The most powerful steps we could take to wrest public schools from the hands of the woke would be for states to move school board elections “on-cycle” (to federal Election Day) and allow political parties to nominate the candidates.

A few states do this now, yet by far most school board elections remain off-cycle and “nonpartisan.” The result is that a great many conservative districts are run by progressive Democratic school boards. That’s because low-turnout, low-information, off-cycle school board elections are dominated by highly organized and self-interested teachers’ unions.

The current system also deprives the conservative half of the country of a farm team of education experts, administrators, and higher-office-holders-in-the-making, who could counterbalance products of the monolithically progressive ed schools. That ed school–produced progressive education establishment now dominates local, state, and national education bureaucracies, even in red districts and states.

You may have heard something about moving school board elections on-cycle and listing party affiliation, when the pushback against woke schooling began to catalyze several years ago. Yet even that tiny blip of publicity has by now fallen off the radar screen. The discrepancy between the significance of this proposed electoral shift and its near complete absence from public discussion is striking.

A big reason for the silence is that proposed changes to the structure of school board elections are easily lost track of when dispersed across 50 states and thousands of local districts. Yet there are plenty of issues — abortion, gun control, health care, immigration, climate/energy — where interest groups track, publicize, and discuss trends and developments at the state and local levels. When it comes to proposals to change our way of electing school boards, no one — at least on the conservative side — seems to be systematically following the issue.

The good news is that despite some setbacks, several red states have now successfully moved, or are moving, toward on-cycle school board elections, with party affiliations listed. The bad news is that the movement is far too slow and, as noted, public awareness remains virtually nonexistent.

Were the national Republican Party — perhaps even President Trump — to make the school board election system a point of discussion, we could see an electoral shift with huge cultural consequences. The education field is so massively tilted toward the left that if only conservative states and districts were to elect school boards that actually represented their point of view, it would set off a cultural sea change. Sadly, however, the school board election system as currently constituted is designed to confuse and discourage voters.

The supposed depoliticization of school board elections was instituted during the progressive era (circa 1890–1920). Over time, unfortunately, that effort has backfired spectacularly. Nonpartisan, off-cycle school board elections were supposed to curb corruption by breaking the power of political machines, thereby ensuring that schools would be governed by professionally trained and politically disinterested experts. What’s happened instead is that machine politics, corruption, and ideological partisanship have all returned — sometimes in more disturbing forms than the abuses that drove the original progressive era reforms.

The lingering illusion that school board elections as currently structured are benignly “nonpartisan” may be the greatest barrier to reform. To understand how supposedly disinterested nonpartisanship is actually the opposite, we need to trace the origin and fate of progressive era school board election reforms.

Those late-19th- and early-20th-century reforms were an attack on the urban political machines that dominated immigrant neighborhoods. In those days, members of big-city school boards........

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