About 15 years ago, I sat in a classroom in a one-horse, no-high-school town in New Jersey as the clock struck midnight. I was a reporter covering a school district reorganization meeting that had begun at 6 p.m. Friends a few miles away texted, wondering why I had to stay at the meeting until the building was empty when I’d already been there for six hours. The best I can explain it is to reference the famous joke in Europe about why the sun never set on the British Empire: Because God couldn’t trust the English in the dark. Thanks to the state’s Sunshine Law, these school board meetings had to be public. So, the meeting was mostly a filibuster, designed to wear down anyone with children in the district’s public schools who would be...