As regular readers know, I spent much of the past two years co-leading the Building Bridges Initiative, which sought to bring education reformers from left, right, and center together (again). One of the most useful moments in our deliberations came when one participant introduced the notion of a “suitcase word.” Like a suitcase, such words may look the same to everyone, but we each have different ideas of what may lie inside. In order to avoid misunderstandings or unnecessary conflict, it’s helpful to “unpack” these words and be crystal clear about the concepts we’re discussing.

Suitcase words are everywhere in our political conversations and in K–12 education, including “social justice,” “parental rights,” and “accountability.” But the granddaddy of them all is surely “educational equity.” In coming weeks, I aim to unpack this phrase and discuss what it would mean to do educational equity right (double meaning intended).

My experience is that “educational equity” lands very differently with my friends on the left versus the right. Their suitcases hold strikingly different contents. On the left, the phrase conjures up praiseworthy efforts to help low-income kids and kids of color succeed—to make up for past and present injustices by ensuring that students from marginalized groups have access to schools, teachers, and instruction that are just as good, if not better, than those enjoyed by their more advantaged peers. Who could be against that? Thus, my friends on the left don’t understand why their friends on the right are triggered by the phrase.

But that’s because, in conservative circles, there’s much alarm over what we see as the move away from “equality of opportunity” as the goal in American society and its replacement by “equality of outcomes.” This alarm stems from claims, like Ibram X. Kendi’s, that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Which goes on to include the assertion that any racial disparity (in educational attainment or achievement, or involvement in the criminal justice system, or wages, or anything else) is by definition racist. Conservatives view this as a vast oversimplification and at odds with notions of personal responsibility and agency, not to mention meritocracy. It also paves the way for policies that we tend not to like, such as affirmative action and income redistribution.

So when liberals see the educational equity suitcase, they picture good things for poor kids and kids of color. When conservatives see that same suitcase, they picture Kendi-style discrimination and redistribution with a soupçon of accusation and implied guilt.

If we could unpack the suitcase, however, we might find a measure of agreement. For example, few people on the left or right would defend our (past) funding system that regularly sent more money to schools serving rich kids than poor kids. Nor would many disagree that it’s more expensive to effectively educate poor students than rich ones, and thus that progressive funding policies are appropriate. (This is the classic “equity” versus “equality” example. It’s not enough to provide equal funding for all kids; we must provide more money to high-poverty schools in order to ameliorate disadvantage.) Thus, we can find common ground around school funding reforms that provide adequate and equitable funding to high-poverty schools, as many red, blue, and purple states have embraced in recent years.

I’m not saying that identifying alternative words to use in place of “educational equity” will resolve all of our left-right debates; these have been around forever and will be here long after we’re gone. What we can do, however, and something surely worth trying to do, is to identify specific education policies and practices that embrace a version of “equity” that can garner broad support across the ideological spectrum and benefit the greatest number of students. Let me suggest three rules for doing so.

1. When aiming for equity, we should level-up instead of leveling-down. In graphic form, we should avoid modeling our actions on this meme, inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”:

Five years ago, Ron DeSantis toiled away as one of 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, he looms large in American politics as Florida’s twice-elected governor—and the Republican widely considered to have the best shot at toppling Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

While many factors have played into DeSantis’s rise, education policy has been at the center of nearly every episode propelling the Florida governor forward. Governor DeSantis has made education a major priority of both terms in office. And he has skillfully tackled some thorny education issues using a two-pronged approach that delights parents who share his views—while neutralizing, or even winning over, many outside his core group of support.

The first, and more attention-grabbing, part of DeSantis’s approach could be called “Defying the Establishment.” The second, and potentially more important, part might be called “De-Escalating the Stakes.” Both merit closer inspection—and the best place to begin is with a fascinating-yet-often-overlooked episode that brought these two strands together.

Defusing the School ‘Mask Wars’

In the summer of 2021, education officials in Florida (and beyond) were gearing up for Round Two in the Great Covid Response Dilemma—whether students returning to public schools in the fall would be required to wear masks.

Round Two had all of the appearances of a high-stakes, winner-take-all showdown. One side insisted on Covid caution. The other emphasized personal freedom and responsibility. No win-win solution seemed possible. Public schools were either going to require masks or they weren’t. If ever there were a Solomonic conundrum crying out for an ingenious “split the baby” response, this was it.

Enter Ron DeSantis.

Governor DeSantis strongly identified with those emphasizing personal freedom and responsibility, just as he had a year earlier in championing a return to in-person instruction (over the objections of public-school unions, public health officials, and most major media outlets). Among other things, DeSantis worried mask mandates would hinder classroom instruction because teachers and students would be unable to see each other’s mouth movements.

Still, the governor recognized that some parents wanted their kids to wear masks, often for understandable reasons (such as having an immunocompromised family member at home). Accordingly, he said schools should neither mandate masks nor forbid their use.

In July, DeSantis issued an executive order to “protect parents’ right to make decisions regarding masking of their children.” And he reminded Floridians that he had recently signed into law The Parents’ Bill of Rights, which affirmed parents’ authority “to direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health” of their children.

DeSantis’s “mask-optional” executive order surprised no one. But what happened next surprised many.

Several Florida school districts announced they were going to defy the governor’s order and impose mask mandates anyway. In response, DeSantis instructed Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran to issue a rule making students who suffer “Covid-19 harassment” eligible for a Hope Scholarship.

Florida’s Hope Scholarship program allows victims of bullying or harassment to transfer to another school of their parents’ choosing, with funds following the student. DeSantis and Corcoran (who had spearheaded Hope’s adoption when he was House speaker) maintained that the law’s language could be legitimately applied to situations when students are mistreated by local school officials over masking policies.

The governor’s move drew modest, momentary, and mostly meh mainstream media attention.

But it sparked an interesting response from some Covid-wary Florida parents who felt mask-optional policies threatened their child’s well-being. They asked if they too could get a Hope Scholarship to send their child to a private school that mandated masks.

“Absolutely,” the DeSantis administration answered, thereby reaffirming the unimpeachable idea behind Florida’s Hope Scholarship—that no child should be required to attend a school his parents consider unsafe.

And with that, the Great School Mask Wars of 2021 came to a peaceful resolution in Florida. Thanks to DeSantis’s deft governing, parents on all sides enjoyed access to public funds to send their kids to a school with Covid policies that matched their preferences. Win-win.

Defying the (‘Woke’) Establishment

Most people outside Florida have never heard the latter part of this story because it runs counter to the dominant narrative surrounding DeSantis’s approach to education policy. That narrative emphasizes DeSantis’s willingness to stand up for underdog parents who find themselves at odds with the progressive Establishment, often on zero-sum issues with no possible win-win solution.

“Virtually every major institution in our country is attempting to impose a ‘progressive’ agenda on society,” DeSantis told the New York Post. “Florida strives to protect the ability of its citizens to live their lives free from this agenda being shoved down their throats.”

DeSantis has challenged the “woke” orthodoxy by:

• Championing the adoption of legislation banning critical race theory and its related tenets which, in DeSantis’s words, “teach kids to hate their country and to hate each other;”
• Signing into law a measure outlawing male participation in high school sports for females;
• Spearheading the adoption of the Parental Rights in Education Act (or, as critics dubbed it, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill) which prohibited public schools from teaching young students about gender ideology and human sexuality;
• Leading an effort to curb the Walt Disney company’s special governing privileges after Disney joined LGBTQ advocates in fighting against the Parental Rights in Education Act;
• Denying state approval of the College Board’s new Advanced Placement African-American Studies course over its inclusion of “queer theory,” “intersectionality,” and other problematic content;
• Repealing and replacing Common Core standards throughout the curriculum to encourage greater emphasis on classic literature and the foundations of western thought;
• Vetoing an “action civics” proposal that would have emphasized training in student activism over the acquisition of core knowledge about our political system;
• Engineering a leadership transformation at New College, a state liberal arts institution long dominated (and mismanaged) by left-wing academics; and
• Eliminating funding at state universities for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs that directly or indirectly violate federal civil rights standards.

As this long (and growing!) list makes clear, Governor Ron DeSantis is a man on a mission—to rid his state of the cluster of neo-Marxist ideas that comprise “wokeness.”

His efforts to promote “education, not indoctrination” have earned him broad support inside the Sunshine State, where he won re-election last year by a larger margin than any Republican gubernatorial candidate in Florida history.

And Governor DeSantis’s commitment to systemic change can be seen in the fact that he broke precedent last year and endorsed more than 30 school board candidates from around the state who share his belief that schools should not be “a tool for a special interest partisan agenda.” Almost all these candidates won, flipping control of five county school boards.

Defaulting with ‘Normies’

Some critics claim DeSantis is guilty of the very thing of which he accuses his opponents—politicizing K–12 education. But DeSantis says he is simply defending bedrock American values in a time-honored American way.

Just as many of America’s first settlers believed the Establishment church of their homeland was coercively teaching heresy, DeSantis believes the Establishment schools in the U.S. today are coercively teaching “woke” ideas contrary to America’s founding creed, the Declaration of Independence.

Specifically, DeSantis believes “woke” lessons on race violate the idea that all of us are “created equal”—and that “woke” lessons on gender violate the “laws of nature” also referenced in the Declaration.

To many people beyond his base, “DeSantis’s education efforts carry far broader yet much more nuanced and complex support than might otherwise be suggested,” observes Lynn Hatter of WFSU, a public radio station based in Florida’s capital.

For example, some election observers attributed DeSantis’s 2022 landslide to the fact that he drew strong support from conservatives concerned about “woke” issues and from moderates more attracted to his support for ideas like increasing teacher pay. Yet, even here, DeSantis has kept his opponents off balance by shrewdly combining a 2023 teacher pay increase with a “paycheck protection” measure that requires public school unions to recruit members and collect dues on their own time and with their own dime.

“The governor’s top-line promises can sound good, but there’s always a catch,” says Florida Education Association president Andrew Spar. “Governor DeSantis says he’s for teachers’ rights, then moves to take away their rights to teach honest lessons or join together to advocate for Florida’s students and our profession.”

Criticisms like these sometimes fail to land with middle-of-the-road observers. Indeed, Bill Maher has defended DeSantis, calling him a “normal” governor pursuing reasonable goals. “They called it the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law,” Maher said. “It could have been called the ‘Let’s do things in schools the way we did five years ago’ law. It really could’ve.”

Similarly, a national poll by University of Southern California scholars found that even a majority of Democrats oppose teaching about gender ideology and sexual orientation in elementary schools.

And when DeSantis pushed back against the College Board for “using black history to shoehorn in queer theory,” a prominent African-American social-justice advocate came to his defense. “Frankly, I’m against the College Board’s curriculum,” said Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor. “I think it’s trash. It’s not African American history. It is ideology … sub-mediocre propaganda.”

De-Escalating the Stakes

Still, DeSantis remains a frequent target of many progressives, including history professor David Blight from DeSantis’s alma mater, Yale. Blight has criticized DeSantis’s agenda, echoing a common complaint that the governor’s actions raise the question, “Who gets to control knowledge and education?”

While it is true DeSantis is trying to rid Establishment schools of “woke” teachings, it is a mistake to view DeSantis as someone trying to “control” education with an iron grip.

In fact, in many ways, he’s doing the exact opposite.

Think back to the mask wars incident and DeSantis’s win-win solution that included scholarships for families who felt “harassed” or “threatened.” Rather than imposing his own personal preferences on others, DeSantis has sought consistently to empower parents to make decisions about the education of their children.

DeSantis championed a new K–12 voucher program called the Family Empowerment Scholarship as his first major legislative initiative as governor. It added nearly 50,000 lower- and middle-income families to Florida’s K–12 scholarship rolls. And it laid the foundation for two subsequent school choice expansions, including a monumental 2023 measure that extended scholarship eligibility to all Florida families and converted Florida’s state-funded vouchers into flexible-use Education Savings Accounts (ESAs).

Governor DeSantis’s aggressive actions in expanding education choice have solidified Florida’s position as a national leader in education freedom. And his policies have continued Florida’s impressive rise in national K–12 rankings, which began more than 20 years ago with the reforms of then Governor Jeb Bush. Over the last quarter-century, Florida has gone from a Bottom 10 state to a Top 5 state in most measures of student achievement.

In 2022, Florida achieved its highest-ever rankings in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a fact that DeSantis attributed to his anti-lockdown policies during the pandemic. “We insisted on keeping schools open and guaranteed in-person learning in 2020 because we knew there would be widespread harm to our students if students were locked out,” DeSantis said. “[The NAEP results] once again prove that we made the right decision.”

Remarkably, Florida has posted record learning gains over the last 25 years while increasing per-pupil spending less than every other state in the nation. Free-market advocates tout these bang-for-buck results as evidence of the improved efficiencies that come with school choice. But the qualitative results of Florida’s policies may be as impressive. Among other things, robust education choice has lowered the stakes for all sorts of potentially contentious battles fought out in schools.

Wish your child could attend a school that emphasizes STEM? Or the arts? Or core knowledge? Or learning through play? Or the foundations of your religion? Or project-based learning?

In Florida, you don’t have to convince a majority of your neighbors to agree with you. You can pursue the best learning fit for your child, regardless of what philosophy of education your local school district adopts. Currently, more than 250,000 Floridians receive K–12 scholarship assistance of some kind—and nearly half (49%) of all Florida students attend something other than their assigned district school (private, charter, magnet, virtual, homeschool, etc.).

In essence, Florida is offering the nation a lesson in why America’s founders were so wise in crafting the language of the First Amendment. For just as the founders facilitated the “free exercise” of religion rather than its Establishment, Florida has facilitated the “free exercise” of education by allowing parents to determine where their child’s per-pupil dollars will be spent.

Governor DeSantis’s anti-establishment posture, and the mostly negative media attention it has generated, often worked in his favor. For example, during Covid, many frustrated parents from around the country moved to Florida so their kids could get in-person instruction. And this great migration wasn’t limited just to public school families. Many Jewish schools in South Florida saw a significant uptick in their enrollment, thanks especially to a large influx of families from the New York City area.

DeSantis has seen that education choice not only is good policy but also good politics. It has won him a number of unlikely allies. For instance, during the Florida Legislature’s 2021 consideration of a major expansion to DeSantis’s Family Empowerment Scholarship program, a gay teen testified that school choice had “saved his life” by providing him a way out of a school bullying situation that had led him to contemplate suicide.

Moreover, many Floridians who don’t share DeSantis’s party affiliation have found it’s better to be a dissenter in the “free state of Florida” than in any other state. In Florida, hippie homeschoolers don’t get hassled. John Holt disciples are free to use vouchers to send their kids to Montessori schools. And African-American moms unhappy with their local public school can “vote with their feet” and enroll their child elsewhere.

This last group is notable because their votes in the 2018 election were responsible for DeSantis’s improbable, razor-thin victory over African-American Democrat Andrew Gillum. DeSantis won that first gubernatorial election by less than 40,000 votes, thanks to 100,000 African-American “School Choice Moms” who voted for him because they worried Gillum’s vocal opposition to school choice would end programs benefiting their children.

Delighting the ‘Deplorables’ (and others who Dissent)

As the 2024 election approaches, many conservatives are hoping DeSantis runs for president.

But before anyone gets too carried away imagining the implications of a DeSantis candidacy, it may be worth considering what would have happened if Gillum had shown “School Choice Moms” the same consideration DeSantis showed Covid-wary families who wanted a scholarship to leave their “mask-optional” school.

Had Gillum embraced school choice for Florida families, he would have won the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election. He might have subsequently wound up as either the presidential nominee or vice-presidential nominee in the 2020 national election.

Instead, Gillum squandered a winnable election. And he lost not just the “School Choice Moms,” but the “School Choice Daughters” as well. I recently spoke with Hera Varmah, a graduate of Gillum’s alma mater (Florida A & M) who told me she cast her 2018 ballot for DeSantis because she knew from personal experience the life-changing power of school choice.

The number of such “School Choice Voters” is sure to increase as more states expand education options. And, hopefully, school choice expansion will help de-escalate the stakes over school policies in places way beyond Florida as more states seek to imitate the success of Governor DeSantis’s two-pronged approach to K–12 education.

William Mattox is the director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida. He is a registered independent.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s crusade against “wokeness” in education (and in some other areas) has drawn a ferocious backlash. The Republican governor and presidential hopeful has been accused of whipping up a right-wing culture war over a non-issue in a bid to boost his political credentials—and, in the process, imposing his authoritarian will under the guise of championing freedom of speech and expression. In fact, concerns about radical progressive ideologies in education are more valid than DeSantis critics allow, and free speech is not as much of an issue in K–12 education as in colleges and universities since the state has a legitimate role in shaping the school curriculum. But for those who would like to see meaningful reforms to address concerns about overpoliticized education, the DeSantis “anti-woke” crusade is frustratingly counterproductive.

This crusade goes back at least to 2021, when the Florida State Board of Education approved DeSantis-backed rules that not only called for “factual and objective” classroom instruction but also explicitly banned “theories that distort historical events,” giving “critical race theory” and Holocaust denial as examples, and specifically excluded “material from the 1619 Project,” a New York Times package of essays placing slavery at the center of American history (See “‘The 1619 Project’ Enters American Classrooms,” features, Fall 2020).

In 2022, as the culture wars heated up, DeSantis signed two major bills that regulated educational practices in the state. The education section of the “Stop WOKE Act” required all classroom instruction to follow “certain principles of individual freedom,” among them that “no individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex” and “a person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” The “parental rights” bill dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay Law” prohibited “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity … in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

Apart from its cringeworthy acronym (for “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees”), the Stop WOKE Act seems clearly unconstitutional with regard to higher education; it has been challenged and blocked by federal courts, with litigation expected to continue at least until the end of this year. But K–12 is not covered by the same legal protections for freedom of speech.

Detractors of DeSantis’s legislative crusade argue that it’s a nakedly demagogic appeal to bigotry and moral panic stoked by right-wing propaganda. They scoff at the notion that children are being taught either Critical Race Theory (CRT)—which they describe as a method used in universities or law schools of analyzing how structural racism operates—or “gender theory” lessons with explicit sexual content. They dismiss objections to materials from the 1619 Project as discomfort with honest discussion of slavery and racism in America.

The critics are wrong on a number of points. CRT has indisputably influenced K–12 schooling. More than a decade ago, an article in the journal Educational Foundations noted that “a growing number of teacher education programs are fundamentally oriented around a vision of social justice” and often incorporate “critical race theory” and related “critical pedagogy.” The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, explicitly endorsed CRT as one of the “tools” of anti-racist teaching in a 2021 resolution (later scrubbed from the NEA’s website along with other “business items”). Moreover, CRT is not just an analysis of racism but an ideological framework with rightly controversial elements. It makes disputed claims about embedded racism in every aspect of society and in every interaction. It also exhibits hostility to liberal institutions and, as prominent Black scholar Henry Louis Gates noted 30 years ago, to First Amendment protections for speech. And while claims about the pernicious effects of CRT in school often come from culture warriors with an agenda, such as Manhattan Institute fellow (and DeSantis ally) Christopher Rufo, they have enough documented factual substance to be concerning.

For instance, a classroom project in Cupertino, California, in 2020, canceled after one session due to parental complaints, had 3rd-grade students list their various “social identities” and analyze them in terms of “power and privilege.” Dozens of schools have reportedly used as K–5 reading material a picture book called Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, which presents “whiteness” as a literal devil offering “stolen riches” and offers a crude dichotomy in which Black Americans are cast solely as oppressed victims, whites as perpetrators or enablers. High school assignments on “white privilege” can easily devolve into blaming-and-shaming tactics such as asking students to ponder “everything you may be doing to promote/maintain” racial privilege or telling them that “the world is set up for [white people’s] convenience.” This is not only polarizing but inaccurate: While racial prejudice and injustice remain a reality, 21st century America is far more diverse and complex than such perspectives allow.

Likewise, the 1619 Project has been accused not only by the right but by liberal and socialist critics of distorting historical facts to claim that “[o]ur history as a nation rests on slavery and white supremacy”—claiming, for example, that one of the goals of the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery from supposed British efforts at its abolition.

And gender identity education, sometimes as early as elementary school, can include questionable material—for instance, material telling second-graders that “You might feel like you are a boy, you might feel like you are a girl” or “a little bit of both,” regardless of body parts that “some people” associate with male or female sex. Not only conservatives but some suburban liberal parents have objected to readings which not only include overly sexualized content but seem to reinforce stereotypes—for instance, that girls who aren’t “girly” and like to wear pants may actually be boys. (School library books, another bone of contention in Florida, sometimes raise similar issues.)

So the problems are real. But how good are the proposed solutions?

On their face, the “principles of individual freedom” articulated in the “Stop WOKE Act” sound mostly reasonable: most of us will agree that children should not be told that they are presumptively racist because of their skin color or racial identity, or told that they should feel shame and anguish because of racist acts committed by people of the same color or identity in the past. But while the language of the bill makes some attempts to focus on intentionality (i.e. to specify that there must be deliberate instruction to feel guilt, shame, etc., or explicit assertion that members of some groups are by definition racist or oppressive), laws that attempt to regulate speech and ideas are inevitably open to subjective interpretations. In one notorious incident in Tennessee, some conservative activists from a parents’ group combating “CRT” and other “woke” excesses in schools targeted Ruby Bridges Goes to School, a children’s book written by Ruby Bridges, the Black civil rights icon who was famously escorted by federal marshals on her way to a previously all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960. Some people evidently objected to the reference to a “large crowd of angry white people who didn’t want black children in a white school,” feeling that the passage was too negative, and also complained that the book didn’t offer “redemption” at the end. This is an almost perfect example of how easily a factual account of some episodes from history can run afoul of laws that attempt to target deliberate shaming. Some Florida teachers have said that in the wake of the “Stop WOKE Act,” they’re worried about teaching material like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” because it could mean “trampling on … landmines.”

The same problem of subjective standards plagues regulations regarding school library books, the purging of which new Florida laws make it much easier for parents to demand—in some cases without even reading the books in question.

This situation is particularly ironic since so much of the conservative critique of “wokeness” ridicules—for the most part, rightly—claims that people from “marginalized” groups need to be “safe” from words and ideas that could make them feel bad about themselves or their identities. You could make a solid argument that the “Stop WOKE Act” should actually be called “the Safe Spaces for Conservatives Act.”

The CRT bans and the restrictions on gender- and sexuality-related instruction suffer from the same problem of subjectivity. Since critical race theory is not directly taught in K–12, the bans would apply to texts or other materials that can be described as influenced by this mode of analysis. But that, once again, opens the way to parental complaints based on interpretation of any text related to either contemporary or historical racial issues. And with regard to gender and sexuality, “age-appropriate” and “developmentally appropriate” may open even bigger cans of worms.

What’s more, the conduct of the DeSantis administration so far does not exactly dispel concerns that its educational regulations are setting the stage for massive overreach. Just recently, the administration moved to expand the ban on teaching related to gender identity and sexual orientation from K–3 to K–12. And a new bill introduced in the Florida House of Representatives in February, based on proposals made earlier by DeSantis, takes the axe to a variety of state college and university programs based on progressive ideas about race and gender—including majors and minors in “Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems” and general education core courses that include CRT or define American history in something other than the approved way (i.e. “the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence”).

There are better ways to tackle the problem of ideologically skewed public-school instruction. Reviewing K–12 school materials for accuracy and balance, for instance, should not raise objections. But this task should be approached in the genuine spirit of balance, not culture-warrioring. Once again, the DeSantis administration’s record in this regard is not encouraging. (Witness the recent college-level controversy over the “anti-woke” takeover of New College Florida, where DeSantis packed the board of trustees with people who were both his personal loyalists and Donald Trump supporters—and who immediately embarked on a project to make over the college in an explicitly political way.)

Some “woke” excesses can be curbed with rules that prohibit the personal targeting of students—for instance, with exercises suggesting that they or their families are racist or complicit in white supremacy—without broad bans on certain types of ideas or concepts, especially if those concepts are defined so broadly and subjectively that they could apply to a wide range of material. Other matters might be more constructively addressed by school districts rather than statewide.

Lastly, at least in older grades—perhaps 6–12—the best approach to contentious issues should be to teach the debates. The 1619 Project is a perfect example: instead of turning it into forbidden fruit and putting the state in the role of curriculum censor, why not have students read excerpts from the project as well as the critiques? The same approach could be taken to other issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—issues to which students will invariably have exposure one way or the other, via social media, journalism, or entertainment. Teaching the controversies would alleviate concerns about indoctrination in one or the other direction and instead encourage critical engagement with both historical sources and modern media. Likewise, asking school libraries to add more ideologically diverse content rather than remove content some parents find objectionable could be a constructive approach to the library wars.

More is better. Done right, such an approach in K–12 would promote genuine diversity of viewpoints, intellectual tolerance, and understanding instead of polarization.

Cathy Young is a fellow at the Cato Institute who also writes for The Bulwark, Newsday, and Reason.

Locally elected school boards are having a moment, though not the one their supporters might want. School boards, formerly viewed by many as innocuous, have come roaring to life with fights over race and gender identity, pandemic-related policies, and social-emotional learning. School-board races, often derided for abysmally low turnout, now appear to be ground zero for the nation’s culture wars.

Past efforts to dismantle school boards were largely unsuccessful, in part because American citizens value them as a hallmark of local control and in part because alternatives like mayoral control have yielded mixed results. Now, many Americans are rightly disturbed by the fierce politicization of school-board meetings, making the time ripe for critics to update old arguments (see “Lost at Sea,” forum, Fall 2004) for a new era.

Enter political scientist Vladimir Kogan, who asserted in the headline of his recent Education Next article (“Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing,” Summer 2022) that locally elected school boards are failing. Kogan highlights several significant problems with school governance, including the insufficient responses of many school boards to persistent achievement gaps. He also alerts readers to the fact that many school boards fail to reflect the demographics or interests of the communities they serve. Kogan isn’t wrong on these counts.

But are locally elected school boards actually failing? Answering this question isn’t merely a matter of determining whether they ensure the academic outcomes Kogan prizes. It also requires us to examine the democratic purpose and practices of school boards. Taking into account the mission, stakeholders, and procedures of public schools and their governing boards—the what, who, and how of their activity—we believe that publicly elected school boards continue to play a vital role in serving children, communities, and democracy.

Failing at What?

In making the case against locally elected school boards, Kogan revives the argument made by John Chubb and Terry Moe that politics allow “the moral concerns of adults” to interfere with the “the educational needs and interests of students.” Though Kogan does not explicitly state what these needs and interests are, we can infer from his references to the importance of “student academic outcomes” that he sees the primary work of school boards being the “effective and efficient” maximization of literacy and numeracy skills, as revealed by state assessments. In an ideal world, then, school-board elections would elevate candidates who prioritize “student academic outcomes” and would punish candidates who do not. But, as Kogan notes, “there’s little indication that voters use elections to hold school boards accountable” based on measured student outcomes. Instead, incumbency and the endorsement of teachers unions have a greater effect on election results. That, he argues, is how we know that locally elected school boards are failing.

At the bottom of Kogan’s objection lies the failure of local school systems to do all that they can, and all that the research indicates they ought to do, to improve student academic outcomes. Elections, the rudiments of democracy, have proven inadequate to compel district leaders to value student achievement highly and singularly. Why are elections bad at this kind of accountability? Kogan floats two interconnected reasons. The first is the outsized power of special and vested interests (most notably teachers unions), which he argues have disproportionate capacity to organize and mobilize for electoral politics in order to advance the priorities of their members. The second is the combination of apathy and structural incentives that yield low turnout, which further amplifies the power of unions and voters without children to the detriment of other stakeholders, particularly parents. Kogan would like to break this kind of institutional capture so that locally elected school boards can deliver the policies that a silent majority wants. These are real issues that can be addressed by reforming the electoral process—by declaring election days state holidays, expanding voting hours, offering early voting opportunities, or, as Kogan suggests, “holding school-board elections on cycle.”

But we also want to highlight two of the more questionable assumptions that Kogan makes. The first is that policies focused on student achievement are so popular that only special-interest capture can explain the electoral losses of candidates promoting them. The second is that certain voting blocs deserve priority, and, in the current system, these voting blocs are structurally silenced. Kogan seems to believe that if we reformed local electoral processes to encourage the turnout of all eligible voters, candidates supporting “the interests of students” rather than the “moral concerns” of adults would be swept into office. But it is not at all obvious that the interests of students and the moral concerns of adults are orthogonal to one another. Nor is it obvious that the “core missions” of schools are easily picked out from the variety of responsibilities that schools bear. We should be skeptical that any one of us knows exactly how to draw these lines, which we believe should be available for periodic public checks—and this is precisely what local elections offer.

Why are student academic outcomes the sine qua non of public education? Kogan would like us to believe that it is objectively in the interests of children. Yet the reasons to pursue measurable academic outcomes bottom out in a moral concern—one that includes concrete assumptions about the nature of children’s interests. Influential research makes a point of correlating academic achievement to behavioral habits that we judge to be morally prudent and financially sound, including contributing to retirement accounts, avoiding teenage pregnancy, and purchasing real estate. We know that academic achievement serves the interests of children, in other words, because we have a substantive moral view of what those interests are. Even in this ideal vision, it is difficult to draw a distinction between student and adult interests. The line becomes even less clear in research suggesting that “academic outcomes” will increase Gross Domestic Product or realize our ideals of equal opportunity. The “interests of students,” in short, are inextricably bound up with adults’ moral concerns—a vision of what it means to lead a life worth living and of how schools are expected to contribute to it. This is not a problem. This is how it should be. Adults, including Kogan, can identify children’s interests only because we have what Adam Smith would call moral sentiments.

Attempting to distinguish schools’ “core missions” from the many other things we expect schools to do leads us into similar tangles. We have long known that schools serve a variety of needs for students, as well as for their parents, for employers, for the life of a community, and for the health of the nation. But pandemic-related closures and the political battles around reopening provided a blunt reminder of how various, and how important, these needs are. The fact that basic skills are the common denominator across schools does not mean that it is always reasonable or justified to sacrifice other needs in the name of “academic outcomes.” School boards are a form of governance that enables us to work through our legitimate value pluralism from community to community, allowing localities to weigh and balance academic performance among the other educational goods valued by the school or district.

This is not to say that the democratic governance of schools is flawless. Kogan is astute in pointing to off-cycle elections that depress turnout and encourage special-interest dominance. He is not wrong to insist that the interests of adults can run counter to the interests of children. And he is quite right to suggest that, if local government is insufficiently responsive to its publics, there are readily available ways of addressing these issues. We worry, however, about the standard that he uses to judge the worth of electoral politics. We would advocate for the same electoral reforms as Kogan, yet for a different purpose—to strengthen democratic procedures that help communities navigate their internal value pluralism. Kogan’s evidence that locally elected school boards are failing suggests that local board elections can only “succeed” if they produce a specific result: a board singlemindedly committed to raising student achievement.

Failing for Whom?

Kogan’s argument suggests that schools should primarily serve the interests of students and that we can tell whether they are doing their jobs by examining performance-based accountability scores. In particular, the argument suggests that when test scores do not drive school-board decision making or electoral results, illegitimate interests must be interfering with the process. But public schools in the U.S. have a wide range of stakeholders, including a diversity of students and families, as well as the economic, civic, and social sectors in those families’ surrounding communities.

The diversity of students goes far beyond ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic identities and backgrounds. Students’ academic, social, and emotional intelligences reflect a wide array of strengths and areas to be developed. And students bring to school different conditions or challenges that require educator knowledge and professional skill. Local educational governance allows boards to adjust and adapt their visions for schooling over time to account for the range of student needs and aspirational goals. Student academic outcomes are an important, but not singular, consideration in that accounting.

Students aren’t the only ones who benefit from public education. Local and regional communities have a serious stake in their schools and gauge their success far more broadly than can be captured by standardized test scores. Public schools are valued for many reasons, among which is their function as community hubs, providing a means to discover shared educational interests that are locally and regionally distinct. A strong democratic local-governance model for schooling can create policy that is preferred by many communities because it serves those local nuances and distinctions. It’s also more responsive than a privatized market model, which, though not explicitly endorsed by Kogan, was Chubb and Moe’s preferred alternative. In our view, relying on market models of governance will diminish the means available to local and regional communities for developing shared visions for student growth and flourishing in light of local conditions, public priorities, and assets.

It is important to acknowledge that at least part of the rise of voucher policies lies in frustration with public schools as they currently operate. Public schools struggle to serve all members and all communities equally well. For a district to serve all stakeholders, including and most importantly students, school boards must be more inclusive in how they understand and define common interests. We agree with Kogan on this point. But the dearth of informed, diverse candidates for these offices is a problem that can be addressed in a variety of ways other than the elimination of elected school boards. In Cincinnati, Ohio, for instance, the nonprofit School Board School recruits and trains cohorts of community leaders on school issues, finances, board roles, and educational policy. The organization builds cohorts of leaders from diverse backgrounds to help diversify governance and focus on building and maintaining excellent schools.

Cultivating more diverse, representative, and knowledgeable school-board candidates in every state would address some of the challenges Kogan discusses, as would broad electoral reform. Indeed, the main problems Kogan identifies with school boards—that they are whiter and wealthier than the communities they represent and that they fail to push hard enough on equity reforms—could be identified in nearly every elected body in this country, from local city councils to statehouses to Congress. That’s not a reason to scrap democratic school governance; it’s a reason to improve it.

Failing How?

How are school boards supposed to function? According to Kogan, it seems, school boards should be focused on the following questions: “Where are our test scores at? What accountability score have we received? How do we increase these and close gaps between students in these?” Let’s assume that Kogan is right and that these questions should take precedence. What next? If test scores or accountability ratings are too low, Kogan contends the board should implement reform; or that the school-board members should be held accountable for low scores, removed from office, and replaced by new members who will get a chance to improve academic outcomes. But is this how local governance should operate?

How a school board functions—the topics members discuss in public meetings, how they run their meetings, the work they do between meetings—is in large part dictated by state law. The primary legal responsibility of a school board, as outlined in state constitutions, is to act as a governing body—to discuss and establish policies and processes that support district goals, following inclusive and transparent governing procedures. It is not a school board’s task to patrol every turn that is taken en route to accomplishing those goals. Formal duties often include hiring and evaluating the superintendent, passing an annual budget, overseeing finances and capital outlay, holding regular meetings open to the public, and ensuring compliance with state and federal laws. In some states, boards also approve collective-bargaining agreements. These duties matter and take substantial time.

Kogan seems to imply that school boards should concern themselves with leading the curricular and instructional programming of a district, that is to say: making decisions that close academic-achievement gaps. And, when there is little movement to close achievement gaps, school-board members should be punished. Yet that raises a serious question about the role of expertise. Most school-board members are not equipped with the educational and experiential background to understand what it takes to improve academic achievement. School boards should ensure that processes are in place to review and adopt curricula, as well as to review and question testing data, including ensuring that the community is informed about test-score results. It is concerning, however, and even disrespectful to educators with professional expertise, to put instructional and curricular decision making primarily within the purview of school-board members. Doing so asks boards to be more certain and unified than the education-research community itself tends to be about what “the research” implies schools should do.

Let’s compare this situation to a parallel one in another field. The San Antonio Regional Hospital Board of Directors is chaired by a banker and, in addition to medical staff and doctors, is made up of lawyers, jewelers, real-estate agents, and internet entrepreneurs. In an ideal world, how would we want this board to govern? Would citizens want their county hospital’s board telling doctors and nurses how to care for patients, simply because one branch of the medical-research field says that a particular procedure tends to lower morbidity and mortality in patients generally? Of course not.

So why include non-experts in the mix at all? Kogan might suggest that our analogy reveals something else—the need to eliminate the hospital board or to staff it only with medical professionals. Yet we would remind him and others that the “how” of local boards’ governing processes is not to govern the work of experts; instead, it is to share the ideas and concerns brought by the electorate, support those who receive services from the institution, and draw on different backgrounds and experiences to make sound decisions collectively. Just as a hospital’s board will spend hundreds of hours deciding when and how to invest in a building addition to expand the number of beds available, a local school board will spend hundreds of hours deciding whether to invest in one-to-one digital devices, to replace the chilling unit, to consolidate schools, or to reroute buses. In short, school-board members simply cannot focus solely on closing test-score gaps; as a local governing body, they are both legally and morally required to govern so as to ensure that their district operates in a holistically effective manner.

Flaws Aren’t Failure

Critics aren’t wrong when they identify shortcomings in the efficacy and efficiency of locally elected school boards. And given recent politicization, school boards as a form of governance may be more vulnerable than ever. If all they offer is an outlet for resentment and a platform for grievance, perhaps they aren’t worth the effort.

School-board elections and governance are very much in need of reform. And Kogan is quite right to criticize their vulnerability to special-interest capture, in particular. But disparaging the interests of teachers and adults, and demeaning voters for not casting votes based on school ratings, would leave less room for value pluralism and fewer opportunities for local citizens to engage as members of a public.

We support reforms like on-cycle elections and enhanced accountability systems with better measures of student learning. Yet we do so because improved access to voting opportunities and the availability of more nuanced school-performance data empowers citizens in a democratic society. It allows them to use their voices to demand governance that is open and responsive to the needs of the community, not because they will contribute to boards being laser-focused on improving test scores. We believe that public education serves many interests other than the elevation of standardized-test scores, as well as many constituencies in addition to students. And we believe that the process of democratic self-governance has value in its own right, which must be considered in any critique that threatens to further undermine it.

Local, democratic control of schools has not yet realized its full potential, but that’s no reason to declare it a failure. Instead, it is a work in progress that requires us to understand the multiple purposes it serves.

Rachel S. White is assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Sarah Stitzlein is professor at University of Cincinnati. Kathleen Knight Abowitz is professor at Miami University. Derek Gottlieb is associate professor at University of Northern Colorado. Jack Schneider is associate professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell.

In a recent article in Education Next (“Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing,” Summer 2022), I argued the Covid-19 pandemic has made salient a critical flaw in our public education system—that our dominant school governance model is largely designed to serve the interests of adults, rather than the students public schools actually serve. In reviewing a large body of recent academic literature on this topic, I concluded this is largely because only adults vote in local school board elections and the subset of adults with the most skin in the game—parents of school-aged kids—represent a relatively small voting bloc, allowing other interests to play an outsized and often pernicious role in the process, creating perverse incentives for elected officeholders.

In their response, the authors of “Are Locally-Elected School Boards Really Failing?” speak up in defense of this governance model. Their arguments are nuanced and thoughtful, but ultimately unpersuasive. And while elements of their critique do highlight subtleties that deserved more careful consideration and discussion in my original essay, I believe they also largely misunderstand and this misrepresent my key arguments. So I’m grateful for the opportunity to respond.

Reviewing My Argument

In the authors’ telling, my argument is that local politics allows “the moral concerns of adults” to interfere with the “the educational needs and interests of students.” And in its place, that I advocate for abolishing locally elected school boards (in their words, “scrap[ping] democratic school governance”) and replacing them with a market-based model that “will diminish the means available to local and regional communities for developing shared visions for student growth and flourishing in light of local conditions, public priorities, and assets.” Yet neither is a fair nor accurate summary of my position.

While I do mention “moral concerns of adults” in tracing the historical origins of our system of local school control—dating back to the Old Deluder Satan Act passed by the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s—my criticism of the current system is much broader. It is not just moral concerns but also adult partisanship and racial politics that have infiltrated modern education policy debates, and I argue that these developments have come at the expense of education quality. Such dynamics were clearly on display during the pandemic, when the partisanship of (mostly childless) adults rather than local public health conditions were the single best predictor of which public schools reopened for in-person instruction at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year. I suspect few readers would agree that a system in which the political agendas of adults drive education policy, often to the detriment of kids, is a model of healthy and legitimate “value pluralism” the authors seem to endorse.

In advocating for reforms, my prescriptions are also relatively light touch. As I write in the conclusion of my original essay, “Such reforms should include holding school-board elections on cycle, when participation among parents is highest; reworking accountability systems to ensure that district-performance ratings emphasize each school’s contribution to student learning rather than the demographic mix of students it serves; and timing the release of school ratings to coincide with school-board election campaigns.” This is hardly a wish list of a market-obsessed neoliberal out to dismantle public education and destroy local control.

Yes, Education is Multi-Dimensional, But…

A key premise of my essay is that improving student academic achievement is a central (but not exclusive) purpose of public education. This position is perhaps most eloquently summarized by a recent memo written by a school governance coach working with the San Francisco Board of Education:

First, school systems exist to improve student outcomes. That is the only reason school systems exist. School systems do not exist to have great buildings, happy parents, balanced budgets, satisfied teachers, student lunches, employment, or anything else. Those are all means—and incredibly important and valuable means at that—but none of them are the ends; none of those are why we have school systems. They are all inputs, not outcomes. None of those are measures of what students know or can do. School systems exist for one reason and one reason only: to improve student outcomes.

For those who disagree with the above premise—which perhaps includes the authors to whom I’m responding—the remainder of my original essay and the policy prescriptions that follow from it are probably not their cup of tea. Fortunately, I believe that both stated and revealed preferences of most voters are on my side.

For example, according to the latest Education Next public opinion survey, two-thirds of Americans say that schools should prioritize academic achievement over student “social and emotional wellbeing.” (Although these numbers dipped temporarily during the pandemic, they never fell below 50 percent.) In her analysis of California school board elections, political scientist Julia Payson also found that voters hold school board members accountable for student academic achievement as measured by test scores—but only during high-turnout, on-cycle elections when the electorate is most representative and when parent participation in local elections is highest.

To be sure, test scores are hardly the only metric of a quality education. Indeed, recent research suggests that schools’ contribution to non-cognitive outcomes—skills such as self-regulation, executive function, and persistence—are probably even more important determinants of students’ long-term success. And there is certainly room for reasonable disagreement about the optimal way to balance academic considerations with other dimensions of student well-being—such as emotional and psychological—and collective societal goals, such as promoting citizenship and pro-social values. However, few would argue that academic considerations, as measured by test scores, should play absolutely zero role in public education. That these considerations do appear to play zero role in low-turnout, off-cycle local school board elections—the modal system currently in place—is thus strong grounds for concern about the health of local democratic institutions.

Perhaps even more importantly, metrics constructed from test scores already play a big role in other, non-electoral contexts. Parents look to them when making school enrollment decisions. Homebuyers look to them when shopping for homes. Unfortunately, the most salient existing measures, which focus on proficiency rates or student achievement levels, do not actually isolate aspects of student academic performance over which schools have control. Instead, they largely reflect the demographic composition of students local schools serve. Developing and publicizing alternatives that increase the salience of school contributions to student learning, which I advocated for in my original essay, offer an important improvement on the current metrics, which encourage racial and class segregation and exclusionary school attendance boundaries.

Value Pluralism or Adult Interests?

The absence of any relationship between student achievement and most local school board election outcomes does not appear to be driven by consensus among parents or voters about the (lack of) importance of test scores. The authors offer a second explanation: students and their parents are not the only stakeholders that local school districts are expected to serve. They write:

Students aren’t the only ones who benefit from public education. Local and regional communities have a serious stake in their schools, and gauge their success far more broadly than can be captured by student standardized test scores. Public schools are valued for many reasons, among which is their function as community hubs, providing a means to discover shared educational interests that are locally and regionally distinct. … School boards are a form of governance that enables us to work through our legitimate value pluralism from community to community, allowing localities to weigh and balance academic performance among the other educational goods valued by the school or district.

While the authors are almost certainly right in a descriptive sense that school boards must weigh multiple, often-competing considerations, I believe this is a bug, not a feature, of our existing governance system. To understand why, consider applying their argument to other policy domains.

Suppose that a municipal water system is constantly producing outbreaks of waterborne illness, such as cholera or dysentery, because local public officials believe the primary purpose of the system is to provide well-paying job opportunities for favored constituents, not delivering clean and safe drinking water to local residents. (This is not an uncommon occurrence in many developing countries, where government jobs are seen primarily as a form of political patronage, not a mechanism for providing vital public services.) Or suppose that the local fire department cannot respond in a timely manner to calls for service for most residents, causing building to burn down, because too many agency resources are diverted to keeping open under-utilized fire stations in sparsely populated parts of town, where fire houses are considered important “community hubs.”

Or take the authors’ own example, San Antonio Regional Hospital, whose board of directors is made up of largely non-medical professionals. Suppose the board spent most of its time ensuring that doctors are satisfied with their pay, that insurance companies aren’t complaining about billing rates, and that various politically connected local contractors are getting their fair share of hospital construction contracts, while spending almost no time examining data on patient health outcomes and preventable medical errors. Imagine further that the board continues to be reelected—and, indeed, many board members run unopposed—even though the hospital routinely provides substandard medical care to its patients. (This is obviously a hypothetical; I have no special insights about the quality of care provided by the San Antonio Regional Hospital!)

I suspect few readers would view these scenarios as evidence of vibrant and healthy local democracy, characterized by “legitimate value pluralism.” Yet they are rough approximations of local education governance in many communities. What would be characterized as misguided priorities and instances of interest group capture in almost any other policy domain are routinely accepted as legitimate considerations in education policy debates.

Against Complacency in Education Governance

In my reading of the authors’ response to my original essay, I am struck by what comes across as complacency with the status quo. “There is nothing to see here folks,” the authors seem to say, “move along.”

That school board members are reelected regardless of how well local schools are teaching students to read or do math must mean that the community just doesn’t care about test scores. (Never mind that nearly three-quarters of voters support annual standardized testing.) That many school board incumbents face no opponent must mean that voters are happy with their current performance. (Never mind this is the same argument dictators who win reelection with 97 percent of the vote often make.) That most voters seem to like local democratic control in surveys is evidence that this is the optimal way to govern public education. (Never mind that the majority of the same voters also endorse alternatives such as home schooling and many of the market mechanisms the authors deride, such as universal school vouchers.)

The bottom line for me is simple: If the authors are correct and current education governance institutions work just fine, then the modest reforms I recommend in my essay—on-cycle elections, improving academic performance metrics to isolate school contributions to learning from demographic composition, and making these academic measures more salient—won’t matter much. But if I’m right, reforms that increase the political influence of parents, give them more proportionate voice in local democracy, and better align the electoral incentives of officeholders with the academic interests of the students their schools serve could make a big positive difference. With the downside risks seemingly minimal and the upside potential significant, it is hard to justify complacency over modest but meaningful governance reform.

Vladimir Kogan is associate professor at The Ohio State University.