The heightened tensions that school boards navigated both among members and with their communities during the COVID-19 era haven’t fully abated in the time since, new research finds.
But even as issues like masking, remote learning, and how schools discuss race and sexuality animated debates at the local, state, and national levels, they did not lead to a widespread increase in participation in school board elections, an accompanying analysis of one state’s voting patterns shows.
“We are going to look back on this as a historically important period for school boards,” said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. “We are going to want to understand what happened here.”
The Brookings Institution released the research, and the results of a nationally representative survey of 1,000 school board members from 700 districts on June 5. Researchers weighted the survey results, collected between October 2024 and January 2025, by enrollment to make national projections of how many students attended districts affected by political controversies. Taken together, the research paints a comprehensive picture of how a rise in conflict affected the most local of governing bodies.
Eight percent of U.S. students attend schools in districts that had “a lot” of board-community conflict before the pandemic, the researchers projected using the survey findings. That figure rose to 47% of students after COVID-related disruptions, they found.
“Some conflict is unavoidable given that school boards often bring together elected representatives with differing views—and, sometimes, strong personalities,” the report says. “However, conflicts can be detrimental to governing outcomes, and there is reason to suspect that intra-board conflicts have become more common in recent years.”
The findings come as school districts face challenges related to improving academic achievement, defining the appropriate role of technology in schools, and addressing declining enrollment and related financial challenges.
Twenty-three percent of respondents to the survey said “COVID and culture war conflicts” had negatively affected their boards’ ability to govern. Researchers project that about 28% of students nationwide attend districts where such conflicts affect board governance.
School board members face protests, threats, disruptions
Forty-four percent of school board members representing an estimated 62% of public school students reported experiencing at least one conflict-related incident between 2020 and 2022, the survey analysis finds. Those incidents included threats and harassment of board members, protests and violent outbursts during meetings, meetings being stopped because of disruption, and arrest or removal of meeting attendees.
“School boards got catapulted into this national debate when they are used to being your neighbors, the people you see in the grocery store,” Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs, the executive director and CEO of the National School Boards Association, said in a virtual event hosted by Brookings Monday.
Even as they faced confrontations in meetings and threats at home, board members had to continue to make high-stakes decisions about federal relief aid, curricula, and recovery, sometimes with limited information, she said.
The NSBA itself was the target of controversy in September 2021, when it issued a memo to President Joe Biden’s administration, requesting federal help with confrontations and threats against local school board members and saying some of those threats could be classified as “domestic terrorism.” The organization later apologized for the language it used after some critics accused it of trying to stifle dissent from conservative parents. Within a few months, at least 22 state-level organizations had cut ties with NSBA.
To probe trends in conflict further, researchers analyzed published media reports covering a sample of 2,300 school boards selected to represent districts from a variety of rural, urban, and suburban areas, between 2018 and 2024. About 10% of school districts nationwide, representing about 30% of public school students, were mentioned in at least one report about a conflict related to masking policies, critical race theory, “book bans,” or transgender student issues, the analysis finds.
Coverage of school board conflicts related to masking policies and critical race theory peaked in 2021 and has steadily declined since, the analysis finds. Coverage of conflicts related to book bans and transgender-student policies peaked in 2023, the analysis finds. Although it has declined since, the number of reports remains far above pre-pandemic levels.
Reports of conflicts on “culture war” issues like critical race theory were more common in large districts and urban areas. They were also more common in “blue” districts, where voters supported former President Joe Biden by a margin of 5 percent or more in the 2020 election, and “purple” areas where voters sided with either major candidate by a margin of less than 5%. That finding aligned with data from the survey, which finds incidents like protests and threats were more common in blue and purple areas.
Conflicts had a limited effect on school board elections in one state
Even as school board conflicts made headlines and drove political debates, an analysis of voting trends in Florida suggests they did not have widespread effects on participation in school board elections, which often have lower turnout than races higher on the ballot.
The Brookings researchers used a dataset covering Florida elections from 2014 to 2024, tracking turnout rates and contested seats in every school board race. In general, turnout rates increased gradually during that decade.
“We are interpreting it as a reason for us to be a little cautious and humble in thinking about how much the conflicts around education have really fundamentally changed American politics or how the American public engages in schools,” Valant said. “It clearly activated a large number of people, but that’s much different than having measurable effects on who shows up to vote.”
The number of contested school board races increased only slightly during that time, with more pronounced increases in politically purple districts, researchers found. Turnout in general school board elections during presidential election years rose from 62% in 2016 and 2020 to 66% in 2024.
In purple counties, school board turnout rates rose from 58% in 2016 to 64% in 2020 and 63% in 2024, the analysis finds.
Whatever the effect on turnout, there’s no denying that the era of conflict raised public awareness of the importance of school boards and public participation in their decisionmaking, speakers at the Brookings event said.
“School boards are probably our most accessible democratic institutions,” Valant said. “When people are upset, school boards are one of the few places where you can walk in and speak directly to your representatives.”
