By Stanley Kurtz
Thursday, April 16, 2026
The most powerful steps we could take to wrest public
schools from the hands of the woke would be for states to move school board
elections “on-cycle” (to federal Election Day) and allow political parties to
nominate the candidates.
A few states do this now, yet by far most school board
elections remain off-cycle and “nonpartisan.” The result is that a great many
conservative districts are run by progressive Democratic school boards. That’s
because low-turnout, low-information, off-cycle school board elections are
dominated by highly organized and self-interested teachers’ unions.
The current system also deprives the conservative half of
the country of a farm team of education experts, administrators, and
higher-office-holders-in-the-making, who could counterbalance products of the
monolithically progressive ed schools. That ed school–produced progressive
education establishment now dominates local, state, and national education
bureaucracies, even in red districts and states.
You may have heard something about moving school board elections on-cycle and listing party
affiliation, when the pushback against woke schooling began to catalyze several
years ago. Yet even that tiny blip of publicity has by now fallen off the radar
screen. The discrepancy between the significance of this proposed electoral
shift and its near complete absence from public discussion is striking.
A big reason for the silence is that proposed changes to
the structure of school board elections are easily lost track of when dispersed
across 50 states and thousands of local districts. Yet there are plenty of
issues — abortion, gun control, health care, immigration, climate/energy —
where interest groups track, publicize, and discuss trends and developments at
the state and local levels. When it comes to proposals to change our way of
electing school boards, no one — at least on the conservative side — seems to
be systematically following the issue.
The good news is that despite some setbacks, several red
states have now successfully moved, or are moving, toward on-cycle school board
elections, with party affiliations listed. The bad news is that the movement is
far too slow and, as noted, public awareness remains virtually nonexistent.
Were the national Republican Party — perhaps even
President Trump — to make the school board election system a point of
discussion, we could see an electoral shift with huge cultural consequences.
The education field is so massively tilted toward the left that if only
conservative states and districts were to elect school boards that actually
represented their point of view, it would set off a cultural sea change. Sadly,
however, the school board election system as currently constituted is designed
to confuse and discourage voters.
The supposed depoliticization of school board elections
was instituted during the progressive era (circa 1890–1920). Over time,
unfortunately, that effort has backfired spectacularly. Nonpartisan, off-cycle
school board elections were supposed to curb corruption by breaking the power
of political machines, thereby ensuring that schools would be governed by
professionally trained and politically disinterested experts. What’s happened
instead is that machine politics, corruption, and ideological partisanship have
all returned — sometimes in more disturbing forms than the abuses that drove
the original progressive era reforms.
The lingering illusion that school board elections as
currently structured are benignly “nonpartisan” may be the greatest barrier to
reform. To understand how supposedly disinterested nonpartisanship is actually
the opposite, we need to trace the origin and fate of progressive era school
board election reforms.
Those late-19th- and early-20th-century reforms were an
attack on the urban political machines that dominated immigrant neighborhoods.
In those days, members of big-city school boards were elected by ward. They
served on boards yet equally acted as cogs in a larger party apparatus. Back
then, teachers were hired based on political pull. Instead of “what do you
know,” “how do you teach,” and “have you been trained,” the political bosses
who controlled teacher hiring wanted to know “what are your connections,” and
“how many votes can you and your circle control for me when I run for mayor.”
As a result, a hefty share of the teacher corps was incompetent.
The problems went beyond teachers. Massive purchases of
textbooks and other supplies, school construction and repair, and the hiring of
janitors and administrators opened plentiful opportunities for graft,
patronage, and favoritism. In one notorious case, textbook salesmen deployed
alluring women to blackmail school officials. Corrupt school board members
sometimes ended up in jail.
When progressive reformers said they wanted to “take the
schools out of politics,” they chiefly meant killing off this system. Their
goal was to shrink and centralize school boards, electing members at large
instead of by ward — all as a way of undercutting control of schools by locally
dominant ethnic immigrant minorities loyal to party bosses. Off-cycle and
formally nonpartisan school board elections were another part of this program.
Progressive reformers saw their proposals as steps toward
curbing corruption and promoting the Americanization of immigrants. Yet there
was an antidemocratic undertone to the goal of low-turnout, off-cycle
elections, with no listed party affiliations. The drive to lower urban vote
totals and deprive voters of key information sometimes shaded into open
anti-Catholic bias. Many progressive education reformers outright admired the
mechanisms for disenfranchising black voters employed in the South. Although
corruption was a serious problem, and Americanization a necessity,
representation for the new immigrant communities was hardly the outrage some
progressives made it out to be. As David Tyack, author of a classic
history of urban education, put it: “The slogan ‘get the schools out of
politics’ could disguise effective disenfranchisement of dissenters.”
What the progressive reformers wanted to put in place of
the machine-dominated system was more or less what we have today. Instead of
politically controlled hiring, teachers and administrators would develop
expertise at university-based schools of education, with professional licensure
recognizing that expertise. Accordingly, university presidents soon took up
leadership roles in the school board election reform movement.
While the idea of off-cycle municipal elections was at
the core of the reform platform, it was by no means a novelty. Throughout the
19th century, as control of state legislatures shifted, urban political parties
allied with the new state majority would prevail on legislatures to shift
elections on or off the federal cycle, whichever way would be to their
advantage. The Minnesota legislature, for example, shifted the election timing
of St. Paul three times in four years. Typically, weaker parties would shift
local elections off-cycle as a way of undercutting the dominant machine’s
ability to turn out votes. (The machine in power tended to be of the party that
won presidential elections.) Few claimed these shifts were rooted in
good-government principles. Everyone knew that switching election timing was a
way of jockeying for electoral advantage, even if often at the cost of voter
participation and information.
Progressives, on the other hand, did claim to be
following good government principles. First, they argued that national party
positions had nothing to do with local education issues. Then they warned that
on-cycle voters would be tempted to decide based on party loyalty, rather than
on a disinterested search for the most honest and competent candidates. Yet
there was an unspoken reason as well, the same one that drove the long-standing
19th-century election-timing wars: the progressive reformers (often organized
as local third parties) knew they couldn’t beat the machines without moving
elections off-cycle to suppress voter turnout.
Sometimes it worked, but in many cases off-cycle
elections actually helped the machines. New York’s Tammany Hall, for example,
had so many electoral foot soldiers that off-cycle elections actually cemented
its power. Although Tammany did lose many of its voters in off-cycle elections,
low voter turnout also gives highly organized competitors an advantage. When
few show up to vote, well-oiled and committed political machines can win, as
Tammany did, even off-cycle. In fact, it was the relative failure of their
off-cycle election tactic that led progressives to propose suppressing
information on candidate party affiliation as well.
But why, after a 19th century characterized by constant
on/off-cycle local election-switching for political advantage, has the current
system of electing school board members off-cycle and without listed party
affiliation remained so stable and widespread? The answer is persuasively provided by UC Berkeley political scientist
Sarah Anzia, who points to several factors.
Progressives prevailed at the right time. Throughout the
19th century, legislatures shifted election timing in urban centers through
“special legislation” applying only to particular cities. State constitutional
changes later in the 19th century, however, forced legislatures to pass only
general laws applying to every municipality in the state. Around the same time,
many states locked progressive-backed election timing rules into their
constitutions. Beyond the schools, moreover, progressives succeeded in killing
off the broader spoils system, and most urban political machines along with it.
With city jobs now distributed (at least in theory) by merit rather than party
loyalty, national parties lost interest in local elections as a source of
political power. Thus, much of the motive and opportunity for election timing
shifts disappeared.
Anzia adds that interest groups — especially teachers’
unions — filled the vacuum left by defunct political machines. Teachers’
unions, you might say, are the new Tammany Hall. Their superior organization
and intense self-interest allow them to dominate off-cycle school board
elections. Their organized activism also gives teachers’ unions
disproportionate influence in the state legislatures that control the timing
and nature of school board elections. Few, if any, state legislators can
propose a change without running into a brick wall of teachers’ union
opposition. And there are no comparably organized conservative groups to
balance the unions.
I think there are additional reasons why the structure of
local school board elections has remained stable for a century, until only very
recently. The original progressives could plausibly argue that national party
differences had little to do with education. That was true at the time because
“getting politics out of the schools” was far less about ideology than about
favoritism, graft, and patronage. True, Democrats in big cities were more
likely to allow the teaching of German or Polish as a second language, or the
inclusion of ethnic heroes in textbooks. Yet the national parties were
ultimately not very far apart on the need for assimilation, and that remained
true for some time.
Particularly over the last decade, however, the
ever-growing post-1960s divide between our political parties over cultural
issues like sexuality, patriotism, and assimilation has widened. Nowadays, on
issues like critical race theory and transgenderism, school boards are forced
to make choices. In that context, a candidate’s party is essential information.
In more ways than one, the progressive era school board
election reforms have boomeranged. Certifying teachers after nonpartisan
training at schools of education run on business principles was supposed to
depoliticize K–12. For decades, however, schools of education have been the
most politicized — and antibusiness — places on campus, no-dissent zones where
the most commonly assigned author is an out-and-out Marxist opponent of politically
neutral teaching.
Off-cycle, “nonpartisan” elections were supposed to break
the power of political machines. But just as this backfired with Tammany Hall,
modern, organized, and motivated teachers’ unions now dominate low turnout, low
information, off-cycle school board contests. And teachers’ unions are more
than just a self-interested group filling the power vacuum left by defunct
political machines. The teachers’ unions actually are the modern
Democratic Party’s political machine. At least in the 19th century, local
control frequently flipped between competing party machines. Now, because of a
distorted and petrified local electoral system, such flips are relatively rare.
But at least we’re rid of corruption, right? Well, was
the Biden administration’s policy on Covid and the schools a purely medical
decision made in the best interests of children, or a concession to the selfish
interests of the Democrats’ de facto political machine? Modern conservatives
(following FDR) often note that public-sector unions create conflicts of interest
by effectively negotiating against the very politicians who rely on them for
electoral organization and votes. Sure enough, Anzia found that teacher pay
raises are substantially higher in districts with off-cycle elections, where
teachers’ unions dominate. Conservative critics also argue that teachers’
unions make it too tough to fire incompetent teachers, whose prevalence was the
original reason for the progressive era reforms. Perhaps the political corruption
of old hasn’t so much been banished as institutionalized.
In short, the aura of hallowed tradition that surrounds
supposedly nonpartisan off-cycle school board elections is a joke. Yes, this
system has dominated for a century, but only because it’s a self-interested,
self-perpetuating monstrosity. Our currently dominant way of electing school
boards mocks and defeats the very purposes for which the system was instituted.
Locked in by a combination of entrenched interests and fortuitous state
constitutional changes, the school board election system is tried and false,
not tried and true.
Yet this problem can be fixed. Last year, for example,
Indiana allowed school board candidates to list their party affiliations.
States could follow up now by passing Ohio Senate Bill
107, sponsored by Senator Andrew Brenner, and Missouri Senate Bills 1002 and 839,
sponsored by Senators Adam Schnelting and Mike Cierpiot, respectively. If Michigan House
Bill 4588, sponsored by Representative Jason Woolford, clears the house, it
will likely have a tough time in the Michigan Senate, currently controlled by
Democrats. Yet laying down a marker by passing such a bill through the house
now is exactly what Michigan’s Republicans ought to be doing.
Conservatives — and the national Republican Party — ought
to be paying more attention to this battle. Again, the education establishment
is so one-sided right now that simply putting conservatives on an equal footing
could provoke a huge cultural shift. A raft of new conservative school board
members could serve as a culturally and politically savvy farm team for the
education world, and the nation as a whole. Rhetorical attention to this issue
by President Trump might even launch a flotilla of red state bills moving
school board elections on-cycle, with party affiliation listed. There may be no
single step we could take that would do more to bring America’s public schools
back to sanity. Now that would be true “progress.”
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