Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. These days, if you want to find the most white-hot politics, you might look to your local school board. My guest today is the former chairman of Blythedale Children's Hospital in Westchester County, New York, and he's a former investment banker and he's currently a partner at an investment management firm. And he decided several years ago that he'd seek a seat on his local public school board. And he has something to say, not only about the experience, but about school boards more generally. Scott Levy recently published, "Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming the Heart of American Education and Democracy." Mr. Levy, welcome to the program.

Scott Levy: Well, Grant, it's great to be with you today.

GR: I really appreciate you making the time. Let me just start with the book's title, "Why School Boards Matter," I think in at least one way, I think it's obvious to a lot of us in recent years that school boards do matter, they have mattered. And let me just give you and our listeners a quick story to illustrate this. At Syracuse University, I help run a course for military veterans who are interested in pursuing elective office for the first time. And as a way to get started down that path, what we used to suggest to them is that they look at school boards, among other local offices. It's a common first step. Now we're cautioning them to tread very carefully there, because this terrain has become so politically fraught with divisive cultural debates. I mean, it's a way for, it seems to me, for someone to get labeled and sucked into a polarized debate right out of the gate in their public service. And just to sort of put an exclamation point on this point I'm making, one of the folks that teaches on our program is a former National Party campaign chair, and he starts out his presentation saying, you know, one thing I want to tell you, don't run for school board.

Scott Levy: (laughter)

GR: So, my question is, what has happened? Have school boards, do you think, just been drawn into this black hole of political polarization right now along with everything else, or is something more distinctive going on? What happened?

SL: So, you're getting to the heart of one of the reasons why I decided to write the book. Because when I first became a school board member in 2015, it's a local district outside of New York City, in Westchester County, I remember school boards being thought of as relatively boring, and I remember when I won the election and I was walking in my town, somebody had stopped me in the street and they said, oh, Scott, congratulations on winning the race, and I said to them, oh, I really appreciate it, and they said, yeah, we're going to see you on video because all the school board meetings are videoed and anybody can watch them. That's one of the things about school boards that's so important, the transparency. And I remember thinking at the time, wow, somebody actually watches this because this is 2015 and not a lot of attention was being paid to it.

GR: (laughter)

SL: And he responds by saying, yeah, I watch it. I watch it because I've been having trouble falling asleep lately, and it's very helpful, especially when you're doing the budget or you're doing policy language. And that was really, I think, the way so many people thought about school boards in 2015. And then you fast forward to 2020, 21 and 22, in the heart of Covid and afterwards, and we see everything explode. And what my message would be is, on the one hand, school boards have always been a place throughout American history where these battles have taken place. And I did a lot of research looking back at the 1800s and early 1900s, finding examples where you could almost find the same language that people used for the smallpox vaccine, as they did for the Covid vaccine when there was talk of vaccination requirements in the early 1900s on smallpox and obviously around, you know, in the middle of the pandemic. This battle between parental rights and government control or curriculum versus indoctrination, and the fact that we as Americans approached these questions with slightly different ideas, I think gets to the heart of what happens in boardrooms. Now, there are a bunch of things that have changed as well that I'm happy to get into it with you.

GR: Yeah, well, you actually anticipated something I want to ask you about. You do get into the history of this, and you take a look at the past regarding school board politics. So, you went back to the 1800s, and that example was smallpox. But, you know, I'm old enough to remember really epic battles over school desegregation. I can't remember how many of those happened at the school board level, but I know it was a big issue at the state level and certainly the national level. Thinking about maybe after World War two, have there been other times when school boards occupied a similarly volatile political space? Or again, are we now in this combination of, you mentioned indoctrination versus education, the battles over curriculum and what books people are going to read, battles over bathrooms and battles over gender identity, the Covid battles, which were huge. I mean, is it new, do you think, or is it just a blip on our continuum?

SL: I think it's a blip on the continuum in the sense that there are always issues that permeate boardrooms, and obviously they change from time to time, teaching evolution versus creationism, the way in which religion comes into schools in different ways, even today, we see that, but we've seen that throughout American history. In the early 1800s in Philadelphia, there was literally a riot that happened over what Bible was going to be taught in public schools in Philadelphia. And then you look at the way that lines are drawn between different schools within a district. That's a very controversial issue. Whether a school is potentially going to be closed, that's, it's not a cultural issue, but it's an incredibly important issue for the community that tends to bring out a lot of different factions and some real battles that happen in boardrooms. So, there's just so many different reasons why things can heat up, and you never quite know what's around the corner. But I think that these places are just manifestations of what's happening in broader society and/or in that community.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Scott Levy. He's a former investment banker and a member of the board of education in Westchester County, New York, and the author of, "Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming the Heart of American Education and Democracy." So, we've been talking about the real headline, you know, political battles that that are deeply divisive and that have been located in school boards, but your book is about a lot more than that. And, you know, you want to emphasize how important school boards are in American democracy and in education policy. So, I just want to give you some space to talk about that. What are the other reasons why school boards are so important?

SL: So, the reason that I decided to run for school board is really after I had seen what happened with the rollout of Race to the Top in New York State, which happened around the time of 2013, 2014. I was the chair of an organization that was raising money for public schools to try to fund innovative projects, projects that couldn't be done in the regular way - school budget. And this organization had been around for 20 years, there had been a steady stream of ideas that had always flowed from teachers, from administrators to the organization, for, you know, funding opportunities. And all of a sudden, those ideas stopped. And I remember thinking at the time, why all of a sudden, I become chair of this organization do the ideas stop? And the reason was that Race to the Top as it was executed by New York State in a very aggressive manner, really did upend the way that everybody thought about schools, the way teachers were teaching, the role of tests tied to teacher evaluations, there were a lot of elements of this, and it garnered all the attention. And I remember thinking at the beginning, well, maybe this is just affecting my district and not affecting the districts more broadly. And I went to this forum that I'll never forget where there were schools across our region, there were schools that were high needs, schools that were low needs, schools on all different, you know, economic ends of the spectrum, all different demographics. And really across the board there was an amazing amount of energy focused on how this initiative was really upending schools in a very negative way. And so that got me to doing a lot of policy research and work and thinking about the fact that, if you're on a school board and you sit within the district as the governance body, there are a lot of things that you can do that even the state and federal government, as well-meaning as they may be, can't do. And that is really the, you know, heart of a lot of what I talk about in my book, ways that school boards can improve districts in just a very different manner than can be done at a centralized level. The thing that I found by the time I finished writing the book was that, perhaps maybe the most important takeaway, is the role of school boards in our democracy more broadly, and how I really do think that despite the fact that we see a lot of infighting in school board meetings and polar...