Recommended reading

• You may have recognized how damaging the right-wing assault on school districts has been, but now there's a first attempt to calculate how expensive it has been. The answer: $3.2 billion. The report, posted through UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, is here. You can also find coverage in The Guardian, K-12 Dive, Chalkbeat, EdWeek
  
  
• Coming in this week's New York Times Magazine is this long read on cheer: how it became a dominant sport, how dangerous it is for girls, and how it's probably violating anti-trust laws. That's a gift link, so read and share. 
  
  
• In both Oklahoma and Louisiana, educators and parents are suing their respective states to stop mandates for Bibles (Oklahoma) and the Ten Commandments (LA) in the classroom. 
  
  
• I really appreciated this opinion piece from New Bedford superintendent Andrew O'Leary on vocational school funding.
  
  
• I appreciated the paragraphs in this piece regarding San Francisco on position control.

A few interrelated articles from across the country on school boards

First up, Governing looks at the culture warrior aspect of school board elections and looks into if that is waning:

There will be other issues that polarize future school board candidates as these shifts ebb and flow according to what’s been successful and what’s failed in capturing voters’ attention. That cycle of controversy is yet another reason why it’s too soon to call these elections results a permanent blow to extreme partisanship in school board elections. Complacency and a sense of too-early satisfaction around some wins in school board elections nationwide can’t help protect students and teachers’ rights.

Even more coverage of the culture warriors losing on Tuesday

 ...because, really, this is something to celebrate!

USA Today headline: "In school board elections across America, voters offer stunning rebuke of culture war politics" and here's the conclusion:

“It’s going to cause school board candidates down the road to seriously question whether affiliating themselves with some of these far-right groups is good for their chances of getting elected,” said Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

“I think a lot of them are going to come to the conclusion that it is not and that there’s too much risk that comes with associating with these groups,” Valant said.

Christian Science Monitor headline: "Parents’ election plea: Could schools get back to teaching?" and notes "a growing disenchantment with the way so-called culture wars have dominated school board discussions"

And Amanda Marcotte in Salon, who had done a report Moms for Liberty in Pennridge last month, followed up yesterday:

The suspicious aura of money around the group was interesting to journalists, but what really damaged Moms for Liberty was that they underestimated the intelligence of the people in the communities they were targeting. The parents of Pennridge were not fooled by attempts to characterize literary fiction as "pornography." Local residents also feared that rewriting history classes to adhere to right-wing mythologies would ultimately harm the school's reputation, which could hurt both their property values and the ability of their kids to get into good colleges. Above all, multiple parents expressed a belief that schools should be preparing kids for the real world. They worried that right-wing whitewashing of history, social studies and other courses would leave kids without the basic skills necessary to thrive in a diverse, dynamic society. 

Don't rest on your laurels, but it's worth celebrating. 

The national school board news from Tuesday

While I am not quite in a space to yet post on our local results from Tuesday, I want to be sure that you've caught the big national news on school board elections on Tuesday, which is that the Moms for Liberty, culture war candidates largely lost, and even lost in some pretty amazing places.

Front counter at the
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Malden, MA

The Association Press has an overview here focusing on Pennsylvania: 

In recent years, down-ballot elections have become proxy votes for polarizing national issues. Liberal and moderate candidates took control in high-profile races Tuesday in conservative Iowa, as well as swing states Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The New York Times (that's a gift link) frames it as "conservative activists for parental rights" which is doing that thing the Times does of buying someone else's framing, but closes with AFT President Randi Weingarten observing that this isn't what voters want their school boards focused on: 

But the conservative push to restrict books and to ideologically shape the history curriculum is a “strategy to create fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of speech and freedom to learn,” as well as returning local schools to their core business of fostering “consistency and stability” for children.

(As a side note, catch how on brand charter and choice supporter Jeanne Allen is in that piece. She presumably hasn't caught that those issues don't win, either.)

PBS News Hour, which interviewed Julie Marsh, Professor of Education Policy, University of Southern California caught this quite well in this exchange: 

Geoff Bennett:

Well, what effect has all of that had on significant issues that public school boards face, like teacher shortages, pandemic-related learning loss, school safety?

Julie Marsh:

This has been a distraction.

I'll say that I think most of the elections appear to be disagreeing with her conclusion, that it is driving people away from public schools. Instead, they appear to be moving away from those who have put school boards in this position.

HuffPost names Moms for Liberty specifically--Sarah Dohl put together a spreadsheet of how those they endorsed did!--and concludes: 

After a lackluster showing from culture war candidates in 2022 and again last night, it’s becoming clear that casting public school teachers as the bad guys and Moms for Liberty as students’ only hope just isn’t the winning strategy that MFL and other conservatives want it to be.

 And WHYY went to Central Bucks County, where the Democrats completed a clean sweep.

Amanda Marcotte in Salon notes this, on reporting from the Pennridge race: 

The suspicious aura of money around the group was interesting to journalists, but what really damaged Moms for Liberty was that they underestimated the intelligence of the people in the communities they were targeting. The parents of Pennridge were not fooled by attempts to characterize literary fiction as "pornography." Local residents also feared that rewriting history classes to adhere to right-wing mythologies would ultimately harm the school's reputation, which could hurt both their property values and the ability of their kids to get into good colleges. Above all, multiple parents expressed a belief that schools should be preparing kids for the real world. They worried that right-wing whitewashing of history, social studies and other courses would leave kids without the basic skills necessary to thrive in a diverse, dynamic society. 

Erin Reed summarized well on Twitter:

Political pundits: If your analysis of today's race results start and end with abortion, you are missing another huge part of the picture.

Book bans, anti-trans bans, and anti-LGBTQ+ policies are getting resoundingly rejected in school board races across the country.

— Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) November 8, 2023

Just a reminder that, despite all the right-wing action around school board

 ...that largely isn't who is winning: 

...despite enormous advantages, most conservative education board candidates lost in Ohio—even in conservative districts. Similar school board election outcomes occurred in 2022 and 2023, from Wisconsin and Illinois to North Carolina and Texas.  

Why? Well, for one thing: 

 It turns out that most people don’t want someone else’s parents or some outside group telling their kids what they can read or what ideas they can consider. I sure as hell don’t. Like me, most trust teachers, schools, and librarians to do the job, and they vote accordingly.  

But this doesn't just happen: 

Leave no seats uncontested. Anywhere. 

Leave no incumbent extremists unchallenged. Anywhere.  

Take it as your responsibility to fill these seats wherever you are. And if the candidate taking on that run is not you, help them in any way you can. 

As Teresa Fedor, Tom Jackson, and Katie Hofmann prove, even in Republican areas, standing against censorship is not just a moral obligation. It’s a political winner. 

Here's one for the school committee members

I've been attempting over on Twitter to share my education-related reading (#amreading is the hashtag, if you search for that and my handle), and right now, I'm reading High Stakes Reform: The Politics of Educational Accountability by Professor Kathryn McDermott of UMass Amherst. I'm in Chapter 3, which traces the evolution of educational accountability, and this passage (p. 37) made me laugh:

Administrative reformers also disliked small, local districts because they forced school administrators to engage with a broad, cross section of the public on school boards. According to the views embodied in Ellwood Patterson Cubberley's textbooks, school board members should be drawn from the elite of society relative few people had the appropriate outlook and skills for board service. If a state contained hundreds of small school districts, it would certainly run out of elites well before it ran out of school board seats to fill. 

Return to federalism?

The National School Boards Association, meeting in Washington this week, today published a press release along with draft legislation calling for a return to a federalist model of educational policy:

The proposed legislation would ensure that the Department of Education’s actions are consistent with the specific intent of federal law and are educationally, operationally, and financially supportable at the local level. This would also establish several procedural steps that the Department of Education would need to take prior to initiating regulations, rules, grant requirements, guidance documents, and other regulatory materials.

The draft legislation is here. It reads in part:

 As the focus of the federal government in education has grown, the vital national interest in local self‐governance of local educational agencies has been weakened through federal agency regulation, grant conditions, guidance materials and other requirements that are either unnecessary to achieve the specific direction of legislation enacted by the United States Congress, or that impose unnecessary limits on the flexibility that local educational agencies need in order to meet local, state, and federal goals in education

More on Duncan before the NSBA conference here.

This is what democracy looks like, Denver style: UPDATED

Big report from Denver on the big money pouring into the city school board election. The same story is playing out there as elsewhere: privatizing interests pushing an elected board which has a (vocal) minority standing against them (and, as it happens, their second superintendent in a row).
Now from Mayor Hancock comes this:

“I’m very nervous,” he said of the impending election. “I don’t believe the current board of education and its level and tone of conversation reflects the values of our city. I have painfully watched board of education deliberations on television. And as a former legislator, I was embarrassed by the discourse that occurs. No protocol, no decorum, just absolutely disrespectful of one another and the superintendent,  and no one talking about kids. It was painful to watch.”

Now, I'll admit that I don't watch Denver School Board meetings, and maybe they are lacking in "protocol" and "decorum." I'm suspicious, however, that this is less about procedure and more about content in the meetings. In an elected body, people are going to disagree (one hopes). There are going to be split votes. That's actually the way it's supposed to work. It's when all your votes go 7-0 that one should examine if things are working.

 UPDATE: Here's the word from the ground troops on one of the campaigns facing that big money:

As many major campaigns as I’ve worked on, and as much experience Emily has in the public policy arena, we didn’t realize that local races had become this corporatized. Maybe we were naive, or overly idealistic, but the point is that something has gone deeply wrong in America when elections about our local schools have becomes yet another chess board for oligarchs...

 along with wanting her to win, I also want our family’s experience to be a small, microcosmic reminder about how high the stakes now are in every level of our politics. Big money is intent on owning every public institution from the White House to the schoolhouse. You need to know that if you ever think of running for office — and, as important, you need to remember it the next time you get your ballot.

And on that big money and where it's heading:

...a few years ago, insiders say, Senator Michael Bennet, then Denver Public Schools Superintendent, went to Republican oilman (now-University of Colorado president) Bruce Benson. What followed was unprecedented campaign contributions from large Republican donors into school board races in Denver. The big contributions changed the face of Denver's school board races.

Two years later, a so-called "grassroots" group based out of Portland, Oregon called Stand for Children came to Denver. It's first organizer, Johnny Merrill, was open about the intent of the group: to impact the Denver school board races, and that Bennet had invited the group to Denver.

Make no mistake about it: this group, with an avowed agenda to undermine teachers, is specifically designed to siphon dollars from Wall Street and the Chicago investment community into local races across the country.

In 2010, for instance, Stand for Children spent unprecedented sums in Illinois in legislative races last election cycle, outflanking the supporters of traditional public education, resulting in legislation that killed basic protections for teachers in the state. The group's executive director subsequently bragged that in spending such huge sums of money, "individual candidates were essentially a vehicle to execute a political objective" - one aiming to fundamentally undermine traditional public education. He also bragged that "luckily it never never got covered that way" as "the press never picked up on" what they were doing.

In other words, this organization fully acknowledges that it's whole r'aison d'etre is to secretly buy education policy. And now this very same organization has joined with the biggest of big money donors to dump massive amounts of corporate cash into the Denver School Board elections.

It's happening all over, folks. Pay attention.