
Education
Ray Carter | June 16, 2025
Local control? Study shows voters rarely hold school boards accountable
Ray Carter
Despite Oklahoma school-board elections being scheduled on obscure dates that average just 6 percent turnout, defenders of the system claim those elections provide valid “local control” of state schools.
But new research shows that academic outcomes have little impact on the results of school-board races in Oklahoma and 15 other states.
“High Turnover with Low Accountability: Local School Board Elections in 16 States,” by three researchers from Ohio State University and Emory University, reviewed school-board election data from 2002 to 2017 across 16 states, including Oklahoma. Researchers found that very few school-board incumbents are voted out of office, regardless of academic results in a local school.
Overall, the report showed that nearly half of school-board races go uncontested and incumbents are reelected more than 80 percent of the time. The main reason for turnover is that incumbents often choose not to run for reelection to the typically unpaid positions, leading to 53 percent of incumbents being replaced in a typical election cycle.
“If elections do not hold officials accountable for performance, and if community engagement is low, then local control may be more symbolic than substantive.” —Professor Anna J. Egalite
“The results indicate that lower student learning rates do not in fact predict more electoral competition or incumbent retirement and they have only a modest association with incumbents’ reelection rates,” the report’s authors wrote. “Thus, local democracy seems to produce the worst of both worlds—high turnover without much accountability to voters. These results generally hold across districts in different types of locales and that serve different demographic mixes of students.”
In Oklahoma, the report found 46 percent of school-board races drew only a single candidate during the period reviewed.
The other states reviewed included Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Among the 16 states covered in the report, researchers found that the contestation rate for school-board elections was lower than the rate for state legislative elections and far below the rate for congressional House elections.
What if a school enjoyed a dramatic improvement in academic outcomes during a school board member’s tenure? The report indicated that an incumbent school-board member would have only a very small increase in reelection prospects.
“The estimates suggest that a district increasing its learning rate from the bottom 10 percent nationally to the top 10 percent would experience a 2 percentage point increase in the probability that an incumbent school board member is re-elected …” the report noted.
Very low-turnout dates give outsized power to unions and other activist groups in school-board elections.
In contrast, research separately conducted in 2022 showed that “receiving the endorsement of the local teacher’s union increased the odds of an incumbent school board winning the next election by between 25 and 30 percentage points,” the report noted.
That statistic may be a product of how very low-turnout dates give outsized power to unions and other activist groups in school-board elections.
Research done by Americans for Prosperity–Oklahoma found that turnout for the April 2, 2024, school-board elections in Oklahoma averaged only 6 percent of voters. Only one school district in Oklahoma had voter turnout exceeding 25 percent that day, and some districts reported less than 1 percent turnout.
Research published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University in January 2020 reviewed data from four states, including Oklahoma. Among other things, researchers found that “the majority of voters in a typical school board election in each of the four states we examine is ‘unlikely’ to have children.”
To change that dynamic and increase voter participation in Oklahoma school-board elections, particularly voting by parents, state lawmakers have considered moving school-board races to higher-turnout dates.
Senate Bill 6, by state Sen. Ally Seifried and state Rep. Chris Banning, was filed this year to move school-board elections to August for primaries or November for runoffs.
Currently, Oklahoma’s school-board primary elections are held the second Tuesday in February every year, unless there is a presidential election, while school-board general elections are conducted on the first Tuesday of every April.
Turnout for the April 2, 2024, school-board elections in Oklahoma averaged only 6 percent of voters.
There are approximately 2,500 school-board members elected across Oklahoma.
SB 6 passed out of the Oklahoma Senate on a 33-10 vote. It passed out of the House Elections and Ethics Committee on a 5-1 vote and then passed out of the House Government Oversight Committee on an 11-6 vote. The bill did not receive a vote from the full membership of the Oklahoma House of Representatives before the 2025 legislative session adjourned, but it could be brought up in that chamber during the 2026 session.
The findings of the report by the Ohio State University and Emory University researchers have gained national attention.
“If elections do not hold officials accountable for performance, and if community engagement is low, then local control may be more symbolic than substantive—an empty vessel we continue to praise without asking whether it delivers,” wrote Anna J. Egalite, a professor of educational evaluation and policy analysis at North Carolina State University.
The report itself warned state officials that claims of school-board races bolstering “local control” may be wildly overstated, given the actual results of and voter participation in school-board races across the 16 states reviewed. The authors noted that the data showed school-board turnover is “only weakly related to student learning rates” and that local democracy has produced “minimal incentives to improve student learning.”
Thus, the report’s authors bluntly noted that “political appeals to local control appear to be based on a romanticized view of how local democratic control actually works.”

Ray Carter
Director, Center for Independent Journalism
Ray Carter is the director of OCPA’s Center for Independent Journalism. He has two decades of experience in journalism and communications. He previously served as senior Capitol reporter for The Journal Record, media director for the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and chief editorial writer at The Oklahoman. As a reporter for The Journal Record, Carter received 12 Carl Rogan Awards in four years—including awards for investigative reporting, general news reporting, feature writing, spot news reporting, business reporting, and sports reporting. While at The Oklahoman, he was the recipient of several awards, including first place in the editorial writing category of the Associated Press/Oklahoma News Executives Carl Rogan Memorial News Excellence Competition for an editorial on the history of racism in the Oklahoma legislature.