Make the Most of Your Midterms Coverage

Covering school boards, state boards of education, superintendents, and governing bodies for higher education systems is a top priority for many reporters right now. Midterm elections are set for the first Tuesday in November (and early voting is already underway in many states).

Historically, school board races didn’t attract much attention – or much money. That’s changed in recent years amid renewed federal and state action to restrict what is taught, read, and discussed in public schools around race, gender and sexuality. At the same time, charter schools and voucher programs remain controversial in many communities, even as the Trump administration has expanded access to public dollars for school choice programs.

In Denver alone, nearly $2.4 million was spent on behalf of 2025 school board candidates, setting a record for the races. In those races, charter school proponents outspent teachers’ unions by a 3-to-1 margin, an investment that failed to stop a “blue wave” at the ballot box, as Chalkbeat Colorado reported.

Higher education trustees also hold enormous power to raise tuition and cut core funding, which was subject to a vote in Minnesota. At the University of Houston, regents voted to eliminate programs related to LGBTQ+ studies and climate change, among others. Elected officials can also help make it easier or – as has been more likely recently in red states, such as Florida and Texas – more difficult for college students in particular to vote.

The Education Writers Association spoke with Jessica Huseman, editorial director of Votebeat, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization. She previously reported on elections for ProPublica, and she is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her curriculum on investigative reporting for student journalists is in use by more than 500 high schools.

1. Why do school board races matter more than some people realize?

A surprisingly small number of voters can end up choosing people who oversee enormous budgets and make decisions affecting tens of thousands of students – what, where and how they learn. That’s especially true in off-cycle elections. And some decisions can reach well beyond one district.

There’s also often a lot of public money at stake. Large school systems are huge purchasers of textbooks, curriculum, technology and other materials, so what [school districts] choose can help shape what companies make and sell elsewhere. These are local elections, but their consequences aren’t always entirely local. (For one example, see how a controversial Texas reading curriculum made its way to Colorado classrooms.)

2. How might education reporters investigate candidates’ platforms, identify the key individuals and organizations contributing to a candidate’s campaign, interrogate who stands to benefit if the candidates are elected and discover who’s helping drive candidate policies? 

To interrogate candidates’ platforms and their potential impact on a community, the key for me has always been to go talk on background to the workers who would be responsible for actually carrying out the policies they advocate. For Votebeat, that’s county clerks and the people who run mail-voting companies or the vendors who build the products that do the thing. There are equivalent folks in education. As the people who would ultimately implement whatever the candidate is advocating, they have the best understanding of the workability of a policy. Individual ideas can be really popular but impossible to implement.

Open Secrets has combined its state and federal campaign finance databases into a single, searchable platform. That’s a really good starting point, especially if you are unfamiliar with campaign finance records. Open Secrets also has folks on hand to answer questions or to help with searches. It’s a great resource I wish more local reporters would take advantage of.

I would also consider looking into public contracts a candidate might be associated with. If the candidate owned or led a company or was associated with one as an investor, these government contracts – often available through procurement or comptroller websites – can be as useful as campaign finance databases.

3. Where should reporters expand their scope beyond the candidates? 

I’d also spend some time covering the electorate. Look at how the board is districted, who lives in those districts, and what the boundary lines and the demographics of the electorate tell us about who is likely to elect each member. School boards can be gerrymandered just like other elected bodies.

Reporters should also look closely at when the election happens. School boards and community college boards are often elected off-cycle when turnout can be much lower, and the electorate who show up to vote looks very different. Even if your school board isn’t on the ballot in November, that’s potentially a story: Why isn’t it? Who decided when the election would happen? Who actually turns out? Education reporters who don’t normally think of themselves as voting reporters really are voting reporters right now.

4. What are some suggestions for reporters who want to write about the youth vote? 

I’d really like to see more reporting about the young people we miss when we do the obligatory college-quad youth-vote story. Who is reaching the 19-year-old working full time, or the young person in an apprenticeship, or someone who left school after high school? Where are they getting information about registration, ID requirements and deadlines? If they intend to vote and ultimately don’t, what happened?

Be careful with the data itself. Most “youth vote” polling refers to people ages 18 to 29, which is not the same population as high school seniors or first-time voters. This year, 56% of 18- to 29-year-olds told the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) they were extremely likely to vote, but in the 2022 midterms, only 23% of eligible young people actually voted. (CIRCLE also has a list of states where the youth vote is expected to have an outsized impact on the midterms. Future CIRCLE work is expected to be negatively impacted by the National Student Clearinghouse cutting ties with the center, amid pressure from the Trump administration.)

There is always some gap between intention and turnout, and getting at the “why” is more interesting than just saying young voters are energized. Is it access? Registration? Confusion about the process? Or do people who genuinely mean to vote ultimately decide not to? (Florida and Texas both have large populations of out-of-state students. Check out the Campus Vote Project, part of the nonpartisan Fair Elections Center, for more. The Voter Rights Lab also tracks state laws that curtail polling on college campuses.)

Don’t let “youth vote” become shorthand for “college vote.” CIRCLE estimates that 51% of eligible 18- to 29-year-old voters this year have no college experience at all. And in 2022, young people without college experience made up about 40% of young citizens but just 12% of young voters. (See The 74’s takeout on the future youth vote – students who will be eligible to vote by the 2028 presidential election.)

That is an educational disparity story if I’ve ever seen one. College students have all kinds of built-in mechanisms that can help them participate — campus registration drives, student newspapers explaining deadlines, professors and classmates talking about the election, sometimes even polling places on campus. Young people who aren’t in school may have far fewer of those supports.

5. Are there any particular education-related races on Votebeat’s radar right now as especially interesting or potentially consequential?

The Texas State Board of Education is one I’d watch. Eight of its 15 seats are up this year, and the board has substantial influence over curriculum standards and instructional materials in one of the country’s largest public-school systems. (Jessica Ma of The Dallas Morning News looked at one of the board’s more controversial curriculum decisions.)

Washington also has statewide ballot measures dealing directly with schools, including parental rights and participation in school athletics. (Both bills are backed by conservative groups seeking to put new limits on diversity, equity, and inclusion in school curriculum, student-level supports and extracurricular participation.)

And California Proposition 3 is a good example of why education reporters should look at the entire ballot, not just races with “school” in the title. It’s a tax measure, but most of the money involved goes to K-12 schools, with another portion going to community colleges. (Check out CalMatters’ innovative quiz for prospective voters looking to sort out how various measures, including Prop 3, might play out.)

6. How can Votebeat help education reporters covering elections?

Please sign up for our Election Expert Desk. It’s free, and it connects reporters with vetted election officials, lawyers, academics, technologists and other experts who can answer questions, sanity-check reporting and help reporters quickly understand election rules and processes.

We also have a growing set of public reporting guides. Those are available to everyone, whether or not you join the Desk, and we’re continuing to add to them as the election gets closer.

For other resources, look to Ballotpedia, which tracks school board races nationally, as well as local and state-level election races and issues. EWA also has Reporter Guides on covering campaign finance issues, as well as polling data.