Vladimir Kogan, assistant professor, political science; and Stéphane Lavertu, associate professor, John Glenn College of Public Affairs, are the recipients of a $632,778 Lyle Spencer Research Award from the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation to fund a research study on education governance and accountability. The purpose of the Education Governance and Accountability Project is to improve understanding of the political institutions governing U.S. public education, so that they may be designed to promote democratic accountability and the efficient provision of K-12 education.

Kogan and Lavertu, along with their co-principal investigator, Emory University political scientist Zachary Peskowitz, will be collecting a decade of data on local school district elections across 20 states and applying rigorous statistical techniques to understand how the politics of public education affect school administration, instruction and student learning.

The three-year project builds on a pilot study the researchers recently completed in Ohio, with funding from Ohio State’s Democracy Studies Program, a nonpartisan initiative of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Moritz College of Law, with administrative support from the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

“Local school boards are the most common elected office in the country, yet very little research has examined them. Our findings to-date raise important questions about how political processes shape public education in this country, and we expect that our work with the Spencer Foundation will lead to even more important insights,” said Kogan.

The findings from the Ohio pilot study challenge much of the conventional wisdom about local school district elections. For example, the researchers found no evidence that lower ratings on state school report cards led to more electoral accountability for school board members. However, they did show that certain performance information influenced school levy elections — but in a perverse way, with voters withholding public funds from what they perceived to be low-performing schools, even when these schools were actually quite effective.

Another part of the pilot study showed that Ohio levy elections had an important impact on school district administration and student learning. They found the defeat of a levy resulted in one week less of student learning the following year.

“Many popular education reforms — from dissemination of school report cards showing how students are doing to the opening of publicly funded charter schools — are based on the assumption that local democratic control over public school districts is broken. Many of these assumptions are based on faith, rather than facts. We have only a very limited understanding of voter behavior in these local elections, and how election results translate into the day-to-day administration of schools and student achievement in the classroom,” said Lavertu. The Education Governance and Accountability Project is designed to fill precisely this gap.

The funds from the Spencer Grant will be used to build on the Ohio pilot study and expand data collection to at least 19 other states.

Ohio pilot study reports

Do School Report Cards Produce Accountability Through the Ballot Box?
Performance Federalism and Local Democracy: Theory and Evidence from School Tax Referenda
The Impact of Local Tax Referenda on School District Administration and Student Achievement