As seen in Chapter 1, the declaration of the COVID-19 public health emergency in March 2020 brought local education policymaking and school boards into national headlines. In Chapter 2, we heard from school board members who reported sharp increases in conflicts they experienced with their communities and fellow board members.
Together, these findings indicate that many Americans were deeply dissatisfied with schools’ handling of COVID-19 and culture-war issues—and that they acted on this frustration. Less clear is whether this unrest translated into broader changes in how the public engaged with school boards. For example, did conflict drive higher voter turnout or increase candidate participation in school board elections? If so, this would suggest a fundamental shift in school board politics. If not, the high-profile conflicts may reflect the actions of a relatively small but vocal segment of the electorate, set against a less activated, more ambivalent majority.
In this chapter, we examine school board elections in Florida before and after the declaration of the public health emergency in March 2020. Florida is a particularly relevant case: The state was a major focal point of early-2020s education culture wars, including intense disputes over school reopenings and masking policies. It was also where Governor Ron DeSantis (R) pressed for controversial education-related legislation such as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act and Parental Rights in Education Act (known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill), with conflicts playing out at both local and state levels. During the 2022 election cycle, DeSantis publicly endorsed school board candidates for the first time, and he took the unprecedented step of removing and appointing school board members. DeSantis also advocated to make school board elections partisan—though Florida voters rejected that initiative in 2024.
If the political conflicts over schools had measurable effects on school board elections, it seems likely we would see them in Florida. Yet the extent of these changes remains an open empirical question. The clearest evidence to date comes from a 2024 study by Brian Jacob that examined school board elections in about 500 large districts across the country. Jacob found modest increases in voter turnout and fewer uncontested school board races in elections held after the pandemic. However, it is unclear whether these patterns extend beyond large districts.
This chapter addresses that gap by analyzing school board elections across nearly all Florida districts and comparing school board election trends to concurrent changes in state house elections. This comparison allows us to assess whether electoral behavior shifted differently for school boards than for other local offices. To preview our main results, we find that:
- Voter turnout in school board elections remained steady before, during, and after the pandemic, closely tracking turnout in state house elections.
- Overall, the share of contested school board elections increased only slightly, if at all, relative to pre-pandemic levels.
- In politically purple areas, the share of contested school board elections increased relative to pre-pandemic levels.
School governance in Florida
Public education in Florida
Florida educates approximately 2.8 million students across about 4,200 schools in 67 public school districts. District boundaries align with county lines, making Florida districts larger on average—and more variable in size—than those in many other states. For example, Miami-Dade County Public Schools serves more than 300,000 students, while Jefferson County Schools enrolls roughly 700. Florida’s public school population is also racially and ethnically diverse, with a student body that is 38% Latino, 33% White, 21% Black, 4% multiracial, and 3% Asian.
School board elections in Florida
Across Florida, local school board members serve four-year terms, with elections staggered so that not all seats in a district are up for reelection at the same time. School board elections are held on cycle in even-numbered years and coincide with other statewide and (sometimes) national elections—taking place during the August primary and the November general election.
School board races may be decided in either the August primary or the November general election. A race is decided in August if a candidate wins a majority of the vote or if only two candidates are running, in which case the top vote-getter wins outright. As a result of this structure, about 69% of school board races are decided in the August primary, with the remaining 31% decided in November.
Board members are elected either at large (58% of seats statewide) or by ward (42%). Most school boards have five members, with a few having seven or nine.
Data and methods
Voter and candidate data
Our objective is to assess whether voter turnout or candidate participation in school board elections increased following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflicts that followed. To do so, we provide a descriptive analysis of Florida school board elections before, during, and after the pandemic. For some analyses, we use a set of comparison elections—state house races—to distinguish potential shifts in public engagement with school board races from other changes in local elections more broadly (e.g., voting becoming easier or harder during the pandemic).
Florida is well suited to this analysis partly because of the Florida Department of State’s high-quality election data. We used those data to construct a dataset that covers elections between 2014 and 2024. This dataset contains candidate names and vote totals, with results reported at the precinct level for each contested election.
Our analysis focuses on two outcomes:
- Voter turnout rates (only for contested elections) – We calculate turnout rates as the number of voters in an election divided by the total number of registered voters eligible to participate in that election. As a robustness check, we also calculate turnout rates with the number of adult citizens, not registered voters, as the denominator.
- Candidate participation – We define an election as contested if two or more candidates ran for the same seat.
We use two units of analysis. Most of our analyses rely on data reported at the seat level (specific to races for a particular school board seat). Our final analysis sample includes 351 of 358 school board seats in Florida. When we compare school board and state house election turnout, we use data reported at the precinct level instead. A precinct identifies a smaller geographic unit that is not specific to school boards. For any given year, our sample includes approximately 85% of Florida’s precincts (i.e., those that had a contested election). Table 1 shows descriptive statistics for the seat-level sample; Table 2 shows statistics for the precinct-level sample.
The methodological appendix contains additional details about our data and methodology.
State house elections as comparisons
We begin each analysis by describing patterns in voter turnout or candidate participation in school board elections. Where possible, we compare these patterns to state house elections. These state house elections offer useful comparisons because they occurred on the same dates and, like school board elections, are “down‑ballot” contests that generally drew fewer voters than higher‑profile elections.
Given these similarities, state house elections offer a benchmark for interpreting school board election patterns. Consider, for example, that school board election turnout is typically much higher when elections coincide with presidential contests. Spikes in school board turnout during presidential years may reflect broader ballot‑level participation rather than heightened engagement with school issues. State house election results from the same dates help contextualize these fluctuations. They also help account for turnout changes associated with the COVID‑19 pandemic, including health concerns about in‑person voting and the adoption of new voting procedures.
Comparing trends in school board and state house election outcomes can help isolate changes in public engagement that are specific to school boards. For example, if voters felt strongly about district-level COVID-19 policies but were less engaged with state legislative issues, we might see increased turnout in school board elections without a corresponding increase in state house election turnout. However, two caveats are worth noting. First, state legislatures also engage with education policy, so voters may have looked to both school boards and state legislatures for action on schools. Second, voters motivated by a school board race may have voted in a state house race (or vice versa) simply because they were already casting a ballot. For these reasons, the differences that we find in these comparisons could understate voters’ reaction to education issues.
We supplement our descriptive analyses with regression‑based estimates to test whether differences in turnout and candidate participation before and after the pandemic are statistically significant. To do so, we estimate a difference‑in‑differences model to assess whether changes in school board election outcomes differed from changes in state house election outcomes over the same period. (For more details, see the methodological appendix.)
Findings
Voter turnout in school board elections remained steady before, during, and after the pandemic, closely tracking turnout in state house elections
In Figure 3.1, we show average voter turnout rates across Florida school board elections from 2014 through 2024 (with a vertical line at 2020 to indicate the onset of COVID-19).1 We present rates for the August primaries and November general elections separately.
Turnout in school board elections increased slightly across both elections over this decade-long period. However, we find little evidence that turnout in either the primary or general elections changed sharply after March 2020. For example, 29% of registered voters participated in the August 2016 primaries, 28% in 2018, and 29% in 2020. Turnout rates fluctuate more in November general elections—higher in presidential election years—but there, too, we see no major shift during or immediately after the pandemic.
Figure 3.1 also shows these patterns disaggregated by school districts’ surrounding political environment, enrollment, and urbanicity.2 (These results can be seen by toggling the blue buttons.) In general, across different types of districts, we continue to see little evidence that turnout changed with the onset of the pandemic. However, across this period, turnout in primary elections is higher in more conservative, rural, and smaller districts.
We also examined whether these patterns change when voter turnout is calculated using all adult citizens as the denominator (rather than registered voters as shown in Figure 3.1). This could matter if, for example, heightened views about the government’s COVID-19 response spurred additional voter registration. The resulting estimates, shown in supplementary Figure A3.1, similarly show no evidence of a pandemic-related shift in school board voter turnout.3
Next, we compare voter turnout trends in school board elections with trends in state house elections. Figure 3.2 plots average turnout across all precincts that held a school board election and, separately, across all precincts that held a state house election.
Turnout trends in school board and state house elections look similar, as the blue and orange lines generally move in tandem. We assess this formally using a difference-in-differences model that tests if the change in turnout rates from the pre-COVID-19 years (before 2020) to the COVID-19 years (2020 and later) differed for school board and state house elections. We find no statistically significant differences. Full results appear in Table 3.
Taken together, the findings in this section suggest that controversies surrounding schools during the COVID-19 and culture-war era did not produce sizable, immediate changes in school board voter turnout.
The share of school board elections that were contested increased only slightly, if at all, relative to pre-pandemic levels
So far, the results in this chapter suggest that school board voter turnout was largely unaffected by COVID-19 and culture-war conflicts. However, these conflicts, which seemed particularly salient in Florida, may have influenced school board elections in other ways. For example, some Floridians could have responded by running for seats that otherwise would have gone uncontested (a common occurrence in school board elections).
We define a school board race as competitive if at least two candidates ran for the same seat. Figure 3.3 plots the share of school board races that were contested in each election year. In Florida, school board seats are elected on four-year cycles, which allows us to distinguish between two cohorts: seats contested in 2014, 2018, and 2022 (shown in blue) and seats contested in 2016, 2020, and 2024 (shown in orange).
Here, we note an important difference in timing between candidate participation and voter turnout. Candidates file to run for office months before voters first go to the polls in August. In the voter turnout analysis above, the 2020 results came from votes cast in August or November. That is well after the pandemic started. However, the timing of candidate filings relative to the outbreak and subsequent conflicts is more ambiguous. As we saw in Chapter 1, the number of pandemic-era school conflicts covered in news reports did not spike until 2021. Since our goal is to measure changes in candidate participation in response to these conflicts, we consider 2022 to be the first clear, pandemic-affected year for candidate participation. (Therefore, the figures on contested elections do not contain a vertical line to indicate the onset of conflicts.)
For the 2014-2018-2022 cohort, we see a slight uptick in contested elections after the onset of COVID-19 and the accompanying culture-war conflicts. In 2018, 62% of school board races were contested. In 2022, that number climbed to 70%. However, we see little change in contested election share for the 2016-2020-2024 cohort. (Note that these cohorts are comprised of the same set of districts, as they stagger the timing of their school board elections.)
Figure 3.4 compares trends in the share of contested elections across school board and state house races, again using state house contests as a down ballot comparison. The figure shows that the competitiveness of state house elections has increased steadily over the past decade (with a one time dip in the 2022 midterm cycle). Meanwhile, the share of contested school board elections has remained relatively stable over time.
In other words, we see no visual evidence of a statewide increase in the share of school board elections that were contested. We also find no statistically significant increases in candidate participation using the same difference-in-differences framework discussed above (see Table 4 for estimates). Additionally, we looked for evidence of increases in the average number of candidates that ran for office (see supplementary Figure A3.2 and Table 4). Here, too, we find no sign of a statewide increase in school board candidate participation.
In politically purple areas, the share of contested school board elections increased relative to pre-pandemic levels
Although the overall change in candidate participation is modest, we see a notable increase in one subset of districts. School board races in politically purple areas were more likely to become contested during this period. This is noteworthy, especially given the findings in Chapter 2 indicating that school board members in purple areas reported substantially higher levels of conflict over COVID-19 and culture war issues.
Figure 3.5 shows the share of contested school board elections separately for districts in politically blue, purple, and red areas. For simplicity, the figure does not disaggregate results by school board seat cohort, though cohort specific estimates are reported in supplementary Figure A3.3. Figure 3.5 also allows readers to view results disaggregated by district size and urbanicity.
In politically purple areas, the share of contested elections rose from 68% in 2018 to 88% in 2022 (before declining slightly to 83% in 2024). This trajectory differs from the patterns observed in politically blue and red areas.
We should be aware that the apparent trends in Figure 3.5 could be the product of small sample sizes. For example, only 14% of these school board races occurred in politically purple areas. Therefore, we ran statistical tests to check for statistically significant changes in the share of school board elections that were contested in the “pre” period (before 2022 in this analysis) and “post” period (2022 and later). We find no significant changes in blue or red areas but a statistically significant increase of almost 15% in purple areas. Full results appear in Table 5.
We should note that the patterns observed in politically purple areas do not indicate that it was the politically mixed nature of these areas that caused more elections to be contested. For example, Figure 3.5 also shows an uptick in contestation in very large districts. The precise drivers of these changes are difficult, if not impossible, to isolate empirically due to the close associations between urbanicity, district size, and political leanings.
Together, the results from this section indicate that there may have been a slight increase, overall, in the share of school board elections that were contested after the pandemic began. However, any increase was not unique to school boards—and appears to have been concentrated in politically purple areas.
Conclusion
This chapter complements the findings in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 by examining school board politics from a different vantage point. Overall, the results suggest that pandemic‑era and culture‑war conflicts did not produce large‑scale changes in public engagement with school board elections. We find no significant increase in voter turnout following the onset of the pandemic and little evidence of a broad rise in candidate participation.
Notably, however, school board races did become increasingly competitive in politically purple areas. This pattern is consistent with the survey evidence from Chapter 2, which indicates that school boards in politically mixed districts experienced culture‑war conflicts more acutely and more broadly than those in politically red or blue areas.
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Authors
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Acknowledgements and disclosures
The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings is grateful for the support of the Spencer Foundation.
The research reported in this report was made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (#202300189). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation.
Brookings is committed to quality, independence, and impact in all of its work. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment, and the analysis and recommendations are solely determined by the scholars.
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Footnotes
- The turnout rates reflected in Figure 1 (and all others) represent the average turnout rate across seats (rather than the overall turnout rate statewide).
- In this chapter, we use four categories—low (<2,500), medium (2,500), high (15,000-50,000), and very high (>= 50,000)—to describe district enrollment instead of the three categories (low, medium, and high) used in earlier chapters. We do so because Florida districts are larger, on average, than the average district nationwide.
- For these analyses, we calculated turnout rates using only votes cast in at-large elections. This is because the counts of citizens over 18 are available from the Census’ American Community Survey at the county level and not the precinct level (or by school board ward). With this smaller sample (58% of board seats are elected at-large and not all districts have at-large seats), some subgroups of districts are missing voter turnout rates for some years because they did not have any seats with a contested election in those years (as seen in Figure A3.1).
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