The conventional wisdom is that school board members in the U.S. face limited electoral incentives to invest in schools and student achievement. I argue that they are electorally incentivized to invest in some schools and students. Specifically, I argue that school spending can boost vote shares for incumbent school board members, and that school board members will allocate resources strategically, prioritizing schools located in neighborhoods of their district where spending will maximize their vote share. I test this argument using data from a discretionary school modernization program in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and find that board members distribute resources to schools in competitive and moderately supportive neighborhoods while excluding schools in overwhelmingly opposed and supportive areas. This paper is the first to show how elections affect the allocation of funding across schools. The results suggest that local democratic control of school boards can hinder education equality.