Education Week - December 13, 2017 - 10

Shifts From At-Large Elections
Help Boost Latino Representation
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

prove that the voting structure
prevents them from electing candidates of their choice.
As the nation's public schools
becoming increasingly diverse,
there's growing concern that the
composition of school boards does
not reflect that diversity, and in
some communities, the concern has
sparked legal battles. There's a lot
at stake in those battles as school
boards hire superintendents, approve district spending, and set
policies that directly impact students, such as choosing curriculum
and deciding how students are disciplined.
"There a quiet revolution going
on, and I think it's getting louder,"
said Robert Rubin, a civil rights attorney and former legal director of
the San Francisco-based Lawyers'
Committee for Civil Rights, which
has successfully sued several California jurisdictions to switch from
at-large to single-member district
elections.
However, Rubin said, as long as
money plays an outsize role in elections, it will be hard for groups that
have been historically left out of
the political process to get elected
in large numbers.
But it matters, he said, because
voting rights "determine who gets
to say which benefits go where,
and which school gets a new facility, and which school gets the best
teachers, and which school gets
the best textbooks and gets the
playground repaired more quickly.
That's really what voting rights are
all about."
But some critics argue the state's
law has done more to benefit lawyers' paydays than it has to move
the needle on diversifying representation.

Who's on School Boards?
While school board members
make up the largest group of
elected officials in the nation-
more than 90,000 of them, according to the National School Boards
Association-there are scant data
on their race and ethnicity. A 2010
report published by NSBA, which
surveyed 900 school officials, found
that among respondents, 80 percent identified as white, 12 percent
as African-American, and 3 percent
as Hispanic.
In California, where Hispanic
students make up more than
54 percent of students in public
schools, Hispanic representation
on school boards has improved in
recent years but is not close to
mirroring student demographics. In a 2015 survey by the California School Boards Association,
66 percent of board members
who responded identified as
white, while 19 percent said they
were Hispanic.
Since the passage of the state's
voting rights act, the number of

Hispanics serving on local school
boards has more than doubled,
according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. But the data is
imperfect since the state does not
collect information on either voters' or candidates' race and ethnicity. It's especially challenging
to find data on African-American
and Asian-American representation on school boards.
An independent analysis also
shows that switching from at-large
to single-district elections has
helped accelerate the numbers of
Latino board members.
School districts with more than
2,035 students (the median school
district size in California) that
switched from at-large voting to
district-based voting between 2008
and 2016, saw a larger percentage
increase in Hispanic board mem-

[Voting rights]
determine who gets
to say which benefits
go where ... which
school get the best
teachers. ..."
ROBERT RUBIN
Civil rights lawyer

bers than those that remained atlarge, according to Morgan Kousser,
a professor at the California Institute of Technology. In those that
switched, the number of Latinos
on the school board grew by 61 percent, while in those that remained
at-large, the number of Latinos
grew by 18 percent, the analysis
by Kousser and research assistant
Connor Moffatt found.
Rosalind Gold, the senior director of policy, research, and
advocacy at NALEO, cautioned
against drawing a direct connection between the law and the increase in Latino representation.
The state's Latino population has
grown, and more of those residents have registered to vote, she
said. The state's Hispanic community has also stepped up efforts to
recruit and support more candidates and educate voters about
elections, Gold said.
And, Gold stressed, the state's
law, like the federal Voting Rights
Act, does not guarantee that minority candidates will win if they
run. How new district boundaries
are drawn and whether communities are involved in that process
matters as much as making the
switch to district-based elections,
Gold said.
Before the Modesto school board
could switch to single-member

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 13, 2017 | www.edweek.org

districts, voters had to approve a
change to the city's charter, which
they did in 2016. While the board
drew new district boundaries
earlier this year, some members
pushed to delay the election for
the newly created Area 7 seat to
2019, saying six months was not
enough time for a quality candidate to mount a campaign for the
Nov. 7 ballot.
That's when a Latino community
activist warned the board it was at
high risk of violating the state law.
Rebecca Harrington, the president
of the Latino Community Roundtable, presented the board with two
options: hold elections in the heavily-Hispanic Area 7 in 2017 or face
the possibility of a lawsuit.

'Bringing a Different Voice'
In the end, the school board capitulated, and the Area 7 race fielded
three candidates.
There was Lopez, a community organizer who is MexicanAmerican; Matthew Harrington,
a group home worker who is of
Mexican descent (and is Rebecca
Harrington's son); and Ryan
Schambers, a substitute teacher
who is Caucasian.
In an October candidates' forum,
the Area 7 candidates told a sparse
audience that students in their
community did not always have
access to the same academic programs, including gifted and talented education, as others in the
district.
Lopez, who won the election with
65 percent of the 1,432 votes cast,
said that while he was campaigning, some residents told him it was
the first time in years that a school
board candidate had knocked on
their doors.
"Any person that's going to sit
on that board should have the
goal to improve our students' education-and that should be the
No. 1 goal," Lopez said. "It should
not be about one side or another.
That's when we lose."
But, he added, "We are bringing a
different voice."
While proponents see California's
voting rights law as a way to give
minorities a better shot at running
for office, some critics have said it's
been more of a boon for trial lawyers who have successfully sued
local jurisdictions and won large
settlements.
Some city officials have described
it as akin to extortion: spend huge
sums of taxpayers' money to defend in court and lose, only to pay
attorneys' fees or change to district
elections. Until the state legislature
amended the law in 2015 to cap attorneys' fees at $30,000, the settlements were in the millions.
Joaquin Avila, a civil rights lawyer who wrote the law and is a
former president and executive director of MALDEF, said the statute
has accomplished what he envisioned: forcing local jurisdictions to

Modesto, Calif., a city of more
than 200,000 residents, is
home to a large agriculture
industry. Latino students make
up more than 60 percent of the
Modesto school district, and a
recent change to school board
elections there has some
activists hopeful that more
Hispanics will be elected.

ADOLFO LOPEZ
won a seat on the
Modesto school
board in November
to represent the
predominantlyHispanic Area 7.

n African American,
not Hispanic
(350,000 students)
n American Indian
or Alaska Native
(33,000 students)

The number of
Hispanics elected
to California school
boards has more
than doubled in the
last two decades.

n Asian
(559,000 students)
n Filipino
(154,000 students)
n Pacific Islander
(29,000 students)
n White not Hispanic
(1.5 million students)
n Two or more races
not Hispanic
(207,000 students)
n None reported
(46,000 students)

Education Week - December 13, 2017

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