5 Dec 2007, Frederick Hess
[This is an abstract of a paper given at the symposium School Board Research: Main Lines of Inquiry, in Des Moines, Iowa, September 14-15, 2007. The full paper is published in Relevancy and Revelation: The Future of School Board Governance, by Rowman and Littlefield, Spring 2008.]
The issue of local school board governance has been a subject of debate, and more than a little ridicule, for over a century. Mark Twain, of course, famously opined, “God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” In a more contemporary vein, one need not search hard to find the 2006 Reuters story entitled “Dead woman wins deadlocked vote by coin toss.” Headlines routinely depict school board elections as alternately venal, conflict-laden, or unimportant, in stories such as the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel’s “Insults, Charges Mark Race for School Board,” the Modesto Bee’s “Campaign in District 3 Turns Nasty,” the Daily News of Los Angeles’s “School Board Still Stewing; Last Year's ‘Nasty’ Election Leaves Lasting Wounds,” or the Arizona Republic’s “School Board Seats Attract Few; Lack Of Candidates In 17 Districts May Force Cancellation Of Elections.”
Nonetheless, the more than 100,000 board members serving on approximately 15,000 school boards constitute the largest group of elected officials in the United States and collectively oversee the expenditure of more than $500 billion a year. How they govern and how effectively they do so are serious questions deserving of systematic inquiry. As with any democratic body, that inquiry starts with understanding how they are elected. While elected boards have been both celebrated as pillars of democracy and assailed as anachronistic institutions, claims about board electioneering, responsiveness, and democratic accountability have been made on the basis of remarkably little data. Little is known about how much board elections cost, who funds board members, how competitive board elections actually are, or which interests are most active in board elections.
The contemporary reform debate has encompassed a variety of reform proposals, each premised on particular critiques of board behavior. Hill (2003) has proposed replacing traditional school boards with multiple, competing entities that are each free to sponsor “charter districts.” Others have suggested that school boards are ill-suited to the challenges of contemporary schooling and have advocated dismantling boards and replacing them with mayoral control or some similar arrangement (Broad 2003). Still other thinkers have argued that the priority ought to be ensuring that boards have the training and professional development necessary to enable them to play their governance role more effectively (McAdams 2006).
The various prescriptions rest on assumptions regarding the nature of board governance and elections, but are typically handicapped by the dearth of evidence documenting how school board elections, decision-making, and processes unfold in practice. The aim of this chapter is to provide a more substantive understanding of the electoral process. In particular, it seeks to deepen understanding of boards and the role they play by exploring how money and interest groups affect board elections. In this respect, it complements the earlier and more quantitatively sophisticated analysis of Hess and Leal (2005) by providing a more updated and less technical discussion of the dynamics of board elections.
While previous research provides insight into the link between factors like public opinion and local spending, it does not tell us much about the electoral mechanism itself or how it may influence the makeup and behavior of school boards. Using information collected from a national sample of more than 800 school boards and matched with district-level census data, I provide an empirical inquiry into the role of money and interest group activism in school board elections. The focus is on five questions: How much money do board candidates spend on their campaigns? Which interest groups supply campaign funding? How active are various interests reported to be in board elections? How competitive are school board campaigns? And, finally, how do factors such as community context, electoral arrangements, and the presence of collective bargaining affect the role of key interests in board elections?