Worthy reasons to move school votes
IN political debates on education, it’s often argued that state officials should defer decision-making authority to districts in the name of local control. Yet this potentially empowers school employees far more than the families of children served by those schools.
Put simply, “local control” of schools is as much myth as reality, an argument bolstered by voting participation in school elections.
As of Jan. 15, there were 2,016,157 Oklahoma citizens registered to vote. The Feb. 13 elections, which included school board and city government races, drew 93,468 voters, about 4.6 percent of registered voters statewide. The April 3 election, which included runoffs for school board seats and school bond elections, drew just 37,561 voters.
According to the Department of Education, as of Nov. 30, 2017, state schools employed 49,634 fulltime equivalent employees in certified positions and 34,441 in support positions, more than 84,000 combined.
Thus, it’s statistically feasible that a substantial majority of school election voters are directly employed by schools. Research backs up that conclusion.
In 2006, Terry M. Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford University, examined teacher turnout in school board and school bond elections in Los Angeles school districts. He found the turnout gap between teachers and average citizens in those elections was an average 36.5 percent.
While just 9 percent of registered voters turned out for school board elections, turnout among teachers working at a school who lived in the district was 46 percent. Turnout among other school employees who lived and worked in the same district was 35 percent.
While one might expect school employees to turn out in higher numbers because of their involvement and familiarity with education issues, when Moe examined teachers who worked in one district but lived in another, their turnout rate fell to 20 percent. Thus, many teachers were motivated to vote only when directly choosing the people who hire their bosses.
In a recent analysis of state boards and commissions, Byron Schlomach, economist and director of the conservative 1889 Institute, highlighted why this is problematic for good policy.
“Because of the outsized role that insiders have in the election of school board members, school boards at times appear to be more interested in serving the interest of the insiders rather than the interests of parents and taxpayers,” Schlomach wrote.
This was apparent when many school boards voted to close school for two weeks this year to let teachers engage in political lobbying, with pay. In many districts, that decision was made without consulting the thousands of student families who faced “great inconvenience and cost to parents and educational detriment to students,” Schlomach notes.
Why did school boards ignore parents? Because the school board members owed their election largely to school employees, not parents.
We have argued for moving school board elections to higher-turnout dates to increase citizen input. Otherwise, until school-election participation improves, lawmakers can legitimately claim to reflect the education views of their communities as much or more than do school board members, because a far higher share of local citizens voted for the legislator.