A new report published on June 5 by the Brookings Institution, Local control, national conflict: School boards in the COVID 19 and cultural war era, analyzes what happened during the turbulent first half of this decade.
Those who served as trustees from the start of 2020 onward are sure to recall hearing about, if not experiencing firsthand, heated exchanges about school reopenings, mask mandates and vaccination requirements; critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion; transgender athletes and policing reform.
Relying on media reports, a survey of board members and school board election results, researchers found that while conflicts over COVID-19 and culture war issues were widespread, not all communities were impacted to the same extent.
“It’s been a period marked by conflicts over schools and responses to the pandemic, and then a series of cultural issues involving race, gender and sexuality. We believe that history will look back on this period as an important one for U.S. school boards, so we wanted to document what happened in a systematic way,” Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, said during a June 8 webinar about the report’s findings. “What we see is the tensions between board members and their communities spiked nearly everywhere, but conflicts played out differently across the country. For example, tensions were especially high in politically purple areas and in large districts, and different issues emerged in areas with different political orientations.”
Key findings detailed in the report show that:
- School board members across many types of communities and school districts reported sharp increases in conflict between school boards and community members during the pandemic — conflicts that have only partially subsided in the years that followed.
- While conflicts emerged across the country, they did not take the same form everywhere. For instance, mask mandates generated disproportionate conflict in red and purple areas, while debates over school resource officers and student discipline were more prominent in blue areas. The nature of conflict differed by community, with politically purple areas and large districts experiencing the most visible upheaval.
- Heightened conflict did not translate to measurable changes in voter turnout in school board elections, suggesting limited broad‑based political mobilization, even as a smaller subset of residents engaged intensely in school board meetings.
- Any single source of information on school board conflicts during this era provides, at best, an incomplete picture of what happened. Media headlines might suggest that all school boards were deeply embroiled in controversy, while systematic media analyses give the impression that conflicts were less common. Additionally, survey responses indicate major changes in community engagement, but election data shows relative stability in voter and candidate engagement.
“All told, our findings suggest there may be no singular story of what happened to public education during the pandemic and culture war era,” the report states. “This was a tumultuous time, but the conflicts that arose were complex and varied, with greater intensity and more lasting impacts in some parts of the country than others. Some of those conflicts were harmful — and appear to have had lasting effects. Others were likely healthy, an intended outcome of our decentralized, democratic governance model.”
