ID: Fake Superintendent Durst Sues School District

Good Lord in Heaven but this man just won't give up. Branden Durst, the least qualified superintendent ever, has followed through with his threat to sue the district that made the mistake of hiring him and then fired him. I'm going to re-present the whole saga here from a previous post and add the new chapter at the end, so if you remember Durst, you can skip down the screen. If you don't know about Durst, well, you're in for a treat.

Our Story So Far

Last summer, the West Bonner School District decided to go out on a limb and hire Branden Durst as superintendent, despite his complete lack of qualifications. That employment did not last long, but the tale is not over, because Durst has decided to sue some folks over it. I covered the story as it unfolded (here, here, here and here), but I'll go ahead and recap here, because this is an awesome tale of giant brass cajones and the belief that qualifications for education leadership include ideological purity rather than actual knowledge of the work.

Who is this guy?

The broad outlines of his career are pretty simple. Born in Boise. Attended Pacific Lutheran University (BA in poli sci with communication minor), grad school at Kent State and Claremont Graduate University (public policy, international political economy), then Boise State University (Master of Public Administration). In 2022, he went back to BSU for a degree in Executive Educational Leadership.

His LinkedIn account lists 20 "experience" items since 2000, and Durst seems to have bounced quickly from job to job until 2006, when he was elected as an Idaho State Representative for four years. Then in 2012 he was elected to the state senate, a job that he held for one year. He did all that as Democrat; in 2016, he switched his party to the GOP.

Then independent consultant, a mediator for a "child custody and Christian mediation" outfit. Then an Idaho Family Policy Center senior policy fellow. IFPC advocates for the usual religious right causes, but they have a broader focus as well: "To advance the cultural commission." They see the Great Commission in a dominionist light-- the church is to teach "nations to obey everything Jesus has commanded." And they suggest you get your kid out of public school.

Durst's most recent gig was with the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a right tilted thinky tank that wants to "make Idaho into a Laboratory of Liberty by exposing, defeating, and replacing the state's socialist public policies." They run a Center for American Education which, among other things, maintains a map so you can see where schools are "indoctrinating students with leftist nonsense." They also recommend you get your child out of public school.

Durst came with some baggage. That one year tenure in the Senate? Durst resigned because the press got ahold of the fact that he was actually living in Idaho only part time; his wife was working as a teacher near Seattle and he was living there at least part of the time with his family. KTVB, the station that followed the story, "observed his home looked empty of furniture when stopping by to knock on the door last week." Durst insisted that his bed and clothes were there. And he blamed the split living arrangement on Idaho schools:

There's a big difference between living out of your district for an entire year, and having a family member who is a teacher that doesn't get treated well because they live in Idaho and have to find employment someplace else. I think there's a big difference, Durst said.

For a while, it looked like he would fight the charge. But in the end he resigned his seat.

2022 was not a great year for Durst. After the Idaho Senate failed to advance the parental rights bill that he was promoting, Durst confronted Senator Jim Woodward with enough aggressiveness that Woodward called the cops on him. After blowing off a meeting with GOP leadership, Durst blasted senators on social media. The Senate GOP majority wrote a letter condemning Durst for "spurious attacks against members of the Senate, meant to coerce votes and influence elections." In a press release, GOP leaders condemned Durst and said his actions "demonstrate egregious conduct unbecoming of anyone, especially a former legislator and current statewide political candidate."

The "candidate" part refers to Durst's run for the office of state superintendent. He told East Idaho News, “Parents are tired. They don’t feel respected or trusted and they want some real change in their school superintendent. They’re all talking about the same things. They want to stop the indoctrination that’s happening in their schools, they want to (be able) to make decisions for their kids." He ran on three priorities-- end common core, stop critical race theory, and school choice ("fund students, not systems"). He came in second in the GOP primary, losing to Debbie Critchfield by about 25,000 votes. Remember that name.

Durst had remarried in 2016 (in Washington state), and in 2022, his wife and ex-wife got into a scuffle that almost blew up into abuse allegations against Durst and his wife over a whack with a wooden spoon on a 14-year-old child. He explained later, “The child wasn’t being respectful, wasn’t obeying … It wasn’t even very hard, but things can happen in the political world where things get taken out of proportion, and that’s what happened here." Certainly his candidacy made the story bigger than it might otherwise have been.

But West Bonner was pretty desperate. They had been through three superintendents in one year, and the voters had sleepwalked their way into a far right majority. Durst's unsuccessful campaign had pulled 60% of the vote in Bonner County. Hence this justification for his hiring from trustee Keith Rutledge:

“He has a vastly superior understanding of the legal, financial, administrative, and educational philosophy aspects of the job,” Rutledge wrote, adding that Durst is popular among Bonner County voters and “has the broad support of the nearly 13,000 residents of our district.”

Hailey Scott-Yount, a parent in the district, had a different take.

“Why on earth would you hire a mechanic to bake your wedding cake?” Scott-Yount said. “It’s terrifying.”

There was just one problem. Okay, one other problem.

The proposed contract was bonkers. It made him hard to fire-- the trustees would need a super-majority to vote him out. The draft contract also required the district to provide his legal counsel, requiring the district to protect Durst and his wife from “any and all demands, claims, suits, actions, and legal proceedings brought against the Superintendent for all non-criminal incidents arising while the Superintendent is acting within the scope of his employment.” The proposed contract also included a vehicle, a housing allowance, and district-provided meal services. Plus an ability to work remotely (like, say, from Seattle).

However, this was all contingent on Durst getting the state to grant him provisional superintendent certification. That's usually given to someone with relevant experience in education, but Durst said he'd like to see the process opened up so that districts can have "the flexibility they need to make the right hiring decision for them." One has to wonder what sort of district feels that the best fit for them is someone with no actual qualifications.

That was in June. The reaction was immediate, with the public showing up at the next meeting to say "What the actual hell?" He asked Boise State to recommend him for the emergency certification, and the head of the college of education sent a letter saying, "Um, no."

By August, Durst still hadn't actually applied for the emergency cert, but he was making dark noises, promising that the whole business had much larger implications, something something Constitutional Crisis! In the Bonner County Daily Bee:

“That’s really what this is about. The constitutional crisis is now an unelected board — it was appointed by the governor in the executive branch — can tell any (school) board in the state of Idaho whether or not they’ve done something, even if they haven’t done it,” Durst said.

Then the Idaho State Board of Education said no.

In fact, they found two ways to say no. First, they pointed out that there are five requirements to serve as a superintendent, and Durst didn't meet any one of them. Not the "four years of full-time experience working with students while under contract to an accredited school" one or the two years of teacher training one.

Furthermore, they said, having looked more closely at the law, they concluded that they couldn't actually issue emergency superintendent certificates anyway.

Durst took all of this with the quiet grace and dignity for which he is known. On his blue-checked Twitter account, he complained that something smells. "...this was a discriminatory act by a board run by those with a political axe to grind. They will be held accountable for their discriminatory actions." Remember, this is Idaho, not exactly known as a hotbed of powerful lefties.

Bryan Clark at The Idaho Statesman wrote the political obit on Durst, who they called a "serial political entrepreneur" in June when he was trying to establish his "own little kingdom."

The unifying thread is overwhelming personal ambition. The causes change, but what’s been constant is Durst’s belief that he should be given the power to implement his ideas, whatever they are that week.

There has been a second constant as well: failure

But he wasn't done yet

Even as the voters were goggling at Durst's hiring, they were also trying to recall the wingnuttiest of the board members. Despite any number of nasty tricks, the recall succeeded at the beginning of September. But those seats wouldn't be filled until November, and in the meantime, Durst and the board tried some last minute antics, like moving to dissolve the school board at a board meeting scheduled at the last minute for a Friday evening of a three day weekend. It took a court ordered injunction to stop that nonsense.

The recall created another problem. With only 3/5 of the board left, any one member could grind things to a halt by simply not showing, and for the first meeting after the state shot down Durst's aspirations, the remaining conservative member did just that. No meeting held, no action taken, and Durst meekly slinking away--ha! No, just kidding.
But, Durst told KREM 2 he still is the superintendent.

"They don’t make the law," Durst said. "They aren’t the law. How many people could say that? That they don’t have to follow the laws of Idaho.”

Finally, late in September, Durst threw in the towel. Well, not "in" exactly, More like pitched it angrily at his detractors. Declaring he wanted an "amicable and fair" parting, Durst claimed in his Twitter-posted what-sure-looked-like-a -retirement letter, dated September 25, 2023:

Today, I am announcing my decision to seek an amicable and fair exit from my role as Superintendent of the West Bonner County School District. TGhis decision has not been made lightly, and I am fully aware of the challenges and sentiments that have surrounded my brief tenure.

There's another reference to his "short tenure," and a tenure can only be declared short if it's over, right? He also notes that "to promote healing and unity within the community," it is necessary for him to "step aside."

When my last day as Superintendent will be up to the board, until then, I will continue to work to uphold the district's mission and support student success.

Throughout my short tenure, I remained cognizant of the fact that not everyone in the community welcomed my hiring, and there were those who hoped to see me fail and did everything in their power to try to make that so, even if meant hurting very students they claimed to support. I was undeterred by the naysayers and their negativity only strengthened my resolve to do what needed to be done to put this district on a path toward success.

That brings us up to last spring

After leaving the district, Durst ran for County Commissioner in Ada County, but got walloped in the primary. And he was still apparently nursing grudges.

In March, he filed a tort claim (kind of a save the date for an impending lawsuit) claiming $1.25 million in damages. As unearthed and reported by Idaho Education News, Durst is claiming that the Idaho Board of Education's refusal to grant him an emergency certification "resulted in his loss of employment."

He is after compensatory damages on top of “punitive damages due to professional, emotional and reputational harm,” which is a hell of a ballsy move. "Hey, your refusal to grant me professional certification for a profession for which I am in no way qualified has damaged my reputation as a member of that profession." I wonder if I can sue someone for hurting my professional reputation as a brain surgeon because they point out that I am in no way qualified to be a brain surgeon.

Important feature of this story--one of the people he'll be suing is state superintendent Debbie Critchfield, the person who beat his butt back when he ran for that office.

So now, the newest chapter

This week, Ryan Suppe reported for Idaho Ed News that Durst has sued the West Bonner District for breach of contract. Yes, really. He's asking for $100K in damages plus attorney fees, claiming the district violated "an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.

Scroll back up and look at those bits from his exit letter. Does that sound like a letter of resignation to you? Well, that just shows how silly you are, because Durst's contention is that it was no such thing. Writes Suppe:

But the letter wasn’t a resignation, and the district breached his contract by terminating it, according to Durst’s complaint. He also accused “certain members” of the school board of publicly making “false claims about Durst being untruthful” and creating a “hostile work environment.”

“In order to address some of these issues, Durst wrote a letter to the board,” the complaint says. “The board intentionally misrepresented the nature and purpose of such a written correspondence and purported to treat the written correspondence as a letter of resignation from Durst.”

 Intentionally misrepresented? Every news outlet that reported on that letter called it a letter of resignation, probably because it sounds just like a letter of resignation.

Durst has hired the Shep Law Group, an Idaho firm specializing in personal injury cases (their actual url is autoinjuryidaho.com). 

Meanwhile, Durst doesn't appear to have filed the threatened lawsuit against the state. But who knows what Durst will try next. Is Durst going to break his long string of failures with this lawsuit? I'm betting it's not likely. Is that going to lead to him quietly sitting down and finding something more useful to do? I am betting that is also not likely.

CO: Charter Backers Trying To Buy A State Board Seat

A mountain of dark money has been unleashed by charter supporters to win a critical seat on the state Board of Education in an election less than a week away.

I wrote about this race earlier for Forbes.com. Here's what you need to know.

Who's running?

Kathy Gebhardt has years of experience as a school board member, including serving on the state and national school board associations. She's an education attorney who has done some important work like serving as lead attorney on Colorado's school finance litigation. She has the endorsement of the teachers union, both state and various locals, and a hefty number of elected officials.

Marisol Rodriguez entered the race at the last minute; she lists her relevant experience as mom of two current students and education consultant.

It's the consulting work that provides a clue. Rodriguez’s consulting firm is Insignia Partners. She has previously worked for the Walton Family Foundation, a major booster of charter schools. Her clients include Chiefs for Change, a group created by former Presidential aspirant Jeb Bush to help promote his school choice policies; the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group for charter schools and charter school policy; and the Public Innovators in Education (PIE) Network, a national network of education reform organizations.

Most importantly, some of that consulting work appears to have been with the Colorado League of Charter Schools. A February meeting of that board shows her discussing some aspects of CLCS strategic planning.

Gebhardt has never taken a strong stance on charters, but as a school board membe4r she drew a hard line against a proposed classical charter, linked to Hillsdale College’s charter program, that refused to  include non-discrimination protections for gender identity and expression. My Colorado friends tell me that that was the point at which she became persona non grata for Colorado's charter industry. 

She told me “charters don’t play well with others.”

What are the stakes?

This is a Democratic primary. What's the big deal?

First, the GOP candidate is not running (accounts vary on why, exactly, she has disappeared from the race). That means the winner of the primary will take the seat on the state board.

That matters because Colorado gives local boards the power to say yay or nay to proposed charters, but if the charters don't like the nay, they can kick it up to the state school board, which can then overrule the local board's nay. 

The board has had a 5-4 majority favoring the charter industry, but one of the pro-charter crowd has been term-limited out. Gebhardt and Rodriguez are competing for that seat. This election could flip the board majority, making life more difficulty for folks peddling charter schools.

How hard is the charter industry fighting in this election?

On May 21, a group called Progressives Supporting Teachers and Parents filed with the state as a non-profit. On May 23, the Colorado League of Charter Schools gave PSTS $125,000. (Much of this info comes from Tracer, Colorado's campaign finance tracking site).

The registered and filing agents of PSTS are Kyle DeBeer and Noah Stout. DeBeer is VP of Civic Affairs for CLCS and head of CLCS Action, the CLCS partner 501(c)(4). Noah Stout is a member of the Montbello Organizing Committee, a group that receives money through various foundations that support charter schools, including the Gates Foundation and RootEd, and previously served as attorney for the DSST charter school network in Denver.

To date, PSTS has spent money on only one thing-- the election of Marisol Rodriguez.

And boy have they spent!

When I first wrote about this last week, PSTS had spent almost $600K to back Rodriguez. But as of this week, that figure is at $1.2 million. That's $1,270,205.97, to be precise.[Update: I've learned that a glitch in Tracer counted some money twice. The actual amount is $819,000-- so a little under a million instead of a little over a million.] That's a lot of money. 

The money has gone to two firms-- The Tyson Organization (strategic voter contact solutions) and 40 North Advocacy (advocating for and implementing policy change). The latter specializes in digital and print marketing, and the former handles phone calling. CLCS has used both before, but this time they are making some serious money. 

Colorado voters are being hammered with slick mailers and repeated robocalls. And in the last week, the tone has shifted. Where earlier expenditures were for pro-Rodriguez marketing, the last week has seen more "Vote no on Gebhardt." 

And these marketing materials are the campaign. Rodriguez herself has made few appearances, done virtually no press, and is not visible on the campaign trail, so the trail is mostly just paved with glossy mailers and expensive marketing. I couldn't find much in the way of expense costs for previous board campaigns, but in 2022, Chalkbeat reported that almost $5 million had been spent on a total of 213 school board campaigns in Colorado.

So what do we have, Colorado?

It sure looks like the charter industry recruited a paper candidate and then created a funding and marketing campaign to try to push her on the public. And as yet there's no word on where exactly that dark mountain of money came from, but it's a sure bet that it's not from the plain old grass roots voters in Colorado.

The primary is on June 25 (though mail-in voting has been going on for a while), so we'll see whether the charter industry has been able to use a mountain of dark money to install a friend on the state board. 

Stop Calling It School Choice

When framing a debate, it helps to pick just the right names. Just ask the folks who decided to call their respective sides "pro-life" and "pro-choice." 

One of earliest victories for education privatizers was to coin the name "school choice." I don't know if somebody cleverly designed and tested it, or they just sort of stumbled over it, but it's a handy piece of coinage.

The Google Ngram for American English shows barely in use up through the mid-1980s, when it suddenly rocketed up the charts (aka immediately after the release of A Nation at Risk, A Nation at Risk, the Reagan era hit job on public education). That peak comes at 2001, then a steady drop since that year. 

I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of those instances are actually a misuse of the term. Because the privatization and reformster movements have got us using "school choice" to mean what it does not mean.

After all, we already have school choice, and always have. We have a requirement in most states that each child must get some sort of education, but how the child gets that education is a parent choice. Public, private, parochial, religious, home-- you can choose the school you want. But that's not what modern choicers mean by school choice.

Instead, they use the term "school choice" as a blanket term to cover a whole bunch of ideas that are not actually school choice.

Instead, "school choice" refers to a constellation of policies aimed at directing taxpayer dollars into the pockets of private operators. 

Charter schools do so by creating privately owned and operated schools that are nominally part of the system. They offer an alternative to some students, based not on what the students want but on what the school is willing to accept and able to provide.

But nothing looks less like school choice than vouchers. Vouchers--no matter what form they take--allow unregulated, non-transparent, oversight-free private schools to hoover up public tax dollars while discriminating and/or providing education of questionable value for society as a whole. The voucherized system envisioned by Milton Friedman and modern christianist nationalists is a system in which taxpayers subsidize religious schools and the government schools are cut to a bare minimum. 

Voucher schools retain the right to pick and choose their students, to reject or expel students for a variety of reasons or no reason at all. 

"But the public system we have provides good schools for rich kids and less great schools for the non-wealthy," argue voucher fans. But a voucher system would make that problem worse, not better. With universal vouchers, the wealthy would get a rebate to help pay for the schools they already send their kids to, and for poor kids, the high cost schools will stay out of reach (especially as they raise tuition). The biggest difference would be that in a voucher system, the public schools serving non-wealthy students would have even less funding. 

None of this is school choice. And it slips into the discourse. In an otherwise excellent Washington Post article that talks about "school vouchers," Laura Meckler and Michelle Boorstein write:

The growth follows a string of recent victories in the Supreme Court and state legislatures by religious conservatives who have campaigned to tear down what once were constitutional prohibitions against spending tax money directly on religious education. It also marks a win for the school choice movement, which has spent decades campaigning to let parents use tax money for any school they see fit.

Well, no. That wasn't a win for the school choice movement. It was a win for the Tear Down The Wall Between Church State and Force Taxpayers To Fund Christian Schools movement, which doesn't really have anything to do with school choice at all. 

The AP style book defines "school choice" as a sort of blanket term for a whole world of policies aimed at dismantling or privatizing public education. At least they suggest that writers "avoid using the general term when possible."

Fans of voucherizing public ed like "school choice" because it tests well. Ask people if they favor parents having the chance to send their children to the school of their choice, and they absolutely do. Ask them if they would like their tax dollars to go to help someone pay tuition at a private school instead of going to fund public schools, and they turn a big thumbs down. 

We already have school choice. What some folks are looking for is school choice that someone else pays for. And while it's a legitimate complaint that the choice we have is more accessible to the wealthy than the not-wealthy, there isn't a thing in the world of charters and vouchers that changes that a bit, and quite a bit that makes it worse. 

Both the public school system and the charter/voucher system are tied to the free market system--the public system through real estate and the charter/voucher directly--and all the problems that come with it (predatory marketing, picking winners and losers among customers, providing the bare minimum, discrimination, etc etc etc see also: a few thousand posts on this website). But the public system comes with an assortment of safeguards and guardrails that protect (sometimes very imperfectly) the rights of students, families, and taxpayers. The charter/voucher system, in most cases, has no such protections. 

Calling it all "choice" or "freedom" is a canny choice, just like calling a voucher a "scholarship" or a "savings account."  It's good marketing, but like good marketing it only sort of reflects the reality of the situation. Would more choices be better? Sure. I've even laid out how to do it, within certain boundaries (no public dollars for private schools that want to play by their own discriminatory rules). 

My frustration with various forms of education reform, from standardization through universal vouchers, is that I largely agree with the stated goals, but don't believe for a second that any of the favored policies will actually achieve any of those goals. I roughly divide the reformster crowd into people who really believe that their favored policies will work and those that know they won't (or don't care one way or another) because they have their eyes on other goals. 

So let's call it what it is. Privatizing school. Creating a market-based system. School vouchers.It's easier to have useful conversations about things like fundamental changes in the very nature of the country's education system if we call things by their name.

 *But only in America-- the British English Ngram British English Ngram shows a 2002 peak, a 2012 dip, and an all time high in 2019. But I'm not going down that rabbit hole right now.

ICYMI: Fathers Day 2024 Edition (6/16)

You know what sucks in the summer of 2024? Lord knows, the internet has affected in mostly good way, from forcing us all to agree on the fair market for vehicles to allowing us to cruise lots from the comfort of our home. But everything you've read about the industry's inventory problem is, I will certify, true. There is not much of a selection of vehicles, new or used--and used cars are crazy expensive. It's times like this I miss my dad, who was a fine car shopper. I'll let you know if things perk up.

In the meantime, here's some reading stuff.

Tax Docs Link Right-Wing “Parents Group” to Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network

Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen at Truthout with some scoop about who is footing the bills for active astroturf group Parents Defending Education.

Virginia school board sued after reinstating Confederate school names

Some Virginia schools that insisted on reinstating the names of Confederate traitors will now get to explain themselves in a court of law. Karina Elwood at the Washington Post.

After a 7-year experiment, New Orleans is an all-charter district no more

New Orleans decides to bring back public schools, at least a little. Beth Hawkins reports at Route Fifty.

Vouchers Benefit the Wealthy, Oklahoma Shows

This time it's an Oklahoma study showing that a mountain of voucher money is going to subsidize private school for the wealthy.

Using Your Neighbor’s Taxes To Fund Your Child’s Private School Tuition

Sue Kingery Woltanski at Accountabaloney digs into the notion that a voucher just gives someone their own tax dollars back. It does-- plus a bunch of their neighbors' money as well.

Arizona School Voucher Program Funds Multiple $500+ Lego Purchases

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the mess that is Arizona's unregulated voucher spending.

Education Trail Blazers

Thomas Ultican profiles three exceptional women pioneers in education. 

What Schools SHOULD Be Teaching

Nancy Flanagan considers that undying meme about all the things schools ought to be teaching but, supposedly, are not. But how much adulting are schools supposed to teach?

Open Letter on AP African American Studies

South Carolina is quietly putting the kibosh on AP African American studies. Steve Nuzum and Nicole Walker respond to the actions of the state.

When Fear and Xenophobia Infect Discussions of Education Policy

Jan Resseger looks at how education policy can be affected by those who don't want to provide education for Those Peoples' Children.

Absurdity Abounds in the Education Policy Space

TC Weber digs into the nuts and bolts and ins and outs and general absurdity of third grade test-based retention and the miracles it brings.

More Spin Than Historic

Yes, it's Sue Kingery Woltanski again, this time looking at DeSantis and his attempt to claim that he's doing marvelous things for teacher pay. He isn't. She'll explain some tricks worth noting, because DeSantis isn't the only one to try this sort of spin.

In historic first, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoes most arts funding in Florida

Speaking of DeSantis making bold, lousy choices, it appears that arts are on the chopping black in Florida.

Humans are symphonies, not salad dressing

You know I love a good analogy, and Benhamin Riley has a fine one here to help illuminate the nature versus nurture question.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes.com, some good news about the ongoing travails of the Florida teacher who was attacked by the state for her Black Lives Matter flag, and some important information about a primary race in Colorado. 

And don't forget my substack, currently the most reliable way to stay up on whatever I'm putting out into the world.

This Is Where Attacks On Reading Take You

It seems like a minor, irony-soaked story. Erum Salam reports for the Guardian that the Indian River school district (in Florida, natch) has banned Alan Gratz's book Ban This Book. 

The book (summary here, if you've never read it) is the story of Amy Anne Olinger, a quiet 9-year-old who discovers that one of her favorite books (along with many others) has been pulled from the library because the PTA president thinks it will be harmful to children. So she creates a Banned Books Library in her locker. There are a variety of conflicts, culminating in a school board meeting at which Amy Anne and friends confront the school board and PTA president with arguments for removing every single one of the books in the library.

What the book doesn't have is any sexual elements. Nor any trace of critical race theory, and not a thing to make anyone feel they are either the victim or perpetrator of systemic discrimination. And yet, here we are...

The challenge came from Jennifer Pippin, head of the Indian River Moms For liberty chapter. She has lots of thoughts about books that should be removed from schools, including her crusade against a graphic version of Anne Frank's diary, which contains nude statues and is "not a true adaptation of the Holocaust." 

But Pippin has two M4L-backed board members in Indian River, and they joined a DeSantis-appointed member to vote 3-2 in favor of extreme irony. Kevin McDonald, the DeSantis appointee, offered this explanation of why the book had to go:

The title itself and the theme challenges our authority. And it even goes so far as to not only to mention books that are deemed inappropriate by school boards, including ours, it not only mentions them but it lists them.

So, two problems. One is that it mentions the names of the forbidden books, thereby allowing students to, I guess, know those books exist (though the mentioned books include such Naughty Classics as Harriet the Spy and Juney B Jones books). Another board member had a charge as well--

This book is really just a liberal Marxist propaganda piece.

 It challenges the school board's authority! It gives students the idea that they can have a say in things or challenge adults. Goodness gracious! It must be Marxist propaganda, because only Marxist propaganda would suggest you can disagree with the People in Charge.

This is a tell of epic proportions.

There are (as I've said repeatedly) serious conversations to be had about what books are appropriate for which students at what time. But the drive to stomp children (and adults) under the thumb of Liberty Watchers reveals itself pretty quickly to be mostly about authoritarian impulse. That means--

First, they are never, ever satisfied. There never comes a day when they say, "We are satisfied that the library has removed the really concerning materials, and that there's a good policy in place to address future acquisitions, so you won't be hearing from us again." The librarians who say, "Okay, if we fold on this batch of books, then they'll be happy and go away" are doomed to disappointment. No, once they've gotten rid of the books that are 90% objectionable, they'll move on to the 80% books, and on and on and on. 

Second, authoritarians always have to defend their authority. Do not question them, challenge them, contradict them. In the case of book banners, challenging their authority can be as great an offense as putting sexual content in the library. There's nothing complicated or nuanced about it-- they have the power and you dare not challenge it.

The other layer of irony here is that Ban This Book is actually a pretty nuanced tale-- there are no blatantly evil villains, our heroine is not angel, and the book says a lot about how complicated these situations can be. But to three members of the Indian River board that doesn't matter. Like Eric Cartman, they will not allow anyone to question their authority.

And so what starts out being about books with sexual and CRT content and protecting the children ends up being about control and power and slapping down anyone and anything that challenges it. 

MO: More Book Banning Foolishness

Now that the book banning craze has had some time to find its legs, certain patterns of foolishness have emerged.

In many states, it has become a way to circumvent democratic processes entirely. We see over and over a tiny minority--sometimes just one person--demands to decide what everyone's children can read.  There's Vicki Baggett in Florida (at least 150 books). There's Washington Post's finding that  60% of book challenges came from just 11 persons. Adam Andre in Wisconsin challenged 444 books challenged 444 books. In Fort Bend, Texas, it was an actual board member, David Hamilton.

Hamilton is typical of another phenomenon-- the book challenger who has not actually read the book. 

This kind of blind attack on a book is facilitated by sites like Book Looks. Set up by some former Moms For Liberty, the site provides a quick, handy guide to all the Naughty Books. You don't even have to read them yourself (and if you're really lazy, you don't even have to check to see if the books are even in your library before you demand they be removed).

Here's a particularly striking example from St. Joseph School District in St. Joseph, Missouri. St. Joseph exists in the shadow of the Herzog Foundation, one more far right organization created by a rich guy to impose his vision on society. This particular vision involves school vouchers, lots of GOP officials, and a goal to “catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education.” They are directly tied to some local churches, and they have lots of money to throw around.

Keeping an eye on Herzog shenanigans is Herzog-free SJSD. A Herzog official filed a Sunshine request back in December for a list of all books, and soon book challenges started to appear. See what you notice about the list of challenges:

Yes, reading is hard. I am particularly unimpressed with Lawrence, who could not find the time to read "And Tango Makes Three," which, to be clear, is a children's picture book with fewer than forty pages.

The group also shared some of the actual forms on their Facebook page (comments were added by HFSJSD

It's no wonder that one other frequent theme in book banning coverage is librarians who have absolutely had enough (here, here, here, and here). 

Are there serious discussions to be had about which books are suitable for which young audiences? Absolutely. But to have serious conversations, you have to have serious people on both sides, and some of these culture panic folks are not serious enough for any such conversation.

ICYMI: Party Day Edition (6/9)

This week the Board of Directors turned 7, and this afternoon we'll be celebrating with an assortment of classmates, cake, fruit, and a swimming pool. Good times. Also this week, the insurance company declared my car a total loss, so I've got that project to take care of. But the Board and the CMO are now officially on summer vacation, and the last day of school is behind us and summer is here. So we've got that going for us. 

Last day of school!

But meanwhile there is a whole heap of reading to do, so here's your list. Live it up!

You’re paying for Pa.’s cyber charter schools. You deserve to know where your money goes

Legislator Joe Ciresi joins the chorus of people begging to finally stop wasting taxpayer dollars on an overpriced service that doesn't deliver. He's not the only person ringing this alarm bell.Not by a long shot.

Data-Mining and the "Data Race"​ for Gold in Texas

If you have sort of let data mining of children and cradle-to-career tracking drift to the back of your mind, the folks who want to push that stuff have not. Lynn Davenport lays out some of the players involved these days.

Floridians come to Iowa bearing brilliant ideas

Todd Dorman has a column in The Gazette that deploys sass and facts to explain how Iowa Republicans are getting their ideas from wealthy Florida business folks.

 

Local school, run by group on SPLC 'hate map,' is part of state's voucher program

In New Hampshire, it turns out that one school hoovering up taxpayer-funded vouchers is an outfit so radical that the Catholic Church says, "uh-uh--they are not with us no matter what they say!" Christopher Cartwright reports for the Keene Sentinel. 

Judge issues ruling in Catholic lawsuit over Colorado universal preschool program

Catholic preschools in Colorado were sad because the state wouldn't give them taxpayer money without requiring them to not discriminate against LGBTQ folks (among others). The ruling doesn't help much, but there's a depressing twist-- the state has solved the problem by cutting the anti-discrimination language. Melanie Asmar at Chalkbeat reports.

Republican Pennridge School Board Director Wants Students to Be Taught Creationism

You might think this has already been settled, but a school board director in Pennridge would like to mandate the religious version of the origins of the universe. Jenny Stephens reports for the Bucks County Beacon.

An American flag, a pencil sharpener − and the 10 Commandments: Louisiana’s new bill to mandate biblical displays in classrooms is the latest to push limits

Charles Russo writes for The Conversation about Louisiana's attempt to get religion into the classroom.

Billions in taxpayer dollars now go to religious schools via vouchers

Laura Meckler and Michelle Boorstein do some honest to goodness reporting on just who gets the benefit of taxpayer-funded vouchers-- and who doesn't. It's in the Washington Post.

Florida revises school library book removal training following public outcry

On the USA Today network, a report on Florida doing its "Okay, now that we made a public splash by announcing a policy, let's adjust it a tiny bit to reality" thing.

Third Grade Retention: The Gool's Gold of Reading Reform

Paul Thomas is here to remind us that this dumb policy is a dumb policy.

Why “Fund Students, Not Systems” Is a Recipe for Disaster

On the one hand, it's behind The Nation's annoying paywall. On the other hand, it's Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, so you know it's worth a read.

An Illinois School District’s Reliance on Police to Ticket Students Is Discriminatory, Civil Rights Complaint Says

ProPublica reports on a district where they have real cops give real students real tickets. Guess who gets the greater number of them.

Dark Money Ran Through Texas’s Runoffs and Probably Just Delivered Win for Private School Vouchers

Marlissa Collier reports on how hard Abbott and some friends worked to get him his vouchers.

Man with Sixteen College Degrees Can’t Read

Nancy Flanagan with a tale about reading and some assumptions we make about it.

Moms for Liberty Was Never About Protecting Kids

Maurice Cunningham for The Progressive and yet another Moms for Liberty spin on their bogus history.

Florida sticks by social studies standard teaching ‘benefit’ of slavery

Florida has some really dumb ideas about how the history of enslaving folks should be taught, so bad that even Byron "Jim Crows Was Great" Donalds objected.

Sex Discrimination Education Law

Thomas Ultican provides some history of Title IX

The Women Will Do It

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at the new book Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net.

Ask When Children Should Begin to Read

Nancy Bailey continues to shed light on the world of reading instruction and some of the actual research behind it.

An Unserious Book

Sal Khan is back once again to tell us another of his amateur-hour ideas about how to revolutionize education while disguising marketing as analysis. John Warner explains why you can ignore Khan's new book.

Both State Tax Cuts and the School Voucher Expansion Threaten Fair and Equal Public School Funding in Ohio

Ohio continues to do its best to become the Florida of the midwest. Luckily, Jan Resseger is there to explain their anti-public-ed policies.

Are we intelligent or are we educable?

Benjamin Riley explains some of the major theories about what makes human thinking unique.

The New Apostolic Reformation Wants God's Government Back

Texas Observer with more reporting on the NAR, that delightful group of anti-democracy dominionists that you should be paying more attention.

NAR 19-county plan

Religion Dispatches covers the plan to hit 19 particular counties hard for the next election. Some of these will seem familiar.

Join me on substack. It's free and convenient and easy. Tell your friends and help me build my newsletter audience. Then have a good week.

How Stupid Can A Shooting Drill Get ?

I'm bringing this up not in the heat or anniversary of some awful school shooting, but because once again some misguided adults tried an active shooter simulation on students. 

Active shooter drills are pretty upsetting in the best of times. I've been through them, and the experience was unnerving. the experience was unnerving. Add to that the non-zero number of drills that are handled terribly. 

Like the infamous Indiana drill in which teachers were shot with pellets ("This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing," the helpful police offered.) The Indiana legislature, hearing about this terribly upsetting drill, decided that-- maybe it's a good idea to shoot teachers with pellets. "It's got to do with reality and making sure they experience the emotions and adrenaline," offered the head of the state senate education committee who was also an ordained minister.

Or that time in Missouri, where the state mandates shooter drills, that students were outfitted with fake wounds and fake blood.

Firing blanks during a drill doesn't even count as unusual any more. As are discussions about the "right" way to conduct these drills (which just kind of skip over the if).

But local law enforcement can still find ways to surprise. Just this week, Burlington VT police officers teaching a class of high school students (in the police station) decided it would be a good idea to stage a surprise faux active shooter attack. Masked gunmen burst into the room and started firing (blanks, one presumes). The students thought they were there to tour the station and hear a presentation about how detectives solve crimes. The police thought they were giving a demonstration of eyewitness unreliability. The students were scared to death. 

Police said they'd used the same "realistic as possible" demonstration with adults and college students without trouble, but of course adults and college students are not regularly marinated in a system that reminds them constantly that even in a seemingly safe place, they could be brutally murdered at any moment. This is how we've raised a whole generation.

It is infuriating and enraging. Since Columbine we have insisted as a country on "hardening the target" which translates into making schools responsible to thwart attacks and students responsible for saving their own lives, but not--God forbid--in any way interfering with every American's born right to have at their disposal technology that has no purpose other than to rip bullets through human flesh as swiftly and efficiently as possible. 

Of all the things that schools are asked to fix--ignorance, poverty, racism, drug abuse, pregnancy, auto accidents, etc etc etc--the demand that schools and students somehow shoulder the burden for a nation with the worst death-by-gun figures in the industrialized world is the most unjust, unreasonable, unfair and unhealthy. It is also one of our societal tells, a clear sign that all our collective talk about how much we value young humans is just not serious talk at all. And it's not just every death that reminds us, but every child who spends a day (or more) shaking or crying because once again some adult has decided that the best way to handle gun violence in this country is to scare the living shit out of some children. 

Five Takeaways from "They Came for the Schools"

Mike Hixenbaugh has written a heck of a book about the newest wave of attempts to dismantle America's public schools. They Came for the Schools is centered on Southlake, Texas, the community that turned out to be the cutting edge of harnessing culture panic for political gains (it is, among other things, the district where an administrator famously told teachers to cover both sides of the Holocaust). It's the community that pioneered the "Southlake Playbook," the plan for the far right to take power in a district. 

Hixenbaugh focuses on Southlake, but he also puts Southlake in the national context, showing where this movement spun off into other locales. It's a good read, and I recommend it. Here are a couple of particular takeaways from the book.

Historical Context (Present)

There's a tendency to mark the start of current culture panic at the pandemic years of 2020-2021. But Hixenbaugh lays out a fuller timeline quickly and efficiently.

Barrack Obama is elected President, and a whole lot of white folks get uncomfortable. Donald Trump is elected, and a whole lot of built-up pressure and panic gets permission to uncork. The incidents of racism and abuse in schools climb during the Trump presidency, and schools all over country (including Southlake) start thinking, yeah, we need to address this somehow. George Floyd's murder puts an exclamation point on that idea, but 2020 is also pandemic closings and Trump's defeat, and folks on the far right see conspiracy, loss of cultural relevance and centrality, and a need to grab power before Those People go too far.

As Hixenbaugh describes it, it's a series of reactions, and each culture panic reaction is fueled deliberately by power-seeking opportunists, from birther Donald Trump through culture panic guru Chris Rufo. Hixenbaugh does a good job, through Southlake, of stitching together a fuller narrative of how we got here.

Historical Context (Past)

We've been here before, and Hixenbaugh walks us through some of the other iterations of culture panic. Here's Anita Bryant with the old "I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce; therefor, they must recruit our children."

The desire to silence certain voices, to put cultural and racial minorities In Their Proper Place, to inject certain religious beliefs into school while also sending taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools-- none of that is new. They have always been with us in this country.

Big Fish, Small Ponds

One of the recurring themes, from Southlake to Chester County, is that many of these contentious communities are the homes of people used to operating on a big budget national stage, and when they turn their money and resources to local school board races, regular folks can find themselves suddenly swamped. 

That holds true for individuals and corporations. Hixenbaugh highlights the work of Patriot Mobile, a cell phone company that ploughs its resources into backing far right christian nationalists for local school board races and school policy. 

There are some stunning stories here, like the teacher who became a whistleblower on NBC news and found that opponents had access to the kinds of high tech resources needed to reverse the voice-disguising tech that the network had used to conceal her identity.

Relentless and Focused

The Southlake conservatives become a micro-MAGA, demanding absolute purity of those they support and relentlessly hound board members, staff, even students who do not fall in line.

Not only does this bar any sorts of compromise or attempts to coexist, but the culture panic crew shows an absolutely unwillingness to accept any view of events except their own--which is often untethered from reality. Sometimes that means ignoring part of the picture; they are concerned about a school's response to racist incidents, but not the racist incidents themselves. Sometimes it means a striking lack of interest in any nuanced understanding; their opponents are never people who mean well but may have chosen poorly, but are always evil and terrible. Sometimes they just lie. 

It's what always makes culture panic movements both dangerous and doomed. Dangerous because they accept neither reason nor compromise, and because they are never satisfied. No book banning group has ever said, "Okay, now that you've removed these books, we're perfectly happy and we'll stop now." That is also what dooms them. Their demonization of all opponents and their unwillingness to compromise becomes increasingly off-putting to folks outside the panic and debates. And their demand for complete fealty means that they often turn on their own people. 

Politics and Religion

Hixenbaugh lays out how christian nationalism and right wing politics are merged in this culture panic moment. If you aren't paying attention to dominionism yet, this book will help explain why you should. In the meantime, you know what I always say-- when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.

While some of these folks come across as power hungry and selfish, there are also those who appear to have fallen for the seductive song of "the ends justifies the means." I have no doubt that there are many who sincerely believe that schools and the nation would be better off if christian nationalists had the power and public schools were required to push a particular brand of christianity, and that it's a goal so important that it should be pursued by any means necessary. Certainly Rudo and others have called explicitly for a certain ruthlessness.

The trouble with justified means thinking is that, since we so rarely achieve our ends, we are mostly defined by the means we choose. You may decide to use lying and other tools of politics to advance the kingdom of Jesus, but in the end that just makes you a liar and a politician. 

And More

There's a great deal more to Hixenbaugh's book. He does a masterful job of toggling between the local story of Southlake and the big picture nationally. There are some stories of hope here (though not from Southlake itself) and some successful attempts to work to preserve public education as we know it. It's a clear picture of what's driving much of the culture panic and the fight decide what gets taught and who gets to make those decisions. Well worth the read.

Whose Money Follows The Child?

"Let the money follow the child," say choicers repeatedly, but the more honest plea would be "Let your money follow my child."

But that's not how they present it. Take this quote from today's Washington Post piece:

“It’s the parents’ money to use as they see is best,” said Brian Hickey, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Ohio. “We don’t necessarily see it as taxpayer money.”

Or the other framing one encounters on the interwebs-- the "I just want to use my money to educate my child as I see fit" version. Corey DeAngelis, choice evangelist, argued in a speech that all families should be able to take "their dollars" to the school they choose. 

Except this is bunk. Let's take me as an example. I have two children in school. I pay roughly $1,000 a year in real estate tax. If you give me my $1,000 back, can I educate my boys with that money? Nope. There is no voucher state in which my money would not have to be supplemented with the tax dollars of my neighbors.

I've heard the counterargument-- the voucher represents a return on my real estate tax dollars over my entire lifetime. Let's check that math. I have a grand total of four children, and in my younger years I lived in places that carried a far lower tax burden, but let's pretend it has always been about $1,000. So let's assume that I pay $1,000/year for 55 years, for a grand total of $55,000. Would that cover 13 years of annual vouchers for 4 children? No, that would be about a little over $1,000/year. 

But hey-- I'm a guy living in a small town area that is technically part of Appalachia, where we have the kind of housing prices that the rest of you only dream of (seriously--if you have a small town bone in your body, you should move here). What if we checked other parts of the country?

Well, in North Carolina the average real estate ballpark tax bill is about $1,663. So that's not going to work much better.

In Texas the average property tax rate is 1.80%, so if you have a $350K house, you'd pay $6,300. That gets us closer to voucher money-- as long as you don't have too many kids. Of course that's an average, so some folks in less pricey housing would be paying way less. In Bandera County, a $150K house would yield $1,755 in real estate tax money. 

We could run numbers for a variety of locations, or we could make a common sense observation-- if the real estate tax money from parents was sufficient to fund the public school system, we wouldn't need to tax any non-parents, which is a point I fully expect non-parental taxpayers to bring up in voucher states in the not-too-distant future.

If this is just giving the parents back their own tax payments, then do non-parents get a real estate tax exemption? Once my kid graduates from high school, do I get to stop paying taxes? Are tax-paying parents given a limit to the number of children they actually get credit for? Where do the taxes paid on business real estate go in all this? 

The suggestion that vouchers are simply a means of giving parents back their own money to spend on education as they see fit--that's absurd. Our entire public education system is funded on the theory that everyone in the country benefits from sharing space with educated co-workers, neighbors, and pretty much everyone else we have to deal with. Everyone shares the cost. 

It's odd that so much of the voucher crowd is also the "taxation is theft" crowd, because voucher funding requires the voucher holders to take tax dollars from their neighbors while stripping those neighbors of any say in the kind of education those dollars will be spent on. That includes spending my neighbor's tax dollars on a school that would forbit, bar, eject, and demonize those neighbors and their children.

Your money should follow my child.

"Just give us back our tax money, and I'll get my kids the education I want and everyone else can get the kind of education they want," is top-grade bullshit. The only people who it even sort of works for is the folks living in very expensive houses. For everyone else, the end result is some kind of lower tier cheap crappy school--or getting your neighbors to chip in.

Your money should follow my child. 

Or maybe we could pool all our money and set up a system to take care of all the children.

Where Does High Quality Curriculum Come From?

Ollie Lovell's blog post is from Australia, but it fits with the ongoing discussion of the value of curriculum in this country. He notes that in a recent discussion about a variety of school issues, he kept coming back to the same place:

The fast and robust way to increase student achievement is to put high quality curriculum resources in the hands of their teachers (ref).

The fastest way to reduce teacher workload for early career teachers in particular is to give them high quality curriculum resources.

For PD centred around pedagogical content knowledge, we only see effective professional development when that PD is anchored to concrete examples that teachers plan on teaching. Without this, conversations become overly abstract and theoretical.

Student behaviour systematically improves when students are learning more successfully, or in the words of Rob Coe, ‘Success precedes motivation’ (ref). And this is greatly scaffolded by quality curriculum materials.

And when we address all of the above issues, we will see greater teacher retention, and an easing of our current teacher shortages.

In all of these instances, the devil is firmly encamped in the details. Does "increase student achievement" mean "raise test scores"? Because that's not my idea of increasing student achievement, and as we've been seeing for twenty-some years, a rich high-quality curriculum is not needed, or even preferable, for raising scores on the Big Standardized Test. Can a HQC reduce workload? That depends on how easy it is to implement, how well it matches the needs of the students and the skill set of the teacher, and how much prep and adaptation it requires. I would have agreed that solid lessons and instruction help with classroom management; I'm not sure that post-COVID we aren't seeing new behavior issues that are more resistant to that solution. And I'm pretty sure this oversimplifies the problems with teacher retention in the U.S. Maybe things are different in Australia.

So Lovell may be overselling a tad, but having a high quality curriculum does matter. I worked most of my career in a district that couldn't quite get its act together on curriculum. We went through many curriculum development cycles, but the district leaders could never quite commit the district resources (teacher release time, paying for extra hours, some useful leadership and direction) to get the job done. 

It was frustrating, and ultimately my department created something we could use on our own. That was also frustrating; one department member didn't feel like following the plan, so she just didn't, and there really wasn't anything we could do about it. And while building admins were willing to recognize that what we had created existed, that didn't keep them from still shooting for that old standby, Curriculum By Textbook, insisting we insert test prep drill, and occasionally unilaterally announcing that a Certain Book would no longer be taught because somebody somewhere might be upset. 

I will skip past the unavoidable eternal arguments about HQC (what is included and who decides) other than to note that they add another level of complexity to all of this.

But Lovell moves on to an interesting question-- if we want some HQC, where do we get it?

Getting expert level resources requires expert level knowledge, the kind that Lovell says is "hard to build." Not only do we need expertise in the content area, but expertise in teaching, and expertise in the audience for the instruction. The standards movement kind of skips past all three, assuming that if one sets certain standards, the content takes care of itself, the specific audience doesn't matter, and the teaching piece is where you blame educators for faulty implementation. The curriculum/materials industry has limited expertise in the first two and assumes that its actual audience is the people who make purchasing decisions in districts, not the people in the classroom who have to deal with it.

High quality curriculum does not come in a one-size-fits-all box right off the instructional materials rack. It is not prepared by some company hundreds of miles away. It is not googled. And it is not, God help us, created by large language model computer programming. The place you are most likely to find the expertise required is among the master teachers in your district.

Even the best instructional materials and curricular design stuff doesn't become an actual high quality curriculum until it receives its final shape from the master teachers who turn it into classroom instruction. This has been a point of frustration for folks who want to fix schools by imposing standards and instructional design-- once it hits the classroom, it is going to be delivered and interpreted by the classroom teacher. Master teachers are doing curricular design and redesign every day. That's the expertise we need to tap.

And as Lovell notes, even if we tap the expertise of the teachers in the district, we hit the time issue. When, exactly, are busy, swamped teachers supposed to do this? And are they supposed to do it for free? 

There can be other obstacles. Our do-it-ourselves program was thin on details because we'd hashed those out in conversation. And that gets to one of the other challenges in building a curriculum--exactly for whom are you creating it? Most of the district-directed attempts we made were not curriculum designed for teachers, but curriculum designed so that administration could have something to show the state. They weren't to help us teach, but to help administrators and bureaucrats prove that we were teaching. 

Or the most insidious curriculum purpose of all-- "I want to know that if you drop dead tonight for some reason, I can hand this curriculum to your replacement and everything will stay right on track in your classroom." It is the education version of "I want you to train your own replacement."

In a district with low trust between administration and teachers, curriculum is collateral damage. Can I trust you to do your job? Can I trust you to let me do my job? I'm going to argue that the loss of teacher autonomy over the past few decades is directly connected to curriculum problems. "I am going to hand you this curriculum in a box, and you will implement it with fidelity or else" is another way to say "I don't trust you to do your job." Fear and control never make a system better than trust and support.

Okay, this is taking longer than I expected. Let's get back to the question--where does HQC come from?

Lovell suggests an intriguing idea

How do we overcome large-scale expertise and/or time shortages to ensure that solid curriculum materials are accessible and usable by every teacher in our country?

To me, one of the most promising opportunities on the horizon is multi-school organisations, groups of schools working together, and under common governance, to share resources in a way that enables each to achieve much more than they could on their own.

I like this idea. It still has some major holes to fill, like what format and organizational scheme should they use? We were several times required to use a format that was basically a response to the Common Core Pennsylvania State standards, so that the result, had we ever finished it, would have been geared to proving to the state that we were checking off a list by "unpacking" and addressing the standards and not giving a teacher direction and support in designing instruction for the year. 

It's one of the great curriculum traps-- a document designed to prove to the state that you're doing your job is not a document that helps you actually do your job. 

I also recognize that multi-school design looks hugely different in a big district where such a program would be inside the district and in an area like mine, where such a program would have to be intra-district. 

I think back to our teacher-to-teacher design work and imagine what we could have done with more time, more support, and more teachers to provide perspective on what works in particular grade levels. We did okay, but with the additional resources, we could have created something really cool and useful for students across the county. If we could have tapped the varied and rich professional experience and research across the county, we could have accomplished so much more.