Hall Pass: Your Ticket to Understanding School Board Politics, Edition #126

By

Samuel Wonacott

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 Bible teaching requirements in Oklahoma 
  • School board filing deadlines, election results, and recall certifications
  • Where Harris and Trump stand on K-12 educational issues 
  • 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 Bible teaching requirements in Oklahoma

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.

Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters (R) issued a memo June 27 requiring teachers to reference the Bible as a contextual source in lessons on history, law, western civilization, and comparative religion. The order is effective for the 2024-2025 school year.

Jacob Randolph, Assistant Professor of History of Christianity at the Saint Paul School of Theology in Oklahoma City, writes that Superintendent Walters’ policy is based on the religious assumption that the Bible promotes liberty, democracy, and justice. Randolph says the Bible has been used to support conflicting positions throughout American history. He says Walters’ claims aren’t historical and that schools shouldn’t promote theological claims.

Hiram Sasser, Executive General Counsel for First Liberty Institute, writes the policy aligns with U.S. Supreme Court precedent and statements from U.S. presidents of both parties that did not generate controversy. Sasser says the Bible is important for understanding subjects like American history and Western Civilization and is appropriate to reference in those contexts.

‘Every teacher’ in Oklahoma must teach the Bible? That’ll keep them from leaving. | Kathy A. Megyeri, The Washington Post

“Ryan Walters made the rounds defending his policy mandating that Oklahoma public schools teach the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, because it is a ‘necessary historical document’ as he said at a State Board of Education meeting last month. In his announcement, he said his team found ‘major points in history that refer to the Bible.’ … Mr. Walters shows his hand when he leapfrogs history. He shows it further when he marries his educational policy to his rhetoric, in which he often promotes Judeo-Christian values. For him, the values of America are synonymous with a particular theological understanding of Christianity, and the country’s ethical identity is instantiated in the message of the Bible. … The issue is that his demands infer particular theological judgments about both the Bible and the United States. It also prioritizes a moral vision of the Bible that, as I pointed out above, is anything but self-evident. To assert that America is good because of the Bible, or that the Bible unambiguously points in a morally unified direction — toward liberty, toward democracy or toward a more just society — is to make a theological declaration, not a historical one.”

Superintendent Walters is following a well-worn path forged by the U.S. Supreme Court | Hiram Sasser, The Oklahoman

“Superintendent Walters is simply following in the footsteps of many elected officials from the left and right who promoted the same thing using very similar language. … [R]ead Walters’ memo carefully. He clearly indicates the Ten Commandments should be ‘referenced as an appropriate study of history, civilization, ethics, comparative religion, or the like.’ Though not cited in his memo, Walters is directly quoting Stone v. Graham, which states that it is entirely appropriate to educate students about the Ten Commandments for such purposes. If any critic has a problem with this reasoning, their issue is with the version of the Supreme Court that struck down displaying the Ten Commandments in the classroom. Walters is merely following the favorite case of the critics. … His memo simply calls upon the schools to enrich the education and cultural currency of the students of Oklahoma in accordance with Supreme Court precedent. As the Supreme Court reiterated in Van Orden v. Perry in 2005, ‘[t]here is an unbroken history of official acknowledgement by all three branches of government of the role of religion in American life from at least 1789.’ There is nothing wrong with continuing that history and tradition in Oklahoma.”

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

This year, Ballotpedia will cover elections for over 11,000 school board seats across more than 30 states. We’re expanding our coverage each year with our eye on the country’s more 80,000 school board seats.  

Election results from the past week

Rhode Island

On Sept. 10, Ballotpedia covered school board elections in the following districts:

Except for Warwick Public Schools, the districts on the list above held partisan primaries.

Rhode Island is one of five states—including Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—where state law effectively allows partisan and nonpartisan elections depending on the school district. In four states, school board candidates run in partisan elections only. More than 90% of school boards are nonpartisan.

Upcoming school board elections

South Carolina

There is a special general election on Sept. 17 for Beaufort County School District Board of Education District 7. David Carr is running unopposed. 

The Beaufort County School District is the 54th largest district in the state, with an estimated student population of 6,500 students. 

Alaska

On Oct. 1, Ballotpedia will cover recall elections against Emil Mackey and Deedie Sorensen, members of the Juneau Borough School District school board. Sorensen is the president of the board, while Mackey is the vice president. 

So far this year, 10 school board recall efforts have gone to the ballot—voters recalled six members and rejected efforts to remove four. Click here to listen to our recent On the Ballot podcast breaking down this year’s state and local recall efforts. 

The recall effort started after the district’s finance consultant informed the board in early 2024 that the district faced a $9.5 million budget shortfall. In the spring of 2023, the board unanimously approved the district’s budget through June 30, 2024. After the budget shortfall was discovered, the board approved a modified budget, which included a $4 million interest-free loan from the city of Juneau.

The recall campaign submitted petitions faulting Mackey and Sorensen for their “failure to understand the FY24 budget and accounting errors resulting in $7.9M deficit and taxpayer loan from CBJ [City and Borough of Alaska]”. 

Both board members said they voted to approve a budget in the spring of 2023 based on information the district’s administration and financial staff gave them. Sorensen said: “While people keep acting as though maybe we should have hired someone to do a deep dive into our budget, that’s exactly what we did. We gave the superintendent in, I believe it was November, the authority to find someone who could basically forensically crawl through our budget after the audit and figure out what was going on.”

Click here to learn more about school board recall efforts. Click here to read our 2024 mid-year recall report. 

Where Harris and Trump stand on K-12 educational issues 

On Sept. 10, former President Donald Trump (R) and Vice President Kamala Harris (D) met onstage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the first presidential debate since President Joe Biden (D) ended his re-election campaign in July. You can check out Ballotpedia’s full coverage of the debate here.

While K-12 education was not one of the topics that Harris and Trump discussed at the debate, it will continue to be an issue in the election, with both candidates staking out different positions on the campaign trail on everything from school choice to Title IX. Today, we’re going to look at what the candidates have said about education. The quotes below are gathered from candidate campaign websites, official statements, and interviews. We also look at the Republican and Democratic education priorities as reflected in each party’s recently updated platform.

As a reminder, Ballotpedia collects and organizes presidential candidate stances on more than 40 domestic, foreign, and economic policy areas. You can view that research here. 

Where Trump and the Republican Party stand on K-12 public education

The Trump campaign released its 12-point Save American Education and Give Power Back to Parents K-12 education plan in early 2023 and issued it again on July 25, 2024. The plan touches on everything from combatting Critical Race Theory (CRT) to providing taxpayer funding for private educational expenses.

These stances largely reflect the 2024 Republican Party platform, which the GOP formally adopted at its national convention in Milwaukee on July 8. The platform calls for “an Education System that empowers students, supports families, and promotes American Values. Our Education System must prepare students for successful lives and well-paying jobs.” The platform also states that Republicans “support Universal School Choice in every State in America” and “will restore Parental Rights in Education.” 

School choice is an umbrella term that includes policies that provide families with taxpayer funding for private educational expenses, like private school tuition or homeschooling. In 12 states, all or nearly all students are eligible to receive such funding.

Here’s a look at some of the stances Trump has taken on K-12 education, both in his Save American Education and Give Power Back to Parents plan and elsewhere.

  • Trump wants schools to prepare students to find jobs after they graduate. His campaign website states: “that we owe our children great schools that lead to great jobs, which will lead to an even greater country than we’re living in right now. To that end, President Trump will work to ensure that a top priority of every school is to prepare students for jobs.”
  • Trump has called for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, a stance he first proposed in his 2016 campaign. At a rally in Wisconsin on Sept. 7, Trump said, “We’ll send our education back to the states. Some states will do a fantastic job; some won’t.” 
  • Trump has said he would cut federal funding from schools teaching CRT, gender theory, “or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”  
  • Trump has said he would create “a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but to educate them.”
  • Trump’s plan calls for adopting “a Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice.”

Where Harris stands on K-12 education

As of this writing, the Harris campaign has not released a detailed K-12 education plan. Harris’ campaign website states she “will strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class…She has implemented policies that have led to over one million registered apprentices being hired, and she will do even more to scale up programs that create good career pathways for non-college graduates.”  

In her Aug. 23 Democratic Convention speech, Harris responded to one of Trump’s central education goals: “We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools.”

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) approved its 2024 platform on Aug. 19, a day before the Democratic National Convention. The platform states Democrats support “reducing chronic absenteeism by building social and emotional supports at schools, offering literacy programs, and setting high expectations for student attendance; providing intensive tutoring; extending the school day and school year; expanding community schools; and helping schools to lift student achievement, rather than punishing them based on state standardized tests.” 

The platform also states that Democrats oppose “the use of private-school vouchers, tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education.”

The country’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation Teachers (AFT), endorsed her candidacy in July. NEA President Becky Pringle said: “The choice for the nation is clear: We can elect a president who will make sure our students can live into their full brilliance by prioritizing our public schools or a president who will demonize them and corporatize our schools, minimizing who has access and opportunities.”

During her 2020 Democratic primary campaign, Harris released a proposal to spend $315 billion over 10 years on increasing teacher pay. Harris has not resurfaced that proposal this election cycle, but she did reference teacher pay in her speech at the AFT’s national convention on July 25 of this year: “The most noble of work, teaching other people’s children. And God knows we don’t pay you enough as it is.” In that same speech, Harris contrasted the Democratic and Republican Party education priorities as she saw them: “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books.”

Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), a former high school teacher, as her vice presidential running mate. As governor, Walz signed several bills related to K-12 public education, including legislation that made Minnesota one of eight states providing students with free, universal school meals. 

Click here to read more about presidential issue stances. 

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 incumbent Dana Schallheim and LaToya Nkongolo, two candidates running in the Nov. 5 general election for Anne Arundel County Public Schools Board of Education, District 5, in Maryland. Schallheim was first elected in 2018. 

Anne Arundel County Public Schools is the fourth-largest district in Maryland, with an estimated enrollment of 84,000 students. Seven seats on the board are up for election this year. 

Here’s how Schallheim answered the question, “What are your preferred strategies for faculty, staff, and administration recruitment?”

“Our excellent teachers require better pay. Over the last five years I have substantially increased teacher pay & restructured salary scales which moved us from 19th to 4th for new teacher salary in MD, supported ‘grow our ow’” programs to encourage our students to pursue careers in teaching & recruitment efforts nationally & internationally, career ladders that incentivize teachers to stay in the classroom, & student schedules that increased planning time for all elementary school educators.

This year we’ve seen a 13% increase in our applicant pool, with the largest class of teachers of color our district has had in years. We’ve filled dozens of vacancies in our teaching staff. Additionally, we’ve improved our outreach, recruiting candidates at 70 job recruitment fairs during the 22-23 school year in 11 states, DC, Puerto Rico, and the HBCU national virtual job fair, partnering with nearly 30 colleges and universities.”

Click here to read the rest of Schallheim’s answers. 

Here’s how Nkongolo answered the question, “What are your preferred strategies for faculty, staff, and administration recruitment?”

“Recruiting and retaining high-caliber teachers and staff across the district requires a multifaceted approach. Professional development must be a priority as this will enable teachers to refine their skills and excel in their profession, striving to become top-tier professionals in the field. Additionally, soliciting feedback from staff and implementing their suggestions can enhance job satisfaction and retention.”

Click here to read the rest of Nkongolo’s answers. 

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.