Q&A of the Day – Success in Flipping School Boards
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Social: @brianmuddradio
iHeartRadio: Use the Talkback feature – the microphone button on our station’s page in the iHeart app.
Today’s Entry: Happy New Year & welcome back! It’s great to hear you live once again. You said something this morning which I’d like you to expand on. You mentioned that 70% of the time there were challenges to school board control they were successful (at least I thought that’s what I heard). If you could please elaborate. Thanks!
Bottom Line: I totally get the surprise at hearing the 70% figure – it pleasantly surprised me when I found the info myself. Today’s note is in response to something I cited in my Top 3 Takeaways yesterday. Here’s an excerpt: According to the 1776 PAC, starting with Virginia school boards last year, 100 school boards across the country have flipped from essentially being controlled by teachers' unions, back to parents who are more concerned with reading, writing and arithmetic than say gender fluidity discussions in elementary school. In fact, according to the 1776 PAC, the success rate for flipping school boards over the past year plus was approximately 70% when real concerted efforts were made to flip local school boards. In Florida, Governor DeSantis endorsed 36 challenging school board candidates across the state as part of the effort to flip local school boards. 30 of them, or 83%, won – flipping numerous school boards across the state. So, in elaborating about the 70% success rate, and what really making an effort to flip a school board looks like...
The success in flipping school boards across the country – with Florida having experienced the biggest shift of all – didn't just happen. It required a three-pronged effort. Candidate recruitment, campaign coordination, funding. While all three of those ingredients were key in the shift, we’ve seen – the biggest is the first. People who raised their hands and were willing to run. After all, if you don’t have candidates challenging the incumbents, you’ve already lost. And historically that’d been a huge part of the story. Over the previous decade the re-elect rate for school board races had been 82%...meaning incumbents almost always won. But a huge part of that story is how many, or how few as the case happened to be, were even being challenged. Prior to 2021, a whooping 39% of incumbents running for reelection to a school board ran unopposed. So independent of other factors, simply running candidates in more elections was bound to produce some different results. But the proliferation of Critical Race Theory and gender fluidity discussion in the classroom served as major change catalysts. This as parents across the country, commonly watching and learning along with their kids during the pandemic, were often concerned, if not horrified by what they were seeing and hearing.
As I’ve long pointed out, and reiterated to a certain extent yesterday, our classrooms have long been a battleground, and the teachers' unions had firmly seized control by 1980 with the Department of Education. No there weren’t Critical Race Theory and gender fluidity discussions with kindergarteners back then, back then it was incrementalism which eventually led to it. The biggest difference with the advent of CRT and gender fluidity being pushed by teachers' unions, a la, the American Federation of Teachers – the parent of every teachers’ union in the state of Florida – was that parents started paying attention. And that led to grassroots organizations like Florida based Moms for Liberty and the aforementioned New York based, 1776 Project PAC. These groups helped identify and encourage candidates who supported parental rights in education and led to the next two keys in the success in flipping school boards. Campaign coordination and funding. And really, all three go hand-in-hand. Commonly well-intentioned parents who’d have been interested in running for school board, didn’t because they didn’t know how to run a campaign, including how to finance it. Organizations like Moms for Liberty and 1776 have gone a long way in helping fill that gap. And that takes us to the success rates.
The 1776 Project has specifically focused on attempting to flip school boards in nine states since 2021. Those states: Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia. Their strategy was to attempt to focus on moving the needle in a small group of states (which included large states like Florida and Texas), rather than attempting to cover the whole country at once and perhaps not have as meaningful of an impact. The success spoke for itself with 70% of their endorsed school board candidates winning – which again, is all the more remarkable when you consider the incumbent re-elect rate of 82%. Moms for Liberty went even bigger, endorsing candidates across 15 states at a 74% rate (there often was overlap between the two organizations). While Governor DeSantis received a lot of attention for having 30 of his 36 endorsed candidates for school board win last year – which is hugely impressive – it's worth nothing that many of those candidates wouldn’t have been on ballots and/or money to run campaigns without the work of grassroots organizations assisting in the first place.
It’s my hope that the progress that’s already been made is just the beginning, and that going forward we’ll see greater engagement at all local levels of government. Conservatives flipped two of three Palm Beach County Commissioner seats up for election last November. The view of the possible is considerable if we keep the momentum up on all fronts and recruit good candidates to run for all local offices. Many communities have elections throughout the Palm Beaches on March 14th. Now is the time to begin to engage with what’s happening in your community.