School Boards Are the Most Powerful Offices Nobody Votes For

There is an election that happens in your community every two to four years that controls more money than your city council, affects more lives than your congressional representative, and shapes the future of your children more decisively than any presidential contest you have ever voted in. It determines who teaches your children, what they are taught, how they are disciplined, who builds and maintains their schools, and how hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds are spent. And you almost certainly did not vote in it. The school board election — the most consequential election in American civic life for families with children — draws voter turnout between 5% and 15% of eligible voters in most jurisdictions. In Black communities, the number is near the bottom of that range. This is not a problem of voter suppression. This is a problem of voter indifference to the election that matters most.

There are approximately 13,000 school boards in the United States, governing roughly 13,500 school districts that collectively educate 50 million children and control an annual budget that exceeds $800 billion. To put that number in context: $800 billion is larger than the GDP of Switzerland. It is larger than the defense budget of the United States. It is, by a considerable margin, the largest pool of publicly controlled funds in the country that is subject to direct democratic oversight at the local level. And the people who control it are elected in contests where the winner is frequently determined by fewer than a thousand votes, and sometimes by fewer than a hundred.

The implications of this arithmetic for Black communities should be obvious and apparently are not: school board elections are the single lowest-cost, highest-return opportunity for the exercise of Black political power that exists in the American system. In a congressional race, a Black community must mobilize hundreds of thousands of voters against well-funded opponents supported by national party infrastructure. In a school board race, a Black community can win a governing majority with a few thousand votes, a few thousand dollars, and a door-knocking operation run out of a church basement. The power gained is not symbolic. It is operational: control of a budget, control of hiring, control of curriculum, and control of the contracting process that determines which companies receive millions of dollars in construction and service contracts.

What School Boards Actually Control

The phrase “school board” carries a connotation of tedium — of fluorescent-lit meeting rooms, parliamentary procedure, and arguments about bus routes. This connotation is the greatest gift the existing power structure has ever received, because it causes the people who have the most at stake to ignore the institution that has the most power over their lives. Here is what school boards actually control:

Curriculum. The school board determines what is taught in every classroom in the district. This includes which textbooks are adopted, which supplementary materials are approved, and what standards are emphasized. When Moms for Liberty chapters across the country launched campaigns to remove books from school libraries and alter curriculum content, they did not petition Congress. They ran for school board. They understood what many Black communities do not: the school board is where the culture war is fought and won, at the local level, one district at a time.

Hiring. The school board hires the superintendent, who in turn hires every principal, who in turn hires every teacher. Research consistently shows that teacher quality is the single most important in-school factor affecting student outcomes, and that Black students benefit measurably from having Black teachers. The Gershenson, Hart, Hyman, and Lindsay studies found that Black students assigned to even one Black teacher in elementary school are significantly more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college. The school board determines whether the district prioritizes recruiting, retaining, and developing Black teachers. Most districts do not, and most Black communities have not demanded it.

Budget. A mid-sized school district has an annual budget between $200 million and $1 billion. The school board determines how that money is allocated — which schools receive what resources, which programs are funded, and which positions are created or eliminated. Budget allocation is not a technical exercise. It is a political one, and it reflects the priorities of the people who control it.

Discipline policy. The school board sets the district’s discipline framework, including policies on suspension, expulsion, and the presence of police (school resource officers) in schools. Black students are suspended and expelled at rates three times higher than white students for comparable infractions, and the school-to-prison pipeline begins, in a significant number of cases, with a discipline referral that the school board’s policy either permits or prohibits. A school board that adopts restorative justice practices instead of zero-tolerance policies directly reduces the number of Black children who are pushed out of school and into the criminal justice system.

Contracting. School districts are among the largest purchasers of goods and services in their communities. Construction contracts, food service contracts, transportation contracts, technology contracts — collectively, these represent millions and sometimes billions of dollars in annual spending. The school board determines the procurement process, including whether the district has a minority business enterprise program, whether local businesses receive preference, and whether contracting decisions are transparent.

How Organized Minorities Win

The mathematics of school board elections are what make them so vulnerable to organized effort. In a typical school board election in a mid-sized city, total voter turnout might be 15,000 to 25,000 voters out of 200,000 eligible. A winning candidate might need 4,000 to 8,000 votes. A bloc of 2,000 organized voters — a single large church congregation, or a network of three or four smaller congregations — can determine the outcome.

Moms for Liberty demonstrated the power of this arithmetic with striking efficiency. Beginning in 2021, the organization recruited candidates for school board races across the country, provided them with training, talking points, and organizational support, and won enough races to shift the ideological composition of school boards in hundreds of districts. Their voters were not a majority of eligible voters. They were not even a majority of likely voters. They were simply a disciplined minority that showed up to an election that the majority ignored, and they won because showing up was sufficient.

Kogan, Lavertu, and Peskowitz, in their research on school board election timing, demonstrated something that should be tattooed on the forehead of every civic organizer in Black America: school board elections held “off-cycle” — separate from presidential or midterm elections — produce electorates that are whiter, wealthier, and older than the communities they govern. The electorate is not representative because the election is designed to be inconvenient. Off-cycle elections suppress turnout among working-class voters, younger voters, and minority voters, all of whom are less likely to track election dates that do not coincide with the major elections that dominate media coverage. This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural feature that produces predictable outcomes, and it can be overcome by any community that chooses to organize around the school board election calendar.

Case Studies: When Black Communities Showed Up

In Denver, a coalition of Black and Latino parents organized to win school board seats in 2019, running on a platform that included expanding bilingual education, reducing suspensions, and increasing the number of teachers of color. The coalition won a majority. Within two years, the board had restructured its discipline policies, redirected funding to schools in underserved neighborhoods, and implemented a hiring initiative that increased the number of Black and Latino teachers by measurable percentages. The total number of votes that produced this transformation was smaller than the attendance at a single Denver Broncos game.

In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a community organizing effort led by parents and clergy members won three school board seats in a single election cycle, shifting the board’s majority and ending a period of state control that had reduced community input to an advisory role. The winning candidates ran on transparency in contracting, community input in superintendent selection, and the restoration of art and music programs that had been cut in low-income schools. The margin of victory in the closest race was fewer than 300 votes.

In Atlanta, a coordinated effort by the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP and several community organizations to engage Black voters in the 2022 school board election produced a measurable increase in turnout and the election of candidates who committed to specific targets for minority business participation in district contracting. The effort cost less than $50,000 — a fraction of what is spent on a single congressional campaign mailer — and it produced control of a budget that exceeds $1 billion annually.

“Give me control of the school board, and in ten years I will reshape the community. Not through rhetoric. Through hiring decisions, budget allocation, and the contracting process. That is where power lives in American education.”
— Derrell Bradford, education reform advocate

The Black Teacher Pipeline

Of all the powers that school boards exercise, the power to hire may be the most consequential for Black communities. The research on the impact of Black teachers on Black students is not ambiguous. It is not a matter of perspective. It is one of the most replicated findings in education research: Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are significantly more likely to graduate high school and to enroll in college. The effect is particularly strong for Black boys from low-income families, for whom a single Black teacher can reduce the probability of dropping out by nearly 40%.

And yet, Black teachers constitute approximately 7% of the national teaching workforce while Black students constitute approximately 15% of the student population. The mismatch is not primarily a supply problem — there are Black college graduates who would teach if the conditions were right. It is a retention and recruitment problem that school boards have the power to address through targeted recruitment programs, mentoring structures, competitive compensation in hard-to-staff schools, and the creation of career pathways that make teaching a viable and respected profession for Black college graduates who currently choose other fields.

A school board that makes the recruitment and retention of Black teachers a measurable priority — not a line item in a diversity statement, but a target with a timeline and accountability — can transform outcomes for Black students within a single generation. This is not theoretical. It has been demonstrated in districts where boards have made it a priority. And it requires nothing more than a school board election where the candidates who commit to this priority receive enough votes to win. Enough votes, in most districts, means a few thousand.

The Revolution Nobody Is Organizing

There are approximately 90,000 school board seats in the United States. They are held, overwhelmingly, by people who won elections with turnout so low that a single organized community effort could have changed the outcome. In communities with significant Black populations, these seats control budgets that dwarf the budgets of most nonprofits, social service agencies, and community organizations combined. They determine who teaches Black children, what Black children learn, how Black children are disciplined, and which businesses receive contracts funded by Black taxpayers’ dollars.

And Black voter turnout in these elections is under 10%.

The revolution that Black America needs is not a national one. It is not a presidential campaign, or a march on Washington, or a viral social media moment that trends for three days and changes nothing. It is a school board revolution — a systematic, sustained, community-by-community effort to identify school board election dates, recruit candidates who commit to specific and measurable goals, and mobilize the modest number of voters necessary to win races that are currently decided by default.

The infrastructure for this revolution already exists. It exists in churches that have congregations larger than the total vote count in most school board races. It exists in fraternities and sororities with chapter networks in every major city. It exists in parent organizations, community groups, and neighborhood associations that already meet regularly and already care about education. What does not exist is the organizational framework that connects these existing institutions to the specific electoral opportunity that school board races represent.

Building that framework requires three things: a calendar (when does your school board election happen?), a slate (who are the candidates, and what specifically have they committed to?), and a turnout operation (how many votes does it take to win, and which voters can you mobilize?). These are not complex questions. They do not require consultants, or grants, or national organizational support. They require a room, a calendar, a phone tree, and the understanding that $800 billion in public spending is controlled by people who were elected in contests where nobody showed up — and that showing up is, in this context, the entire revolution.

Thirteen thousand school boards. Eight hundred billion dollars. Ninety thousand seats. Turnout under 10%. These are not just numbers. They are the coordinates of the most underutilized opportunity for community power in American democracy. The opportunity is not theoretical. It is not aspirational. It is sitting on the November ballot — or the May ballot, or the April ballot, because off-cycle timing is part of the design — waiting for a community that has spent sixty years pouring its political energy into presidential contests to notice that the most powerful office for its children’s future is the one it has never bothered to vote for.