It’s not in your head: School board meetings really have gotten more heated in recent years.
But most of the time, school board meetings are relatively civil, and most of the recent high-conflict meetings occurred in a small number of districts in cities and suburbs, researchers found in an analysis of thousands of school board meetings.
“We find that most boards experience some kind of conflict at some point, but it’s not always about these extremely nationalized political issues,” said Tyler Simko, an incoming assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan who coauthored the recent working paper released in June. “The most intense versions of these conflicts over issues like race, gender identity, and book bans are focused in larger city and suburban districts.”
The findings provide context for post-pandemic concerns about education politics that have contributed to superintendent turnover, sagging teacher morale, and concerns about district governance. The new dataset researchers created also provides a jumping off point for continuing research about local political polarization, the authors wrote.
What makes a school board meeting high-conflict?
Most research about perceived polarization in education politics relies on anecdotal evidence and survey data. The researchers wanted to find a more nuanced way to study conflict in school board meetings that did not solely focus on major issues driving national headlines, Simko said. After all, things like firing popular coaches, changing bus routes or catchment areas, and school start times are all classic friction points for school boards.
He and his co-researchers scoured the internet to identify YouTube videos of full school board meetings from 48 states. They downloaded the videos and generated transcripts, which they analyzed alongside federal data about district spending, size, and demographics. In all, they analyzed about 100,000 board meetings from 1,600 districts between 2010 and 2023.
To identify meetings with conflict, they developed a list of 25 issue-agnostic “conflict words” that frequently arise during tense exchanges—whether the subject concerned a national issue, like COVID-19 precautions, or a local issue, like the firing of a football coach. Those words include disgusted, ridiculous, evil, miserable, and furious.
The researchers deemed a meeting high-conflict if speakers and commenters used conflict words more than eight times—an amount per meeting that put it in the 75th percentile for use of conflict words. Low-conflict meetings had two or fewer conflict words, the 25th percentile.
The use of conflict words spiked in 2020, they found, as districts debated responses to the pandemic. The highest-conflict period documented in dataset occured in the second half of 2021, when districts saw increased tensions over critical race theory and book restrictions.
Before the pandemic, the data showed a spike in conflict words in early 2016, when states debated so-called “bathroom bills” to prohibit transgender students from using school facilities that align with their gender identity.
“When ranking the 25 most conflictual months in school board politics since 2015, 21 of the top 25 have occurred since January 2020,” the researchers wrote.
High-conflict meetings often focus on issues like race and sexuality
Even during the recent spike, most conflict was clustered in a small number of districts that tended to spend more dollars per-pupil, had more white students, and were located in cities and suburbs, the data showed.
Only 6% of districts in the dataset experienced a high-conflict meeting.
The terms that were more likely to be used in high-conflict meetings related to “cultural issues” such as race and sexuality, the researchers concluded. Those words include: racist, indoctrination, transgender, ideology, queer, and pronoun.
“Immunocompromised” was also frequently used in high-conflict meetings, reflecting the tense discussions related to masking and virus mitigation during the pandemic.
For most districts, fewer than a quarter of meetings were deemed high-conflict. And much of that conflict centered on local issues, like a New Jersey district’s four-and-a-half hour discussion of whether to cut its premilitary ROTC program in 2023.
“Collectively, our results suggest that issues of national concern are often brought into school board meetings, but the story is not simply one of national ‘puppet masters’ directing angry parents into their children’s school boards,” the study says.
While the researchers identified upticks in conflict in their dataset, it’s difficult to know whether those high-conflict meetings outnumbered those that occurred before school boards posted meeting videos online, Simko said.
“Maybe we could have written the exact same paper about debates over teaching evolution, if there had been videos of that,” he said. “Or we could have written a great paper about the Boston busing crisis.”
