We analyze the most comprehensive dataset on U.S. school board elections. We find that nearly half of races go uncontested and that incumbents are reelected more than 80% of the time when they run. Because many incumbents retire instead of running for another term, however, turnover is high (with 53% of incumbents replaced in a typical election cycle). School board turnover is also only weakly related to student learning rates. These dynamics-high turnover disconnected from school performance challenges-occur across both urban and non-urban districts, regardless of student demographics and local media environments. Together, these results suggest that local democracy produces high leadership churn and minimal incentives to improve student learning, two findings that can inform debates regarding the benefits and costs of local democratic governance.

We examine how the timing of local elections affects the success of minority candidates, who remain woefully underrepresented in public office. We build on research showing that concurrent elections narrow racial gaps in voter turnout and leverage changes in the timing of local elections in California. Our analysis shows that filling local offices in November of even years increases minority officeholding, at least for some groups. The results demonstrate how, when, and for whom election timing matters. Latinos gain most, potentially at the expense of White and, to a lesser degree, Black representation. An investigation of potential mechanisms suggests that these effects depend on group population size and the magnitude of the turnout changes. An increase in the number of co-ethnic candidates running also appears to contribute to the representational benefits of on-cycle elections. Finally, the effects are most pronounced during presidential elections, when turnout improvements are largest.

School board candidates supported by local teachers' unions overwhelmingly win, and we examine the causes and consequences of the "teachers' union premium" in these elections. First, we show that union endorsement information increases voter support. Although the magnitude of this effect varies across ideological and partisan subgroups, an endorsement rarely hurts a candidate's prospects with the electorate. Second, we benchmark the size of the endorsement premium to other well-known determinants of vote choice in local elections. Perhaps surprisingly, we show the effect can be as large as the impact of shared partisanship, and substantially larger than the boost from endorsements provided by other stakeholders. Finally, examining real-world endorsement decisions, we find that union support for incumbents hinges on self-interested pecuniary considerations and is unaffected by performance in improving student academic outcomes. The divergence between what endorsements mean and how voters interpret them has troubling normative democratic implications.

How do adult "culture wars" in education affect student learning in the classroom? I explore this question by combining information on nearly 500 school district political controversies with data on state test scores. Leveraging variation in the location and timing of these events as the basis for a difference-in-differences design, I show that student achievement declines in the wake of adult political battles. The effects are concentrated in math achievement -- the equivalent of approximately 10 days of lost learning -- and persist for at least four years. The declines are particularly pronounced for controversies surrounding racial issues and the teaching of evolution. These results suggest that well-intentioned education advocacy efforts focused on salient social justice issues may backfire, producing in unintended negative impacts on student achievement, and raise new questions about the adequacy of local democratic processes for the governance of public schools.

At last count, U.S. voters were responsible for directly electing more than 510,000 public officials. Few of these contests feature lively campaigns or attract substantial media attention, often leaving the average voter to make decisions with limited information. We argue that the cognitive strategies voters use to make decisions in these low-information contests depend in part on the informational cues printed on their ballot-in particular, the presence or absence of partisan labels. Using two "Who Said What?" experiments, we show that voters engage in social categorization-and do so on the basis of race and ethnicity when candidates differ in their demographic background. We also find, however, that the availability of party labels shapes the degree to which voters categorize candidates based on their race and ethnicity. A central implication of our results is that efforts to increase minority representation should look beyond electoral institutions-such as district versus at-large elections-to the information printed on the ballot itself.

Low and uneven turnout is a serious problem for local democracy. Fortunately, one simple reform—shifting the timing of local elections so they are held on the same day as national contests—can substantially increase participation. Considerable research shows that on-cycle November elections generally double local voter turnout compared with stand-alone local contests. But does higher turnout mean a more representative electorate? On that critical question, the evidence is slim and mixed. We combine information on election timing with detailed microtargeting data that includes voter demographic information to examine how election timing influences voter composition in city elections. We find that moving to on-cycle elections in California leads to an electorate that is considerably more representative in terms of race, age, and partisanship—especially when these local elections coincide with a presidential election. Our results suggest that on-cycle elections can improve local democracy.

We conduct a randomized control trial to assess the efficacy of utilizing modified introductory language in student evaluations of instruction to mitigate implicit bias. Students are randomly assigned within courses to three treatment arms and shown so-called "cheap talk" scripts referencing implicit bias, the high stakes associated with student evaluations, and the combination of the two. We analyze both the impact assignment of the treatment has on completion rates as well as the effect on average instructor rating. Our analysis indicates assignment has statistically significant effects on the likelihood of response for those assigned the combined treatment, though the effects are heterogeneous with respect to both instructor and student race/ethnicity and gender. We further find the high-stakes treatment leads to higher average scores for racial/ethnic minority instructors with no significant effects from the implicit bias and combined scripts.

Student surveys are widely used to evaluate university teaching and increasingly adopted at the K-12 level, although there remains considerable debate about what they measure. Much disagreement focuses on the well-documented correlation between student grades and their evaluations of instructors. Using individual-level data from 19,000 evaluations of 700 course sections at a flagship public university, we leverage both within-course and within-student variation to rule out popular explanations for this correlation. Specifically, we show that the relationship cannot be explained by instructional quality, workload, grading stringency, or student sorting into courses. Instead, student grade satisfaction—regardless of the underlying cause of the grades—appears to be an important driver of course evaluations. We also present results from a randomized intervention with potential to reduce the magnitude of the association by reminding students to focus on relevant teaching and learning considerations and by increasing the salience of the stakes attached to evaluations for instructor careers. However, these prove ineffective in muting the relationship between grades and student scores.

In 2005, Missouri and Tennessee tightened eligibility for their public health insurance programs, resulting in widespread coverage losses. Leveraging county-level variation in subsequent disenrollment, I show that voters in Tennessee punished the incumbent governor for the Medicaid cuts. In Missouri, by contrast, disenrollment had no impact on the subsequent gubernatorial election but did increase support for Democrats in 2006 state legislative elections, possibly due to the strategic entry and exit of candidates. In both states, the loss of Medicaid coverage was associated with lower support for Democratic presidential candidates, although these declines appear part of a longer-term trend that preceded the coverage loss. The results speak to the potential political costs of welfare spending cuts and the electoral consequences of reducing income-targeted social programs.

Political scientists have largely overlooked the democratic challenges inherent in the governance of U.S. public education-despite profound implications for educational delivery and, ultimately, social mobility and economic growth. In this study, we consider whether the interests of adult voters who elect local school boards are likely to be aligned with the needs of the students their districts educate. Specifically, we compare voters and students in four states on several policy-relevant dimensions. Using official voter turnout records and rich microtargeting data, we document considerable demographic differences between voters who participate in school board elections and the students attending the schools that boards oversee. These gaps are most pronounced in majority nonwhite jurisdictions and school districts with the largest racial achievement gaps. Our novel analysis provides important context for understanding the political pressures facing school boards and their likely role in perpetuating educational and, ultimately, societal inequality.

Growing evidence suggests that pocketbook considerations influence voting behavior in the United States and other developed countries and that incumbents can use targeted government benefits to win voter support. It remains unclear whether the general relationship between government spending and incumbent support also holds for means-tested welfare programs, however. I contribute to this empirical literature by taking advantage of the decade-long rollout of the American Food Stamp Program. The staggered timing of local program implementation allows me to credibly estimate the causal effect of this new benefit on election outcomes. Overall, I find that Democrats—at the center of the program’s enacting coalition—gained votes when the program was implemented locally, apparently through mobilization of new supporters rather than the conversion of political opponents.

We employ a regression discontinuity design leveraging close school board elections to investigate how the racial and ethnic composition of California school boards affects school district administration and student achievement. We find some evidence that increases in minority representation lead to cumulative achievement gains of approximately 0.1 standard deviations among minority students by the sixth post-election year. These gains do not come at the expense of white students’ academic performance, which also appears to improve. Turning to the policy mechanisms that may explain these effects, we find that an increase in minority representation leads to greater capital funding and an increase in the proportion of district principals who are non-white. We find no significant effects of minority representation on school segregation, the reclassification of English Language Learners, or teacher staffing. Word count: 9,975 †Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, kogan.18@osu.edu ‡Professor, John Glenn College of Public Affairs, Ohio State University, lavertu.1@osu.edu §Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, zachary.f.peskowitz@emory.edu, Corresponding Author ∗The authors are listed in alphabetical order. This work was generously supported by the Spencer Foundation through a Lyle Spencer Research Award. We thank Deven Carlson, Jason Grissom, George Krause, Robert Lowry, Michael Leo Owens, Julia Payson, Beth Reingold, and seminar participants at the University of Georgia, Vanderbilt, Duke, UCLA, and Emory and the APPAM, Boston University Local Political Economy, and State Politics and Policy conferences for helpful comments on this project. We thank Madhu Kumar for excellent research assistance. Public school districts play a critical governance role in the United States. There were over 3.6 million public school teachers in 2016 and school districts spent a total of $634 billion in 2013-2014, representing more than 10 percent of overall government expenditures. The vast majority of these school districts are governed by locally elected boards that determine education policies. The decisions these boards make—including negotiating teacher contracts, choosing curriculum used in the classroom, setting tax rates, approving budgets, and adopting disciplinary policies—have direct consequences for the quality of education students receive. Despite improvements in the overall academic performance of public school students in recent decades (Rindermann and Thompson 2013), the U.S. education system continues to face large and stubbornly persistent gaps in achievement between white and minority students (Lee 2002). Although the achievement gaps between minority and white students have narrowed in recent years, large differences in performance remain (Clotfeleter, Ladd and Vigdor 2009, Reardon and Galindo 2009, Reardon and Portilla 2016). Some of this gap is undoubtedly due to socioeconomic differences and other structural factors beyond the control of schools, but the actions local districts take can have an impact (Hanushek and Rivkin 2009). In this study, we examine whether (and under what conditions) increasing minority representation on school boards leads to meaningful changes in the administration of local school districts and, ultimately, academic achievement—particularly among minority students. Survey results illustrate that there are important differences in education policy preferThese numbers are from the National Center for Education Statistics. Total governmental expenditures in 2014 were approximately $5.9 trillion according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In 2015, only 10.3 percent of elementary and secondary students attended private schools and approximately 5.4 percent of public school students attended charter schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.