A divisive political climate for school boards has led to packed meetings, bursts of misinformation about complicated decisions, and even threats of violence against the elected officials who have traditionally occupied a lower profile corner of local politics.
As school board members search for strategies to counter those dynamics and win public trust, they often come up empty-handed, said Jonathan E. Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Education research focuses more heavily on the work of teachers and administrators, and there’s a dearth of national data on how school boards form, how they function, and how their stewardship affects student learning.
Collins founded a new research lab this month to help provide solutions and paint a clearer picture of how the most local of local governing bodies operate. The School Board and Youth Engagement Lab, or S-BYE, plans to assemble a national data set on factors such as how boards are elected and how they interact with the public. It also will partner with local boards to pilot new communications tools.
“If you talk to school board members now, versus in 2012, it’s like the Twilight Zone,” Collins said. “School boards have become these Ground Zero spaces for major political and ideological fighting, and we as a research community haven’t provided enough support for the board members undergoing these challenges.”
Tensions at board meetings have been stoked in recent years by disagreement over policies like school masking requirements that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. That climate has been further fueled by scrutiny over how schools address issues like transgender student rights and discussions of race.
“I would tell any board to be prepared, follow the national trends. It’s happening in one district, then it’ll pop up in a next,” Chris McCune, a Westchester, Penn., board member who lost a reelection bid after a dispute over critical race theory, told Education Week in 2021. “Do your homework on what these tactics are, and deal with them in an appropriate way that doesn’t escalate them, that de-escalates them, but also counters them.”
Adding to the dynamic: Well-financed national political groups have poured money into local races and supported recall elections.
How can school boards build public trust?
The climate has even led some boards to limit public comment at meetings to avoid contentious displays and marathon hearings.
But some boards are looking for ways to build democratic processes and encourage parents and members of the public to weigh in on more routine issues, like strategic plans and how schools spend grant funds, Collins said.
The S-BYE lab plans to conduct academic research of those strategies to test their effectiveness. And researchers plan to work with an advisory panel of school board members to hone an online platform that allows boards to seek written and verbal public comment, divide virtual meeting attendees into video breakout groups to discuss suggestions, and conduct polls. A pilot version of the platform includes an AI feature that summarizes input, and it allows school boards to communicate with participants about how their input was used in resulting decisions, Collins said.
“The idea is, theoretically, if we make participation more accessible, and we also make the focal point of participation something to where their perceived stake in the outcome is very clear, then we should see some of the participation imbalances [between very vocal community members and those who are less likely to participate in meetings] start to flatten,” he said.
The lab’s initial national dataset will focus on the 250 largest school districts, collecting information about factors like whether their elections are partisan, whether boards allow public comment at their meetings, whether comment time is limited, and other measures of interactions between boards and the public.
“I think we as a research community, we have an obligation to step in and be very thoughtful, intentional, and aggressive about how we can be useful here,” Collins said.
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