How do adults form preferences over education policy? Why do Democrats and Republicans disagree about how schools should work and what they should teach? I argue that public opinion follows a “top-down” model, in which rank-and-file voters largely adopt the positions of prominent national leaders in their parties. This causes policy preferences to become polarized. I illustrate these dynamics with four case studies: (1) public opinion toward school reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) debate about Common Core education standards; (3) voting behavior on a 1978 California initiative that sought to ban gay teachers; and (4) voting behavior on a 1998 California initiative that banned bilingual education in that state.

I combine a national dataset on high-profile education culture wars – dealing with school mascots, curriculum, religion, sexuality, and evolution – with information on student achievement on standardized tests to examine how adult political conflicts impact student learning in the classroom. I show that student achievement declines after an outbreak of controversy, an effect that persists for several years and appears driven mostly by controversies involving evolution and race. In addition to a large-N, “difference in differences” analysis, the chapter provides two detailed case studies, over a controversial school mascot in California and a federal court case involving a Pennsylvania’s district policy to teach intelligent design.

This chapter examines how linking school assignment to students’ residential addresses via geographic attendance boundaries drives inequities in public education. Because “perceived” (but not actual) school quality is capitalized into home values, property value concerns encourage segregation and exclusion, a phenomenon I describe as “education NIMBYism.” I argue that the overrepresentation of homeowners in local school board elections creates problematic political incentives for office holders, in contrast with Fischel’s “homevoter hypothesis” predicting that the political influence of homeowners makes government work better and more efficiently. I also show how the capitalization of school quality into home values can create unintended consequences and offset efforts to improve the lowest-performing schools.

Public schools exist to educate students. Local school districts are governed by elected school boards. But only adults vote in local school board elections. I argue that these three facts are the primary cause of low academic achievement in American public schools, particularly for the most disadvantaged students. The institutions of democratic control cause unacceptably poor performance because the main concerns of adults who vote in local school board elections are not aligned with the academic needs of students. Adult interests – organized around partisanship, identity politics, employment concerns, and property values – dictate what schools do, often at the expense of academic achievement. I also argue that the existing literature, focused on the debate about the role of money and teachers’ unions in education, overlooks other major problems with public education. Finally, I also anticipate the main counterarguments to my thesis and “prebunk” them by showing why they are wrong.

This chapter examines the politics of school closure, which represents the “third-rail” in education. I argue that school closures closely follow a “bootleggers and Baptists” model of politics. Bootleggers provide the behind-the-scenes financial and organizational resources to shape policy, while the Baptists serve as the movement’s more sympathetic and earnest public face. In the context of schools, the bootleggers are school employees who worry how school closures will affect their jobs, while the Baptists are local community members who want to keep their neighborhood schools open. A large-N quantitative analysis examines both the causes and consequences of closure. I find that: (1) although closures appear to disproportionately affect communities of color, the disparities are explained by school enrollment patterns and differences in achievement that are correlated with the racial composition of students; (2) on average, building closures neither improve nor reduce average student performance on math or ELA exams in elementary and middle school grades; and (3) school closures modestly accelerate student enrollment losses and significantly decrease teacher employment.

Historically, African-Americans have found work disproportionately in the public sector, including in local school districts, and I argue that this has created impediments to improving public education in majority Black cities. Educational reforms are evaluated primarily based on how they impact adult employment opportunities, not student learning. Often, the loss of local democratic control is necessary to overcome opposition to reforms driven by employment concerns. I illustrate these dynamics with two case studies of (1) the integration of schools in the South after Brown v. Board of Education and (2) the state takeover of New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina.

This chapter shifts the focus from the “masses” to “elites” and examines state legislative roll call votes on bills dealing with school curriculum. It compares how states have approached the teaching of reading over time, a policy area once highly polarized (“This is worse than abortion.”) but now moving toward bipartisan consensus, to debates about the teaching of history and race. I argue that legislators, like voters, follow the cues of national partisan leaders, and that media narratives and coverage play a big role in how education issues become nationalized. That suggests that efforts by highly divisive national leaders to engage in “leadership” on education issues (akin to Kernell’s “Going Public” strategy) are likely to backfire and turn half of the country against their ideas. Importantly, polarization of education policies is not a one-way ratchet that is always increasing, as the reading controversy shows.

In this chapter, I conclude with a new framework for how to think about reforms designed to improve student academic achievement. My proposal focuses on (1) encouraging voters to care more about student outcomes and (2) shifting political power to adults with the most skin in the game in order to (3) try to align the electoral and political incentives of office holders with the interests of students. Specifically, I recommend holding school board elections “on-cycle” (in November of even years), making student achievement growth information more salient to both voters and parents, and increasing high-quality school choice options. Overall, I argue that future reforms should be evaluated based on how they impact student achievement, not how adults feel about them. Drawing on recent research on housing policy, I conclude that more democracy is not always better and that we should be open to reforms that modestly reduce local control if such reforms are likely to help students.

Most research on education governance begin with the premise that school boards are the natural default and that locally elected school boards must be defended. This chapter demonstrates why this assumption is wrong. I show that: (1) most voters don’t have school-aged kids and thus lack sufficient “skin in the game” to prioritize academic achievement; (2) voters don’t hold school board members accountable for student learning; and (3) local school board elections are uncompetitive, with nearly 80 percent of the turnover driven by incumbent retirements rather than Election Day defeats. Several case studies, focused on school districts in San Francisco (California) and Easta Ramapo (New York) illustrate why broken elections have negative impacts on education quality. At best, school board elections are extremely low-turnout affairs, in which a small and highly unrepresentative group of adults impose their parochial, self-interested, and often uninformed views on the rest of the community. At its worst, school district governance devolves into an absolute clown show, where performative politics takes precedence over serious policy meant to serve the academic interests of students.