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Writer's pictureScott Davison

What Happens When Educators Win School Board Seats, According to New Research

"Electing educators to local school boards often results in a pay bump for teachers, but does not correlate with higher student achievement or high school graduation rates."



Are you surprised to hear this? Most people would be. Why wouldn't a teacher be the most qualified person to sit on a school board?


Let's start with a basic rule you might not know: teachers are prohibited from serving on their school boards. Why? They would be voting on their own raises, and representing their own interests instead of those of the school district. That's why we have school boards, which provide oversight for the community and are sworn to act in the best interests of the community and students that the school is designed to serve.


The study mentioned in the article, from the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, was summarized as follows:


"While electing more professional educators—classroom teachers, principals, superintendents, or other administrators—to school boards leads to an average teacher pay increase of approximately 2 percent for each educator elected, there’s little evidence that having more board members with education backgrounds leads to better student performance in core subjects like reading and math, the researchers behind the study found."



The findings about teachers’ union endorsements “support our conclusion that school boards are potentially an important causal channel through which teachers’ unions exert influence,” according to the report.



What does this mean for November 5th? Choose wisely when there's a teacher on your ballot!



Other Key Findings

"In districts with more educators on the school board that had increased teacher salaries, there were corresponding decreases in district spending on investments including capital projects."


This should make perfect sense by now. Schools have limited resources, so if you spend money on increased salaries, you cannot spend it on other things, like improving facilities, better technology, updated textbooks, etc.

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