Around the St. Louis region, as around the nation, school board candidates espousing radical-right agendas for school curriculum fared middling at best in this month's elections. That's not to say they were universally routed, unfortunately, but it's clear the project by populist extremists to put schools at the front lines of their culture war failed to catch fire in its most recent big test. That provides an opening for more moderate voices to press for getting big government out of local education decisions. Which, after all, was once the stated position of the Republican Party.

The GOP once maintained that education is best handled locally, without a centralized state government overruling elected school boards and micromanaging teachers. Some Republican politicians today still pay lip service to local control, but in deed, they are more likely to call for overarching rules confronting bogeyman issues like critical race theory or porn on school shelves, neither of which is actually happening. Transgender students participating in school sports happens in the real world so rarely as to render the level of conservative attention to the issue ludicrous.

But as former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt demonstrated in his successful U.S. Senate run last year, vilifying teachers and school boards and sounding the alarm over rare or non-existent cultural issues works with a certain segment of the political right. It doesn't help students in any way — and in the case of Schmitt's legal challenges to school mask mandates during the pandemic, it actually endangered them and their families. But if the goal is to whip base voters into an anti-"woke" frenzy that can translate into votes, it can be a cynically winning strategy.

But not, apparently, during the school board elections around the nation in early April. Since school board elections are generally nonpartisan, it's difficult to precisely quantify the outcomes by ideology. But an anecdotal analysis by Politico found that, while right-wing candidates did have some scattered success with their culture-war harangues, it was by no means a pattern of victory. "We lost more than we won," admitted one conservative education activist, whose spin to the website was reduced to, "We didn't get obliterated."

In the St. Louis region, hotly contested board races were split, with important victories by serious education-minded candidates over ideological firebrands in districts like Parkway and Rockwood. Conservatives won in Francis Howell and Wentzville — though in the case of the latter, the race was likely skewed by the late exit of a mainstream candidate who left after conservatives challenged him over his government employment.

Anyone serious about bolstering education in Missouri will focus on doing something about the state's abysmal school funding and teacher salaries, not conjuring up ideological red meat. To the extent that the recent round of elections confirms that, it's a promising sign for schools.

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