The vast majority of Americans will ignore the school board elections that are on the ballot Tuesday. Yet these races have the power to determine how schools spend billion-dollar budgets, what children read in the classroom, and whether teachers unions will tighten their grip on America’s public education system. 

Thousands of school board seats from the nation’s more than 13,000 public school districts are up for grabs this year. These local school leaders, most of whom are unpaid volunteers whose names voters won’t recognize, are charged with determining how the next generation of Americans will be educated. Only 5 to 10 percent of voters, however, mark their ballots for school board candidates, who tend to appear at the bottom or on the back of their ballots, according to the National School Boards Association.

“The most important local elected offices in America” is how the co-founder of the conservative political organization, Moms for Liberty, Tiffany Justice, describes school boards to The New York Sun. While these seats are typically nonpartisan, they’ve entered the culture wars between parents, activists, educators, and administrators, with conservative politicians and groups like Ms. Justice’s that target how public schools address issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

Under the mission of defending “parental rights,” Moms for Liberty has endorsed 84 candidates across 13 states in upcoming local school board and elected superintendent races. “We’re going to keep fighting back and we’re going to win,” Ms. Justice says. “There’s no other option for parents. We have nothing in America if we don’t have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of our children.”

Operating on the other side of the political spectrum is the organization Run for Something, which seeks to “recruit and support young, diverse progressives to run for down-ballot races in order to build sustainable power for Democrats in all 50 states.” The group has endorsed more than 600 candidates this election cycle, and more than 70 percent won their primaries and made it to the ballot. Close to 65 of these candidates are running for education-related offices, including school boards, state boards, and library boards.

“Around 60 percent of school board races go uncontested each year, and groups like Moms for Liberty have been exploiting that to push for book bans and put the wellbeing of LGBTQ students at risk,” a spokesman for the organization, Ross Morales Rocketto, tells the Sun. “This year, we are proud to support more than 65 school board candidates nationwide who will shift the focus back to critical issues like teacher pay, facilities funding, and school safety for the well-being of ALL students.”

School board races attracted more national attention in 2022, as schools across the country were grappling with recent closures during the Covid pandemic, debates over masking protocols, and a growing focus in education on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Following outcry from parents and activists, a total of 30 bills now target DEI programs at state-funded institutions, ten of which have been signed into law.

Meanwhile, 1,131 school districts, impacting more than 12 million students, have policies that prohibit parents from knowing if their child identifies as transgender or gender nonconforming without the child’s consent. Those policies are facing legal challenges based on the Supreme Court’s century-old recognition of parents’ constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children. 

On the November 5 ballot in Florida, voters have a choice to support a state amendment that would make school board elections partisan. “The thinking is that’s one way to help parents and other voters figure out who’s more likely to reflect their views, which might equalize the playing field a bit,” a senior fellow and director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Frederick Hess, tells the Sun. Critics, meanwhile, say the change would veer Florida school boards toward politics and away from policy.

In Texas, voters get to decide five competitive races for the State Board of Education on the ballot next week. The Republican-dominated board is composed of 15 total members who serve two and four year terms and are charged with overseeing a $56 billion endowment for Texas public schools. Conservatives are campaigning on the point that public schools are harming children, while progressive challengers are advocating for more ethnic studies in schools and against the “whitewashing” of history. 

Many of the country’s school board races, however, won’t be on the ballot next Tuesday. They will take place in separate, lower-attendance elections in the spring, in an ostensible effort to keep politics out of school decisions. According to Mr. Hess, however, “what you wind up with is a political turnout in which the unions tend to play and school employees tend to play an outsized role.”

Union influence is particularly apparent in New York. The New York State School Boards Association, a voice of the state’s more than 700 boards of education, is a near mirror of the statewide teachers’ union, New York State United Teachers. The director of research at the Empire Center, Ken Girardin, has found that in 24 of New York’s 45 largest school districts, the union backed two-thirds of the board’s membership, and in four of those districts, every board member won with union support. At New York City, school board leaders are not elected, due to the system of mayoral control enacted by Mayor Bloomberg which Albany has extended for two more years.

“The school boards are increasingly populated by people who are themselves teachers or retired teachers from other school districts. That makes them more inclined to support more generous contract terms for their unionized employees,” Mr. Girardin says. He adds that some school board members are simultaneously dictating and receiving retirement benefits, “a huge conflict of interest” contributing to “massive unfunded retirement healthcare liabilities.” 

Beyond occupying local school boards, unionized teachers in New York are increasingly running for office in what critics see as an effort by the union to sit on both sides of the negotiating table and set state and federal policies for their own interests. The union’s Pipeline Project has helped more than 300 of its members win elections for office since it launched in 2015. “We want more,” the union president, Melinda Person, said in a May video directed toward members. “We want you to run for office because our voice needs to be heard in Albany and Washington.” The press office of the union did not respond to requests for comment. 

The “outsized role” of unions might help explain why New York’s public school system is the most costly in the nation, yet has seen losses in math and reading outcomes that are double the national average. “School boards in New York serve school employees first, and their actual mission to educate children second,” Mr. Girardin says. 

The future of American education rests on who wins these battles to control public school classrooms. Moms for Liberty, for its part, is “a grass roots army” of more than 300 chapters nationwide, boasting 130,000 members who are fighting for people and policies that will protect their children, Ms. Justice says.

“This is about changing America, one school board at a time.”