School Boards Prioritize Public Engagement?

Nationally, the U.S. has over 13,000 school boards, and most meet monthly to handle district affairs. These school board meetings are the spaces where some of a community’s most important decisions are made. Yet, if you are a parent of a child in the public schools, you’ve likely never been to a school board meeting. Or, if you have, then you most likely had an underwhelming experience. You were probably inundated in acronyms and esoteric language. You likely felt uncomfortable with the idea of giving public comment, and you also quickly realized that should you make a comment, you’ll get no response from the school board.

But, what if school board meetings were different? What if they were more engaging? What if school board members and the superintendent were going to give you a direct response when you brought an issue to the floor? Would that change your view of how useful the meetings are?

A more engaging school board seems like wishful thinking during a time when the actions of school boards are quite critical. Millions of students, mostly low-income students of color, are expected to experience significant learning loss due to the pandemic. With the American Rescue Plan Act sending $123 billion in flexible funds, boards are tasked with deciding the most effective way to stop the bleeding. Many of our local education officials are having to develop reopening plans. This means tough decisions on mandates for things like mask wearing and vaccinations. Meanwhile, as America’s racism problems continue, school boards are facing pressure to abandon racial justice curricular reforms. Not to mention they’re still responsible for major decisions like selecting superintendents and managing teacher contract parameters.

These are big dilemmas that we should be literally talking about with our school boards. By design, school boards are supposed to be spaces where these big decisions are made publicly. The meeting space, in theory, creates access points for the public to directly engage with their school board members. It also offers transparency and opportunity for public monitoring and accountability.

Unfortunately, the typical school board meeting is far from the democratic ideal. The modal session is an hours-long sludge of procedural motions, technical language, and discussion limited primarily to board members at the front of the room. Pair the reality of board meetings with the low attendance rates (only about 20-30% of American adults attend at least one local government meeting a year according to the American National Election Study), and we have a formula for apathy.

But, it remains unclear: would implementing a more engaging meeting structure reduce some of the apathy?

I decided to study this question. Here’s how I did the research.

Over a year ago, I found a school board in Southern California that got the crazy idea to embed direct response to public comment into their monthly meeting agendas. So, in March 2020, right before the Pandemic set in, I conducted a survey experiment centered around this school board’s unique structure.

I created a short 90-second video clip from one of the board’s meetings in which this board gave direct response to the public’s comments over the issue of teacher salaries. I found a neighboring district that was having the same discussion in their district, but of course, without the direct response embedded. I created two more additional clips from the neighboring district; one where there is no public comment on the issue at all and one where there is public comment but no direct response from the school board. I tucked the clips within a questionnaire on “Assessing Opinions on Public Education and School Governance” and recruited 2,244 respondents from Amazon MTurk to complete the survey. However, I was particularly interested in the impact for people on the margins; therefore, I recruited an oversample of people of color and individuals from low-income households. The final sample was 50% people of color and 48% low-income.

I randomly assigned each respondent to view one of the streams of actual school board meeting footage. So, they saw either what I consider to be a standard meeting (no public comment on the agenda item), a meeting with public participation (the public speaks but with no response from the officials), or a meeting with elements of public deliberation (the public speaks and receives a reasoned response from the school board member).

In the political science literature, we define deliberation as reason-based discussion. In its most common form, small mini-publics engage in civil debate to either reach consensus or at least solidify their preferences based on accurate information and justified claims. Public comments with a direct response from a school board member isn’t exactly the ideal, but the elements of discourse still make for a heightened level of public engagement.

I tested the effect of exposure to these elements of public participation and public deliberation (relative to the standard meeting) on trust in school boards and willingness to attend an actual meeting in the future.

Here’s what I found.

Participants who viewed the school board meetings with public participation (public comment with no board response) or with public deliberation (public comment with board response) expressed higher levels of trust in school boards post-treatment by 4% points and 5% points, respectively.

The effect sizes become even more pronounced, when examining only respondents who expressed low levels of trust in school boards pre-treatment. While only 12% who saw the standard meeting expressed high levels of trust post-treatment, 18% of respondents exposed to public participation expressed high trust, and 24% of respondents expressed high trust from within the public deliberation treatment group.

I find similar effects on future meeting participation. Respondents shown the public participation treatment were 4% points more likely to express willingness to attend a school board meeting, while those shown the public deliberation treatment were about 8% points more likely. These effects were even stronger for respondents who had never attended a public meeting as well as people of color. Moreover, the public participation and public deliberation treatments were most effective on people of color, despite the fact that the school board members and public commenters were all White. For a more detailed look into the study, you can access the full academic paper here.

 These results in no way mean that descriptive representation doesn’t matter.  Instead, this evidence points to the kind of substantive representation that Americans, particularly our most vulnerable, are looking for. People respond positively to seeing environments where local officials are facilitating or at least allowing public dialogue.

 This also does not mean that local democracy can be fixed by simply responding to public comment. Commenters have to maintain civility; board members have to turn public comments to action. But, routinely inviting public deliberation into the school board meeting space puts us on a pathway to a more democratic education system. 

Jonathan E. Collins is an assistant professor of Education, public policy and political science at Brown University and director of the PAVED Research Initiative.