Partisanship and Professionalization:
School board decision-making in the midst of a pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, school board members played a prominent role in deciding the reopening plans of school districts across the country. As a result, school boards have seen a dramatic increase in workload to deal with an ever-changing and increasingly complex environment. Our central goal is to understand how the nationalized, polarized political context of pandemic responses shaped the decision-making processes of individual school board members and who they trusted for information. Using an original large-scale survey of individual school board members conducted across 13 states, we find partisan differences in both how members see the role of the board as well as which sources members trusted. Members who identified as Republican were more likely to see that board members should be responsible for developing re-opening plans as opposed to health professionals. Republican members were also more likely to say that members should follow their own conscience instead of following what the district wants when there is a conflict. We found large partisan differences in trust in sources.  If the other party was in power at the state level, the school board members from opposing parties had less trust in that source.

We would like to thank the Spencer Foundation for funding this project.

The results of the survey can be found in the appendix.

A draft of the paper can be found here: Partisanship and Professionalization