Kenneth K. Wong — Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy: State-level governance will offer opportunities and challenges for educational progress in 2022. Education policy will be influenced by the substance and rhetoric in the electoral process across states throughout this year. Of the 36 gubernatorial races, at least five Republican incumbents and three Democratic incumbents have decided not to run for re-election. Fifteen states will hold elections for either the school chief, such as California and Arizona, or state board members, such as Ohio. Races for state legislators will determine the magnitude of single-party dominance, meaning one party has control over the governorship and the two chambers of the state legislature (aside from Nebraska, which has a unicameral legislature). Currently, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party dominate 23 and 15 state governments, respectively.
Electoral dynamics will affect several important issues: the selection of state superintendents; the use of American Rescue Plan funds; the management of safe return to in-person learning for students; the integration of racial justice and diversity into curriculum; the growth of charter schools; and, above all, the extent to which education issues are leveraged to polarize rather than heal the growing divisions among the American public.
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