“We find that most boards experience some kind of conflict at some point, but it’s not always about these extremely nationalized political issues,” said Tyler Simko, an incoming assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan who coauthored the recent working paper released in June. “The most intense versions of these conflicts over issues like race, gender identity, and book bans are focused in larger city and suburban districts.”
He and his co-researchers scoured the internet to identify YouTube videos of full school board meetings from 48 states. They downloaded the videos and generated transcripts, which they analyzed alongside federal data about district spending, size, and demographics. In all, they analyzed about 100,000 board meetings from 1,600 districts between 2010 and 2023.