School Board Battles
The Christian Right in Local Politics

by Melissa M. Deckman
Georgetown University Press. 224 pp., $ 26.95

Reviewed by Frederick M. Hess
Perspectives on Political Science
June 22, 2004

http://www.frederickhess.org/5056/school-board-battles

The emergence of the Christian right as a political force in the 1980s and 1990s fueled questions about the movement's ability to use its resources and the church community to advance its political goals. Given the Christian right's emphasis on culture, values, and education, as well as the leadership's stated concern about public school governance, one obvious issue concerns the extent to which the Christian right pursued and achieved influence in school politics.

The issue takes on added salience because journalistic and popular accounts have pointed to occasional successes and have suggested that the Christian right has mounted a broad and organized effort to affect local education policy. This was a question of pointed interest in the mid-1990s more so than today, but it remains a topic worth exploring.

Melissa Deckman addresses this question in School Board Battles using a national survey of school board candidates and case studies of two districts. She received surveys from 671 board candidates, forty-six of whom (about 7 percent) were members of Christian right groups. Deckman wound up broadening the definition of Christian right candidates to include candidates who supported these groups and sympathized with various policy positions, obtaining a Christian right sample of 127. The methodological approach is generally reasonable.

Deckman finds little evidence that the Christian right has a significant impact on school boards, that it has a systematic or coherent effort to win seats, and or that Christian right candidates campaign or behave all that differently from other candidates. Christian right candidates generally have the same motivations, run on the same issues, use the same campaign strategies, and win at the same rates as their peers. She ultimately concludes that "fears of a Christian right 'takeover' of school boards are greatly exaggerated" (170).

Christian right groups do little to train, endorse, finance, or support candidates. In the two district case studies that Deckman uses, the major difference between these candidates and others, in fact, turns out to be the simple fact that Christian right candidates report that they attend church more frequently.

The volume consists of six substantive chapters and a conclusion. The chapters include a brief overview of the Christian right and education politics, a profile of school board candidates, an examination of why Christian right members run for school boards, an analysis of the campaign strategies of Christian right candidates, an assessment of the unremarkable political success of Christian right board candidates, and two brief case studies suggesting that Christian right board members have a marginal impact at best on district policy or governance.

There are two areas in which additional research would have been helpful. First, aside from her two cases, Deckman relies on illustrative anecdotes and quotes that are almost uniformly at least a decade old. The book would have benefited from examples demonstrating that the issues raised are still relevant and were not merely products of the early 1990s.

Second, Deckman either ignores or is unfamiliar with the work on school board politics that has been conducted over the past seven years. Work by political scientists including Terry Moe and David Leal has quantitatively documented board electoral processes and interest group influence. Familiarity with this work would have left Deckman less surprised by her findings regarding board amateurism and would have informed her efforts to explain the relative character of Christian right candidates.

On the whole, the volume is an incremental contribution to our understanding of school boards and politicking by the Christian right.

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