It’s 2024—Let’s get going!

In this first episode of 2024, Democracy and Education is revamped to a new, shorter and more frequent interview format featuring Karin Chenoweth talking with school board candidates and people working on school board campaigns. Throughout the year we will talk about what strategies and tactics are successful and which are unsuccessful, as well as the political environment in which those campaigns operate.

To kick the year off, Karin checks in with Kris Amundson. Kris is a former school board member, a former member of the Virginia General Assembly, and former head of the National Association of State Boards of Education, and she has wise words for anyone working on a school board campaign.

And there are a lot of people working on school board campaigns!

More than 21,000 school board seats are up for election in 2024.

Those elections will veer wildly from being political afterthoughts to being highly contested and consequential. Some of them will feature people who want to ban books, limit the history children can learn in school, and—in some cases—dismantle public schools entirely.

And because school board races are such low-information races, some of those extremists will be elected if the voters aren’t aware of the stakes of the election.

Which means that pro-public education candidates need to run real campaigns, and Karin and Kris talk about what’s involved in that.

For those who want to dig deeper, Karin and Kris produced a five-episode podcast, So You Want to Run for School Board that covers all the major aspects of a campaign, from fundraising to organizing a field operation—and some of the minor ones as well, such as placement of lawn signs. You can find all episodes here.

In the meantime, subscribe so that you can hear whenever we have another episode talking with smart people around the country who care about kids, public education, and democracy.