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. 

ICYMI: My Mom's Birthday Edition (11/12)

Wow, this week was a lot for a lot of folks, but here at the Institute it was the week my mother turned 90, so that was pretty exciting. She's had a challenging couple of years, but she still does her volunteer work, still sends cards to everyone for everything, and still gets on the floor to play with her youngest descendants. She's got a good heart and makes the world a better place, and this week was a reminder that we can always use a few more people like that. Lots to read--and remember, it's a lot harder to get things out and about on social media these days, so you can help by pushing out things that you think are worthy of attention.

Moms for Liberty members call the cops on Florida librarians

Adam Laats called this one a while ago--an organization that spreads like M4L has will inevitably end up empowering some over-the-top wingnuts who will proceed to make the brand look really bad. Judd Legum at Popular Information dug out this story of an attempt to get a librarian arrested for letting a 17 year old check out a fantasy book about gargoyles.

Moms For Liberty And The Dominionist Assault On America’s ‘Education Mountain’

Jennifer Cohn and the folks at the Bucks County Beacon have been right in the thick of things this week, connecting lots of dots.

Does Speaker Johnson really believe there’s no separation between church and state?

And if you're not really up on dominionism, it's getting time to study up, because you're going to hear the term more and more.

A Billionaire Megadonor Is Behind the Bill to Weaken Florida’s Child Labor Laws

Let's get those young 'uns back to work (and out of school). The wing of the reformster movement that is mostly pre-occupied with getting more cheap meat widgets for employers is, of course, active in Florida. Jason Garcia and Jordan Zakarin found some billionaire fingerprints on the Florida bill.

As Wyoming voters lose faith in churches, politics is the new religion

Ryan Burge is the expert used by the authors of The Great Dechurching, and here he's part of a piece by Kerry Drake that tracks a curious phenomenon--people who act out politically on the religious right, even as they don't actually set foot in church.

Pro-Trump Church Burns Pride Flags at Massive Bonfire

I missed this story when it ran in Newsweek a month ago. The church's name? Rod of Iron Ministries. Really. I suppose it's more subtle than The Church of The Mighty Penis, but it sure suggests that there are some other issues at play here.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: Voters Give Pennridge Democrats A Mandate For Change In The School District

Pennridge is a Bucks County district that has been steered far to the right by conservative members (this is the place that hired Hillsdale's Jordan Adams to dewokify their curriculum). But that conservative slate lost hard this week. Jenny Stephens has some of the details for the Bucks County Beacon.

Youngkin’s disastrous night shows the right’s culture war has fizzled

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post looks at Virginia. Quotes a Dem consultant with this great line: It turns out that talking endlessly about critical race theory is not a successful way to win critical races.

‘Moms for Liberty’ endorsed candidates fail to win seats in Linn Mar school board election

Here are the Moms losing out in Iowa in another supposed-to-be-a-slam-dunk race. The article's really short, but still good news.

Mat-Su Moms for Liberty’s Impact on Candidate Wins: Not Even a Participation Trophy

A look at how M4L played their hand in Alaska's MAGA country. 

NC State Superintendent Catherine Truitt refuses to disclose “outside counsel” in controversial charter school decision

They couldn't get their charter approved, so they turned to Truitt, who consulted some mystery lawyers and discovered that the company (that donated to her campaign) should get an official okay. Seems totally legit. Justin Parmenter digs in.

Poisoned Water in Missouri Public Schools? Let The Kids Eat Cake.

Jess Piper has a conversation with a wealthy charter fan who figures that school choice is the perfect solution to lead-laced water in public schools. Because reasons.

The Plight of the Poorest Students in America’s Public Schools Is Hidden in Plain Sight

Jan Resseger... well, I won't say digs, because, as she points out, you don't exactly have to dive deep to see the problems.

Ohio GOP won't let democracy stand in the way of imposing their religion as law!

A reminder that these days, a certain brand of politician does not consider voting results a final word on anything. Ohio voted for women's health care rights; it remains to be seen if Ohio's GOP will let those results actually take effect.

Nonbinary teacher at Florida school fired for using 'Mx.' as courtesy title

Of course it's Florida. USA Today adds one more item for your "dumb reasons teachers can be fired" file.

Believe it or not, Generation Z prefers print books over digital, study reveals

This may or may not be news. For years, when I gave students links to readings on line, their first step was to print them out. But here's further evidence that the e-book revolution isn't coming.

How to Define Democrats for Education Reform Using Two Quotes from Democrats for Education Reform

Maurice Cunningham lays out why DFER isn't exactly what they pretend to be.

It’s Fall and I Have A Mild Case of Teacher Brain

Anne Lutz Fernandez talks about the effects of stress on the teacher brain, and what schools could do about it.

Andreessen Horowitz would like everyone to stop talking about AI's copyright issues, please

Turns out generative big language "artificial intelligence" wouldn't be profitable if developers had to actually pay for all the writing they steal borrow to "train" the algorithm.

I was busy at Forbes this week:

* Illinois becomes the first state to undo its voucher program

* Let's take yet another look at competency based learning

* Two key districts in Pennsylvania get de-MAGA-fied

I invite you to join me on substack, where you get regular emails that cover everything new I've cranked out along with old faves from the blog. It's free and it's easy and it's not subject to billionaire whims (so far). 

A Handy Guide To Privatizers

Maurice Cunningham retired in 2021 from an associate professor of political science post at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is an expert in the special art of tracking dark money and political connections, and his book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization is a must read for anyone who wants to make sense of how the wealthy stage manage attempts to privatize public education.

Now Cunningham has added another useful guide for folks trying to make sense of this. For the Network for Public Education, Cunningham has created A Citizen's Guide to School Privatization. It's a trim 18 pages packed with lots of information about the money and the organizations working to dismantle public education.

The guide highlights some well known names like the various arms of the Kochtopus and also draws some attention to the under-noticed Council for National Policy. There are regional players here, and that matters--remember that Betsy DeVos was long thought of as just Michigan's problem. So the Wilks of Texas, the Uihleins of Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania's Jeffrey Yass deserve attention even they seem to be operating far away from you.

Cunningham also highlights some of the activist groups (Moms for Liberty is not the only one out there), and some state-level privatization activist groups, like Awake Illinois, Coalition for TJ, Denver Families Action, Idaho Freedom Foundation. And he covers both the conservative side and the neoliberal-dressed-up-as-lefties side.

He offers these words of warning:

Chaos is the product. It’s a lot easier to break something than to build something or to improve upon it.

The guide is useful not only for providing information about these various groups, but for connecting the dots as well. These kinds of connections are important; these days many privatization efforts operate on a local level, and as local folks push back they can feel as if they are alone and isolated when, in fact, the same kinds of battles are going on in other communities across the country. You aren't alone.

The guide is also meant to be dynamic. That is, if you know of another organization that ought to be in the guide, it can be updated to include new information. A handy feature for a guide like this, as groups pop up regularly. Expect to see new configurations in districts that were recently flipped to public school supporting boards; privatizers aren't going to give up or go away, but they may hatch yet another group to implement their newest strategy. Privatizers are loaded with resources; it's only fair that citizens have access to more information to help them recognize the threat to public education when it appears. 

Why A National Christian Foundation?

Why is it that the continuing theme among certain folks is that this country was founded on Christian (or Judeo-Christian) principles? How does the myth of a Christian nation, and the desire to teach it to the young, fit in their larger picture?

We could devote an entire book or twelve to how that claim is incorrect, but the simplest end run around that argument is that this nation's founding fathers could not agree about anything-- not even whether or not they wanted to be founding fathers of this country-- and so we should understand any statement along the lines of "The founding fathers all wanted X" is automatically disqualified. 

The Christian nation myth is certainly about establishing the primacy of Christianity in American life along with a privileged position for its adherents. 

But for many folks, the nation established on Christian principles myth goes hand in hand with a disbelief in democracy. 

I know we all understand that some folks in this country don't much care for democracy, but I'm not sure we all understand just how much some folks disagree with democracy entirely. They could tolerate it for a long time while it was a game they were in a position to win. But as white Christians become an ever-smaller part of US citizenry, the dislike of democracy is becoming more open. 

Just this morning, we've got Rick Santorum saying out loud with his mouth the words "pure democracies are not the way to run a country."

Robert P. Jones, honcho of Public Religion Research Institute (part of Brookings), in an interview with Chauncey DeVega, made this point while talking about Mike Johnson:

If you listen carefully to Johnson and others on the right, they use the word "republic" and not "democracy." That is not just something pedantic. They believe in the rule of the virtuous, not in a "we the people" democracy where everyone is equally represented. What they're actually committed to is a particular outcome where America's laws and government and society correspond to God's laws as they see it. That's the only legitimate outcome for Johnson and other white Christian nationalists. Everything else is illegitimate. They will use the language of democracy and voting if it achieves their ends and goals, but Johnson and the other white Christian nationalists and many other conservatives at present are not committed to those principles and values if they come out on the losing side of a democratic election.

Katherin Stewart, in The Power Worshippers (a must-read) put it even more succinctly:

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

I think there's one more layer to this. In the New York Times, David French responds to Johnson's claim about using the Bible as his chief policy guide by pointing out that Johnson, as a supporter of The Big Lie, is violating the Biblical principle of honesty. But I will bet dollars to dishrags that Johnson doesn't see it that way.

There's a phrase that my evangelical friends like to use-- "in the world, but not of it." It reflects a view that Christians are just passing through this world, but their task is to pass through without getting any of its cooties on them. I maintained that it was why Betsy DeVos as education secretary appeared to never even kind of try to be accountable to the legislature-- they are of this world, but she is not, and so she owes them nothing. 

Honesty is an ethical behavior we owe toward fellow humans, but when Christian nationalists look around, they don't see fellow humans. They see worldly sinners pursuing illegitimate goals through illegitimate means using illegitimately tools, like, say, democracy. Godly Christians owe those various layers of illegitimacy nothing. It's not wrong to lie to them, to manipulate them or abuse power to shut them up, because they are of this world and its sinful, illegitimate pursuits, and righteous folks are called to avoid compliance with them, called even to thwart them and battle them with whatever tools are handy.

Democracy is fine, when it's useful for truer pursuits. But for Christian nationalists, democracy is at best a tool, but not a foundational principle of this country. For them, the foundational principles are alignment with God's Truth (as they understand it), and everything takes a back seat to that. This is why attempting to argue that public schools are important democratic institutions, a foundation of a democratic nation--those arguments mean nothing to Christian nationalists who don't particularly value democracy in the first place.

The movement undoubtedly a mixture of true believers and opportunists. Either way, part of the push is for children to be taught that the foundation of this country is not democracy or Enlightenment principles, but the word of God (as they understand it), and to that end, to take public education away from the people who have made it "Satan's youth ministry." That's why injecting programs like the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum (which targeted history before any other subject matter) is a goal, and why this particular sub-sect of right wingers will continue to focus on how US history is taught-- because it's critical to their cause, and their power, that people grow up understanding that the country is meant to be ruled by only those who understand God's Immutable Objective Truth, and not just any shmoe that a bunch of people vote for. 

The Anti-Reading Crowd Is Never Satisfied

At the heart of the raging controversy about reading restrictions, there are books about which reasonable adults can disagree, even books that the most ardent free speecher might not want their younger children to read. This is why one tactic of the reading restriction crowd is to shove the most extreme excerpts and pictures in front of audiences. If you aspire to being a reasonable person in these debates, you probably accept the premise that there are some books that do not belong in the middle school library.

But no matter how reasonable you want to be, you have to remember one thing.

The book banners, reading restrictors, censors, ultra-conservative crowd, whatever you want to call them--the people out in front of this drive-- are never going to be satisfied.

There will never, ever, be a day when they will say, "Well, I think that's it. We are perfectly happy that the truly objectionable stuff is out of the school library, and we're going to go home now because our work here is done."

The Moms for Liberty members who call the sheriff because a librarian let a 17-year-old check out a young adult fantasy novel that barely counts as PG-13 for its sexy content. The people who count victories in terms of total number of books removed. They're not going to be satisfied ever. Ever.

We've seen lots of questionable book challenges, like the classic overly-sexy seahorses, but to see how this really goes, look at Collier County Public Schools in (of course) Florida. They've yanked a reported 300+ books from shelves in attempting to follow HB 1069, the anti-sex talk law that was noted for probably forbidding telling young girls about periods.

One local agitator explained what the Collier County book vanishing act was all about, as reported by Ryan Arbogast for NBC-2

“They’re Just requiring school districts to not indoctrinate our kids on things that our sexually inappropriate,” added Keith Flaugh, of the grassroots political organization Florida Citizens Alliance. “I often say, to folks that call it book banning, so … are you ok with prohibiting guns and drugs in schools? The Role of the school districts is to provide a safe environment.”

So what books did Collier County find as dangerous as guns and drugs? The list is long, but PEN America is sharing it; here are some highlights. 

Some of the usuals are here-- Steven King, Ellen Hopkins, Toni Morrison. But Ernest Hemmingway? Three are on the list, including The Sun Also Rises which I taught for years and while, yes, sex is obliquely (really obliquely) an idea in the book, digging out sexual content would be a hopeless quest. 

Dune Chronicles? Steve Martin's novel Shopgirl? One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest? 2001: A Space Odyssey-- I mean, seriously, Clarke is one of the most asexual authors in all of SF. 

Many Waters??!! The Madeline L'Engle second sequel to Wrinkle in Time is, like the rest of the series, soaked hard in religious ideas, but Many Waters has for sexual content some heavy flirting. Flowers for Algernon, also regularly taught and unsexy. The Once and Future King, T. H. Whites four-book Arthurian doorstop that is the basis for both Disney's Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot and, again, not very sexy. 

Man in the Iron Mask, the final of Dumas's three Three Musketeers novels published in the mid-nineteenth century, when no literary characters ever had sex at all. This is one of several items on the list that lead me to suspect that, in the time honored tradition of non-readers, the compilers of the list skipped the book and watched a movie version instead.

And, believe it or not, both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, the two Ayn Rand cornerstones. Granted, I agree that nobody ever needs to read Atlas Shrugged ever, but if you feel so compelled, go ahead. Both books, other than presenting Rand's bizarro notions about romance and some very ungraphic depictions of what appears to be angry sex, these are not ban-worthy books. I mean, I deeply dislike them for their blundering prose and teenaged sociopathic egoism promotion, but I wouldn't ban them.

My point is this-- we can mock districts like Collier County and their scattershot book restriction lists, bur the important point is that they are not going to stop, ever. Appeasement will not stop them. They will not at some future point run out of steam and consider their work done. They will never run out of books to be offended by, and even as they go even too farther and allies step away from them, they will not see that as a signal to maybe cool it.

It will never stop until someone (or maybe a bunch of someones) stands up to them, gets between them and the power to keep culling books, and makes it stop. I sure hope you voted today.