in the country, but we have a very decentralized kind of system of decision making in the United States. So school boards make a lot of policy decisions.

Denise Pope (00:15):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:38):

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:48):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed. Hi, Dan. How's it going?

Dan Schwartz (01:00):

Pretty good, Denise.

Denise Pope (01:01):

Yeah. I found out from a little birdie that you ran for student body president as an 11th grader and you won.

Dan Schwartz (01:12):

That is correct. I'm not sure I ran for it. I was in 11th grade and there's a group of senior girls who wanted me to be president. And as an 11th grader, you don't really say no to the senior girls-

Denise Pope (01:25):

Oh, I see.

Dan Schwartz (01:25):

... And so I became president. God bless them all.

Denise Pope (01:28):

This foray into student government, did it lead you to ever want to consider other government roles and maybe running for, let's say, school board?

Dan Schwartz (01:38):

Oh, there's a bridge. It never occurred to me. I was a teacher. It never occurred to me that a teacher could be on a school board. So I never actually thought about it. But I imagine you've been in front of school boards a lot, Denise.

Denise Pope (01:53):

Yes. I too have not won a run for school board. I was a teacher too, but now with the work that I do with Challenge Success, I am presenting in front of school boards often. Very tricky things like we're trying to convince the school to do a late start time. And so all of a sudden that affects the schedule and that affects union and teachers and now the school board has to come in. A lot of times I'm just going to talk to them about the latest research and I want them to understand what the state of mental health is of teenagers or how some of the things that they're talking about at the school board level may have unanticipated effects on kids or parents or families. But it's tricky because school board members do not have to have any education background or experience. They may not even know what the acronym SEL, social emotional learning, means. So you don't know what you're going to get when you walk in front of a school board.

Dan Schwartz (02:51):

Just because you haven't had experience doesn't mean you're not good. I was a great student body president.

Denise Pope (02:58):

I'm sure you were.

Dan Schwartz (02:59):

So we have a guest who's going to help clarify all things. This is... Beth Schueler is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education. She studies educational policy and governance and she is very good at navigating political tension. She is the faculty director of the Politics of Education Lab, a group of interdisciplinary scholars who study the political dimensions of educational policymaking. So welcome, Beth.

Beth Schueler (03:24):

Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Denise Pope (03:26):

Well, Beth, I think just for the sake of all of us here, can you walk us through what exactly a school board does?

Beth Schueler (03:35):

Sure. Yeah. I'd be happy to. So a school board is kind of one of the primary decision making bodies at the sort of local level when it comes to education policy. So this is a group of elected officials, usually five to seven typically, who make a lot of policy decisions. Probably first and foremost, they hire and oversee and sometimes even let go the superintendent of a school district. So that's their key primary responsibility. But then they're also making, as you already sort of suggested, Denise, decisions about a range of policy matters. So it could include things like scheduling decisions, calendar decisions. They adopt the budget, so they're making decisions about resource allocation. They're often negotiating with labor unions and making important decisions about human capital policy. They came under recent attention for decisions around reopenings in the aftermath of the COVID school closures. So when and how to reopen schools for in-person learning and curricular decisions. So really kind of a range of matters that they're making decisions over.

Dan Schwartz (04:48):

So do they meet every day? That's a lot of stuff.

Beth Schueler (04:53):

That is a lot of stuff. Yeah. No, they don't meet every day. I mean, I think it varies from place to place, but typically they'll have a website that provides a calendar of monthly meetings and just meeting minutes. And sometimes they'll post videos of their meetings that the public can get access to find out when they're meeting, where they're meeting, what they're talking about, what's on the agenda and how the public can get involved.

Denise Pope (05:18):

I mean, Dan, some of these meetings go on for hours and hours and hours. It's actually unreal. It would probably drive you crazy to sit and listen at some of these school board meetings, right, Beth?

Beth Schueler (05:31):

Yeah. And I think that varies a lot from place to place too, but they'll have opportunities for public comment. And so sometimes this can go on a long time. I think it depends too what issues are on the agenda in a given meeting. Sometimes it can be very kind of pro forma. We're getting on record voting in favor of adopting the meeting minutes from last time and moving forward things that we all already sort of agreed we were going to vote for. And then sometimes when there's more kind of contentious issues on the table, it can really be an opportunity for people to kind of voice concerns and that can take a long time.

Dan Schwartz (06:06):

Didn't I see a video recently of a school board getting into a fight, like somebody threw a chair, and I mean, it was heated.

Beth Schueler (06:14):

Yeah. I mean, there's some empirical evidence about sort of media coverage of school boards and sort of the politics of education that suggests, I think the media sometimes has a tendency to focus on some of the more sort of charged or polarizing issues in education policy. And so there's been coverage in recent years around, as I mentioned, the school reopening decisions, but then also there was sort of a wave of decisions school boards were making around curricular issues, especially related to identity politics issues. So teaching of race and racism, gender issues, LGBTQ issues and the like that really got a lot of kind of play. And I think especially when there's sort of evidence of kind of dysfunction or challenges in their kind of engagement with one another or with the public, that can get some media attention. But I think that, in some ways, is a little bit unrepresentative of sort of the typical board meeting, which is a little bit sleepier.

(07:09):

And I think those are kind of a little bit more of the outlier kind of instances and cases that end up getting more of the attention than sort of what your typical meeting would look like.

Dan Schwartz (07:20):

So just continue with the concrete aspects of the meeting. So there's some discussion about a new reading curriculum for, let's say, preschool and first grade and a parent brings in their child to testify how much they love the books.

Beth Schueler (07:35):

Yeah, yeah. So you'll have parents, teachers, sometimes students participate. Some school boards actually have student representatives that participate as members on the school boards themselves. So sometimes that's kind of a mechanism through which they get student information or feedback. I think some of the recent research that we've been working on suggests that, to some extent, research can play a role in the work of school boards, but I think there's a hunger and a desire for more kind of training and trying to use research and data to inform decisions at the school board level and sort of a recognition that maybe there's not kind of built-in opportunities to get training in those areas as much as school board members would like.

Dan Schwartz (08:19):

Yeah. So on the research side, we have partnerships with school districts, they're called research practice partnerships. And there'll be some topic that the district's interested in and the faculty will do studies. And the superintendent and school board are very thankful because they get to actually get the research on what's going on. They really valued knowing about their school district for sure.

Beth Schueler (08:42):

Yeah. I think one thing that some observers have expressed concerns about in terms of the way school boards operate and are arranged in the past is this idea that in some ways the board is charged with holding the superintendent accountable and sort of overseeing their work, but in many ways they're kind of dependent on the superintendent and the district central office for a lot of the information that they're using to make these decisions and figure out how to improve things in their district. And so that could create challenges, if the folks that you're trying to hold accountable are providing the information to you. And so I think that's one way in which sometimes board members may be hungry for more kind of external sources of information.

Denise Pope (09:23):

So am I right that there's no minimum requirements? So there's no age minimum for school board members, there's no experience required. Is that right?

Beth Schueler (09:34):

There are some basic requirements and it varies from state to state what the requirements are in terms of whether they're required to participate in some kind of training or something like that. But I think it's fair to say that in most places, those requirements are fairly minimal. So maybe some training in kind of basic ethics and the rules of Robert's Rules of Order and state laws that govern meeting procedures and what you're allowed to talk about behind closed doors and that kind of thing. So more like kind of procedural and kind of ethics training and less sort of intensive training in things like using data to try to drive instructional improvements or trying to use research to improve public policy or how to negotiate with organized labor, how to navigate political challenges, how to engage with community members. Those pieces, I think there's survey evidence suggests there's a lot of hunger for more training and development in those areas.

Denise Pope (10:36):

Okay. This is going to sound bad, but in my town, I know one person who is on the school board and his motivation, he wanted his kid to be able to play baseball at the other school. And the school board makes the rules over who plays baseball where and the team and all of this, okay. And that was his sole motivation. And he said to me, "I don't care about reading. I don't care about test scores." So are most people in it for the right reasons or is this like, "Another person I know it was a stepping stone because they wanted to then run for city office and then maybe mayor"? So what's the motivation that you see?

Beth Schueler (11:09):

So these school board members, they're not, like, paid particularly well. Sometimes there's sort of a small stipend that varies to some extent if you're in a very large district where it's much more professionalized, that can vary. But in most places, you're not, like, making big bucks doing this. I think it's most appropriate to think of it as kind of a volunteer position where it's sort of a public service. So that's not kind of the primary motivation. The idea of it serving as a stepping stone I think is more common in larger, you know, especially urban contexts, but is not the typical kind of scenario. So in most places, school board members are not indicating that they're planning to kind of run for higher office. I do think there's, you know, as you sort of suggested, the possibility in many places that there's sort of maybe a pet issue or a particular area of concern that drives folks to get involved.

(11:59):

And I think it's not particularly well understood, the process through which we end up with the board members we have or how folks decide to run, but I do think some evidence that sometimes it's driven by a particular kind of set of concerns or issues and not necessarily kind of a holistic picture of the district. That said, I think most folks that are in this role, they're not doing it for the compensation. They're there to try to contribute to the public good. So I don't want to kind of mislead folks in that way.

Denise Pope (12:30):

That's fair. In prepping for this, I read something and I was very surprised to hear this, that the typical election of a school board member is off cycle on purpose. What does that mean?

Beth Schueler (12:44):

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, I think, you know one challenge that we have in terms of school board governance in the US is that typically we have fairly low levels of public participation in the elections that determine who ends up on the school board. So very low levels of turnout overall relative to like a presidential election, for example. And also the folks that end up turning out to vote aren't particularly representative of the broader communities that they go on to represent. So they tend to be older, they tend to be whiter, and they tend to be more affluent than the communities that they're serving. One factor that plays into that is the timing of when school board elections are held. So traditionally, many school board elections are held what we call off cycle from federal national elections that are held on November of even numbered years. So they're held on a different day or month or year.

(13:42):

And there's some pretty compelling evidence that suggests that that really contributes to reducing both overall participation levels. So it makes turnout rates low, but also changes the kind of composition of the electorate to make it look less like the population that these school board members go on to represent. And in places where they've shifted to more on-cycle elections to align school board elections with other national or even statewide races as has happened in California and other places, we've seen increases in terms of the rates of participation overall.

Dan Schwartz (14:16):

But the original motivation for off-cycle was to make sure that I wasn't on a slate of Republicans or a slate of Democrats or...

Denise Pope (14:26):

Does it say your party when you run for school board?

Beth Schueler (14:29):

The vast majority of places, we have nonpartisan school board elections. That doesn't mean that partisanship doesn't play a role, but the party identification is not listed on the ballot of the individual candidate. So you don't know if this person identifies with a particular political party or not. And that's by design, the timing piece is by design as well. So there was a wave of reforms around the turn of the century, so late 1800s, early 1900s, part of this administrative progressive movement that was geared toward trying to kind of shield education policymaking from broader kind of nationalized partisan political debates and sort of patronage politics. So that meant that they shifted to largely nonpartisan elections where you don't know the party ID of the candidate, off-cycle elections that are held at a different time than these other national elections. And also there was a shift at that time toward more, what we call, at-large elections.

(15:27):

So as opposed to ward-based elections where smaller subsets of districts are kind of voting for someone to represent their particular pocket of the district, it became the whole... District as a whole is voting for their representatives. So this was kind of by design and is one of the things that I think makes education policy and governance particularly interesting relative to other areas of public policy because in most areas of public policy, you have what we call general purpose government. So a city council or a mayor that's dealing with lots of policy issues. Whereas in education, you have this whole separate system of school boards that are just devoted to focusing on education policy issues.

Dan Schwartz (16:11):

So Beth, I think I've got it. School boards are elected. They have many reasons to become members of the school board. Often they're good-hearted. They're good citizens. They're undertrained for the position and they have spectacular level of power over the school district. They can basically touch everything.

Denise Pope (16:31):

What could go wrong?

Dan Schwartz (16:33):

Yeah. So is there a limit to their power? Is there some braking mechanism? We have tripartite government at the federal level. What stops and controls are there?

Beth Schueler (16:45):

Yeah, that's a great question. So I mean, in the US, we have no federal right to education. Education isn't mentioned in the US Constitution. And so things that aren't in the US Constitution are delegated to the states. So really states actually have kind of primary control over education systems in the US and it's built into many of the state constitutions. States then delegate a lot of that authority to the local level, to these school boards and local school districts. In some cases, when states feel like the district, either there's sort of dysfunction on the school board or they're dissatisfied with the outcomes that a school board has been able to make, or they're worried about academic performance or sort of fiscal mismanagement or budgetary challenges, the state will actually step in and kind of remove decision making authority from the local school board and bring it back up to the state.

(17:38):

You could imagine a sort of state appointed board or a single person, a state appointed kind of superintendent or receiver. Sometimes it leads to mayoral control of a local system. So there are some of these rare, but kind of distinctive alternatives to school board governance that occur typically when things are not kind of going to plan for a number of years.

Dan Schwartz (18:00):

Remind me how many school districts there are. It's like 19,000 or something. Yeah.

Beth Schueler (18:04):

I think maybe like 13, 14 is-

Dan Schwartz (18:07):

13 or 14,000 and the 50 states are monitoring all these? I mean, that seems really tough for the information to flow up to the state to say, "You're going broke," or, "There's too much spread that's based on demographics of grade distribution." Like this seems really tough.

Beth Schueler (18:28):

Yeah. I mean, I think part of this is built into some state accountability systems. So there's some metrics that they're trying to use to kind of determine whether districts are sort of off course. And oftentimes, it'll be... These kinds of actions will be triggered by sort of persistent challenges as opposed to a single year things are going awry. So the state will have its eye on a particular district for a number of years before intervening in this way, if that makes sense. And the sort of factors that can trigger takeover and what the state is allowed to do in the event of takeover kind of varies from state to state. So in some states, they have a kind of more aggressive set of possible policy responses at their fingertips than others.

Dan Schwartz (19:11):

And so I'm on a school board and I get told... Someone walks into the school board meeting and says, "Give me your keys. You don't matter anymore. We're taking over." Is it that cold?

Beth Schueler (19:22):

Well, in some places, the school board will remain in service and they'll sort of end up as more of a kind of advisory body that the state can get information from, can consult with, can work with. And in other places, that's less the case. They stop meeting and don't participate. So it varies from place to place. Typically, these takeovers can be fairly contentious affairs. So at the state level, I think there's sort of majorities of support for state takeover like policy mechanisms, but at the local level within the communities that are targeted for these reforms, you often see sort of intense pockets of resistance to these shifts.

Dan Schwartz (20:08):

I can imagine that, but it's a big deal if suddenly your power is evacuated. How often do the state takeovers work? Do we know?

Beth Schueler (20:16):

Yeah. So when we look at the effects, there's kind of two categories of things. There tends to be takeovers that are primarily undertaken for fiscal reasons and then the ones that are more focused on academic achievement, those sorts of performance metrics. And what we find in terms of academic outcomes, we find on average kind of no effects of state takeovers on student academic achievement outcomes, either kind of positive or negative, but that sort of obscures the fact that there's quite a bit of variation in terms of the effect from district to district. So in many places we see these takeovers actually seem to pave the way for pretty large improvements in student achievement outcomes. In other places, it can be quite disruptive and actually harmful to student achievement outcomes. And in other places, just more neutral effects. So lots of variability from place to place.

(21:07):

And that's one of the things we're trying to learn about with research is why are some more effective than others? In terms of the fiscal outcomes, we have some other work looking at the effects on those types of outcomes and we find takeovers tend to increase per pupil spending on education on average. That funding tends to come largely from state sources and some evidence of improvements in terms of measures of fiscal health in the districts. But there is, again, variation from place to place and some kind of inequities in the types of communities that end up seeing some of the benefits versus others.

Denise Pope (21:46):

So okay, this is making me think that in the ideal world, people with the right experience would be making these decisions. So are you envisioning a world where local school board races go away and it kind of falls under the states? Is that even a possibility? Do you think this system is working and what do you think we should do?

Beth Schueler (22:10):

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think we don't have a lot of evidence suggesting there's some sort of silver bullet alternative to school board governance. And so I think without an alternative to point to, it's difficult, I think, to say that we should just throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of school boards entirely. But I do think there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of making sure this governance arrangement is operating more effectively, more democratically. I think there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of community participation, both in the electoral process, in terms of figuring out who's elected to school board, and then also participation throughout the governance process as well in informing the decisions that school board members are making.

Denise Pope (22:54):

How can we get the people to run for school board? I mean, you get paid almost nothing, you're working a full-time job on top of this or you're raising kids or... Any ideas?

Beth Schueler (23:06):

Yeah, it's tricky. There are a number of organizations that have popped up to try to do just that, just what you're describing, to try to help kind of basically make more transparent, the kind of hidden curriculum of running for school board or running for local office in general. I mean, I think one of the things that is a bit of a mystery to folks, people often think, "Oh, this would be... I need some huge apparatus. I need a lot of money to run for school board." When in reality, most folks that are running for school board are not spending very much money on this at all. In your typical community, these tend to be fairly low spending elections. They are often uncontested, so you don't even necessarily have competition. There's like three open seats and three people run. And in some ways, just even a kind of public information campaign about the sort of limited barriers to running and to getting involved could go a long way.

Denise Pope (24:00):

You don't need a campaign manager. You don't need fancy posters or balloons. If you're a mom or dad out there, just run.

Beth Schueler (24:08):

Yeah. And there are some of these organizations that are trying to help kind of provide guidance for folks who are interested, but are like, "I just don't even know where to start." Some have more of a partisan lean or an ideological lean than others, but I think there's room for the kind of a nonprofit sector and others to step in and provide some of this information to try to build up the supports to provide for folks who might be interested, but just don't know where to get started.

Dan Schwartz (24:33):

Short of me having to run for school board, as much as I would like to be in hours long meetings, as a parent, do I start a letter writing campaign to my school board members? As a parent, the school board was pretty invisible to me. The PTA was visible, but the school board was not. And so as a good parent, should I bother these people or just let them govern?

Beth Schueler (24:59):

I think just being aware of when are these elections occurring, and that's not often a very straightforward thing to know given they're not always held at the same time as other elections. So finding out when they're occurring, participating in voting in them, and trying to gather some information that could be useful in sort of figuring out who to vote for once you do end up there. And as I mentioned earlier, most of these school boards do have websites that provide information about when the next meeting is happening. Oftentimes they'll have videos of meetings that you can look at to try to understand what's going on, contact information so you can figure out how to reach out to these school board members themselves, but often lower hanging fruit than a sort of state level elected official or federal official where it might be harder to actually get in touch. I think you'll have more of a chance of actually connecting with more local officials. It's a really kind of underutilized and underappreciated pathway for big impact with sort of lower barriers than you might expect.

Dan Schwartz (26:05):

Denise, vote for me.

Beth Schueler (26:07):

Dan for school board.

Denise Pope (26:08):

Dan for school board. Okay. I would love for you to run, but in all seriousness, what did you learn today?

Dan Schwartz (26:14):

I don't know? That the school board has a tremendous level of governance and fiduciary responsibility, not a lot of training in many cases, mixed motives for being on there. I sort of think the superintendent must take a tremendous amount of responsibility for trying to make a cohesive, effective board. So it's an interesting model of governance, but on the practical level, pay attention that there's this group that's making decisions about your kids' lives and they are your representatives.

Denise Pope (26:44):

Yeah. And I think you're hearing so much on the news these days of certain groups pushing certain ideologies and trying to infiltrate school boards to move things in a direction that you may or may not agree with. That's all the more reason to figure out who you're voting for, run yourself, right? There's a lot of power and people don't realize just how much power there is. So yeah, really interesting show. Beth, anything you want to add before we head out?

Beth Schueler (27:10):

Yeah. I mean, the last thing I'll say, and I love it, you guys are preaching to the choir, as you know. One thing that might be surprising in our recent survey work, most of these school board members that are serving right now expressed really positive perceptions of their own experiences. They said this was really useful for their own personal development. It was not something that most school board members were saying was negatively impacting their emotional wellbeing or creating significant kind of hurdles for them personally or professionally. So I think those positive experiences are maybe just one more reason to throw your hat in the ring or check it out, get involved.

Denise Pope (27:46):

Love it. I love it. I really think this is going to become the ad that they're going to play over and over again to get people to run. So Beth, thank you so much. I think we've all learned so much from this show, so thanks for being here and thanks all of you for joining this episode of School's In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope and I am not running for school board.

Dan Schwartz (28:12):

I am Dan "Vote for Me" Schwartz.