School Boards, Election Timing, and the Politics of Public Education

• In Event: Local-level Policy and Resource Variation: Political Origins and Consequences

Abstract

How effectively can states use election law to influence municipal policy? In early 2012, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed A4394, encouraging the state’s 590 school districts to move the date of school board elections from the third Tuesday of April to the state and federal election day in November. The bill was part of the Christie administration’s broader attempt to reign in the state’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes and limit the power of public sector unions. Proponents of the bill argued that aligning elections would save money on election administration, increase voter turnout, and decrease the power of “special interests” – in this case, teachers’ unions. A4394 incentivized changes in election timing by allowing school boards to pass district budgets without voter approval as long as proposed tax levy increases did not surpass a 2% increase cap implemented in 2011. Most districts quickly followed the administration’s carrot: 83% of school districts switched board elections from April to November in 2012. By 2018, all but 13 districts had moved to on-cycle elections. The bill also followed two years of initiatives by the Christie administration and allies in the state legislature to control New Jersey’s powerful public sector unions, including successful and controversial increases in state employee contributions to pensions and health care coverage. In this paper, we leverage the exogenous policy change from A4394 to analyze the effect of school board election timing on election outcomes and the political strength of teachers’ unions proxied by teacher salary. Previous work on school board election timing and school district referenda has connected election timing changes with the strength of teacher unions. Berry and Gersen (2011) find a small decreasing effect of alignment on teacher salary in California, and Anzia (2012) finds a significant decrease in teacher salary in Texas. Both studies take advantage of changes in state law to allow or force election alignment; however, neither study is able to identify the causal mechanism connecting election law with salary. While citizens with particularized interests, like school employees, should be advantaged in low-turnout, off-cycle elections (e.g., Moe 2005), Kogan et al. (2018) argue that teachers and other school district employees remain a small proportion of voters even in the off-cycle elections and that policy consequences from election timing instead rely on the changing proportion of elderly voters. Our analysis is the first to examine the issue in New Jersey, where school funding and quality is closely tied to central issues of the state’s political issues: local government home rule, highest-in-the-nation property taxes, affordable housing, racial segregation, land use, and public sector pensions. We collect data on voter turnout, school board election outcomes, and school budgeting decisions. We employ a number of methodological strategies including matching, difference-in-differences, and district fixed effects regression to analyze whether and how election timing shapes school district policy. Our analysis identifies important consequences of election alignment on school board elections: alignment dramatically increases school board turnout, increases incumbent reelection on school boards, and reduces teacher salary increases by about 1.5 percentage points. We further show that election alignment did not reduce the attractiveness of school board service and did not reduce the number of candidates running for election. Our results suggest that school board members are changing their behavior in response to the larger and broader constituency brought upon by election alignment, rather than through other mechanisms like the replacement of incumbent board members with those less favorable to school employees.

Authors

• Daniel Bowen, College of New Jersey

• Dillon McNamara