Hall Pass: Your Ticket to Understanding School Board Politics, Edition #114

By

Ballotpedia staff

Welcome to Hall Pass, a newsletter written to keep you plugged into the conversations driving school board politics and governance.

In today’s edition, you’ll find:

  • On the issues: The debate over accelerated math curricula  
  • School board filing deadlines, election results, and recall certifications
  • From the ballot to the blackboard: education-related ballot measure news
  • Understanding the financial return on educational investments (Part 3): The origins of MyFloridaFuture
  • Extracurricular: education news and numbers from around the web
  • Candidate Connection survey

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On the issues: The debate over accelerated math curricula

In this section, we curate reporting, analysis, and commentary on the issues school board members deliberate when they set out to offer the best education possible in their district. Missed an issue? Click here to see the previous education debates we’ve covered.

Should schools teach algebra in middle school?

Brent Staples writes that more states should create programs that allow students to enter accelerated algebra programs in middle school. Staples says accelerated math tracks can better address COVID learning losses than traditional remediation approaches.

David Scarlett Wakelyn writes that accelerated algebra programs are not sufficient to address COVID learning losses because students are too far behind. Wakelyn says schools should give students more time to fully master topics like fractions and decimals in middle school so they have the tools to approach algebra in high school. 

Fixing the Calamity in U.S. Math Knowledge Starts With Algebra | Brent Staples, New York Times

“Only about a quarter of American students study algebra in eighth grade. That proportion needs to grow. Fortunately a few states, including North Carolina and Texas, are adopting systems under which children who meet specified performance levels on state exams are automatically channeled into advanced math classes. In Dallas there are no hoops to jump through. As The Dallas Morning News reported last year, young people no longer have to wait for counselors to recommend them or for parents who know little about how schools operate to sign them up. Students who were unaware that honors courses even existed are now being enrolled. The gravest challenge facing the country today is redressing the devastating learning losses that children suffered during the Covid pandemic. Among other things, solving this problem will mean equipping teachers to manage classrooms that include students of different preparation levels. … [S]tudents who would ordinarily be tracked into remedial work can perform well in algebra classes that include higher-performing peers.”

Middle school math is a unique problem that needs more attention | David Scarlett Wakelyn, Hechinger Report

“The rhetoric and policy of ‘accelerate, don’t remediate’ makes sense when students are a year to a year and a half below grade level. But even the best guides on how to help students complete unfinished learning don’t have advice on how to help math students who are three years behind. … In the best of circumstances, middle school math is uniquely difficult. These are the years when students must master fractions and division and decimals; the degree to which they do so predicts their math achievement for the rest of their education. If elementary and middle school students don’t learn these subjects well, the steady ramp up from arithmetic to algebra becomes a ninety-degree wall, according to Hung-Hsi Wu, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Poor knowledge of fractions may lead students to give up trying to make sense of math altogether. … [S]chool leaders need to take incremental steps toward providing ‘mastery learning,’ in which learning expectations remain fixed but the time to meet them is flexible. Students who need more time get it.”

School board update: filing deadlines, election results, and recall certifications

In 2023, Ballotpedia covered elections for over 9,000 school board seats in more than 3,000 districts across 34 states. We’re expanding our coverage each year with our eye on the more 13,000 districts with elected school boards. 

Election results from the past week

Nevada

On June 11, Ballotpedia covered elections in Clark County and Washoe County. These are the two largest districts in Nevada, with about 328,991 students and 67,300 students, respectively. 

Four seats are on the ballot in both districts this year. In Nevada, a candidate can win outright with more than 50% of the votes. If no candidate crosses that threshold, then the top-two vote-getters advance to a general election. 

  • As of June 12, preliminary results show no candidate running in the Clark County School District has passed the 50% threshold.
  • Preliminary results from the Washoe County Public Schools show that three candidates in three districts have received more than 50% of the vote. In District E, incumbent Alex Woodley has 51.06% of the vote and Bev Stenehjem has 32.92% (Oscar Williams and Cameron Kramer currently have 8.25% and 7.77% of the vote, respectively). 

Upcoming school board elections

Georgia

Ballotpedia is covering all school board elections in Georgia this year. 

On June 18, voters in the DeKalb County School District will decide a general runoff election for District 5 on the school board. On May 21, candidates Tiffany Tate Hogan and Donna Priest-Brown advanced to the runoff after winning 43.2% and 30.7% of the vote, respectively. Candidates Telessa Ammons and Manus Bernard Caldwell Jr. lost in the general election.

In Georgia, the top-two vote-winners advance to a runoff if no candidate wins the majority vote. 

Georgia is one of three states—along with Mississippi and Louisiana—that require runoffs when a candidate doesn’t win a majority of the vote. The Dekalb County School District is the third largest in Georgia. 

On June 18, we are also covering runoffs in the following districts:

  • Appling County Schools 
  • Barrow County Schools
  • Clarke County Schools
  • Douglas County Schools
  • Griffin-Spalding County Schools
  • Houston School District
  • Lowndes County School District
  • Rockdale School District
  • Ware County School District

Utah

Ballotpedia is covering elections in the following districts on June 25:

From the ballot to the blackboard: education-related ballot measure news

Ballot measures have shaped education policy since the 19th century. In this section, we bring you monthly updates on upcoming statewide education-related measures and a look back at significant or interesting historical measures. Ballotpedia’s Historic Ballot Measures project aims to document nearly 200 years of direct democracy in the United States. This ongoing research effort will provide an unparalleled resource for researchers, reporters, and the voting public on how ballot measures have evolved, the issues they’ve covered, and the role they have played in our civic life. Our list of historical education-related measures stretches back to 1862. Click here to see our last update.

Today, we’re bringing you an update on Florida’s Amendment 1, which would change how the state conducts school board elections. Amendment 1 is one of eight education-related ballot measures on the ballot this year in California, Utah, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Kentucky. Sixteen additional statewide measures could appear on the ballot this year. 

On November 5, Florida voters will decide Amendment 1—a constitutional amendment that would make school board elections partisan beginning in 2026. Candidates would be nominated for the general election through partisan primaries and be featured on the ballot with partisan labels, such as Democrat and Republican. The Florida Constitution requires school board elections to be nonpartisan, meaning that partisan labels do not appear on the ballot next to a candidate’s name.

Florida had partisan school board elections until voters approved Amendment 11 in 1988, a measure that prohibited party labels in school board elections. The Florida Constitution Revision Commission (CRC) referred Amendment 11 to the ballot. The CRC is a 37-member commission provided for in the state constitution that reviews and proposes changes to the Florida Constitution. Florida is the only state with a commission empowered to refer constitutional amendments to the ballot.

There are 67 traditional public school districts in Florida. Each county makes up a school district unless two neighboring counties have voted to combine school districts. There were a total of 358 school board member seats as of 2022, and Those districts operated a total of 4,200 schools.

School board members in Florida serve four-year terms. Currently, voters elect five or more members in a nonpartisan election. 

Florida is one of 41 states with state laws providing for nonpartisan school board elections. Four states—Alabama, Connecticut, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania—have state laws providing for partisan school board elections. Five states—Rhode Island, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—provide for partisan or nonpartisan school board elections depending on the district. The state laws of 41 states containing 11,761 school districts provide for school board elections without party labels identifying the affiliation of candidates listed on the ballot (nonpartisan elections).

State Rep. Spencer Roach (R-76), who sponsored Amendment 1, said, “This is not about, at least for me, advancing the cause of one political party over another. But for me it’s about transparency, and I simply believe that we have an obligation to give voters as much information about a candidate as possible, and let them make a decision about vetting a candidate. I would tell folks, if they truly want to vote for nonpartisan candidates, those candidates in Florida who are NPAs that don’t have a philosophical association with either of the two major parties and they (voters) viewed them as sort of purist NPAs — right now in Florida, the law prevents you from doing that, because you don’t know who that candidate is.”

State Rep. Angela Nixon (D-13), who opposes the amendment, said, “I believe this bill is not about transparency at all. This bill is about making our school-board elections and our school boards more contentious, more like D.C., which [Republicans] honestly always try to oppose.”

From 2000 to 2023, including both odd and even-numbered years, an average of eight ballot measures related to education appeared on the ballot nationwide.

Click here to read more about education-related ballot measures in 2024. 

Understanding the financial return on educational investments (Part 3): The origins of MyFloridaFuture

Last week, we looked in detail at the types of information available through MyFloridaFuture, an online dashboard from the State University System of Florida for comparing salaries, student loans, and employment rates for different programs and career paths. The State University System of Florida developed the dashboard in response to a 2021 law. Through a series of snippets, we’re exploring MyFloridaFuture’s data and looking at other states with similar laws. In our third snippet in this six-part series, we’ll look more deeply at the legislative origin of MyFloridaFuture. 

At the beginning of 2022, the Florida University System Board of Governors launched the public-facing, online dashboard and data repository called MyFloridaFuture. The Florida State Legislature mandated the data collection and dashboard in 2021 through House Bill 1261 (HB 1261). The Florida Senate unanimously approved the final version of HB 1261 on April 27, 2021. The Florida House approved the Senate’s version in a vote of 102 to 11 on April 28, 2021. All voting Republican representatives approved the bill, and Democratic representatives were split 26 in favor and 11 opposed. 

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed HB 1261 into law on July 6, 2021.

The bill contained multiple provisions related to higher education, including:

  • immunity for educational institutions for actions related to the COVID-19 pandemic;
  • tuition waiver, fee waiver, and other financial aid programs; and
  • the education outcomes and career planning information requirements that resulted in MyFloridaFuture.

At least 15 states have passed similar legislation requiring colleges and universities to provide students with detailed information on graduate employment rates, student loan debt, and average starting salaries. Alabama, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia have passed this type of legislation since 2022.

Proponents refer to legislation like HB 1261 as Students’ Right to Know laws. In 1990, Congress passed the Student Right to Know Act, requiring colleges and universities that accept federal student aid to disclose information such as graduation rates, security details and crime statistics, financial aid information, information on athletics, and transfer credit policies. President George H.W. Bush (R) signed the Act in November 1990. 

Laws in the 15 states differ in specifics, but all require public higher education institutions to publish information that could help students and parents choose colleges and majors. That includes information on graduation rates, demand for different fields, salaries for careers in different fields, student loan amounts, and average costs. Some states also require information about vocational degrees and certificates and apprenticeships. 

Here are some examples from the laws: 

  • In Arizona, the state commerce authority is responsible for gathering the data, and must distribute it directly to every public high school.
    • Arizona’s law requires the inclusion of median earnings information for state universities and community colleges and also vocational and private postsecondary institutions according to available data from the U.S. Department of Education
  • As in Florida, Alabama’s law also requires an interactive online tool called the Student Horizon Database to display the data. Alabama’s law was enacted in 2023, and the Student Horizon Database was launched this year on the website of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education.
  • In Iowa, the law, also enacted in 2023, requires public colleges and universities to provide links to annual reports on its data to all first-year students.

Click here to explore our analysis of MyFloridaFuture’s data. We’ll return next week to look at data on the fields of study with the highest and lowest earnings. 

Extracurricular: education news and numbers from around the web

This section contains links to recent education-related articles from around the internet. If you know of a story we should be reading, reply to this email to share it with us! 

Take our Candidate Connection survey to reach voters in your district

Today, we’re looking at survey responses from Jeff Church and Christine Hull, two of three candidates who ran in the June 11 nonpartisan primary for Washoe County School District Board of Trustees District A in Nevada. Stephanie Flores also ran in the election, but she did not complete the survey. 


Church has represented District A since 2021. 

As of June 12, preliminary results show Hull leading with 54.43% of the vote. Church has 33.41% and Flores has 12.17%. Candidates can win outright with more than 50% of the vote. 

Washoe County School District has approximately 67,000 students, and is the second largest in the state. 

Here’s how Church answered the question, “Who are your constituents?”

“All residents: students, voters, taxpayers, staff. Too often people reference the children (of course) but the taxpayers need representation regardless of if they have kids in school.”

Click here to read the rest of Church’s responses. 

Here’s how Hull answered the question, “Who are your constituents?”

“As a government teacher, I could say the voters are the constituents, but it’s more than that. The kids in school now will become our community’s future mechanics, nurses, teachers, business owners, and more. This means our entire community is served by our schools. A school board trustee’s constituents are the students, teachers, parents, employees, grandparents, employers, and community members as a whole.”

Click here to read the rest of Hull’s responses. 

If you’re a school board candidate or incumbent, click here to take the survey. If you’re not running for school board, but there is an election in your community this year, share the link with the candidates and urge them to take the survey!

In the 2022 election cycle, 6,087 candidates completed the survey. 
The survey contains more than 30 questions, and you can choose the ones you feel will best represent your views to voters. If you complete the survey, a box with your answers will display on your Ballotpedia profile. Your responses will also appear in our sample ballot.