Don't Forget About School Boards
It's the only way to turn public schools around
Recently, I had the pleasure of appearing on the DonorsTrust “Giving Ventures” podcast with Peter Lipsett to talk about my work at the 1776 Project Foundation. I was preceded on the podcast by David Hoyt, who is the Executive Director of School Boards for Academic Excellence — a reform-minded group aiming to supplant the State School Board Associations — and I couldn’t recommend them highly enough.
It’s more important than ever to engage with local school boards, especially since the public school system is facing a rapid decline in many parts of the country. The National Center of Education Statistics released their Report on the Condition of Education 2024 back in May, which included figures like:
The 2023 NAEP LTT reading and mathematics assessments had declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in math compared to 2020.
Compared to the 2012 results, reading scores have dropped an average of 7 points, along with a 14 point drop in math.
“In 2022, overall school enrollment of young children, as well as public elementary and secondary school enrollment, increased from the prior year but remained lower than before the coronavirus pandemic.”
The American Enterprise Institute has done extremely interesting work on tracking chronic absenteeism rates by state, with their most recent update back in September 2024.
Chronic absenteeism — missing 10 school days or more per year — is a huge problem following the COVID-19 pandemic. The rate nearly doubled from 15% to 28% from 2019 to 2022, and even several years later, it remains above 20% in many states. It’s also detrimental for students. The more school days they miss, the more they fall behind, which in turn disincentivizes many from returning to school or finishing their work. This vicious pattern must be stamped out — and AEI has been doing a lot of research to support it.
There are many other problems facing public schools, and each one could be its own separate article. Reading and math comprehension scores are struggling to recover post-COVID, along with chronic absenteeism rates. School districts are facing budget shortfalls after the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) run out. The (lack of) discipline in schools is also a growing concern for all major parties: students, parents, and teachers.
Local school districts are arguably the first and most important layer of governance to deal with these issues. States may have the constitutional remit, but it’s the school district that levies taxes, sets budgets, implements programs, and drafts policy that affect everyone involved in the school system. School districts are often the largest employer in rural areas as well. There’s such a wide intersection of policy issues that it can be overwhelming for board members, especially newly elected members, to get up to speed and make a positive impact.
That’s why I was extremely happy to get on this podcast and break down how we’re going to fix that at the 1776 Project Foundation. There’s a lot more I can (and will) say on this topic in the future.
I’ve broken out the transcript for my segment of the podcast (which starts roughly around 17:30 on the embed).
Transcript
PL: Next is a group that says public schools are too important for conservatives to give up on. The 1776 Project Foundation is the 501c3 offshoot of the 1776 Project PAC, which focuses on electing conservatives to school boards across the country.
The foundation serves as a think tank for developing and promoting better ideas for public schools that challenge critical race theory, promote parental rights, and remove political ideology from the classroom. Aiden Buzzetti is President of the foundation and joins me. Aiden, thanks for being here.
AB: Thank you for inviting me on.
PL: We're at a time when there's so many conservatives who are antagonistic to public schools. I've meant to look at how many Giving Ventures podcasts we've done focused on alternative schooling models, micro schools, classical charter schools, and all these things, but here we are talking public schools today.
All public schools all the time. Your work says we shouldn't cede ground on public schools quite yet. Talk to me about that.
AB: It's very important that conservatives don't give up the fight for public schools. From a purely numeric standpoint, 80% of students in the United States go to public school. Even in states where school choice has been implemented or passed or is popular, a lot of parents still choose districts based on the quality of public schools. It's the base option for parents and students all across the country.
It's inconceivable that we would cede that ground to ideological actors and people who don't understand how bad the education system is.
If we can take it back, if we can fix the way we teach our kids, then we should see tremendous improvement across the board for our parents and kids.
PL: One of the ways your broader organization did that was through the political process. We focus more on the c3s here, but it's worth noting this really is an offshoot of that political project, the 1776 Project PAC. Maybe speak briefly about the work of the PAC, and then I'm curious how that evolved to add the c3 component.
AB: The 1776 Project PAC started in 2021, founded by Ryan Girdusky, who's also the founder of the Foundation. He has this story about how he found out his nephew had been given the book 'Race Cars' in public school, which is a book about police brutality. It was given out in the classroom, and he thought that was unacceptable, and the schools weren't being responsive. The school board wasn't being responsive. He did more research and found out it was a huge issue.
2021 was the year of mask mandates and lockdowns, and many parents were focused on schools in general. Over the last few years, we've done over 400 school board races. We have raised millions of dollars a year from donations of $20 or less. It's a very salient movement.
What we found doing all these board races was that winning candidates would reach out to us and say, 'Thank you so much for the support. What do I do now? What should I be focusing on now?' At the time, there wasn't really an organization dedicated to engaging these board members. If they were, they were very hyperlocal, which is good. But we realized these school board candidates and members we had worked with had no national apparatus.
They had no idea what other school board members, what other school districts were doing, good or bad, across the country. So we started this foundation because we want to fill that gap. We want to provide hands-on resources for school board members interested in reforming public education, interested in these solutions and ideas, for board members across the country. And really challenging the status quo - we shouldn't just accept that public education is as bad as it is.
PL: I'm curious, on a macro level, why does anybody run for school board anymore? It seems like a thankless job. It's hard. My mom was on school board outside of Atlanta in the nineties. It was awful then. It seems awful now. Why are these folks running?
AB: For a lot of these candidates, it really is a labor of love. Most of the people I interviewed were first-time candidates. Many were parents. Some were grandparents. They all worked full time. Many didn't really know how elections worked. They didn't know the stakes or the time it took. Some people adapt really well to that, and some don't.
But people run for school board fundamentally because they care about their communities. They care about their children and want to make sure their area has the absolute best education they can possibly offer. It is usually a completely unpaid job, or very little paid, in addition to being now a very divisive issue in these communities. The people who choose to run for school board, win, and decide to stay on for a long period of time - they just care. They are really invested in the future and in turning everything around in a positive way over the next decade.
PL: Let's get into the meat of your work. As I understand it, there are three main verticals: fellowships, outreach, and model policy. Maybe you could disabuse me if there's something else I'm forgetting, but talk about each of those in turn and what 1776 Project Foundation is doing to help get these school board members more adequately equipped.
AB: The fellowships portion of our programming is intuitive. We want to find some of the most innovative voices in education for reforming public education and bring them in to output research, original research when possible, and other materials that can keep this conversation in the movement going, focused on public schools. There are many aspects of the education movement being debated. We're focused on public schools.
We're focused on not abandoning the 80% of students in this country that go to public school, so we want to find board members, previous administrators, public policy experts, and create this environment where we have a wealth of knowledge and research to pass on to board members. Outreach is functionally the outgrowth of the fellowship. When we produce research and materials they can use, we want to distribute those as far as possible to as many school board members as possible. One of the main things we've been distributing has been our First 100 Days handbook, written by sitting school board members.
It's as broad as it can possibly be — because some specifics depend state by state — but fundamentally covers the basics of being a board member.
If you ran for school board and knew nothing about how it worked, this is the playbook to make sure you are as successful as possible and that you don't get misled by your superintendent, board attorney, or school administrators.
The model policy is us working with board members and our legal center to create or take the ideas we research, take ideas from other groups doing amazing work on education, and create tangible policies, whether at the board level or state level, so we can have statutes and precedents we can show other school board members how it's been working over the long term.
PL: Is there any work you're trying to do at the federal level, or is it really all at the state and local? Maybe there's no reason to do it at the federal level.
AB: The federal level is certainly important, simply because of the amount of money the federal government pours into states and local school districts, and those often come with strings. But there's a lot that school boards can do, and states can do because states have the original constitutional remit of education. Focusing on the board level and state level is where we really want to be. If we can loosen up these federal strings, especially the strings that tie programs to diversity and equity initiatives, that will give these boards a free hand to try out new policies, but they still need to have those policies ready in the first place.
PL: How much do the teachers' unions stand in the way of this? Are they an obstacle at this point, or do they have much interaction with the school boards?
AB: In some cases, the teachers' unions have offices on the school campus, on public school campuses. It's not everywhere, but it speaks to the broader influence of unions in the public education system. Some states like Florida have done a fairly good job at putting pressure on the unions, making them decertify if a certain percentage of teachers don't belong to the union anymore.
Having legislation like that passed in other states would certainly diminish their influence, but the teachers' union is ubiquitous.
The National School Board Associations are pretty tight with them as well, and they often provide the main policy support and legal support for these boards. You can't separate them from the public schools right now, but it is possible for boards to fight back. They regularly spend millions of dollars on these board races.
Whenever we did political work - separate organization - whenever we would invest money in a race and support people, the union, if they were involved in that race, would usually come back with twice, three times as much money that our political action committee spent, not including all the money they'd already given to school board members in the first place.
So they are all over the place, and we are going to have to fight very hard to diminish their influence, but this is part of the work we're doing.
PL: What is the reach right now? I'm trying to think of it in comparison to School Boards for Academic Excellence that we also talk to. You're more of almost a federal think tank, but working at the state and local level, if that comparison seems apt enough. So what is the reach? How many school boards are you working with, or is it really more an individual candidate thing versus the school boards? How do you think about that?
AB: School Boards for Academic Excellence is fantastic, and they're setting up state organizations whereas we are overarching. We're more focused on the individual board members regardless if they're in the majority or minority. There are still things you can do in the minority.
Often, it's about lowering the attrition rate. Prior to 2016, most school board members - I think 80% - ran for reelection. Now it's down to 30. It's definitely below 40. There's massive attrition because of how divisive it's become. Board members as a whole are less willing to deal with it, which is understandable considering they're usually normal people not used to politics.
For us, we want to engage individual board members to make sure they don't quit. The longer you're on the board, the more experience you have, the more able you are to oversee the superintendent, oversee the progress of the school district, try new things out.
We have a network of over 250 school board members that we have supported in the past that we're bringing more closely to the work we're doing on the foundation side. Getting board members to engage with each other individually, even if it's somebody from Florida and somebody from Maryland, is extremely beneficial because there are things board members in Florida can do that board members in Maryland can't, but maybe they want to.
They can apply upward pressure on the states and sometimes on the federal government to try and change the rules to get new things done. We really want to make sure these individual board members are engaged. It's worth pointing out there are somewhere between 12,000-16,000 individual school boards in the United States, and these boards range from having 5 to 12 members on them. So we're looking at over 80,000 individual elected school board members. This is a huge space.
If we can create a core group of experienced people now that can disseminate through different organizations and events, we can build this momentum over a longer period of time. It's not just about elections, not just about flipping boards, although it is the easiest way to make immediate change happen, but continuing the wealth of experience and research and progress that these boards often start completely from scratch.
PL: To wrap up, what's the big push for 2025?
AB: We're distributing our first 100 days handbook, which is immensely useful for new school board members, and we will be identifying new board members aligned with this reform movement and reaching out to them and sending them these materials to get them started on the right foot. We're also going to be expanding our outreach, going to more conferences, recruiting more board members into our network, and hopefully producing original research that can really push the boundaries of what public education can mean or do for their kids.
PL: We're always going to have school boards. As you say, it's a big piece, and we really shouldn't cede that ground even as we work for school reform and all the other fights that we have as well. Aiden Buzzetti, thank you so much.
AB: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.