Historically, school boards have epitomized the ideal of local democracy in America. They have provided the venue for citizens to participate in local governance and have traditionally been the place where citizens encounter and grapple with pressing political, social, and economic issues. Although many of the issues that school boards deal with are influenced by national, state, and local realities, school board politics has been generally shaped by local dynamics. However, over the past decade, local school board elections, which many dismiss as irrelevant, have attracted the attention of wealthy donors in hopes of influencing their outcomes in several cities across the United States.
Why are wealthy donors increasingly interested in influencing local school board elections? Who are the donors? What type of influence do they have? Interestingly, why are wealthy donors seeking to influence school board elections in an era where local school boards have lost considerable authority as a result of state and federal oversight? These are the questions examined in an important and timely book, Outside Money in School Board Elections, by Jeffrey Henig, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Sarah Reckhow.
Henig, Jacobsen, and Reckhow argue that the increasing amount of outside money in local school board elections represents a new stage in American education, which they refer to as “the nationalization of local education politics.” It reflects an evolution in education politics, which began with localism as the pillar of American education; by the mid-twentieth century, however, localism was increasingly seen as a problem. By the 1980s and 1990s, “localism was left behind” as a result of greater involvement by state and federal authorities in local school governance. In the current phase of education politics, the authors argue, “Local jurisdictions are neither ignored nor authoritatively dictated to, but rather emerge as important strategic fronts in national contests over alternative visions of schooling” (pp. 26–27).
Although this new stage in education politics is marked by nationalization, the authors make a distinction between nationalization and centralization. Whereas centralization by state governments or federal officials is aimed at pushing local institutions aside, the nationalization of school politics is different in that national actors realize that local governance is still important. Rather than eliminate local school boards, as some have suggested, in this new phase of American education politics, national donors seek to influence local school politics “in ways that rattle and reassemble traditional lines of coalition and cleavage” (p. 16).
To examine the role of outside money in local elections, Henig, Jacobsen, and Reckhow employ a mixed-methods approach and examine five US cities: Bridgeport, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. As the authors note, these cities are not representative of the thousands of school board elections across the country. However, because they are cities that have received attention from national donors, they enable the authors to examine the factors that attract outside donors and the political implications of their involvement for localities. Their examination relies on interviews and an impressive original dataset that consists of campaign contributions by individual donors and organizations to local school board candidates between 2008 and 2014. They use these data to examine whether outside money has had an effect on candidates’ campaign strategies and visibility, voter turnout, and media coverage.
The authors find that outside donors represent an elite group (“strategic national donors”) who are active in national politics and school board elections. These donors are part of a network of individuals who have been involved in education at the national level, primarily by serving on boards of nonprofits focused on education. Some of the donors are well-known figures like Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Reed Hastings, but many others are less well known, like Alan Fournier, a billionaire hedge fund manager who donated to school board elections in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. The authors find that, in the five cities in their study, national donors represented a substantial share of the overall campaign funds for school board candidates, and their contributions “overwhelmingly supported candidates and committees aligned with educational reform organizations” (p. 55).
In some regards, the outside donors in these five cities are competing with what has been viewed as the dominance of teachers’ unions in local elections. However, rather than painting a picture about two major forces competing against each other, Henig, Jacobsen, and Reckhow provide a more complicated narrative about outside donors and teachers’ unions that involves building and mobilizing coalitions at the local, state, and national level to influence local elections. They also find that the effects of outside money on voter turnout were mixed, but did increase media coverage of school board elections, particularly of the candidates who received outside money.
Thus, what emerges is a complicated and still unfolding narrative about the influence of outside money in school board elections. As the first study to systematically examine the role of outside money in such elections, the authors are rightly cautious about making major claims about their research findings. However, their research helps clarify some lingering debates and points to clear areas of concern for those interested in the democratic implications of outside money in school board elections. The authors demonstrate that outside donors, who overwhelmingly support educational reform, have political objectives on a number of issues, not just education, but see education politics as something to fight over at the national, state, and local level. By showing the explicit political motives in the reform movement, the book helps debunk a common trope among reformers about the need to “remove politics” from education.
The book also challenges the notion that school boards are irrelevant. Local actors have always understood the importance of school boards, particularly among the historically marginalized who have relied on board membership to enter the public sphere when other political spaces were inaccessible. The attraction of outside wealthy donors to the local arena provides further evidence of the political significance of school boards. For instance, in New Orleans, a 2012 school board candidate, Sarah Newell Usdin, raised nearly $200,000, largely from outside donors, at a time when the Orleans Parish School Board only controlled 6 traditional public schools and 12 charter schools in a city with more than 100 schools (p. 130).
Through interviews with candidates in several cities, the book also shows that there is a concern about the role of outside money in these local elections, with one candidate in New Orleans stating that he “can’t have a voice” because “we [the local community members] were out-monied” (p. 155). The exclusion of community voices by outside money is worrying and problematic. Therefore, one of the important questions that emerges from this research is whether the nationalization of education, which recognizes the importance of local institutions, is actually pushing aside local voices in the same way that centralization pushed aside local institutions. If so, nationalization may prove to be just as pernicious for democracy. This important book by Henig, Jacobsen, and Reckhow helps us begin to understand the causes and implications of outside money in school board elections and provides a foundation for further research and analysis.
