Public school districts are microcosms of American civic life—operated by and for members of the community, with their agendas susceptible to the cultural and political winds that blow through those communities. Even in states where school choice is common, the school district and its elected board still remain part of the infrastructure of cities, towns, and counties. It’s no surprise, then, that disputes which bubble (or erupt) through the larger culture regularly land on board agendas and often land rancorously. The Brookings Institution has been digging deeply into the function of America’s elected school boards, and its first published report looks at how recent cultural conflicts were handled by board members, through the lens of that other quintessential pillar of our civic life: the media.
The research team built a dataset of media reports by web-scraping Google search results via its “News” tab for school district conflicts over a specific set of issues. The analysts chose issues which “had been prominent in education politics from 2018 through 2024 (based on [an] initial screening of articles and Google Trends data)” and which used “distinctive language” easily searchable in news reports. The final list comprises Covid-19 mask mandates, critical race theory (CRT), book restrictions, and transgender students’ rights. Not a perfect overlap with so-called “culture war” issues, but close enough.
Districts were chosen for inclusion based on a stratified sampling strategy using the National Center for Education Statistics’ 12 locale type categories (City-Large, Rural-Remote, etc.). The team randomly selected a maximum of 200 school districts of each locale type from across the country—some locale types did not have 200 exemplars—resulting in a final sample of 2,337 districts out of about 13,500 nationwide. They also applied weights so that the sample would be nationally representative and ran a second analysis including student enrollment data to give a picture of how many students attended districts with school board conflicts, not just the number of districts. Team members manually reviewed each article to confirm whether a genuine conflict within the school board had arisen, rather than a simple and non-confrontational discussion of an issue.
The first and perhaps most striking finding is that media reports on these cultural issues were not widespread. Overall, just 10 percent of districts had at least one media report of a conflict between 2018 and 2024 that was related to any of the four issues under study. However, these were often large districts, so about 30 percent of public school students attended school in places with reported conflicts. During individual years, no more than 5 percent of districts (representing 18 percent of students) had any reported school board conflict. Of the districts that did have a reported conflict, most had reports related to just one of the four issues. The most common source of conflict was book content and possible restriction, while the least common was mask mandates.
Between January 2018 and January 2020 (pre-pandemic), media reports of all four issues were scarce—conflicts were reported for less than 1 percent of districts (representing less than 1.5 percent of students)—which makes sense for Covid masking, but comes as something of a surprise for the other three issues. By 2021, reports of school board conflicts over all four issues began to rise. Media coverage of conflicts over Covid-19 masking policies and CRT peaked in 2021 and then steadily declined to near pre-pandemic levels—that is, near zero—by 2024. Media coverage of conflicts over book restrictions and issues involving transgender students peaked in 2023, and, although declining in 2024, still remained well above pre-pandemic levels.
Media reporting on these cultural issues was most common in large districts (as noted above) and urban areas, with nearly half of large districts (more than 15,000 students) having at least one reported conflict. About a third of city districts had at least one reported conflict, compared with 17.9 percent of suburban districts, 8.4 percent of town districts, and just 3.9 percent of rural districts. Reported conflicts were higher in politically liberal (“blue”) and moderate (“purple”) communities, as determined by the 2020 presidential election share won by either Joe Biden or Donald Trump in that district.
The Brookings team is quick to note that while its findings provide a useful snapshot of what was happening around boardroom tables during the period, the picture is incomplete. Local media has been in decline for years, accelerating during the 2018–2024 period. Does the low incidence of conflicts reflect actual frequency of discord, a more vigilant press overall in this period, or just the situation in those districts under watch by journalists and other public meeting documenters? Either way, the analysts say, their findings offer local district leaders a useful corrective for national narratives—especially those leaders not in large, urban, and politically competitive districts.
SOURCE: Jon Valant et al., “Media reporting on school board conflicts,” Brookings (June 2026).
