School boards have reemerged as the site of political battles, with parents becoming more vocal about hot-button issues such as mandated vaccinations, masks on campus, and how topics like race or sexuality should be taught in class.
. “However, the current spate of angry and even violent protests have also been a regular, recurring feature of school board history. Time and time again, from the 1920s to today, we’ve seen instances of conservatives using positions on school boards to push local school districts toward more conservative policies. Occasionally, such tactics have drawn national attention.”
Laats and Weingarten argue that recent school board elections are one piece of a broader Republican push to enact conservative priorities in U.S. schools and boost the profile of rising stars in the party. Several Republican politicians, such asand former Trump advisor Steven Bannon, used school board elections as a stepping stone to establishing their own national platforms.
“Since elections at the local level, like school boards, tend to be stepping stones to other political offices, in the last two or three years we’ve seen several prospective conservative candidates put their sights on changing the nature of the school board as a means of gaining power,” Weingarten said. “In many ways, people like Rufo have laid their agenda bare, which is to simply destabilize public education.
In 2021, conservative school board candidates may have dominated the national conversation, but many lost their races. According to, of the 275 candidates that Ballotpedia was able to label, only about 28% of the winners had taken a conservative stance on issues like race and COVID safety. Still, Weingarten remains fearful for the future of school boards.
“We have to create empathy,” Weingarten said. “There’s a lot of work we have to do in terms of creating a safe educational environment where people are working together to center children and to make schools places where parents want to send their kids, educators want to work, and kids thrive.”
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