Saturday, September 16, 2023
NM: 10 Year Struggle To Fix Funding
Friday, September 15, 2023
ID: Fake Superintendent Fails To Get Real Certificate
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 current gig is 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." The 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 recommend you get your child out of public school.
The "candidate" part refers to Durst's run for the office of state superintendent. He told EastIdahoNews, “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. But he did well in Bonner County.
Said one board member via email to The Spokesman:
But Durst's hiring was contingent on getting some kind of emergency super-special superintendent papers from the state. Boise State, where he got his MBA, sent a letter from the head of the college of education to say that she couldn't recommend him for a certificate.
Discriminatory? The state board is mostly (7/8) appointed by the governor, and Idaho's Brad Little has not exactly shown himself to be a raving liberal; plus he has both CRT and Trans bans to his name. But Idaho, like Oklahoma, is one of those states where the Democratic party is so weak that Republicans are forced to fight with each other. Bryan Clark at The Idaho Statesman had this to say about 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.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
Politics and Public Education
Building a Bridge To Nowhere
So now we get the Building Bridges Initiative. What is it? The short answer is the same old reformy stuff in a pretty new wrapper. The long answer follows. I apologize in advance for how much inside baseball this is. But let's wade through together.
Who put this together?
The year-long initiative was headed up by the Fordham Institute and Democrats for Education Reform, and the website says repeatedly that it collected a group of education advocates from Left, Right and Center.
This is probably a good time to bring up the old quote from a DFER founder about why they used "Democrats" in their name:
“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”We could argue about who amongst this crew represents the Left or Center, but getting into that actually created such a huge digression here that I'm just going to discuss politics and public schools in a separate post. The short version is that education privatization--the three Ds of disinvest, discredit, and dismantle-- has always been a project of the right.
This initiative runs the full gamut of education advocates from A to B. There isn't a single traditional public education advocate here. It['s an impressive roster of reformsters--50CAN, PAVE, E4E, New Schools Venture Fund, NPU, CRPE, PIE-- the list goes on, and we haven't even gotten to the folks who signed on to the finished product. There are, of course, no actual educators in sight.
The report says that the participants "shared, debated, disagreed, and ultimately found common ground" and I'm not entirely clear on what they would have disagreed about. The report does have many camel (horse by committee) moments where they've taken the same old reform idea and translated it into other less-triggering language, or created one of those formulations where the door is open for people whom like the policy but plausibly deniable for those who don't.
This may represent an attempt to mend fences with the social justice wing of school reform? Rebranding reform? Reclaiming some ground for the grownups in the reformster ranks who are getting worried about the far-right burn-it-all-down shenanigans of dudebros like Rufo, DeAngelis and Walters (none of whom show up here)? That would be an interesting development.
So what's in the report?
The report is entitled "A Generation at Risk." Get it? Like "A Nation at Risk" It starts right out chicken littling pandemic Learning Loss, including that baloney about how today's students will make less money because their test scores are lower. Also, mental health issues are up, which is at least a real issue.
A few years back (approximately 2016), the free market reform wing split up with the social justice wing. School choice was good in and of itself, even if the results were lousy for marginalized communities, they suggested. Also, with Dems out of power, they no longer needed a liberal (or at least neo-liberal) friendly pitch about choice would lift up marginalized communities. They did not say that part out loud.
But now here we are, declaring in bold blue font
And we are not doing nearly enough, especially for students from marginalized communities.
The list of "key values" also seems aimed at the social justice wing.
A belief in public education as a critical player in preparing citizens to effectively participate in our democracy and as a critical engine of social and economic mobility in America.
Deep respect for the role that educators and parents play in supporting student success.
There's some juiced-up language that just restates the old "competition will push schools to do better" idea. And--alert! alert!--a note that some choice policies like magnet schools and charter schools don't go far enough.
As always, the false narrative being hinted at here (those damn teachers closed the schools even though we all knew they didn't need to and then they sat on their hands while the learning just fell out of students' heads) is useful to make one more pitch for choicier choice.
For too many years now, the education debate has been taking place inside echo chambers, in shouting matches, or not at all. It’s our intention to interrupt that dynamic.
How can we do right by this generation of students?
What might these ideas look like in our given state, district, or school?
How can we get the education conversation unstuck?
How can we work together to spark bold and lasting action and change?
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
The Default Is In Ourselves
NH: What Ever Happened To Croydon's School Budget Slasher?
You may remember Jody Underwood and Croydon, New Hampshire. It's a story worth revisiting, because it tells us what may be down the road for some of the most extreme MAGA education policies.
The tiny town of Croydon was the scene of more than one big dustup over education. A few years ago it was the scene of a move to push school choice in the state. Underwood and Angi Beaulieu were among the advocates who pushed for a voucher system which allowed students from tiny towns like Croydon to have tuition paid to a school of their choice. In fact, the vouchers-for-some bill was called the Croydon Bill, and Governor Chris Sununu came to Croydon to sign it in 2017.
This was a true voucher program. Not a "here's a couple thousand bucks, good luck finding a place to get your kid an education" program, but a mechanism by which local taxpayers footed the full bill for an education at any public or private school they could get into (that included the school in nearby Claremont, where I started out life). It was not cheap; the taxpayers in the 800 person town paid $1.7 million for a local K-4 school and vouchers for the older students (80 students in all); it's more than they spend to run the town.
Then, in early 2022, at a low-attendance annual town meeting, Jody Underwood, the school board chair, recognized her husband Ian from the floor, and he moved to cut the budget to $800K. The motion passed, and suddenly tiny Croydon was up in arms.
The Underwoods are part of the Free State Project, founded in 2001 with the intent of moving 20,000 Libertarians to New Hampshire with the hope that they might have an outsized influence on the small-population, liberty-loving state. Free Staters have been successful in landing elected offices in New Hampshire, even at the state level (most elected offices in the state are unpaid). Granite State Matters just released a paper about the FSP's progress dismantling democracy in New Hampshire.The Underwoods came to Croydon in 2007. Before moving, Jody had worked for the Educational Testing Service, and before that a researcher for NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as the Lead Learning Scientist for Intelligent Automation, Inc--that's Blue Halo, a company that works in the defense industry sector, and she has some legit credits in the AI world way before it was cool. Ian was a "planetary scientist and artificial intelligence researcher for NASA," a certified hypnotherapist, a "fourth generation wing chun sifu," as well as director of the Ask Dr. Math program.
Asked by the Valley News what her plans were, Underwood offered this:
The first piece focuses on Croydon schools, which represent a spectacularly tiny sample. The school has two classrooms--K/1 and 2-4. The principal teaches the 2-4 and the other teacher handles special ed. So it's not clear what is to be learned by studying their collective test results. But what Underwood arrives is the notion that it's that damn Fountas and Pinnell and what we need in here is some science of reading stuff.