School Board Capacity

Barbara Biasi, Minseon Park, John Singleton and Seth Zimmerman

No 34590, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: H75 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: ED PE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34590.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34590

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34590
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().