ICYMI: Light-Up Edition (11/19)

Last night was our light up night here in town, a parade of floats or all shape and size followed by fireworks in the park in the middle of town. It's one of many times during the year at which this place looks like some kind of uber-typical small town. We ride on a truck with the town band playing an assortment of Christmas carols for a huge crowd. Fun times.

Lots to read this week. Remember to share!

Moms for Liberty reports over $2 million in revenue, with bulk of contributions from two donors

Ali Swenson covers this for the Associated Press. Friend of the Institute Maurice Cunningham makes an appearance. And these ordinary everyday totally not astroturf Moms get $1.5 million from two anonymous donors. 

The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore

At the Washington Post, Ruby Cramer takes a deep look into the story of Tania Galinanes, a librarian driven out of her job by Florida's crackdown on books.

How Moms for Liberty and a notorious English teacher exploited a high school student

Judd Legum returns to the story of the Moms for Liberty attempt to get a librarian arrested, and it just keeps getting worse.

Moms for Liberty asks Oklahoma to drop book fair vendor, claiming it’s promoting ‘radical viewpoints, sexual ideologies’

Moms for Liberty has decided to go after Scholastic book fairs in Oklahoma, because books, you know.

Moms for Liberty Cuddles Up to Proud Boys . . . Again

Maurice Cunningham looks at the Moms attempt to claim that they are totally not BFFs with the Proud Boys. Two chapter leaders take the fall, but that hardly scratches the surface.

Moms for Liberty plays the blame game after its big election losses

Ja'Han Jones at MSNBC calls out the Moms for blaming everyone but themselves for their poor election day showing.

“Moms For Liberty Guy” Shows Up at Duval Workshop

They may have lost elections, but they still have friends in high places-- especially in Florida. Sue Kingery Woltanski reports. 

Why a bucolic Tennessee suburb is a hotbed of ‘Christian Nashville-ism’

Bob Smietana travels to Tennessee's Williamson County for the Washington Post. Money quote: "This is some of the most privileged people in the whole United States of America, acting like they’re on the brink of unimaginable persecution."

How Right-Wing Brainchild ‘Universal School Vouchers’ Blow Through State Budgets

Jeff Bryant's latest piece demonstrates how universal vouchers are fiscally irresponsible, blowing up in cost to bust state budgets.

Arizona school vouchers now cover $500 Lego sets? Sweet

Laurie Roberts in the Arizona Republic covers the latest in voucher spending. Not just Legos, but ninja training and ski trips.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott's proposal for school vouchers goes down in defeat

Yep. His latest attempt failed. Again.

These Are The Right-Wing Ideologues Taking Over School Boards

Steven Monacelli at the Texas Observer breaks down some of the connections between the various folks aiming at privatizing Texas education and "capturing" school boards.

State leaders could decide the legal fate of religious charters

Preston Green and Suzanne Eckes break down the legal question behind current charter school debates. Public or private? We may have an answer soon.

The Battle Over Church and State Could Take Down the Charter School Movement

Adam Laats in the New Republic explains how charter fans could rue the day they let religious charters become a thing.

About That Charter School USA Application in St. Tammany Parish

This tale from the indispensable Mercedes Schneider may seem like a local story, but the kind of charter shenanigans on display are worth watching for anywhere.

What House Republicans want to do to public education funding

The short answer is "slash it to the bone." Valerie Strauss has the long answer at the Washington Post.

Trans Boy Returns To Lead Role In 'Oklahoma!' After Outcry At Sherman School Board Meeting

In a pleasant surprise, a Texas school board undid their superintendent's order to can "Oklahoma" and the trans boy who was cast as Ali Hakim. They even offered an apology. Not included in this story-- the super has been removed from supervision of the fine arts program. (At this point nobody has complained that a white kid was cast as a Persian character).

School district increases security after being targeted by hate influencer Chaya Raichik over a joke

Libs of TikTok continues to be a danger of schools and the people in them.

Mark Zuckerberg Got Lost in Terra Mathematica

Dan Meyer with a great piece that's not just about the problems of teaching math, but what's wrong with the whole idea of mastery in learning.

Going for the education jugular

Gabe Hart at Tennessee Lookout explains the classic strategy-- make schools look bad, then aim to privatize.

84% of schools approved as part of Tennessee’s student voucher program are religiously affiliated

Adam Friedman at Tennessee Lookout breaks down the numbers for Tennessee's voucher schools.

New Book Contrasts What Voucher Proponents Promise to the Inequitable Results

Jan Resseger looks into a new book that dissects the school voucher illusion.

Teaching Music in the Digital Age

Nancy Flanagan with some excellent thoughts about teaching music in the digital (or any other) age.

Black teachers are leaving Allegheny County. A new study examines why.

That's in Pennsylvania. You can click through to the full study from Research for Action (a great outfit in PA) but this summary at an NPR station website gives you the highlights. 

Vermont May Be the Face of a Long-Term U.S. Labor Shortage

Wondering why so many states are rolling back child labor laws? This New York Times look at Vermont offers some clues.

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PA: District Loses Fight Against After School Satan Club

A little bit north of Bucks County and south of the Poconos lies Northampton County, in which lies the Saucon Valley School District, a district which just agreed to settle up with the Satanic Temple to the tune of $200,001.

I would say that it takes a dumb district to fall into this kind of mess, but on the other side of the state where I live local districts play with this kind of fire all the time. 

Forking over taxpayer dollars and the use of facilities to the After School Satan Club has always been a completely predictable outcome. Yet folks who desperately want to get religion back in school somehow keep thinking that "religion" means "only my religion."

Those folks kicked the door open over twenty years ago with Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

That suit made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 2001. The Good News Club is a program of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, a group founded in 1937 by Jesse Levin Overholtzer with the express purpose of evangelizing children. They claim 109,828 clubs worldwide. In the 90s, a couple decided to establish one of these after-school clubs in Milford, New York, but the school said no based on the stated intent to have "a fun time of singing songs, hearing a Bible lesson and memorizing scripture." Deeming the club religious instruction (which it totally was) the district said no, and many lower courts agreed. SCOTUS, however, did not. Justices Thomas, Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia and Kennedy were okey-doke with this (Breyer concurred in part).

And so US school have to provide use of the facilities to after school religious groups.

The Satanic Temple doesn't seem particularly interested in actual Satan worship. But they have adopted a fairly aggressive stance of "well, if you want to play that freedom of religion game, here we come." In their newest enterprise in Texas, they've been arguing hard that abortion is a religious practice of their sect and therefor must be allowed. They are raising money--no kidding-- to fund the Samuel Alito's Mom Satanic Abortion Clinic, which doers in fact help fund abortion services out of New Mexico. 

The after-school Satan Clubs have been launched in a variety of states and schools--specifically schools that opened their doors to The Good News Club. And that includes the Saucon Valley Middle School.

If you read the regular print, it doesn't seem all that scary:

The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic religion that views Satan as a literary figure representing a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny and championing the human mind and spirit. After School Satan Club does not attempt to convert children to any religious ideology. Instead, The Satanic Temple supports children thinking for themselves.

They emphasize a "scientific, rationalist, non-superstitious worldview," which I guess does seem at least a bit scary to some folks. But mostly it's that header-- Hey Kids! Let's Have Fun At After School Satan Club-- that really grabs attention. 

In February, the board correctly approved the ASSC request for facilities use. Then someone left a voicemail with the district threatening violence. Then the district canceled after-school activities and a day of school itself. Then the district decided to "review" the ASSC request. Then they denied it because the club had violated a policy against disrupted district activities, including creating a threat against staff and students and anxiety and fear, which of course they hadn't--it was the guy who left the voicemail that did that.

That was a dumb move for many reasons. As Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist points out

The district inadvertently created a playbook for Christian terrorists to follow anytime there was an atheist or Satanic club meeting at a local school. Just call in a threat, mention the non-Christian group as your motivation, and watch the chaos unfold. It was a horrible precedent.

Meanwhile, the phone caller was caught-- it was some dude in North Carolina. The Satanic Temple sued the district, and the judge landed on their side, hard.

Here, although The Satanic Temple, Inc.'s objectors may challenge the sanctity of this controversially named organization, the sanctity of the First Amendment's protections must prevail. Indeed, it is the First Amendment that enumerates our freedoms to practice religion and express our viewpoints on religion and all the topics we consider sacred. Though "the First Amendment is often inconvenient" depending on one's perspective or responsibilities, this inconvenience "does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech (Int'l Soc'y for Krishna Consciousness v. Lee, 1992, Kennedy, J. concurring). "Even in the school setting, a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint is not enough to justify the suppression of speech." Child Evangelism Fellowship of N.J. v. Stafford Twp. Sch. Dist., 3d Cir, 2004)

Would have been nice if someone had thrown those ideas around every time a legislature passed a law against discussing critical race theory, race history stuff, and other divisive concepts.

Judge John M. Gallagher (who is, incidentally, a Trump appointee) cut through the various piddly shenanigans the district had employed to disqualify the After School Satan Club and ordered the district to honor their original resource use agreement and let the club have its on-school-grounds meetings.

That ruling was filed on May 1. 

Since then, a slate of school board candidates ran on a platform of "no more expensive over-dramatic baloney," citing the ASSC lawsuit as one glaring example of how the old majority wasted $1.6 million on unnecessary legal bills. Those Democratic candidates clobbered the incumbent conservatives.

That was last week. Yesterday, a final settlement in the case was announced. The district will not retaliate against any of the folks involved in the suit. The district shall not subject ASSC to any requirements not faced by other clubs (rules about distributing fliers, etc.). 

As for money, the district will pay The Satanic Temple $1 in nominal damages. Their insurance carrier will pay $200,000 to cover TST's legal costs. 

What's next. More After School Satan Clubs, most likely. And if Oklahoma successfully launches the first religious charter school, I expect The Satanic Temple will be right there to apply for a charter, too. 

And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in this country a person will think twice before demanding that religion be put back in schools. 

USED Has A New ABC Dream (But with cool charts)

A recent policy brief from the U.S. Department of Education carries the not-very-poetic title "Eliminating Educator Shortages through Increasing Educator Diversity and Addressing High-need Shortage Areas." It offers much of the same old same, but it includes one feature that makes it a must-bookmark.

What it addresses is rather old news, though it rightfully reminds us that the teacher exodus is not strictly a COVID thing, but an old thing that COVID made worse.

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, low wages in the education profession, the high costs of educator preparation, inequitable funding practices, poor working conditions, and other factors contributed to a decline in new educators entering the field and high rates of educator attrition, particularly in schools serving large concentrations of students from low-income backgrounds and students of color.

The department's response is some bureaucratic programmy "call to action" thing called "Raise the Bar: Lead the World," 

Raising the bar means recognizing that our nation already has what it takes to continue leading the world—if we deliver a comprehensive, rigorous education for every student; boldly improve conditions for learning; and ensure every student has a pathway to multilingualism and to college and careers.

When the bar is raised in education, all our nation's students will build the skills to succeed inside and outside of school. Our students will reach new heights in the classroom, in their careers, and in their enriched lives and communities, making a positive difference in the world, for generations to come.

Which is a well-massaged piece of verbage. And it comes with goals cleverly packaged as an alphabetic mnemonic-- ABC, Really.

A is for Achieve academic excellence. That means "accelerate learning for every student" and get those "student achievement levels" (aka Big Standardized Test scores) up to higher than pre-pandemic levels, plus closing opportunity gaps. Also, "develop a comprehensive and rigorous education for every student with high-quality instruction that prepares them to be active, engaged, and lifelong learners." The "also" portion is somehow both aspirational and familiar, like someone asked Chat-GPT to write a summary of every school district vision statement. The first part? Yes, we'll accelerate learning, because everyone already knew exactly how to teach more, faster, but they just weren't in the mood. Closing opportunity gaps? Great goal that nobody has figured out how to accomplish in decades.

Each of these goals has a link to another page of strategies, likewise aspirational jargon.

B is for Boldly improve learning conditions. First goal here is to eliminate the educator "shortage" by "ensuring that schools are appropriately staffed, paying educators competitively, and strengthening pathways into the profession." Sigh. The first part is a tautology-- we will reduce the teaching shortage by making sure we aren't short of teachers. The other two are hard-to-impossible to achieve from the federal level, and in fact the details use the verb "support." 

Second goal is to increase school-based health services for students. Yes, that would be good.

C is for Create pathways for global engagement. This boils down to "make all students multilingual" and is, well--

Ensure every student has a path to postsecondary education and training, including by establishing and scaling innovative systems of college and career pathways that integrate high schools, colleges, careers, and communities and lead to students earning industry-recognized credentials and securing in-demand jobs.

So, college and career ready to be useful meat widgets. Okay, then.

So what is so unmissable about this particular page? Data and charts.

One chart allows you to select a state and see how race/ethnicity break for teachers and K-12 students. I can quickly see that in Illinois, 82% of classroom teachers are white, but only 46% of students are; I can also see that there are more Hispanic/Latino students than Black in the state. In Texas only 53% of classroom teachers are white, but only 26% of students are (and 53% are Hispanic/Latino). California? Students are 56% Hispanic/Latino; classroom teachers are 26%. In addition, this chart breaks down Education Preparation Program enrollment--are there teachers of color in the pipeline (in Texas, yes; in Vermont, no)?. I could go on--this is fascinating and the visual is very easy to take in.

Next we get a chart that breaks down classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, and school leaders. Texas shows only 33% of paraprofessionals are white, and only 49% of school leaders. States like New Hampshire and Maine are just as white as you think they are. 

The third chart breaks down student race/ethnicity within the EPP pipeline by program (traditional, alternative IHE based, alternative other). In Pennsylvania, alternative non-IHE programs have a far higher percentage of future teachers of color; in Texas, it's traditional programs that have a higher percentage of TOC.

Finally, a graphic that shows which teacher specialty areas are hurting in how many states. No surprise-- special ed positions are struggling in 45 states, followed by math and science at 37 each. You can also look state by state to see who's having trouble finding what. 

These charts give very broad strokes, which in many states hides some extreme differences between rural and urban districts, but it's still a quick, clear source of data, most of it from within just the last year or two. You can read through the department saying more or less the right things, or you can just skip to the cool charts and graphs to see what things look like in any state you're interested in.

Secular Education Is Not Religious Persecution

When I was teaching, I did not serve lunch during my class. None of the teachers in the building did. That does not mean that we forbid our students to eat any lunch at all during the appointed time. It doesn't mean that we were somehow suggesting that food is a bad idea, that they would be wrong to eat. It just means we left that part of their life empty and unclaimed, available to be filled by them at the proper time with the food of their own choosing. We can talk about food, about how it operates in society, maybe even talk about our personal preferences. But none of that meant I was going to serve up my preferred dish and demand they eat it. 

When I was teaching, I did not provide matchmaking services for my students. I did not fix them up with classmates or try to steer them to what I judged to be appropriate life partners. That does not mean I was suggesting that they should never date or enter a relationship with anyone ever. It just means that that particular portion of their life was something I left alone, for them to address, or not, as they wished in their own time and their own way. 

The repeated complaint from certain sorts of christianist advocates is that secular education-- education that takes place on the state side of the church and state wall-- somehow pushes "atheism as a state-sponsored religion."

That's baloney.

Secular education, like my lunch-free and non-matchmaking classroom, is education that simply leaves a space for students and their families to fill as they think is best. 

We might discuss religion (as a teacher of US literature, I couldn't avoid it), but as a secular educator, it was never, ever my job to suggest or require that a particular set of religious beliefs are correct. It was never my job to serve up my own faith for them to consume, willing or otherwise. That space, that religious faith-based part of their being, was (like many other personal spaces) theirs to fill as they saw fit. The absence of religion does not mean the presence of atheism.

Why do christianists insist that this sort of secular education is such a terrible threat to religion, some sort of government-enforced atheism?

A generous explanation would be simply that they simply believe so strongly in the correctness of their faith that they can't help but want to push it on others. That they see those who believe incorrectly as reckless drivers racing full bore for the edge of a cliff, and they can't just stand by and let that happen.

Or maybe it's a belief in a collectivist fate, the notion that a nation's citizens must follow the proper god in the proper way or suffer a disastrous national fate. A sort of spiritual socialism.

Or the less generous explanation, which is that they enjoy the power of being the dominant cultural and religious group and they are scared and angry in their bones about losing all that. Even less generous--we're talking about christianists who believe that freedom to exercise their religion must involve freely discriminating against and condemning all those with whom they disagree.

But what I find most striking about all of these is that underlying them is a lack of faith in their faith. These are followers of a tiny god, a god who depends so heavily on having followers train up more believers that this god could not survive without them. Schools should train young believers and fill that space for faith constantly and completely because... what? Because if schools don't do that, young folks would naturally not take to the True Faith? We need to enforce official school prayer and Bible reading because if we didn't, students would never pray nor read the Bible on their own? Because God's authority and appeal are so limited that a non-believing third grade teacher can overpower them?

It strikes me as a meager faith, a faith that needs human-exercised authoritarianism to survive, as if somehow the majesty and grace of God are inadequate to overcome human obstacles. 

Which is an even more problematic idea since a secular, non-sectarian school presents the exact opposite of obstacles to faith. Secular schooling, following the First Amendment, simply doesn't endorse any particular faith, leaving that space open and ready to be filled as the student chooses to fill it in whatever time and manner they choose. It may just be my own faith talking, but I think that space will be best filled by use of heart and mind and free will with which God gifted them, and not by force-feeding from the hands of humans.

PA: Central Bucks Super Gets Solid Gold Parachute

Since he was hired by them in early 2021, Superintendent Adam Lucabaugh has backed the ultra-right majority of the Central Bucks school board. Now that the winds have changed, they are set to reward his loyalty as their last act.

Central Bucks has drawn national attention for implementing a wave of conservative policies. They instituted a book banning policy, aided by the Independence Law Firm, the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute ("Our goal is for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.") They banned pride flags. They suspended a teacher who defended LGBTQ students. They implemented a policy that required the school to out LGBTQ students with a "gender identification procedure". No student name changes allowed without a note from home. Both the ACLU and the U.S. Department of Education came after the district for creating a hostile environment for LGBTQ students-- so they hired a noted anti-LGBTQ lawyer to do an internal investigation; the resulting report might not have been entirely forthcoming (but it was expensive).

And Superintendent Lucabaugh has backed them every step of the way, and they thanked it for him handsomely-- just this summer they boosted his salary from $229,500 to $315,000, making him the second highest paid superintendent in the state (behind Philly), as well as extending his contract to 2028.

Then Central Bucks became one of the school boards to see their Moms for Liberty style board majority obliterated. 

This morning Jo Ciavaglia at the Bucks County Courier Times broke the latest news-- Lucabaugh has suddenly resigned. 

It seems safe to predict that the new board will not be composed of Lucabaugh fans. But that board won't be seated until December 4. Until then, the old board is in place, and they have fashioned a solid gold parachute for their favorite superintendent. 

The proposal is a $630,000 severance package, which would mean that Lucabaugh would score over a million dollars for two years of work. Not too shabby.

But to sweeten the pot, the board is also prepared to hire him as a "consultant" to stick around till the end of November (his resignation will be effective tonight, the 14th) for another ten grand.

The nine page separation agreement spells out some details of that $630K price tag. Lucabaugh will be paid $32,105.81 for 26.5 days of unused vacation. He'll also get $30.288.50 for 25 unused sick days. If that seems sweet, well, there's more.

Lucabaugh agrees to forfeit 41 of his accumulated sick leave of 235 sick days, "saving the district $49,673.14," in exchange for which, the district will pay him $235,038.76 for the rest of the sick days. Also, pay for his unused personal and administrative emergency days.

Oh, and medical benefits for him and his family through June of 2024. 

There's a mutually agreed upon press release, which everyone agrees not to contradict, which frames this as a mutual decision to separate. It says, in part of the separation:

This will allow the new School Board, which will be seated on December 4, 2023, to select a new superintendent for the School District. It will also allow Dr. Lucabaugh to pursue other opportunities in the educational arena. The School District wants to thank Dr. Lucabaugh for the extraordinary leadership he has provided through very difficult and contentious times. He always stayed above the fray and focused upon the educational mission of the School District notwithstanding other distractions that existed. The Central Bucks community has profited from his leadership and the School District hopes his successor will be able to maintain the high standards that he has established.

I'll bet there are more than a few teachers who would love to see such a generous handling of their resignations. 

FL: More Meat Widgets Now

Blogging at Bridge To Tomorrow, a blog focused on "a strong K-20 pipeline for physical scientists and engineers," Paul Cottle noticed something about the latest output from a semi-obscure feature of the oversight group for Florida's university system. The Board of Governor's regularly adopts a list of Programs of Strategic Emphasis, and Cottle noticed that something has changed.

Prior to this week, the Programs of Strategic Emphasis list included a broad range of degree programs in STEM fields and other fields of particular interest to the state, including teaching degrees and certain business degrees like accounting. The idea was to encourage universities to educate students in fields where they could easily find jobs after graduation, regardless of where those jobs were.

That is no longer true.

Now the list is driven by the imperative to supply “critical talent to support Florida’s economy”. The list was driven primarily by workforce demand data from within the State of Florida. Giving students opportunities to compete in national and international job markets is no longer valued.

Being able to find gainful employment has always been important for young humans, but there is a difference between putting student needs first and prioritizing the demand of business for more meat widgets. While those two needs will always be related, they also include a basic conflict. When a business wants to hire ten twiddle masters, it's in the business's interest for State U to turn out 100 people with twiddle mastery degrees, but that means that 90 of those grads are going to be stuck. 

The PSE list, according to the state's power point, provides students with a "positive return on investment" for the degree and supplies Florida with "critical talent to support Florida's economy." This is higher education as advanced vocational training. And if that's the aim of college, then we can expect the same attitude toward K-12.  And while that slide at least pays lip service to students, another slide lists the key stakeholders whose "input" was incorporated-- "Staff from the Governor’s office, legislature, universities, key agencies, & the private sector." 

Cottle provides one stark example of whose priorities are being emphasized here:

One example makes the impact of this shift abundantly clear. According to the New York Fed, as of February 2023 the college major with the highest early- and mid-career median wages nationally was chemical engineering. But Florida doesn’t have large chemical companies like Texas, Louisiana and other states do, so chemical engineering is not in the new Programs of Strategic Emphasis list. So since chemical engineering is not important to Florida’s businesses, it should not be important to Florida’s universities.

Florida apparently intends to address its meat widget shortage by reducing students' ability to look for work elsewhere. But that fits, as Florida is among the states looking for ways to roll back child labor laws, because businesses need meat widgets to get to work as soon as possible, so let's not worry about their wants, needs, safety, etc. 

I wish this weren't a harbinger of things to come, but it sure looks like one. Narrowing education to simple job preparation. Undoing child labor laws. Insisting that people ought to be getting married and making more babies. Bitching about how people don't want to work these days. Even stout resistance to a universal health care system that would decouple health care from employment. All fit with news of and panic about a labor shortage, which may be inevitable just because Boomers are getting old. But business needs meat widgets, preferably easily replaced and therefor cheap ones. And as with most terrible things, Florida is out there in front.

OH: Foxes in Charge of Henhouses

Ohio has become a prime exhibit in another version of public school takeover, and it's already showing how corrupt that version can be.

Education privatizers all face the same basic problem--their policies are not popular with actual citizens, who won't vote for them. So pro-privatization politicians have to circumvent that darned democracy thing.

Ohio has been working hard at this, cementing a heavily gerrymandered legislature that is not particularly interested in the will of the people Exhibit A: the voters may have enshrined abortion rights, but the GOP legislatures is working hard to somehow undo that and keep it from happening.

In this approach, you just keep taking power away from any part of the government that might not do as you wish. In Ohio's case, that has meant commandeering the Department of Education and putting it directly under the governor's control. The old board included 11 elected members (the governor got to appoint 8), and that's just too much democracy for Governor DeWine.

The new department is now the Department of Education and Workforce (because, you know, one of the primary purposes of public education is to crank out meat widgets for business), and DeWine has made his choice to head up this new department. And what a choice it is.

Meet Steve Dackin.

Dackin has been a district-level school administrator for districts. In 2015 he was put on the board of KnowledgeWorks, a big Gates-funded reformy monstrosity ("I had the opportunity of working with EDWorks and KnowledgeWorks at a local level, and am looking forward to sharing those experiences as a member of the board of directors.")  He's not there now. 

But his most infamous activity comes from his time on the state board of education. He was vice-president and in charge of developing a job search for the next state superintendent. After he had determined what the best candidate should look like, he resigned from the board and applied for the job. Then he got the job. Then a large number of Ohioans raised their eyebrows so hard that Lake Erie's water level rose ten inches. So after less than a month on the job, Dackin resigned, citing that "concerns have been raised" and he didn't want questions about "revolving doors" to distract "from the important work ahead for schools, educators, and especially children." Setting aside the prediction of children having important work ahead, the resignation seemed pretty clear cut.

But speaking of revolving doors-- after taking one for the team, Dackin may get to run the newly commandeered department for DeWine. It is one of the ever-amazing features of the reformster world-- it doesn't seem possible to ever screw up badly enough that you actually lose your upwardly mobile career.