Gender at the Margin: Women Elected to School Boards and Student Achievement

Abstract

School boards influence the student achievement of close to 52 million students directly through learning agendas, funding, and hiring, and indirectly through institutional culture and priority setting. One of the most pressing issues school boards face is that underperformning student achievement. This paper provides causal evidence on the effect of electing women to K-12 school boards by exploiting quasi-random variation in narrowly contested mixed-gender school board elections across California from 1996 to 2024 using a regression discontoinuity design. A key challenge is identifying the causal effect of electing a female board member to the school board due to systematic district differences and selection bias. This papers finds that electing a female candidate over a male candidate does not produce any detectable effects on district student achievement in Reading (RLA) or Math, as well as in the gender gap. Further, any effect is considered small in causal education research as confidence intervals exclude effect sizes larger than 0.04 standard deviations for Overall RLA and Math.