The Grammar of Fetterman's Hoodie

Ties are an emblem of some of the most ridiculous and inescapable parts of human culture.

I wore ties for my entire teaching career. I started out of a need to differentiate between my 22 year old self and my 20 year old students. I eventually stayed with it because wearing a tie was one of my Things. And once a year, my students would get some version of this shpiel:

Who's the most dressed up person in the room? Me, of course. How do we know? Because this morning I took this magic piece of cloth and tied it around my neck. Now, it only works if I tie it like this. If I do this (throw it over shoulder) or this (loosen it to comic amounts) or this (make skinny end stick out further), I don't look dressed up. I look silly.

Why is that? And what is with that phrase "dressed UP" anyway?

Ties are a perfect example of the human tendency to make shit up and then imbue it with all sorts of Deep and Important Significance. There's all sorts of history, including Chinese soldiers from the 2nd century BCE and Croatian mercenaries in France and so on, but it more or less boils down to "rich and powerful people thought they were cool."

I brought this up in class as an introduction to the units on usage. 

Usage is not grammar, although a multitude of folks conflate the two. Grammar is the mechanics of language--what works, what doesn't, how the parts fit together. Usage is about h0ow particular words or phrases are used. When we're talking about grammar, we're talking about what works or doesn't. As the soon as the word "correct" or "proper" turns up, we're probably talking about usage.

Plenty of things that aren't considered proper usage are fully grammatical. The classic example is "ain't" a word that's considered "non-standard" or "improper" usage, but is perfectly grammatical. By that I mean that a native speaker gets that "I ain't going to the store" means something and "I'm going to the ain't" does not. 

"Proper" usage is like a necktie. Most questions about what is proper usage have historically been settled the same way--whatever rich, powerful people do is correct. This is generally "decided" organically and by consensus; attempts to deliberately shape usage are very hard to pull off (see also: every attempt to fix English spelling conventions). 

After the Norman Conquest, most wealthy and powerful positions in England were occupied by people who spoke French, and so the more proper usage became aligned with French or Latin based vocabulary. Attempts to codify grammar, spelling and punctuation inevitably settled debates by deferring to "how they do it in London." 

It is usage (not grammar) that is used as a marker of class. Two things are true. First, these distinctions are completely made up and without any discernable basis in objective reality. In fact, when closely examined, they can look kind of dumb. Second, however ridiculous, you ignore them at your peril, because they still have enormous power in the world.

I love Fetterman. I don't always agree with his positions, but as a Pennsylvanian I will certify that he is the most Pennsylvanian Pennsylvanian who ever Pennsylvaniaed his way into government. He has defied the "proper usage" of political speech and fashion his whole career in a way that very much reflects a certain blue collar pragmatism that one finds in the state.

If those jagoffs in the House stop trying to shut our government down, and fully support Ukraine, then I will save democracy by wearing a suit on the Senate floor next week.

— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) September 20, 2023

That said, not all usage transgressions are created equal. Shaking off the somewhat arbitrary restrictions of "proper" usage can get you the genius of Shakespeare, and it can get you gibberish. It can be a way to take back power, but the question of what you want to take back power for, exactly, matters a great deal. There are whole big conversations to be had about the power dynamics, and trying to put and keep people in their place, and trying to disrupt just because you're a chaos agent, and trying to shut people out just because they aren't adept at invoking the "proper" usage incantations. And I'm not going to post a whole book today.

But underneath it all is one big important truth--all of this stuff is made up shit. It is human beings decide to staple a hat to a penguin and then declaring that hat-stapled penguins have deep significance about the fate of society. It is about declaring that one community's traditions are objectively linked in some meaningful way to the Fate of Civilization As We Know It. There is nothing we humans like better than to make shit up and then tell ourselves how important that made up shit is, and that made up importance can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, until it isn't any more. 

Plunder, Private Equity, and Education

Brendan Ballou served as Special Counsel for Private Equity at the U.S. Department of Justice, which qualifies him to wrote Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America. It's one of those books that you read to learn about things you were probably happier not knowing. And while it doesn't directly address education, when we put it together with a report on private equity in education, the writing on the wall is pretty huge.

Plunder is divided into three sections-- How They Make Their Money, How They Get Their Way, and How To Stop Them. Early on, Ballou explains how the private equity firm business model so often leads to disaster (for everyone else):

First, private equity firms typically buy businesses only for the short term. Second, they often load up the companies they buy with debt and extract onerous fees. And third, they insulate themselves from the consequences, both legal and financial, of their actions.

Ballou goes on to lay out some of the techniques used by private equity to squeeze money out of businesses. Leasebacks--make the business lease its own stuff, which also creates a insulating layer between the business and the true owner. Dividend recaps--basically borrowing money on the business's credit in order to give that money to the private equity company. Strategic bankruptcies. Forced partnerships--requiring the businesses you own to combine, perhaps by merger, or perhaps by making Company A get all its goods from Company B. Tax avoidance. Rollups--basically a monopoly style of taking control of a market. Layoffs. Price hikes. Quality cuts. Operational efficiencies.

Folks in education will recognize what he says about operational efficiencies, which "belie a certain arrogance in the private equity industry, the idea that in three to seven years, well-educated dilletantes can run a company better than those who've often spent a lifetime doing so." Yup. That sounds familiar.

The book devotes single chapters to the private equity takeovers of housing, retail, nursing homes, health care, and prisons. Ballou also gets into some very specific tactics, like suing the customers, a tactic used against "tens of thousands" of student loan borrowers.

Ballou looks at private equity takeovers in the public sector (check out The Privatization of Everything for even more details), with some attention to private equity in for-profit colleges. He brings up the example of Ashford University. Once private equity bought it, they went from 332 students to 83,000 mostly online students. But the university was allegedly "little more than a scheme to extract money from its students." When Senatore Tom Harkins looked into it, he found that the school had over 1,700 recruiters, and just one employee devoted to helping grads find jobs. And as we've seen in many cases, "the government subsidized the for-profit college, but did little to constrain its predation."

And that alone would seem like a clear indicator of the danger of voucherized private schools if private equity gets its hands on the K-12 sector. Private equity at its very worst is not simply interested in getting profits from its business--any business wants to extract enough money to pay its workers and leaders and insure its own survival into the future. But as this book shows repeatedly, private equity is not interested in the business's survival into the future, but simply looks to squeeze every penny out, right now, and if that nobbles or kills the business, oh well. Ka-ching, baby.

And you may think, "Well, let's be sure not to head down that road." And if that's your thought, I have bad news. 

The Private Equity Stakeholder Project works to track and engage the stakeholders and investors affected by various private equity shenanigans, and they have a whole report entitled Private Equity in Education that lays out some of the private equity holdings, and shows the ways that "Wall Street profits from a public good."

The big picture is striking enough. Private equity deals have been rocketing up for the past few years. In 2021, there were almost 150 deals involving $14M in capital. That's driven in part by the post-pandemic belief that "EdTech is a new and permanent asset class" aka sector that be sucked dry.

Private equity firms and the companies they own have promised to improve educational outcomes for struggling individual students and schools through new technology, personalized learning strategies, and resources for staffing and administration, but there is no conclusive data showing that school funding is better spent at private-equity owned companies than staying within the district.

The report at looks some specific areas where private equity has laid down its marker.

Curriculum development and test administration. 

The private equity technique of forcing its holdings to marry each other really figures in here. If you own the company that decides what gets taught and the company that determines how the outcomes are measured, then you can cash in big time. And it adds a whole other layer to what is already a big business octopus.

Take the Cambium group, which includes all sorts of  edu-bizes, like the Learning A-Z folks, Rosetta Stone, American Institute for Research (the SBA test folks), and a boatload of other companies both the curriculum and testing biz. Or HBH, aka Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a giant octopus that used to be strictly in the text publishing business. They've also expanded through acquisition, including their recent acquisition of NWEA (the MAP test folks). In both cases, when you take their test, what do you suppose it recommends for remediation. And if you want to be pro-active and do well on the test, whose materials do you think are your best bet.

But that's not the end of it.

Both Cambium and HBH are owned by Veritas Capital, a big private equity firm. Renaissance Learning, McGraw Hill, Imagine Learning (including Edgenuity), Edmentum, Discovery Education, Carnegie Learning-- all owned by private equity companies. 

Not only do these companies produce curriculum and tests, but they also support big time lobbying (see a cool chart here). Which, as Ballou points out, is a big private equity tool--lobbying to make sure the rules favor you every step of the way.

That means a huge chunk of the industries that support education is in the hands of folks who can be expected to put their main attention on how to squeeeeeze these businesses for every dollar, and if that means lower quality and cutting corners, oh well. Ka-ching.

Outsourced staffing

For some outfits, the teacher exodus is not a crisis or a problem, but an opportunity. The report says that education staffing companies generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2021. If you want to see how the private equity lens affects the view of this crisis, consider a Forbes column by Evan Erdberg, head of Proximity Learning Inc (previously acquired by Education Solutions Services, result of a merger with Source4Teachers, all under the control of private equity firm Nautic Partners). 

Erdberg acknowledged that this shortage is in large part due to teachers being undervalued, and noted that even though the average teacher salary recently reached $66,000 nationwide, this is not enough: “We cannot expect these highly educated, trained and experienced individuals to continue to work above and beyond their pay scale while never recouping the costs.” Erdberg offers PLI as a solution, but the company does not solve issues related to teacher pay. As of October 2022, PLI advertised pay for part-time virtual teachers between 20 to 30 dollars per hour, which comes out to less than the national average Erdberg cited in his Forbes piece.

Access to student data

Private equity is looking for ways to get value out of assets, and has been said repeatedly, data is the new oil. 

Vista Equity Partners owns at least 27 companies that provide them with a mountain of student data. Writes The Markup in an article entitled "This Private Equity Firm Is Amassing Companies That Collect Data on America's Children."

We found that the companies, collectively, gather everything from basic demographic information—entered automatically when a student enrolls in school—to data about students’ citizenship status, religious affiliation, school disciplinary records, medical diagnoses, what speed they read and type at, the full text of answers they give on tests, the pictures they draw for assignments, whether they live in a two-parent household, whether they’ve used drugs, been the victim of a crime, or expressed interest in LGBTQ+ groups, among hundreds of other data points.

No single one of Vista's companies holds every one of those data points, but Vista itself owns all of it. That includes the popular PowerSchool, SRB, Intersect, Naviance, Schoology, and Kickboard, plus others.

The report also looks at how these companies work to weaken regulations, such as student privacy regulations. 

And, of course, the sweeping up of actual education providers. In addition to the for-profit colleges that Ballou discusses, private equity has also been buying up early childhood education. KinderCare, O2B Kids, Littel Newtons, Northstar Preschools, Small Miracles--the list of private equity owned providers goes on. Many are part of the Early Care and Education Consortium (partnered with the Boston Consulting Group, another red flag), a group that lobbies hard against any public service model for pre-K. 

Charters are also ripe for the private equity crowd. The report outlines how Ron Packard, then CEO of K-12 (now Stride) the 800 pound gorilla of for-profit charters, spun off Pansophic Learning (supported with money from Dubai private equity form Safanad) which in turn gave us the ACCEL charter chain, an outfit that has really refined the many ways that a charter school can be gamed to make money using techniques that Ballou outlines in private equity handling of nursing homes and prisons. Make the business lease back its own stuff. Make money from real estate investing. In fact, Safanad also makes money in the nursing home biz, and Jeff Bryant and Yves Smith found strong parallels between how ACCEL squeezes money out of its charters and Safanad squeezes money out of nursing homes. Ka-ching.

In 2022, Carol Burris looked at how ACCEL gamed an Ohio charter school so thoroughly that even if the school failed, ACCEL would still make money. Because sometimes if you want the money out of the piggy bank, you just have to take a hammer to it.

That, as Ballou shows in his book, is the private equity game at its worst-- a dead-eyed focus on pulling money out of business so narrow that the success or failure of the business itself is irrelevant. As Ballou shows, that has catastrophic effects when applied to public utilities and prisons and nursing homes, and we can expect equally terrible effects in education. Certainly, children do not deserve to become collateral damage because some private equity dude feels he's not quite rich enough yet. 

Private equity should be kept far away from education (and all other sectors involving live human citizens). Schools are too important to be a target for plunderers, too vital to be treated as some private equity investor's piggy bank. You may want to check the Private Equity Stakeholder Project report, just to see if some private equity properties are latched onto your local school. It can help explain why it may seem as if some education business doesn't seem to be even trying to do its actual job--it's because private equity thinks a company's only real job is to generate that lovely sound that drowns out all the noises of complaint. Ka-ching. 

When Choice Advocates Work Really Closely With Legislators

Turns out that the Commonwealth Foundation has been working really closely with the PA legislature to push school vouchers.

The Commonwealth Foundation is a right wing dark money advocacy group. Goerge Coates, the chair of their board, also sits on the board to the State Policy Network (SPN), a collection of right wing activist groups and thinky tanks, and the board of DonorsTrust, a group that turns rich peoples' money dark and untraceable. They advocate for the usual stuff, and try fun tactics like "paycheck protection" and trying to convince teachers to quit their unions.

Commonwealth Foundation has always stayed close to the issue of vouchers in Pennsylvania, which have surfaced with locust-like regularity (here's 2017 and 2018, for examples). The next-to-most recent time (2022), the Foundation showed uncanny timing. When the House approved the neo-voucher Lifeline Scholarships, the Foundation had its press release ready to go that same day, with talking points remarkably similar to those used by the legislators pushing the bill. 

When the court ruled that Pennsylvania's school funding was unconstitutional, Foundation VP Nathan Benefield was at the front of the line of people trying to bend the court's ruling to mean that vouchers should happen. 

So there are no big surprises in today's news from The Keystone. A Right To Know request from The Keystone turned up an assortment of emails (they're right here) between Commonwealth Foundation and the state Treasurer's office. There's PA Treasury Policy Director Tom Armstrong reaching out to see if someone can come talk vouchers to Secretary Stacy Garrity, and Nathan Benefield replying that sure, the last time he spoke with her, "she said she'd like to see our office and stop for coffee, so maybe we can do that with or in addition to a policy discussion." Gee, I sure wish I could casually invite policy makers in government over here for some coffee and the chance to push my policy ideas.

Garrity's office was working with Senate GOP to get their newest version of education savings accounts--neo-vouchers- into law via the budget process. Meanwhile, Stephen Bloom, another Commonwealth Foundation VP, was staying in touch with Armstrong.

“Tom, with the Senate and the House versions of the Lifeline Scholarship bills having been introduced, we wanted to promptly provide you with our updated Fact Sheet and Talking Points on the bills. Please share with Treasurer Garrity and others on your team as you deem appropriate,” Bloom wrote.

You can read The Keystone's account of the sausage making for more detail, or if you have the stomach for it, dive on into the actual correspondence (only 13 pages of it). 

The governor vetoed the line item for vouchers, and so Commonwealth Action magically and suddenly appeared to spend money pressuring lawmakers to pass voucher anyway. 

It's another infuriating reminder that one of the best way to Get Things Done is to be someone whose only job is to sit in an office in the state capitol and maintain a network of contacts so you always get a hand in what's going on. 

P.S. The Keystone story comes with a reminder: Pennsylvania already has tax credit scholarships, a form of voucher that allows rich folks to give money to private schools instead of paying taxes to the state, and all the fans of even more vouchers dodged a ton of taxes (aka shifted the tax burden to other taxpayers) to the tune of millions of dollars. 

ICYMI: Bunch of Dads Edition (9/17)

The CMO (Chief Marital Officer) here at the Curmudgucation Institute is complaining that Instagram is bombarding her with NSYNC reunion images, and "they just look like a bunch of dads." Also something about her lost youth. Meanwhile, the Board of Directors is sorting Legos. Just so you know about the kind of hard-hitting zero-cost scholarship that's going on here.

And now here's your weekly collection of stuff worth reading.

Raising the Bar on Kindergartners: A Nation at Risk Lives On

Nancy Bailey with a pointed reminder that littles are still under extra pressure and the secretary of education is still someone who doesn't quite get it.

Charter Schools Can’t Claim to Be Public Anymore

Carol Burris at The Progressive, explaining that North Carolina is showing the path to transforming charters into another version of private schools.

The Charter-School Movement’s New Divide

At The Atlantic, Cara Fitzpatrick takes a look at the implications of Oklahoma's proposed Catholic charter school, both for public ed and for charter schools.

Chartered: Florida is No. 2 in the country for charter school closures

A Tampa Bay news site has a whole series about charters in Florida. Start with this one about the incredible rate of charter failures and closures in the state. 

Christian lawmakers push battle over church and state after Roe

What if conservative christianists had their own version of ALEC?

James Lindsay Ties Together all the Conspiracy Theories for School Board Members and the M4L Crowd.

Sue Kingery Woltanski caught James Lindsay, a way right speaker, and his talk at a Leadership Institute Summit, and if you like your conspiracy theories with a big topping of commie alarmism, he's your guy. Read her piece, but beware the comments.

Dallas ISD superintendent says new grading method for Texas schools is connected to school voucher debate

Texas has long specialized in regularly moving the goalposts for school evaluation, but the Dallas superintendent says the latest tweak is just about making public schools "fail" so that students need to be "rescued" by the vouchers that Abbott and friends so desperately want to install.

Deeper Learning Requires Deeper Relationships?

Who knew? Well, most actual teachers knew, but Scott McLeod adds some data to the conversation.

Federal grant pays $126K salary of Florida official who pushes DeSantis education agenda

Well, wouldn't it be fun, if you were governor, to use federal grant money to push your own agenda (instead of whatever it was the grant was for). Just another day in Ron DeSantis's Florida.

Teachers are becoming more educated, but salaries are declining

With charts. Some data to use when you get into that argument with your uncle again.

Moms for Liberty Takes on Head Lice and Other Critical Issues

Yes, I recommend Nancy Flanagan every single week. That's because you should read her every single week. This time she tries to puzzle out a Moms for Liberty tweet. What's going on? Are they coming out as pro-lice? 

Takac: Now Is the Time to Invest in All Pa. Public Schools

State Rep Paul Takac tries to make a case that Pennsylvania should actually fund its school systems.

Abolish School Supply Lists, Too

Jose Vilson goes school supply shopping with his child, and notes that school supply lists tell us something about school resources, and who gets them and who has to go shopping for them.

Chris Rufo’s dangerous fictions

Zack Beauchamp read Chris Rufo's book and talked to the guy on the phone, and comes up with one of the better Rufo profiles out there. "Exaggeration and hyperbole are not just incidental to his intellectual project. They are his project."

Local Parents, Educators Face ‘Attack’ on Public Schools from Indiana Lawmakers

Steve Hinnefeld runs down the state of Indiana's various attacks on public education.

Chicago Diminishes Suspensions and Expulsions by Adopting Restorative Practices as School Discipline Strategy

Jan Resseger looks at some data that suggests Chicago has made restorative practices work for school discipline.

My Students Are Writing. That Makes Me Happy

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider with a brief reflection on the moments when teaching just feels great.

Refusing to Censor Myself

Children's author Maggie Tokuda-Hall writes about what happened when Scholastic said it would like to pick up her book--if she would just cut a couple of things.

The Very Common, Very Harmful Thing Well-Meaning Parents Do

Technology makes it possible for parents to subject their children to more surveillance than ever. But Devorah Heitner explains why it's just a bad idea.

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NM: 10 Year Struggle To Fix Funding

Pennsylvania is the most recent state to be declared in violation of its obligation to properly fund education, but it's certainly not the only one. And looking at others can be instructive about how well it works to use the legal approach to forcing fair funding . (Spoiler alert: not great) Let's look at New Mexico.

Their tale starts in 2014, with Wilhelmina Yazzie and her son Xavier. Xavier got straight As at the Gallup-McKinley school, but his results on national standardized tests suggested that maybe he wasn't actually in tip top learning shape. Maybe that's because the school lacked funding, teachers, tutors, computers, and enough textbooks to allow students to take them home to study.

Yazzie couldn't get a satisfactory response from school administrators beyond "we're doing the best we can with the resources we have." So she sued the state of New Mexico for not sufficiently funding education. In particular, the suit said, the state is failing to provide for students from poor economic backgrounds, Native American student, ESL students, and students with disabilities. It was failing to make students college and career ready.

Yazzie's suit was folded in with a similar suit from Louise Martinex, and thus was born the Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit.

That suit until its fifth year, 2018, Judge Sarah Singleton handed down a ruling. The thing is 76 pages long, but the outcome was simple enough--the court declared that the state was doing a lousy. 

Singleton explicitly avoided telling the state what it should do or where it should find the revenue. But she also was clear that the current method of starting with last year's budget number and arguing about whether the legislature felty like spending more or not, without once considering the question of how much money was actually needed to get the job done-- that method was not okay. 

Which is kind of remarkable when you think about it. We are pretty much used to the idea of education budgeting based on what officials feel like spending without ever, ever having a conversation about what is needed to do the job. It's an aspect of education reform that nobody ever talks about. 

At any rate, Singleton gave the state a deadline--have the public education department develop a plan to Do It Right by April of 2019. So the legislature came up with a plan that fixed the whole thing. Ha! Just kidding. The state asked the court to throw it all out, claiming that it had totally met the demands of the judge's ruling--the court said no. In some pointed words.

The state cannot be deemed to have complied with this court’s order until it shows that the necessary programs and reforms are being provided to all at risk students to ensure that they have the opportunity to be college and career ready. There is a lack of evidence in this case that the defendants have substantially satisfied this court’s express orders regarding all at risk students. The court’s injunction requires comprehensive educational reform that demonstrates substantial improvement of student outcomes so that students are actually college and career ready.

Well, yeah. In 2019 New Mexico was still 50th in graduation rate, and the Chance for Success index was D-plus--and last among all states. 

The state dragged its feet and embarked on a series of draft action plans to do... something. Here's a really comprehensive look at all the argle bargle and draft planning from 2022. 

Lots of various features had begin to take shape. In hopes of fostering some community and culturally responsive teaching, the PED called for Equity Councils for both public and charter schools. The job was to "implement a culturally and linguistically responsive framework to prepare students for college, career, and life by supporting their identity and holistic development, including social, emotional, and physical wellness." These, predictably, got a lot of pushback. And still, not much is actually happening.

Now it's 2023, and there was a summit in June by the Institute of American Indian Education on the subject of "So What The Heck Is Happening With That Lawsuit That Was Decided Five Years Ago?"

And now this month, New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez wants his office to take over the state's response, citing a "frustration with the lack of progress over the past five years." 

Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, whose administration has been in charge since 2019 (so that attempt to get the courts to let them off the hook is on her) responded via spokesperson by saying, "Hey, we created some agencies and sent more money to local schools. Maybe you should go get on those local schools' cases about not spending the money well." They have in fact increased spending by, maybe, $3000 per student, which moves New Mexico all the way up to 36th place in the nation. 

But that's just money. The actual plan for how to boost education for the most disadvantaged students in New Mexico is still a draft in the PED computers. Meanwhile, conservatives continue the old complaint of "We're spending more money but scores aren't going up." As if five years or increased spending (with a pandemic smack in the middle) should be enough to turn the whole thing around.

Yes, New Mexico has charter schools (98 of them, with 25,000 students). The legislature even just handed them piles of money for building. That hasn't fixed things. Open enrollment--they have that in some locations. New Mexico has no state subsidies for private choice, though some folks would sure like them. 

What New Mexico has is a clear directive to get adequate funding its schools, even if that means wealthier residents have to pay taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children, and no apparent political will or interest in actually getting the job done. And really--if this were something the state's leaders cared about, simply knowing that they were at the bottom of the barrel in most educational indicators would have been more motivational than some court directive. And now Yazzie/Martinez is approaching its tenth birthday with no end in sight.

New Mexico's issue is the same issue as Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, etc etc etc. If state leaders don't feel particularly compelled to treat education as an important priority, can a court order really change that? I'm reminded of Rick Hess's insight, from another context, that you can use rules and regulations and, I suppose, court orders, to compel people to do something--but you can't make them do it well. Particularly if they don't want to. 

After all, there's nothing to keep legislators from making quality, well-resourced public education for all students a major priority and crafting budgets that reflect that priority. Any legislature could do it any time they wanted to, and they wouldn't even have to wait for a court order. 

ID: Fake Superintendent Fails To Get Real Certificate

It's an encouraging sequel to a discouraging story.

Back at the beginning of the summer, the West Bonner School District board decided they wanted to hire Branden Durst as superintendent, which was a hell of a choice because Durst is not just unqualified--he's spectacularly unqualified.

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, until the press twigged to the fact that he wasn't actually living in Idaho (he blamed it on Idaho schools). 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 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.

Zero education experience. 

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 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.

The proposed contract had some crazypants features. Only a board supermajority could fire him. District would provide a legal counsel for Durst and his wife. Plus a vehicle, a housing allowance, and meal service.
 

The board's choice was bizarre. The district has been through three superintendents in one year. The interim superintendent was Susie Luckey, who has spent nearly four decades in the district as teacher and principal (and a previous National Distinguished Principal). She was the other candidate considered for the job--the one that the board didn't hire.

Said one board member via email to The Spokesman:

“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.”

The reaction was immediate, with the public showing up at the next meeting to say "What the actual hell?"

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.

By August, Durst hadn't actually applied for the emergency cert because something something the state board, and was preparing to fight with the state over the whole thing. 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.

And the Idaho State Board of Education said no.

Durst, the board said, did not meet any of the five requirements to serve as a superintendent. Not one. Not even the "four years of full-time certificated experience working with students while under contract with an accredited school" one. Not the minimal two years of college teacher training. Turns out that being a christian nationalist isn't a qualification for leading a school district.

Furthermore, having reviewed the law, the board decided they couldn't actually issue emergency certificates for administrators, a thing they've done three times since 2015, including--awkward--Susie Luckey in her stint as interim super. That was different, said the state board spokesman, because Luckey held teacher and principal papers, while Durst's situation is "unique" because he doesn't have any qualifications at all.

Durst has taken all of this with the quiet grace and dignity for which he is known. On his blue-checked Twitter account, he has 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."

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.

Maybe Durst will hold somebody accountable for... something. But in the meantime, West Bonner schools are without a superintendent, and while that is undoubtedly a hindrance, Durst probably would have been worse than nothing. This tiny district of around 1,000 students, located in the Idaho panhandle, may want to consider just why it has so much trouble recruiting and retaining superintendents. In the meantime, Durst can go look for his twenty-second job. 

Politics and Public Education

When it comes to education, are you on the Right or the Left? Are you liberal or conservative? GOP or Dem?

And what do any of those questions even mean?

Full disclosure: I'm not an close student of political taxonomies. I most often vote Dem, but not always, and I'm often not very happy about it. In the education debate space, I've often been labeled a progressive, but I'm not honestly certain what that means, exactly. If I were going to claim a label for myself, it would probably be humanist (but not the evil secular type). 

The political landscape in the US has been pretty clearly mapped out when it comes to Dem vs. GOP. But when you look more closely, that doesn't always map out perfectly. NY favors Democrats--as long as they act a lot like Republicans. In Oklahoma, everyone is a Republican, but we've seen some big fights between members of Your Father's GOP and the MAGA GOP. This stuff shifts around over time ("We are the party of Lincoln" is the dumbest argument the GOP ever makes for itself). 

But when it comes to education in general and ed reform in particular, mapping out the political labels against the various reform positions has always been difficult, and remains so.

Take Common Core. Was that supported by either the Left or the Right? Jeb Bush thought he was going to get to the White House running on education in general with a good dose of national standardy CCSS, and he had to slink away from the Core. The Obama/Duncan administration backed the Core, and the teachers' unions climbed on board, too. And everyone who supported the Core took heavy fire from their own side of the political spectrum (and blamed them on the other side of the spectrum).

Charter schools? Fans on both the Left and the Right, and actually the Far Right only ever cared about them as a way to move the overtone window. Once vouchers were seriously in play, many on the Far Right lost their charter love.

Then we have all the people and groups that don't really map onto Left/Right or GOP/Dem. Democrats for Education Reform are a fine example of reformsters masking as liberal Democrats, but while they considered Republicans their "natural allies," I don't really know how they vote. Michelle Freaking Rhee was a Democrat. And while much of the attack on public education has come from the GOP on the right, conservatives also include the people who have a natural inclination to preserve and protect established institutions, like public schools. And where do we put the people who complain because school ought to be teaching cursive and Latin and generally operating like they were Back In My Day? 

And to further muddy the waters we have neo-liberals, those folks who believe that everything works best when it is taken away from government and operated by private business. Neo-liberals can dress up as either party since they support both important social services and having those services provided by some private business. Then we have Libertarians, who oppose government doing much of anything and favor dismantling public education. 

The Free Marketeers are mostly from the right. The folks who argue that to achieve social justice and upward mobility is through a complete re-creation of public education come mostly from the left. Many GOP politicians have attacked public education. Democrats may not have attacked as often, but they seem to lack the language or will to defend it. 

Bottom line. When you say you want to have an education conversation with people on the right, left, and middle, I have no idea what that might actually mean. It could be a roomful of people who all want to dismantle public ed, or a bunch of people who want to protect and preserve it. 

Saying someone is on the right can be shorthand for a reformster (I've used it myself), and yeah, if you're wearing a MAGA cap, I can probably guess where you are on education, but at the same time, saying someone is on the left regarding education is meaningless. 

When all is said and done (actually, while it's being said and done), I'd rather talk about the thing itself rather than trying to figure out what accurate political label I should put on the thing. Bad education policy is bad education policy, wherever it came from. The map of positions on public education does not map at all perfectly onto the map of political tendencies.