ICYMI: Lost Hour Edition (3/10)

Don't forget to move the two or three items in your house that did not automatically change the time. Remember-- today won't be so bad, but tomorrow it's going to be a real treat to pull the bodies of yourself and your loved ones out of bed. But at least we have the comfort of knowing that daylight savings helps... something. I'm sure there's some good reason.

Well, here's your reading list, anyway.

Homeschooling, ‘indoctrination,’ Jan. 6: A look at NC’s new GOP superintendent candidate

Lots of election results this week, including news from North Carolina, where Republicans decided they wanted to go full wingnut, including this candidate for state superintendent.

Public Education Attack Measure

Thomas Ultican takes a look at the Network for Public Education report on how well states support public education.

The surprising promise and profound perils of AIs that fake empathy

From Amanda Ruggeri in New Scientist, a piece that isn't about education exactly, except that this has rather huge implications for the whole idea of teacherbots and what they can't provide students.

PragerU is a conservative video giant. Here's why it's trying to get into schools

Lisa Hagen on All Things Considered takes a look at the conservative propaganda outfit trying to pretend it's an education outfit.

Without Effective Public Oversight, AI in Schools Will Do More Harm Than Good

New report from the National Education Policy Center. Thorough and detailed and well worth the time.

Shocking Online Manifesto Reveals Project 2025’S Link To A Coordinated ‘Christian Nationalism Project’

Jennifer Cohn at the Bucks County Beacon has uncovered yet another planning document from Christian Nationalists who would like to be in charge of, well, everything. 

Nex Benedict’s death shows policy failures, harms from inaction

Oklahoma Policy Institute calls out the atmosphere of hate that led to Benedict's death.

After Nex Benedict’s death, LGBTQ youth group saw 200% rise in crisis contacts from Oklahoma

How are things going in Oklahoma? Not so great, reports Jo Yurcaba for NBC News.

Texas places state’s largest charter school network under conservatorship

IDEA catalog of financial misbehavior has ended up with a state takeover. Ikram Mohamed has the story for the Texas Tribune

Secret recording shows school voucher proponent talking of 'public hangings' of lawmakers

Phil Williams of News Channel 5 in Tennessee has some tapes revealing the kind of threats and arm twisting behind the push for vouchers in the state.

Pennsylvania state senator says cyber charter schools underperform at the cost of the taxpayer

The continuing mystery in PA. Everyone knows cybers are expensive and perform poorly, and yet... Meghan Schiller reports at KDKA News. 

Appeals court blocks Fla. ‘Stop Woke Act,’ says it’s a ‘First Amendment sin’

In other unsurprising news, DeSantis gets a setback and the First Amendment gets a win. By Anumita Kaur for the Washington Post

In Defense of School Sports

Have you noticed lots of young athletes spending the year in private pay to play programs for their sport? So has Nancy Flanagan.

North Carolina’s public voucher dollars are funding Christian Nationalist indoctrination in schools

Justin Parmenter continues to track some of the religious discrimination and indoctrination being paid for by North Carolina taxpayers. 

The Essential Narrative for Public Education Advocates: Public Schools Are Central to the Well-Being of Communities

Jan Resseger looks at some unfortunate implications of recent research. Does privatizing education change a community's very nature?

Illinois Prison Fired Teacher for Saying Jim Crow Laws Were Racist

Elizabeth Will-Greenberg reports for The Appeal on this story that is just as bad as it sounds. Bet you didn't know that Jim Crow laws were totally race neutral.

Over at the Bucks County Beacon this week, I wrote about the Independence Law Center doing the work of pushing bad policy in PA school boards. Also, at Forbes, I wrote about yet another attempt to push AI essay graders on the classroom. 

Join me on substack. It's free and goes straight to your email, where you can peruse my latest output at your leisure (even if you're running an hour behind). 

Vouchers Are For Dodging Regulations

This week, we saw the story of a charter school in North Carolina that, having been ordered to shut down, reimagined itself as a private school.

Expect to see versions of this story over and over again. Charter schools mostly require some sort of authorizer to sign off on their ability to function, and those authorizers are backstopped by the state. Meaning that even in a state like North Carolina, a charter school can be a big enough mess to get itself shut down.

Charter schools in some states have barely minimal accountability and oversight. But "minimal" is still more than "none," and "none" is what most states have in place for school vouchers.

For instance, in West Virginia, where someone just noticed that at least one microschool is failing miserably, the rules for getting voucher monies look like this:

The state doesn’t ask potential vendors to submit a business or education plan up front. Anyone who wants to be an authorized Hope “service provider,” including a microschool, must sign a contract agreeing to get criminal background checks on staff working with students and to notify districts when they enroll. To receive funds, vendors need only submit a W-9, a tax form for an independent contractor, and document the Hope funds they receive from parents.

That's typical. In most voucher states, all you have to do to be a voucher "vendor" is just say so. And it's not just that voucher laws lack any sort of oversight or accountability mechanisms--most of the recent voucher laws or law expansions very specifically forbid oversight or accountability.

This has happened even as voucher fans have retired the talking point that vouchers allow students to get a better education. Fact is, most voucher laws are carefully designed in such a way that we have no idea what quality education students are getting.

Why are we here? It's simple.

Voucher programs are not about giving students access to quality education. Vouchers are about giving churches and businesses access to taxpayer dollars.

The less oversight and accountability, the more access to those taxpayer dollars. If that costs some students a few years of their education, oh well. They are not the priority.

 

A Truly Terrible Use For ChatGPT And Its Ilk

"Teachers are embracing ChatGPT-powered grading," says the headline at Axios, and with all my heart I hope that's not true, because what a terrible idea. What a supremely terrible awful bad idea.

The good (-ish) news is that the article's source for this reported embrace is one of the companies pushing it. The bad news is that the company is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the 800 pound gorilla of school instructional materials. 

It's not that tech has no place in the world of writing (obviously). There have some good pieces of software, for instance, that grew out of the idea of providing a quicker, simpler way of attaching those comments that you find yourself using on student work over and over and over again (though in my experience, as with lots of software timesavers, there's a huge investment of time up front to get the time savings further down the line). 

But to use a bot to assess writing? Crappy idea.

This latest version (Writable) tries to soften the blow by calling for a "hybrid" system with "a human in the loop," which seems to mean that the bot assesses the writing and the human looks over its work, just in case. But why bother? To really check the bot's work would take as much time as just assessing the writing yourself. No, a human in the loop is just a wink wink nudge nudge moment, a way to help folks pretend that things haven't gone too far yet.

But what a lousy idea. Let me count the ways.

The software just isn't very good at it.

We have been over and over and over and over and over and over and over this. Computer software does not "know" or "understand" in any conventional sense of the words. Once you get past the very technical explanations (and here are three good ones of varying complexity), what AI language generating models do is decide, based on all the examples fed into them, what a very probable sentence might be. Give it a topic and specific sort of prompt (which basically allows it to narrow its sample base of examples), and it will give you a high-probability string of words. As an essay grader, what it can do is turn that around and decide if the submitted material falls within the probability parameters established by the examples it has "learned" from.

What it can't decide is whether or not the student has written something stupid. It may spot whether or not the student has included a specific example for support, but it can't judge how good an example it is. And given generative AI's propensity for just making shit up, it's not clear how good it would be at catching students doing the same. 

Misplaced trust in authority.

Your computer cannot think, does not understand, is not smart in a conventional human sense of the word. It's an object whose virtues are an absolute tireless ability to follow instructions at the speed of light. 

But since they first poked their heads into pop culture, computers have been portrayed as possessing some sort of objective superhuman wisdom and knowledge. And human beings continue to defer to computers as having some higher level of authority.

However, computers are machines. They do exactly what their human programmers tell them to do. Even when they employ machine learning to "teach" themselves, they do so according to the instructions of human programmers. In short, computers do not implement and express the computed wisdom of some higher power; they simply implement the ideas of whatever humans programmed them. 

When it comes to insights that might take a human a lifetime to work out, like complicated computations, computers get us knowledge that we can trust and which would have been hard to find otherwise. But an essay is not a computation, and a computer has nothing to offer that improves on human judgment. Software assessment of writing should just be viewed as humans using the programming to make a judgment about writing, not as some sort of objective wisdom over and above what humans could provide. Yet, I'm afraid that some folks will view it as exactly that, and instead of treating the software assessment as they would one more human voice in the room (whose judgment might be suspect), they'll treat it as some digital Word Of God.

Distorting the entire process.

Writing is the work of communicating thoughts, ideas, emotions, and other human stuff to other human beings. Stringing words together in order to satisfy the algorithm is not any sort of meaningful writing (and that is true even if the algorithm is being applied by humans). This is conditioning young humans to string words together in a manner completely unrelated to anything they want to say or express.

Lord knows we don't need computers to promote this bad kind of word spitting. I've seen too many students who figured out that trying to focus on what they actually think or believe just gets in the way of satisfying the assessment algorithm that gives them their grade. And the Big Standardized Test only enshrined that sort of anti-writing as a important goal. 

What do you suppose it does to a student's approach to writing when they start with the understanding that they are writing not for a human audience, but a computerized one? Not to communicate, but to perform word spitting for a digital audience? 

Writable and its brethren are pitched as tools to save labor and time, but they save that labor and time by changing the very nature of the task and distorting the learning goals for students. 

It could be worse, I suppose. The software could be wired to a dispenser that fed students a piece of candy every time they spit out an especially probably string of words. Or it could aim even more directly at the current internet cyber-hell, where AI spits out articles designed to be pleasing to the AI that pushes those articles on search engines-- "Ten Weird Tricks I Used To Enjoy My Summer Vacation (You won't believe number eight)"

I sure hope teachers don't embrace this attempt to train human children to become word spitting widgets. We can do better. 

PA: Central Bucks Taxpayers Fleeced By Law Firm

Back in its MAGA Moms for Liberty period, the Central Bucks School Board implemented so many discriminatory policies that 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 the law firm Duane Morris to do an internal investigation. Turns out that the result was not just junk, by hugely over-priced junk.

The Duane Morris firm was an odd choice to begin with, as the firm includes Bill McSwain, a former failed GOP gubernatorial candidate whose candidacy included such great moments as calling the West Chester Area School Districts' Gender-Sexuality Alliance Club an example of "leftist political indoctrination." So maybe not the guy to take a hard look at the district's LGBTQ environment unless your fear is that it's not hostile enough.

When the report was issued, the ACLU immediately noted

The district got what they paid for – a one-sided investigation that was never intended to take seriously the allegations of a hostile environment for LGBTQ students at Central Bucks

It was not great. But now it turns out that it was also hugely overpriced.

Folks noted at the time that the $1 million bill from Duane Morris was pretty steep. But it has since mushroomed to $1.75, and many folks are crying foul--especially because the previous board majority knew.

Reporting for the Bucks County Courier Times, Jo Ciavaglia unearthed some emails from an attorney whose firm had previously worked for the district to former Superintendent Adam Lucabaugh and former board president Dana Hunter. Those emails warned that the bills were seriously inflated and that the district should seek both detailed documentation and reduced charges. That email was sent in June of 2023.

The attorney noted that while McSwain promised that associates and legal assistants would handle most of the work, keeping costs low, that's not what happened-- a whole team was brought in, and billed hours like crazy. Maddie Hanna of the Philadelphia Inquirer (whose work is always top notch), dug through some of those emails, for specifics like $10,000 billed for a memorandum after the interview of a middle school principal. 

Turns out Duane Morris also helped the district draft some policy barring teacher "advocacy" in classrooms. The policy is a page and a half; it apparently took five lawyers to draft it.

This came under the same board that tried to give Lucabaugh a massive severance reward when the election showed shifting winds. 

Central Bucks is a wealthy district, but that's not an excuse to throw taxpayer money around left and right (well, mostly right). That this particular fleecing was performed in the service of protecting an atmosphere hostile to LGBTQ students is doubly odious. If ever there were board members who deserved to be ousted, it was that crew. Let's hope the current board doesn't find any more messes to clean up after. 

60 Minutes Asked Moms for Liberty The Right Questions

If you have not seen the 60 Minutes piece on book banning, here it is. Go ahead and watch; it will be thirteen and a half minutes well spent.

There are several things on display here, not the least of which is a school district taking a sensible students-first, parents-involved approach to the issue of difficult books. 

Reporter Scott Pelley gets right to the heart of several issues. The difference between giving parents the tools to control what their own children can read (something the district also provides in spades) and trying to control what other parents can let their children read. The outrage-enhancing technique of treating isolated mistakes as proof of some widespread conspiracy.

In the midst of it all, the Moms for Liberty, with Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich finally seen in the footage from an interview they sat for way back in October of 2023. 

The piece is tough on them. The parents that are set up to represent the district are Republican, conservative, combat veterans. Pelley in repeated voice overs points out that the Moms are evasive and avoid answering question but instead retreating to their talking points (he does not point out that they are seasoned political coms professionals, but he doesn't portray them as cookie-baking domestics, either). Some of the talking points were so six months ago. "We don't co-parent with the government," said the women whose demands include forcing the government to help them with the part of parenting that involves keeping an eye on what your children read and watch. 

Their PR firm (Cavalry Strategies) was on the case this morning, emailing out the M4L transcript that includes the part that CBS didn't include, and offering the duo for press interviews to tell their story. It's an odd choice, because the stuff they want you to see is just more of the non-answering that CBS showed. That and they are really, really big sad that CBS chose not to air them reading the Really Dirty Parts or Certain Books. This remains one of their weirdest arguments--since this part of this book is too objectionable to read in certain situations, it must be too objectionable to be found in any situation. Like, it's not okay for me pee on the steps of City Hall at noon, so it must not be okay for me to pee anywhere, ever.

But the question that Pelley asked was a really, really good one. The Moms led into it by saying that although they love teachers so very much, there are some "rogue teachers" out there (I can hear the ty-shirts being printed already). "Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology."

And so Pelley asked the obvious question-- "What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into?"

And the Moms wouldn't answer. The extended answer in their email (and some tweets) suggests that they're talking about gender and sex stuff, and their go to example is telling five year olds that genders can be changed). 

The answer remains unclear. What exactly is the objection? What is the problem? What does "gender ideology" even mean? Because the harder I stare at it, the more it seems as if the problem is acknowledging that LGNTQ persons exist.

But in the MAGA Mom playbook, that's not it as all, which brings us Pelley's other fruitless attempt to get the Moms to explain what they mean by all the "groomer" language that they use on their own social media. They really didn't want to talk about that, though they did insist that they like gay folks just fine. They didn't attempt to address the groomer question in their responses to the 60 Minutes piece. Perhaps that's because their premise makes no sense. 

But if you boil it all down, this is what you get.

If you acknowledge that LGBTQ persons exist in front of children, then you are grooming those children to become LGBTQ.

Part of the premise for that is an old one-- if you believe that nobody is born That Way, that nobody is LGBTQ by nature, then you must believe that all LGBTQ persons are recruited.

But to jump from there to the notion that simply acknowledging that LGBTQ persons exist must only be about recruiting--that's a hell of a leap. And it leads to the worst culture panic impulse, which is to erase those persons, to treat them as if their very existence must be a dirty secret.

And because acknowledging them is equated with grooming other children, this becomes the worst brand of othering. To make it okay to attack the Other, you have to establish that the Other represents a threat, that you need to defend yourself against them. And that makes violence against them okay.

So when Ryan Walters says that he's not playing "woke gender games," he's saying that he won't acknowledge that LGBTQ persons exist, and that anyone who does acknowledge they exist is trying to attack children and groom them and so that "woke mob" is attacking, and so it's okay to attack back. When the Lt. Governor and gubernatorial candidate calls LGBTQ persons "filth," particularly in the context of talking about them in school at all ever, that message is pretty clear. 

Pelley's unanswered questions point us at the nuance missing in the Moms for Liberty outrage and panic factory, the nuance that recognizes that reasonable intelligent people can disagree about the value of certain books. In the real world, there's a huge difference between showing six year olds graphic depictions of the ways one can use a penis and a non-graphic depiction of LGBTQ persons. There's a vast gulf between grooming some small child for sexual abuse and simply acknowledging there are some LGBTQ persons in the world (and possibly in the classroom or the homes of class members). There's a planet-seized difference between saying "LGBTQ persons are not extraordinary or unnatural" and saying "You should become an LGBTQ person."  And yet, in the Moms for Liberty universe, there is no difference between any of those things. 

It's very hard to distinguish between the opportunists and the truly panicked on this issue. The Heritage Foundations Project 2025 seems like an opportunist's political project, but it is also shot through with what seems like a sincere and extreme LGBTQ panic. The Ziegler scandal deserves attention because it suggests that one founding M4L member is not all that freaked out about non-het sex. 

But at a certain level, it doesn't matter whether all this LGBTQ panic is sincere or not, because as the toxic sludge filters through the culture, some people feel justified, even encouraged, in violence and mistreatment of actual human beings. No amount of carefully refined talking points will change that; only the kind of nuanced, complex conversation that doesn't get you a special seat at the MAGA table. 

The encouraging part of the 60 Minutes piece is that it shows how ordinary folks can actually have some of those conversations. Over a hundred citizens came together to have some thoughtful consideration about the list of 97 books that were marked for removal, and they kept 92 of them. Imagine that.

ICYMI: In Like A Weasel Edition (3/3)

Yeah, here at Curmudgucation Institute headquarters, neither a lamb nor a lion showed up, continuing our trend of having a winter that's not very wintery. Maybe later. But there's still plenty to read. Here we go!

Professional: A Word That Means Nothing and Everything To Teachers

Jose Luis Vilson on teacher professionalism, and why it's critical to the education system.

3 Arizona Education Department employees indicted in $600,000 voucher fraud

Arizona's barely-regulated voucher system continues to provide lots of benefits to grifters and fraudsters looking to gather some green. This latest scam involves a whole lot of ghost students. Wayne Schutsky has the story for KJZZ.

Unchartered Territory

In South Carolina, some legislators might be getting a clue and trying to crack down on charter sponsor abuses. Zak Koeske reports for The State.

“Book Ban Hoax” To Target Florida’s School Principals

Ron DeSantis has been trying to redeem his book ban laws by claiming that all the terrible stories that you hear about books in Florida are just hoaxes and baloney, perpetrated by people trying to make the whole book banning thing look bad. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains how his "solution" puts school principals in the cross hairs.

America Neglects to Address the Big Problems for Public Schools

Jan Resseger takes a look at some of the problems that ESSA failed to address.

Do Core Democratic Values Belong in Schools? Some Say No.

Nancy Flanagan considers Michigan's unique adoption of Core Democratic Values as a key topic in the state standards. 

Literacy bill that would hold back thousands more third graders advances in Indiana

Yup, it's 2024 and we're still seeing these bills. In fact, in some states folks are doubling down. Isabella Volmert has the story for the AP.

Philadelphia’s ‘Renaissance’ charter schools did not produce what was promised

Philadelphia had big plans for a charter-driven turnaround, because of course charter operators know secrets of education that public schools don't. Except that it didn't actually work. I know, shocker! Dale Mezzacappa breaks it down for Chalkbeat.

Oklahoma’s culture wars killed Nex Benedict. They’re also why I quit teaching.

Tyger Songbird with a first person story for LGBTQ Nation, from the state that has devoted itself to some serious anti-LGBTQ baloney.

New GBPI/UGA Poll Shows Georgians Oppose Private School Vouchers; Support Funding Public Schools

Yet another survey shows that support for voucher programs is weak. Even in Georgia.

Cyber school costs must be reined in

A letter to the editor in the Tribune-Review lays out the simple case for funding reform in PA

Whitmer, Michigan Democrats have to fix what Betsy DeVos did

Michael Griffie writes for the Detroit Free Press that Michigan is still dealing with the mess that the DeVos dollars made of public education, and it's time to rebuild.

Welcome to the GOP's new education agenda: Loot our public schools for private vouchers

Governor Roy Cooper and Governor Andy Bashear team up in this USA Today op-ed and they mince no words. If you'd like to see an elected official actually stand up for public education, you'll want to read this.

Black male teachers pay tribute to their heroes: 'They're needed so much'

ABC News did this piece, and it's a nice tribute to people who deserve a nice tribute.

Report: Tax-credit scholarship recipients didn’t outscore public school students

Samantha Smylie at Chalkbeat Chicago with yet another study showing that vouchers don't aid academics. Illinois is the first state to have rolled back its voucher program, and from the looks of this study, they didn't lose anything worth keeping.

It’s the bullying, not the tech

Just a short piece from Scott McLeod, but you should check it out for the chart showing where bullying actually happens.

The Misguided War on Test Optional

Here's some fun. Akil Bello ran this piece in Inside Higher Ed a few weeks back, and it's well worth a read. But then you can also read this piece, in which he looks at the material that he cut from the IHE piece, which is pretty interesting stuff in its own right.

Whatever Happened to Mayoral Control of Urban Public Schools?

Larry Cuban with a look at the history and ins and outs of mayoral control of big city school districts. A nice little history lesson.

America’s Need for Immeasurable Outcomes: Valuing the Humanities

A while back, I did a review of Gayle Greene's book about teaching the humanities. Here's another look at this very worthwhile book, this time from Nancy Bailey. 

Christian Nationalists are furious at reporter Heidi Przybyla for accurately reporting on them

The Friendly Atheist breaks down the flap over the Politico writer whose misquoting has launched a whole lot of high dudgeon on the right. Best breakdown of the story I've read.

Over at Forbes.com this week, I looked at the new NPE report showing how states rank for their support of public education.

Please join me on substack. It's a free and easy way to stay up to date on whatever has been falling out of my fingertips lately.

ID: The Fake Superintendent Saga Continues

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

Who is this guy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The proposed contract was bonkers. 

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

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

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

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

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

Then the Idaho State Board of Education said no. 

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

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

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

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

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

There has been a second constant as well: failure.

But he wasn't done yet

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

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

But, Durst told KREM 2 he still is the superintendent.

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

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

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

That brings us up to date

What Durst has been doing since, who knows. His LinkedIn page still lists him as superintendent of West Bonner. But whatever he's been doing, it apparently leaves time for nursing a grudge. 

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

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

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

Is Durst going to break his long string of failures with this lawsuit? I'm betting it's not likely. Is that going to lead to him quietly sitting down and finding something more useful to do? I am betting that is also not likely.