Incumbent school board members run for reelection in uncontested races more often than not, and win the vast majority of contested races, according to new research that raises important questions about how much local democracy actually shapes school districts.
Despite incumbents’ high success rates when seeking reelection, local school boards still experience high turnover because sitting board members frequently choose not to run again, the research shows.
The study, released this month by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, analyzed data from more than 50,000 elections in 16 states between 2002 and 2017. For each contest, researchers examined whether an incumbent ran, whether they won, whether the race was contested, and the margin of victory.
The findings—both that incumbents are likely to retain their seats if they choose to run again, and that many races aren’t contested regardless of whether an incumbent is on the ballot—suggest voters may have less influence over school board composition than commonly believed, said Vladimir Kogan, a professor of political science at Ohio State University.
He conducted the study alongside Stéphane Lavertu at Ohio State, and Zachary Peskowitz at Emory University. The findings also indicate that voters are not persuaded to remove incumbents based on the district’s academic performance, a concept known as “retrospective voting,” Kogan added.
“We have a lot of stories about how democracy works, but those require choices and that voters have more than one option. Here we have found that many races in this local democratic process actually go uncontested—half of the time you really don’t have a choice at all,” Kogan said. “Instead, it’s really decisions that candidates made about whether to run again, and that’s the key mechanism through which we get changes of who’s serving on school boards.”
Most school board turnover comes from incumbents stepping down
More than one-third of the total races in the study were uncontested. When incumbents did run, they won more than 80% of the time. For comparison, state legislative races in the studied states were contested 53% of the time, according to the study. On the other hand, incumbents sought reelection only about 59% of the time, leading to significant school boards turnover. Nearly 80% of school board turnover was driven by incumbents stepping down, rather than being defeated.
Turnover rates and incumbent reelection rates were similar, regardless of the districts’ size or location, local poverty rates, and whether the area had robust local media, the report said.
Lower student-learning rates in the districts did not predict more electoral competition or incumbent retirements, and had “only a modest association” (less than 2 percentage points) with incumbents’ reelection rate, the report said.
“It’s not the case that, in the aggregate, school board elections are a mechanism by which voters are either holding officials accountable for learning or lack thereof, or incentivizing them to provide better educational quality,” Kogan said. “Simply saying, ‘It’s the democratic process’ is kind of a trump card, and really doesn’t get into the reality of the limitations of how well democracy actually works in practice.”
Still, the high rates of board member turnover associated with incumbents retiring from their seats could have unintended consequences for students, Kogan said. The replacement of sitting school board members may, for example, cause a chain of administrative processes—such as the firing of administrators and the revision of curricula—that disrupt student learning, he said.
“A lot of the kind of disruption that we associate with staff turnover is probably related to turnover in the ranks of school board members, and because of board members’ influence in policy and staffing decisions,” Kogan said. “So if we worry about teacher turnover and superintendent turnover, I think we should also be concerned about school board turnover, because often that’s, I think, the root cause of some of these things that are ultimately impacting students.”
