The Dangerous School Board

Rod Paige, U.S. Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush and the Houston general superintendent who hired me to be a middle school principal, once told me that there was only one public education governance body that hadn’t felt any type of reform pressure over the past 50 years – and that was the American school board.

Teachers, principals, central office leadership, curriculum, instruction, assessment have all felt change associated with public school reform over the past half century, but school boards continue to operate pretty much the way they always have. And the way school boards have behaved, and currently are behaving in states like Texas, has a lot to do with how schools and districts operate and will operate moving forward.

Witness a story appearing in The Texas Tribune recently about six Texas school districts using at-large voting systems where ideologically driven groups successfully helped elect school board members who have moved aggressively to ban or remove educational materials that teach children about diversity.

“In 2019, the Keller Independent School District in North Texas looked a lot like its counterpart just 30 miles to the east in the Dallas suburb of Richardson. Each served about 35,000 children and had experienced sharp increases in the racial diversity of students in recent decades. Each was run by a school board that was almost entirely white.”

“In the five years since, the districts have followed strikingly divergent paths as culture war battles over how to teach race and gender exploded across the state.”

“In Keller, candidates backed by groups seeking to limit the teaching of race and gender took control of the school board and immediately passed sweeping policies that gave outsized power to any individual who wanted to prevent the purchase of books they believed to be unsuitable for children.”

“Though more than half of Keller’s students are from racially diverse backgrounds, the district in 2023 nixed a plan to buy copies of a biography of Black poet Amanda Gorman after a teacher at a religious private school who had no children in the district complained about this passage: ‘Amanda realized that all the books she had read before were written by white men. Discovering a book written by people who look like her helped Amanda find her own voice.’ The passage, the woman wrote, ‘makes it sound like it’s okay to judge a book by the authors skin color rather than the content of the book.’”

“Board members at the Richardson school district went in the opposite direction, even as they contended with similar pressure from groups aiming to rid the district of any materials that they claimed pushed critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that discusses systemic racism. The school board did not ban library books but instead allowed parents to limit their own children’s access to them, keeping them available for other students.”

“One major difference contributed to the districts’ divergence: the makeup of their school boards.”

“The way communities elect school board members play a key, if often overlooked, role in whether racially diverse districts like Keller and Richardson experience takeovers by ideologically driven conservatives seeking to exert greater influence over what children learn in public schools, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. Since the pandemic, such groups have successfully leveraged the state’s long-standing and predominantly at-large method of electing candidates to flip school boards in their direction.”

“Most of Texas’ 1,000 school districts use an at-large method, where voters can cast ballots for all candidates. Supporters say that allows for broader representation for students, but voting rights advocates argue that such systems dilute the power of voters of color. If board members are elected districtwide, there tends to be less diversity, according to research, which also shows that if they are elected by smaller geographic zones, candidates of color often have more success.”

“’What you’re seeing happening in Texas is how at-large districts make it easy for somebody to come in, usually from the outside, and hijack the process and essentially buy a board,’ said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute that champions small-donor campaign financing. ‘Because of this conflux of factors – at-large elections and large amounts of outside money – it just sort of defeats the idea of representative democracy.’”

“ProPublica and the Tribune examined 14 rapidly diversifying suburban school districts where children from diverse backgrounds now make up more than half of the student population. In the six districts that used at-large voting systems, well-funded and culture-war-driven movements successfully helped elect school board members who have moved aggressively to ban or remove educational materials that teach children about diversity, even in districts where a majority of children are not white. Nearly 70% of board members in such districts live in areas that are whiter than their district’s population.”

“Eight nearly school systems with similar demographics employ single-member voting systems to elect school board candidates. Under the single-member system, voters within certain boundaries elect a board member who specifically represents their area. Candidates in those districts received less campaign support form ideologically driven political action committees, and none of the districts experience school board takeovers fueled by culture war issues.”

“About 150 Texas school districts have transitioned to a single-member system since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is intended to prevent voter discrimination and has brought greater racial representation to local governments. Richardson joined that list in 2019 after a former Black board member sued the district.”

“Such legal challenges, however, could soon become more difficult. In one of his first acts in office, President Donal Trump froze civil rights litigation against school districts accused of discriminating against minority groups, and many legal experts believe that under his administration, federal prosecutors will refuse to bring challenges against at-large system. DOJ officials did not respond to questions from the news organizations.”

“Trump, a staunch critic of diversity and inclusion programs, has threatened to cut federal funding to schools that he says is pushing ‘inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children.’”

“Districts who boards oppose sweeping efforts to restrict curriculum and books related to race and racism face even more headwinds in Texas. In January, Governor Greg Abbott vowed to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools, a move that would expand the state’s existing ban on college campuses. And Texas lawmakers continue to target the books students can access. One bill, authored by North Texas state Senator Angela Paxton, the wife of Attorney General Ken Paxton, would require every district in the state to follow a version of Keller’s library book purchase policy.”

…

Not only have school boards been immune to reform in the past 50 years, their at-large governance systems continue to prevent equal representation for primarily black, brown, and poor citizens residing in their districts. That makes it difficult for black, brown, and poor children, assigned to attend those school districts, to receive a fair and equitable opportunity to become smarter and stronger in their reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development abilities.

It seems strange that diversity, equity, and inclusion are seen as dirty words by some these days, when uniformity, inequity, and exclusion seem to be the reasons so many black, brown, and poor kids struggle inside our traditional K-12 system.