There was a news report this morning about the Biden administration's rejecting a FOIA request about last year's weaponizing of the federal criminal justice system against "terrorist" parents. It prompted me to check in on how the National School Boards Association was doing. A WaPo article from January gives a sympathetic account of how the misunderstood organization was targeted by conservatives.
The article begins on a promising note:Now, the association is at risk of total collapse.... Nineteen mostly GOP-led states have withdrawn from the association or promised to when this year’s membership expires, and six members of what was a 19-person board have left. Several states are discussing forming an alternative association for school boards. A new executive director of the [NSBA] is working to save the organization, lobbying individual states to reconsider, but so far he has not persuaded any of them to change their minds.The disgraced former director explained how he came up with his bright idea to engage the support of federal cops against parents alarmed by racist curricula and COVID mandates:
Slaven said that because this was a sensitive issue, he circulated the letter to the board’s four officers, who all signed off on it. He said he would not normally have done this, but he worried it would be seen as a slap at the Biden administration for not enforcing federal law so wanted them to see it first.Probably it wouldn't have occurred to him to run the letter by any trusted advisors for fear that it would enrage parents. He just wanted to be sure he wasn't being unfair to President Biden. An NSBA board member reported Slaven's claim at the time that the letter had been solicited by U.S. Education Secretary Michael Cardona. Cardona denies this. The WaPo article goes on to explain why the letter was in a good cause, because of the need to address all those awful parents, then describes the explosive aftermath, including the usual "drumbeat" from malicious conservatives.
About a month after the letter hit the press, ex-director Slaven was fired. His allies assert he was a scapegoat in a conservative movement to undermine public schools by portraying them as hostile to parents. Heavens to Betsy, how would parents ever have gathered that impression? "Many of the [NSBA]’s opponents are also outspoken supporters of school choice programs that direct tax dollars to parochial, private and charter schools." Oh, you'd better believe it. Jim Green, executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, offered this helpful advice:
“If you’re a person who doesn’t support public schools and want to see public schools go away, what better thing could happen than get rid of an organization like NSBA, one of the leading voices for public education,” he said.
Well, it's a leading voice for something. Whether ensuring kids an access to education enters into it is less clear.
14 comments:
Public schools are a make work program for the staff, a babysitting program for the parents, and an indoctrination center for the gov.
Any actual education is a curious side effect, effected by the occasional competent teacher operating outside the mandated curricula.
I read a moving plea from a public school librarians' association the other day, something about how they were the center of students' access to truth and deep information. Maybe things have changed, but when I was a public school student we were essentially forbidden to go to the library. It was well-funded, but empty of students: we had classes all day every day, with almost no free time between them. I used to go to the library at lunch (instead of lunch), but it required me to get a note from my lunch-period teacher giving me permission every single day. Otherwise I'd be sent to the office for not being where I was supposed to be, i.e., either in class or in the lunchroom.
It's a very typical dodge: "It doesn't matter whether what we are doing is wrong, it's just that they are targeting us for other reasons and will take any excuse. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." Left unanswered is the complaint "Yeah, this is exactly the sort of thing that makes you a target. It's evil. We don't like it."
Mary Katherine Hamm provides a helpful guide to the perplexed: https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=50681 "Why are all these parents so ANGRY?"
"Oh, you think I'm upset because I want my babysitters and my brunches back? Hand me my mimosa, b******s, because this has only just begun."
I can only hope the teachers' unions and the Dem leadership (but I repeat myself) remain this perplexed clean through November.
I'm older than Grim, and can remember hanging out in the library quite a bit. The sharp turn down crazy lane appears to have happened a bit later.
A lot of people still have warm and fuzzy feelings for teachers as a class...just yesterday, I someone at FB approvingly shared a meme in which a doctor tells someone that she has an enlarged heart...but that that's normal for teachers!...they have such big hearts, don't you know.
What seemed a little odd about this is that the woman who shared it is very conservative, pro-Trump, and, I don't think she has ever worked as a teacher.
I have great respect for individual teachers, especially my age and older, but not much for "educators" and administrators. Part of this is how badly younger teachers have been taught themselves, especially by professors of education. [I'm a teacher, but not in a public school.]
LittleRed1
My grandmother was a teacher of the most literal "old school". Which is to say the Normal School, of the late 19th century. In that time and place a young woman in her own late teens who had successfully completed 8 years of elementary school might complete another two years of training and become certified to run a school teaching grades one through eight, that is, the levels she herself had freshly mastered.
Grandma taught me to read at age four or thereabouts, using an arcane, magical, and almost lost teaching technique she called "phonics".
I wonder how much of the "our teacher is a good teacher" really is "our teacher is a nice person." I've known some nice honest big-hearted people I wouldn't trust with anything sharper than a rubber ball.
Really malicious teachers are a problem, but beyond that, I'll take a hard-edged type who can get concepts across in an organized way over a sweet doofus any day.
Both my parents were teachers. I have nothing against teachers, only against the public school system that currently hold sway.
Government Union Employees. Very little accountability to the people.
Yes I have a huge problem with government unions. All of them. A classic principal-agent problem.
But-
My kid went to a $$ private school. The headmaster with a history degree ! did not understand why the walk- jog marathon money raiser event , in a school with a heavily southwest Asian population, had a questionable name.
"Wog-a-thon". Seriously.
Maybe I'm around the same age as Texan99, because I remember hanging out in my HS library too. It was a very well-appointed library as well. I've since seen small-town libraries that were smaller.
The thought of that library being closed to students who don't have daily permission, the sheer betrayal of the local parents' trust and contributions, is enraging.
I think I"m only a little older than Grim, but I too spent a lot of lunches in the library. I have no idea about this being in a classroom for lunch (voluntarily). We had lunch outside in the quad.
It was a prison-like institution, my public school. We were to report to the lunchroom, or to the fenced yard directly outside the lunch room. To be in the halls at any time except for appointed movement between classes or lunch required a pass from your current period teacher. No one else was ever in the library while I was there except the librarian, who never took any interest in me except to verify (every day) that I had a current permission slip.
I read The Three Musketeers for the first time there, though. It was the perfect book for a young man of my age and temperament.
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