Stanley Kurtz writes for National Review Online about strategies conservatives can employ to regain a foothold in public schools.
The most powerful steps we could take to wrest public schools from the hands of the woke would be for states to move school board elections “on-cycle” (to federal Election Day) and allow political parties to nominate the candidates.
A few states do this now, yet by far most school board elections remain off-cycle and “nonpartisan.” The result is that a great many conservative districts are run by progressive Democratic school boards. That’s because low-turnout, low-information, off-cycle school board elections are dominated by highly organized and self-interested teachers’ unions.
The current system also deprives the conservative half of the country of a farm team of education experts, administrators, and higher-office-holders-in-the-making, who could counterbalance products of the monolithically progressive ed schools. That ed school–produced progressive education establishment now dominates local, state, and national education bureaucracies, even in red districts and states.
You may have heard something about moving school board elections on-cycle and listing party affiliation, when the pushback against woke schooling began to catalyze several years ago. Yet even that tiny blip of publicity has by now fallen off the radar screen. The discrepancy between the significance of this proposed electoral shift and its near complete absence from public discussion is striking.
A big reason for the silence is that proposed changes to the structure of school board elections are easily lost track of when dispersed across 50 states and thousands of local districts. Yet there are plenty of issues — abortion, gun control, health care, immigration, climate/energy — where interest groups track, publicize, and discuss trends and developments at the state and local levels. When it comes to proposals to change our way of electing school boards, no one — at least on the conservative side — seems to be systematically following the issue.
