Board in Class

Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming the Heart of American Education and Democracy by Scott R. Levy. MIT Press, 286 pages. 2025.

Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten. Thesis, 256 pages. 2025.

Last year, the East Ramapo Central School District in Rockland County, New York, discovered a previously unreported budget surplus of nearly $30 million. Named the most fiscally stressed school district in the state by the New York State comptroller in 2022, it had been operating under the pretense of a $20 million deficit and had gone without adequate funding or resources for years. In 2023, a state-mandated survey found that all thirteen school buildings in the district were in failing condition and had water contaminated with lead, the amelioration of which would cost over $200 million, according to one estimate. Instead of using the surplus to make long-needed repairs, local officials fought to return taxpayer money to the public.

An estimated 96 percent of students in East Ramapo Central School District are Black and Latino. But for years, it has had a majority-white school board whose members often send their children to private yeshivas. Because any citizen who lives and pays taxes in a community is eligible to hold a seat on their local school board, regardless of whether they have children in the public school system, East Ramapo’s private school parents organized to elect school board members who used their position to cut local taxes and siphon public money into racially segregated private schools. As a result, the East Ramapo Central School district became a twenty-first century example of Jim Crow education.

It wasn’t always this way. Longtime school board member and Wall Street executive Scott R. Levy, the author of Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming the Heart of American Education and Democracy, grew up in Rockland County and attended East Ramapo public schools in the seventies and eighties, when the district had some of the best public schools in the state. “It achieved impressive outcomes,” Levy writes, “despite lacking the economic resources of a private school or a public school in a wealthy zip code.” The district was also unusually racially and economically diverse compared to most public schools, including “large Haitian, Hispanic, Asian, and white households ranging from upper middle class to below the poverty line.” School board members were involved members of the community who took their responsibility toward the students in their care seriously. For decades, the town’s Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox population had tacitly agreed to refrain from school board elections and to pay taxes on the condition that their private schools be left alone from government interference.

But the detente didn’t last: growing dissatisfaction within the district over state law that prevented special needs students with intensive needs from continuing to attend private schools resulted in the Hasidic community organizing around local elections to replace the more traditional public school-minded board members with their own candidates. As a result, despite the county and state having more than enough resources, year after year, the East Ramapo school board now approves tax cuts and budgets that prioritize private over public schools.

This attack on public schools has only accelerated under Trump 2.0. Fifteen days after he was sworn into office, Trump told his newly nominated Education Secretary Linda McMahon that he wanted her to “put herself out of a job.” In March, he signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. Trump needs congressional approval to totally abolish the department, but the administration has found ways to deliver on its promise, hastening the department’s death by a thousand cuts. Over the past several months, the Trump administration has fired (or tried to fire) more than half the department’s staff, canceled nearly $7 billion in federal funding for thousands of school districts nationwide, pulled funding for programs supporting students with hearing and vision loss (only to restore it following public outcry), crippled the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, and cut funding for programs designed to help low-income students apply to college.

This wanton cost-cutting spree is deeply unpopular with the public. According to the 2025 PDK Poll, two-thirds of Americans oppose eliminating the Department of Education, and 64 percent of respondents believe teacher salaries are too low. But Trump is only heightening a crisis that has been slowly unfolding for years. In September, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported historic lows: less than a quarter of high school seniors nationwide scored at or above the proficiency standard in math. While learning loss and disruption from Covid-19 play a significant part in this crisis, this downward trend predates the pandemic. Predictably, success in standardized testing maps neatly onto income level and race; more than seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, today’s schools are more segregated than at almost any time since.

It’s in the context of Trump’s attacks on public education that Levy writes about school boards, which he believes are essential to our democracy and the functioning of public education. Levy argues the problem plaguing them is that they have become susceptible to political special interest groups, which deter them from being able to provide the public a meaningful chance to voice their concerns and participate in school governance. He thinks communities should preserve the sanctity and independence of the school board and local control through the careful application of management practices, involving state and federal oversight only when absolutely necessary.

But this argument is based on a fantasy. According to Levy’s logic, if the problem is that interest groups across the political spectrum take advantage of school boards for political purposes, the answer would be to make sure that its meetings are free from politics so that the people can be heard. But no democratically elected body, let alone one responsible for something as fundamental as administrating our children’s education, can be free from politics. Levy’s argument mirrors the right’s logic that school board organizing against critical race theory and masking during the pandemic grew organically from public discontent. In reality, Wall Street billionaires donated millions in dark money to fund a network of right-wing groups, affiliated with professional culture warrior Christopher Rufo, to undermine public education by stoking unrest at school board meetings and the like. “To get to universal school choice,” Rufo said in a speech to Hillsdale College in 2022, “you really need to operate from a premise of universal school distrust.”

One of the dangerously politicized factions that Levy—perhaps unsurprisingly—deems a threat is teachers’ unions. He cites a study by the political scientist Terry Moe from 2006 that “provides potential evidence of self-interest underlying teachers’ involvement in school board politics.” The evidence in question: teachers who lived in the school district they worked in were reportedly “two to seven times more likely to vote” in school board elections. “Teachers’ unions influence state policy by contributing to PACs and lobbying for specific legislation and regulation,” Levy fumes. He does not, however, explain how the interests of teachers’ unions conflict with those of the public, nor what he even conceives the public interest to be.

To Levy, teachers’ unions are a class of their own, wholly separate from “the public” and driven by craven self-interest, often to the detriment of students. In his view, teachers should not be counted among the public, even the ones who live and pay taxes in the same neighborhoods as their students. One glaring omission in his analysis is that teachers’ unions utilize a bargaining framework called Bargaining for the Common Good, which expands the scope of collective bargaining beyond wages and benefits to engage with a given community’s holistic needs. BCG recognizes that students and school employees are equal stakeholders with shared interests, and that those interests are fought for both at the bargaining table and in the community.

It’s no wonder that the right’s strategy to destroy the foundations of our democracy as we know it is routed through our public school system. Seventy percent of teachers are in a union, making teaching one of the most unionized professions in America. Public schools are a rare American institution where people of all races, faiths, and backgrounds are meant to gather and be treated equally.

In her book Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten writes about successes the AFT has had organizing in McDowell County, West Virginia, one of the poorest parts of the country. There, schools underwent reform after reform in an attempt to turn around poor performance—but not even a state takeover produced results. When the AFT, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, stepped in, they piloted reforms based on the community schools model, a vision of public schools as institutions where “schools create a welcoming and safe community for all students by providing wraparound services students, families, and communities need to thrive.” One crucial intervention the AFT made was to provide a mobile dental truck clinic so students could get the dental care they needed, helping address material needs so students could focus on their education. They also built housing for teachers to help retain talent. Good education policy recognizes that schools must involve the entire community—parents, students, teachers, school employees, area residents—because the quality of education that a child receives is built just as much outside the schoolhouse as inside it.

While Levy is of the mind that political engagement of every stripe threatens the democratic nature of public schools and their school boards, Weingarten, crucially, does not make this mistake. She notes that she often receives criticisms from extremists “on the left and the right,” but remains clear-eyed that the threat at hand is the far right. “It’s the difference between firefighters and arsonists,” she writes. “Teachers are working to build better schools. Fascists are trying to burn them down.”

Weingarten’s lucidity on this matter is a welcome surprise, given her relatively tepid politics as a labor leader. She has often shied from more radical stances her fellow labor organizers have supported; for instance, under her leadership in 2015, the AFT endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination despite considerable enthusiasm among AFT rank-and-file workers for Bernie Sanders. And in 2019, she wrote an op-ed for Politico arguing that health care plans that preserved for-profit insurance were preferable to Medicare for All. But now, in 2025, as the Democrats have totally relinquished their responsibility to fight the Trump administration on anything, Weingarten has used her leadership position to fight back. In June, she stepped down from the Democratic National Committee, writing in a letter to DNC chair Ken Martin that she was “out of step” with his choices in leadership.

Weingarten’s liberal politics means that her vision of robust public education is intertwined with a sense of American nationalism. Her book quotes Obama’s remark that “America’s business leaders understand that when it comes to education, we need to up our game,” and considers AFT’s partnerships with private industry to be beneficial for American students. She takes this thinking to dubious extremes. In April, President Trump issued an executive order establishing a federal task force to promote the use of artificial intelligence in K-12 education, and the AFT responded enthusiastically. In July, in partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, they introduced the National Academy for AI Instruction, which provides free AI training to all AFT members. Not all educators are on board; an open letter from educators who refuse to use generative AI in schools has almost a thousand signatures. They have good reason: studies from researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft, and from MIT Media Lab, show that frequent AI usage can result in reduced critical thinking skills. Marc Watkins, a researcher from the University of Mississippi studying artificial intelligence in the classroom, said of the initiative, “This is a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for.”

A world in which the fascist right continues its assault on public education is a public experiment of its own kind. “I love the poorly educated,” Trump said after winning the Nevada Republican presidential caucus in 2016. Now, nine years later, he is more determined than ever to ensure that millions of Americans never receive a quality education. A path forward for public schools must take an expansive view of democracy, in the classroom and outside of it. Weingarten understands that in 2025, believing there is a future for democracy is a partisan choice. You’re either on the side of the American people or you’re against them. Levy believes he can transcend our current messy reality and move us towards something better with the cold, impersonal philosophy of the corporate boardroom. It’s too bad the inhabitants of corporate boardrooms like things just the way they are.