School boards have been mired in fractious political debates in recent years.
Fueled by the anger over masking mandates and vaccine policies during the pandemic, the fights with parents and community members then branched out to other contentious topics like transgender students’ rights and whether to remove certain books from school libraries.
But beyond the public debate in school board meetings, parents and communities don’t have easy access to information on how their school board members vote on some of these topics. Now, for the first time, a national dashboard will collect and present data on how school boards in 161 districts vote on five topics: book bans, LGBTQ-student policies, limits on what teachers can teach, private school choice, and the presence of immigration enforcement agents in schools.
The dashboard was created by School Board Spotlight, a progressive nonprofit that informs the public about the political leanings of school board members. School Board Spotlight is supported by the Pipeline Fund, which selects and trains diverse progressive candidates for state-level political positions.
Although most school board elections are nonpartisan, the dashboard informs users about the political affiliations of board members who ran in partisan races.
In 2023, School Board Spotlight started research on how local and national political debates influenced decisions made by school board members. That research expanded nationally, and became the basis for the dashboard.
“Now, not only can you know who your school board member is, but what’s happening in your school board,” said Denise Feriozzi, the executive director of the Pipeline Fund. “Are [board members] working for your kids, or are they getting distracted by some of these culture war issues?”
Feriozzi is keen to add more topics, like artificial intelligence, to the dashboard, as well as expand to a larger number of districts. In the meantime, she hopes that parents and community members can use the information in the dashboard to push school boards to avoid divisive debates and focus on basic student issues, like test scores and safety.
This dashboard could be useful for parents who can’t always attend a school board meeting to learn about consequential votes, said Rachel White, an associate professor at the department of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas in Austin. White has studied how school boards function and formerly served on a board.
Still, White said it’s not so easy to say school boards should avoid controversial debates. She said it’s difficult to “decouple ensuring all students have access to high-quality education from curriculum censorship. Those two things might, in some cases, be intricately related.”
How were the districts picked?
Feriozzi said the 161 districts included in the dashboard all share similar characteristics: a student population of over 10,000, based in small cities or suburban areas, with 10-50% students of color. These districts are also “ideologically moderate” based on voting trends, not skewing either conservative or liberal.
Feriozzi shared Virginia’s Loudon County as an example. It’s a large, suburban school district that has had multiple conflicts with conservative parent advocacy groups on heated topics like teaching critical race theory.
Politically moderate districts saw the most contentious issues bubble up in their school board meetings, Feriozzi said.
This finding is aligned with other national data from the Brookings Institution that show students in “purple” districts had the biggest increase in conflicts in their districts during the pandemic era; board members surveyed from these districts said there is “lot of conflict” now compared to before the pandemic.
Each school board on the dashboard has passed a mix of liberal and conservative policies. For instance, districts in Missouri, a red state, have passed policies to restrict books or curriculum, but have also voted against the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in schools.
Close to 70% of the districts in the dashboard have passed at least one of what the School Board Spotlight considers to be a “pro-student” policy, said Feriozzi.
However, White noted that the dashboard may obscure some important nuance. For example, a school board that voted to remove a book from a school would be labeled “anti-student"—but the board might have removed the book based on the maturity level of the content, and is opposed to removing books that highlight different student identities.
In other words, a school board policy is more complicated than the way it’s currently tagged in the dashboard, said White. A more detailed user guide would prevent parents from jumping to conclusions about a school board’s values.
“For someone who just stumbles upon this website, how would you want them to consume this information? And what do you think are appropriate ways to use this information?” White added.
What do school board members think about the dashboard?
The dashboard could be a resource for school board members who may want to see how other districts have voted on particular political issues, like private school choice. This information could help board members learn from their peers as they consider what they need to do to engage parents on issues before they become contentious and hard to handle.
It could make school board meetings more transparent and make board members more accountable to the public, said White. When board members vote, they will be more aware of how their decisions, image, and values are perceived by the community.
Current school board members, like Dominique Chatters, welcome the added transparency. Chatters is a member of the Chesterfield County school board in northern Virginia. Before running, she had questioned the board as a parent advocate about unequal division of resources between affluent and low-income parts of the school district.
“This is helpful to voter education because that’s how we get more people turning out to vote,” Chatters said. “It’s getting them educated.”
