Hall Pass: Your Ticket to Understanding School Board Politics, Edition #150

By

Ballotpedia staff

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

In today’s edition, you’ll find:

  • On the issues: The debate over Trump’s K-12 schooling order  
  • Hall Pass reader satisfaction survey
  • School board filing deadlines, election results, and recall certifications
  • U.S. District judge blocks Iowa law requiring school districts to remove books depicting sex acts
  • Extracurricular: education news and numbers from around the web
  • Candidate Connection survey

Reply to this email to share reactions or story ideas!

On the issues: The debate over Trump’s K-12 schooling order

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.

What’s the background?

President Donald Trump (R) signed the executive order titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling” on Jan. 29. The order, one of 109 Trump has issued so far in his second term, directs federal agencies to cut off funding for schools that promote what the Administration considers “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies,” including “discriminatory equity ideology” and “gender ideology.” The order also calls for prohibiting federal funding from going to schools that conceal student gender transitions from their parents.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal government provided about 11% of overall K-12 public education funding during the 2020-21 school year. 

Today, we’re going to look at responses supporting and opposing the order.

What are the arguments?

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora writes the order will prevent tax dollars from funding politics in K-12 classrooms. She says the order will redirect spending to improve learning in subjects like reading and math.

James Zogby writes the executive order will undo progress in making history and other curricula more inclusive and accurate. He says the policy will promote indoctrination and suppress teachings that might show America from negative perspectives. 

Read on

Throwing Money at America’s K–12 Public Education Catastrophe Is Not Helping | Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, National Review

“President Donald J. Trump’s executive order titled ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling’ is both necessary and timely. … In addition to the provable and obscene abuse of taxpayer dollars going toward a politicized public education, children can barely read and do math. … In districts such as Fairfax County Public Schools that prioritize the political indoctrination of students, including un-American equity lectures and unconstitutionally mandated pronoun usage, more funding is arguably counterproductive. Rather, such districts need an external budget audit and to be forced to abide by Trump’s executive orders to end political indoctrination and DEI initiatives. Perhaps states’ departments of education could be helpful to this end. We are at a crossroads in the public education system at which 69 percent of fourth-grade students read below proficiency. This is a problem that has a few clear solutions and requires all hands on deck.”

Trump’s War on History Is Another Slouch Toward Authoritarianism | James Zogby, Common Dreams

“Buried in the flurry of President Trump’s Executive Orders is one that has been largely ignored, despite being potentially the most far-reaching of these presidential acts. Titled ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,’ this diktat lays bare Trump’s intention to roll back the gains that have been made over the last half century by historians working to present a more accurate portrait of American and world history. Trump calls these efforts ‘anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false,’ and demands instead that schools devote themselves to ‘patriotic education’ that will ‘instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation’—in other words, to teach the kind of history we learned three generations ago. None of this is benign. One of the hallmarks of fascist authoritarian rule is the indoctrination of the public to believe in the ‘glorification of the nation.’ The celebrated American author Sinclair Lewis once predicted that ‘fascism would come to America wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross.’”

Hall Pass reader satisfaction survey

Thank you for being a loyal reader of this newsletter. We so appreciate the thoughtful responses you send us to our monthly survey on state, federal, and district-level education policies. This month, we want to ask a different set of questions to help us better understand how you use Hall Pass—and what we can do to make it better. 

Click here to take the brief survey.

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

In 2025, Ballotpedia will cover elections for more than 30,000 school board seats. We’re expanding our coverage each year with our eye on covering the country’s more than 80,000 school board seats.    

Upcoming school board elections

  • April 8—Missouri and Nebraska
  • May 3—Texas
  • May 6—Montana, Ohio
  • May 13—Arkansas and Delaware
  • May 20—New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon

Click here for more information on upcoming elections in your state.

Election results

Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction 

On April 1, Wisconsin voters went to the polls to choose their next Superintendent of Public Instruction. We previously looked at the candidates and issues in the primary and the general election. 

Incumbent Jill Underly, who was first elected in 2021, defeated Brittany Kinser and write-in candidate Adrianne Melby, winning 53% of the vote. Though the race was officially nonpartisan, the state Democratic Party endorsed Underly, while the state Republican Party endorsed Kinser. According to Wisconsin Public Radio’s Corrinne Hess, “Underly’s win continues the decades-long streak of DPI candidates who are backed by the state’s teachers unions occupying the seat.”

Candidates raised more than $4.5 million in the race, making it the most expensive election for Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction in the state’s history. The previous record was set in 2021, when candidates raised about $3 million. On April 1, Wisconsin voters also decided the country’s most expensive state supreme court race. Read more about that election here.  

U.S. District judge blocks Iowa law requiring school districts to remove books depicting sex acts

On March 25, U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher blocked, for a second time, a portion of an Iowa state law requiring school districts to remove all books from public school libraries that contain descriptions of sex acts, as defined in the law.

President Joe Biden (D) nominated Locher to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa in 2022.

Locher ruled that the law—Senate File (SF) 496, passed in 2023—was overly broad and encroached on citizens’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights because “unconstitutional applications of the law far outweigh the constitutional ones.”

Attorney General Brenna Bird (R) said, “I’m going to keep on fighting to uphold our law that protects schoolchildren and parental rights.” 

Locher said in his ruling that many books were unconstitutionally removed due to the vague nature and wide application of the law and the guidance issued by the Iowa Department of Education in August 2024. Locher wrote that due to uncertainty around the Department’s guidance “or the law’s actual breadth (or both), school districts have removed hundreds of books across a variety of genres from school libraries,” including fiction and nonfiction books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Richard Wright’s Native Son. Locher also wrote that the law was unconstitutional because it did not require any “evaluation of a book’s literary, political, artistic, or scientific value before removing it from school libraries.”

State Sen. Ken Rozenboom (R), who serves on the Iowa Senate Education Committee, said, “We worked so hard to get that [language] precise and clear and unambiguous, and I think it’s very clear.”

Background on SF 496

Iowa state law authorizes school boards to remove books from school libraries at their discretion. SF 496 placed constraints on that authority, requiring districts to remove certain books and materials. 

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed SF 496 into law on May 26, 2023. In addition to requiring districts to cull books with sexually explicit content, the law also prohibits instructors from teaching students about gender identity or sexual orientation through the sixth grade and directs schools to notify parents if students ask to change their pronouns. 

The Iowa General Assembly passed the bill mostly along party lines. Iowa has a Republican trifecta. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, Lambda Legal, and four authors sued to block the law on Nov. 30, 2023. ACLU staff attorney Thomas Stoy wrote, “The First Amendment does not allow our state or our schools to remove books or issue blanket bans on discussion and materials simply because a group of politicians or parents find them offensive.”

On Dec. 29, Locher placed a preliminary injunction on a portion of the law requiring the removal of books depicting sex acts. In response, Reynolds said, “Instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation has no place in kindergarten through sixth grade classrooms. And there should be no question that books containing sexually explicit content — as clearly defined in Iowa law — do not belong in a school library for children.”

In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit overturned the injunction on Aug. 9, 2024, allowing the state to enforce the law. The judges returned the case to Locher, saying his initial ruling relied on a flawed legal analysis. 

How Iowa districts responded to SF 496

The law was in effect for the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, and districts responded in varying ways to SF 496’s book content requirements. Many districts removed one or more books, and at least two reported using artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to identify books that conflicted with state law. Some districts did not remove any books, including Des Moines Public Schools, whose officials said they did not find any books on their shelves that conflicted with the requirements of SF 496. Administrators in other districts argued that they didn’t have sufficient guidance to implement the law.

According to a June 2024 analysis by the Des Moines Register, about 36% of Iowa’s 327 districts had removed at least one book from school libraries. Seven percent had removed more than 50. 

The Des Moines Register found that Jodi Picoult’s novel Nineteen Minutes, about a school shooting and the events leading up to it, was the most removed book. Picoult was one of several authors who, along with Penguin Random House, sued the state in a separate lawsuit in response to SF 496. 

Go deeper

Disagreements over which books to permit in school libraries and classrooms have long been agenda items for local school boards. However, those controversies increasingly became the subject of national attention following the pandemic. Lawmakers in states with Republican trifectas, like Idaho, Texas, and Florida, passed laws that restricted certain types of books in schools, typically identified as those with sexual themes or depictions, leading to a rise in district-level challenges. 

Supporters say those laws increase transparency and allow parents to object to content inappropriate for K-12 students. Opponents say the laws target books with LGBTQ themes and promote censorship. 

In some states with Democratic trifectas, such as Illinois, lawmakers have proposed or enacted legislation to make it harder for individuals to challenge books based on their content. 

These controversies over books increasingly hinge on a linguistic framing: whether districts are banning books—or simply making necessary curatorial decisions within limited library spaces. PEN America, a nonprofit that says it defends writers’ free speech, identified more than 10,000 instances of what it described as public school book bans during the 2023-24 school year. But some groups and individuals have challenged PEN America’s methodology, arguing its definition is too broad to be useful.

PEN America defines a book ban as “any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a previously accessible book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished, either temporarily or permanently.”

Writing in the conservative publication National Review, Abigail Anthony said, “By PEN America’s definition, if a school made a book available only to certain students on the basis of age or grade after it was previously available to a larger subset of students, then the book has been ‘banned,’ despite its obtainability.”

PEN America Managing Director of U.S. Free Expression Programs Jonathan Friedman said “When someone wants to downplay a book being banned, they won’t call it a ban. That’s why certain cases don’t make the news.” Friedman said people will use terms like “removal” or “withdrawal,” but that “the whole principle of public education is that it is not supposed to be dictated by particular ideologies that aim to censor what other people can learn and access in schools.” 

According to PEN America’s methodology, Iowa had the second-highest number of incidents of book bans after Florida in 2023 and 2024—3,671 instances across 117 districts.

Ballotpedia tracks school board authority and constraints on their authority across the 50 states. Read more about Iowa school board authority over topics such as curriculum, parental notification, discipline, the timing of their elections, open enrollment, charter schools, and cellphone policies here.

Extracurricular: education news 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 Aryn Peters and Daniel Wartick, two of six candidates running for two seats on the North Kansas City Public Schools Board of Education. The general election is April 8. 

We previously highlighted responses from Roy Copeland III, who is also running in the election.

The North Kansas City School District is the third-largest in Missouri, with roughly 20,500 students. 

Here’s how Peters answered the question, “What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?”

“Areas of public policy I am passionate about are Education, Healthcare and Housing.

Understanding the policies that will affect our community and our schools is of utmost importance. I have made certain to forge relationships with our local officials at the city, county and state level so I can be sure I am aware of up and coming legislation. I enjoy attending the Legislative Committee meetings for the Northland Regional Chamber and having good discussion on legislation and policies.”

Click here to read the rest of Peters’ responses. 

Here’s how Wartick answered the question, “What is the primary job of a school board member in your view?”

“The primary role of a school board member is to provide governance and oversight for a school district to ensure the effective and efficient operation of public schools. School boards play a critical role in shaping public education. A school board member’s responsibility is to represent all members of the community, ensuring that every student receives a high-quality education in a fiscally responsible, ethical and legally sound manner.”

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