School Board Capacity
School boards have statutory authority over most K–12 policies, but longstanding concerns about members’ limited expertise and weak incentives raise questions about their ability to drive policy. Using new data on board members’ priorities and actions, combined with a regression discontinuity design that provides quasi-random variation in board composition, we show that board members have large effects on district outcomes across many policy domains. On average, electing a member aligned with a given priority shifts related outcomes by 0.21 standard deviations in the expected direction. Directly observing policy priorities, rather than weakly correlated demographic or professional proxies, is crucial for understanding board capacity.
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Copy CitationBarbara Biasi, Minseon Park, John D. Singleton, and Seth D. Zimmerman, "School Board Capacity," NBER Working Paper 34590 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34590.Download Citation
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