School Boards Speak

District leaders had a lot to say about their jobs, their communities, and one another

Ballotpedia, the nonpartisan online encyclopedia of American politics and elections, conducted a groundbreaking survey to examine how elected school board members view their roles, responsibilities, and challenges. In her analysis of the findings, Ballotpedia's founder and CEO Leslie Graves notes that a large majority of board members say they would willingly take on the same demanding, often-criticized position again.

July 20, 2026

In 2025, Ballotpedia published a national survey of school board members, which we called the Virtual School Board Listening Tour. Our goal was to understand how these officials viewed their roles and responsibilities, as well as the challenges they faced.

The lessons we learned from their responses give us insights into these community leaders. A nonpartisan online encyclopedia of American politics and elections, Ballotpedia launched the project as part of its multiyear goal to cover all elections in the U.S., including school board elections in the country’s 13,500 public school districts. We sought to learn more about the people who hold these positions of community representation and trust to ensure that our coverage of their elections serves their communities well.

Ballotpedia staffers conducted hour-long interviews with 100 current and former school board members from 33 states. These current and former board members served in urban, suburban, and rural districts, and in communities with a variety of political outlooks and expectations.

While each person had their own story to tell, and the boards they served on often faced challenges unique to their area, five main themes emerged from our interviews.

These themes cut across geographic regions, length of service, the political climate in the area, and the type of district they represented:

• Board members don’t agree on their job descriptions.
• A board’s relationship with the superintendent is the strongest predictor of its success.
• Community trust is fracturing, but boards are more resilient than the media and others suggested.
• “Culture war” topics are present on almost every board, but they rarely define how school boards do their job.
• Despite the challenges and conflict, most of our interview subjects said they would stay on the job and would do it all again.

Let’s take a closer look at these themes and what the school board members we spoke with had to say about them.

STEWARDS, OVERSEERS, AND COLLABORATORS

We asked each of the 100 current and former board members to describe what they thought their role was in one sentence. We got 100 different answers, and 100 genuinely different ideas of what they perceived they were elected to do. What also stood out was that almost none of our participants had ever had a conversation with their fellow board members about what they thought the job meant to them. One respondent put it this way:

“We had been on the board together for two years before someone finally asked in a retreat: ‘What do you think our actual job is?’ The answers shocked us. We had been in the same meetings for two years, operating on completely different assumptions.”

Despite the specific differences in the responses we got, it was still possible to construct three broad visions of board service.

• The Steward (42% of respondents): These people felt it was important to ask good questions during meetings and to stay informed of issues, but not necessarily to intervene.

  One respondent said: “Board members should ask questions, review data, and be educated enough to evaluate the superintendent’s plan.”

• The Overseer (36% of respondents): This group generally agreed that their job was to hold the superintendent accountable.

  As one respondent said: “[Board members] have an obligation to push their administration to improve or maintain the excellence that is seen.”

• The Collaborator (20% of respondents): Respondents in this group tended to see themselves as partners in the education process and were averse to micromanaging the district’s affairs.

  One respondent said, “We are not the professionals … [we] ask questions and digest information before we vote.”

THE SUPERINTENDENT RELATIONSHIP IS THE STRONGEST PREDICTOR OF BOARD EFFECTIVENESS

We asked board members to rate the effectiveness of their board on a 1-10 scale. Then we asked about the quality of their relationship with their superintendent.

Boards with strong superintendent relationships rated themselves 7.4 on average. Boards with strained relationships had an average of 4.1.

We found that the correlation between these two numbers (board effectiveness rating and board-superintendent relationship quality rating) was the strongest across all the data we collected: The higher the board rated its effectiveness, the higher it rated its relationship with the superintendent.

Those respondents who said they had a strong relationship with the superintendent generally echoed the sentiment of this person we spoke with: “[There is] a real effort to work together; everyone’s learning how to navigate.”

Where the board-superintendent relationship was strained, we heard responses such as:

“[There is a] competing vision, and it’s not working.”

“[The] superintendent doesn’t want input. We’re sidelined.”

While many school board members told us they collaborated successfully with their superintendent, others face significant challenges. Forty-one of our respondents said they had a “strong partnership” with the superintendent. Sixteen said the relationship was “moderate” or “uncertain.” Forty-three said there was a “lack of partnership.”

These responses underscore the importance of governance training, clearly defined roles, and ways to build trust between everyone involved, which are crucial to creating and maintaining a functional partnership.

REGAINING AND SUSTAINING PUBLIC TRUST

We asked board members to discuss whether they believed community trust in public schools had shifted during their time on the board.

Fifty-eight percent said their community’s trust in public schools had declined. Fifteen percent said trust had risen.

How can school boards build and sustain public trust? Our participants had a number of answers, including making board members more visible and accessible to the public through events such as community forums or coffee chats. Others suggested getting students and families involved in decision-making. One participant said, “My goal is to grow community communication—get volunteers, senior citizens, and students engaged.”

Increasing media and public understanding of the board’s role was also noted. As one participant said, “We need to demystify the board. People don’t understand what we actually do.”

What we took away from our discussions is that board members want to change how the public engages with them and explore ways to help the community understand what a board does and how it works. Regardless of where our participants were located or the type of district they represented, they shared the desire to build trust and transparency with the community, the professional staff, and one another.

CONFLICT AND THE CULTURE WARS

One of the most interesting things we learned from our discussions with board members is that conflict is a pervasive issue within school boards. Conflict often arises from everyday decisions rather than from the high-profile controversies that many of us may remember from COVID-era school closures or more recent “culture war” flashpoints.

That’s not to say those culture war issues don’t exist—they do. Every board member had experienced some form of pressure about controversial issues. But almost none of them said it was the defining feature of their work on the board.

Instead, the issues board members across the country pointed to as most prevalent were the practical ones: staffing, funding, enrollment, and infrastructure.

For example, a board discussion about budget cuts can sometimes lead to disagreements over which programs to eliminate. Matters can quickly escalate into significant conflicts that have lasting effects on board relationships and the board’s ability to function properly.

The ability of school boards to resolve conflicts varies widely. We found three distinct patterns in how boards respond to conflict:

• Engaged boards: Members can move past conflicts and stay focused on improving student outcomes.
• Stuck boards: Members find themselves mired in ongoing conflicts, struggling to make progress.
• Detached and passive boards: Past conflicts have left members feeling they have little power to change things. They continue to serve but mostly go through the motions.

While board members may have different views on specific issues, how they react to conflict and their flexibility in handling disagreements play a bigger role in determining into which of the three groups listed above a board falls.

In other words, a collaborative environment where board members can effectively engage with one another, regardless of their political beliefs, appears to be a bigger factor in board dynamics and more important than the beliefs themselves.

THE DESIRE TO SERVE

Given everything — the conflict, the criticism, the compensation (typically none), the hours — we expected a fair number of our respondents would not want to serve on a school board again.

On the contrary, 88% of our respondents said they would serve again, and 71% said they would do so without hesitation.

The data showed something that national coverage of school boards has missed entirely: Board members are purposeful and deeply committed to their offices, the districts, and the people they serve.

WHAT WE LEARNED, AND WHAT BOARD MEMBERS WANT US TO KNOW

This is just one way in which our year-long series of discussions with school board members opened our eyes to the realities they face. We learned that conflicts are routine and generally aren’t headline-grabbing topics we find in other parts of our political life. We learned that the desire to serve was stronger than an outside observer might have suspected.

And we also learned that the relationships between school board members are a lot like the ones we have in our own lives. We have our ups and downs, conflicts, and disagreements. We all face competing demands for time, money, and resources.

Sometimes our relationships thrive, and sometimes they fail.

And that turns out to be true on school boards, too.

WHAT BOARD MEMBERS WISH THE PUBLIC KNEW

We asked board members what might be one thing they wished the public and the press understood about serving on a school board. This question prompted some of the most reflective, candid responses in the entire series of interviews. While the exact content of answers varied, nearly every respondent shared the same underlying sentiment: They feel misunderstood—either by the public, the press, or both.

Board members suggested some ways to help fix this, but one response stood out: “Be involved. You have to know all your kid’s teachers, what the requirements are. And please go to school board meetings.”

THE NUMBER THAT HAS STAYED WITH US

Eighty-eight percent of the school board members we interviewed said they’d take on the same hard, thankless, often-criticized job a second time. In election terms, we call that a supermajority. They’re not asking for sympathy. They’re asking for clearer roles, stronger superintendent partnerships, governance training, and a public that understands what the job actually is.

Whatever else is true about the state of public education in America, that’s a foundation to build on.