The School Board Election Revolt Continues
Challenges to union control of local school governance were often successful.
The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
It hasn’t received much attention since Election Day, but local school board races across the country continue to show welcome political ferment. More parents are refusing to let unions dominate education governance without a fight.
Exhibit A is Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis made a special cause of school board races. “We got involved to help candidates who were fighting the machine, fighting the lock-downers, fighting the forced-maskers, fighting the people that want to indoctrinate our kids,” he said in August.
Of the 34 candidates Mr. DeSantis endorsed in 2022, 29 have won. The parental-rights organization Moms for Liberty counts six Florida school boards that flipped to parental-rights majorities. That includes Miami-Dade County, where Joe Biden beat Donald Trump53.4% to 46.1% in 2020, and where Mr. DeSantis made two successful endorsements.
On Nov. 8 all nine school board seats were up for election in Charleston County, S.C., which went for Mr. Biden 55.5% to 42.6% in 2020. Moms for Liberty endorsed candidates for eight of the seats, and five won. One seat is still up for grabs after a candidate who wasn’t endorsed by Moms for Liberty won but said she had withdrawn from the race and left the state.
Tara Wood, the chair of Charleston County’s Moms for Liberty chapter, said parents wanted the schools to focus on essentials, but the old school board members were “all about social and racial justice” and championed “programs and curriculum that has nothing to do with reading, writing and doing math.”
Moms for Liberty says it also helped flip the school boards in South Carolina’s Berkeley County and the York County Rock Hill School District, New Jersey’s Cape May County and North Carolina’s New Hanover County. At least 114 of the 270 school board candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed won on Nov. 8.
The parental revolt even spread to Minnesota despite opposition from teachers union. Denise Specht, the president of the teacher’s union Education Minnesota, claimed in September that its “political program has been successful between 80 and 90 percent of the time when our locals make endorsements in school board races and carry out an aggressive voter contact plan.”
Yet 49 of 119 school board candidates endorsed by the Minnesota Parents Alliance won on Nov. 8. The alliance was formed in response to parental concern about learning loss and a desire to be more involved in children’s education. “The fact that our candidates did as well as they did” shows that “the parent movement really transcends politics,” says executive director Cristine Trooien.
November’s parental-rights outlier was Michigan. The state “had abortion on the ballot, and that turned out Democrats,” said Ryan Girdusky, the founder of the 1776 Project PAC, which opposes critical race theory in school curricula. Nationwide only 20 of the 53 school board and state superintendent candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project PAC won on Nov. 8, with the majority of their losses in Michigan. Yet in total this year 72 school-board candidates and one state superintendent candidate won among the 125 candidates the group endorsed.
Ballotpedia has identified 1,800 school board races where the Covid response or teachings on race, sex and gender were campaign issues. By Nov. 28 it had identified 1,556 winners. Some 31% of the identified victors opposed woke curricula or the Covid response, with some 37% expressing mixed or unclear opinions.
