North Carolina is undeterred by the abject failure of Tennessee’s “Achievement School District,” which turned control of low-performing schools to charter operators. North Carolina will try exactly the same strategy but will call it the “Opportunity School District.”
School board members are miffed that it is taking so long to select five schools for their experiment. Many likely takeover schools have fought back and resisted, with community support.
The state board is adopting a strategy that has no evidence that it works. It removes local control and gives public money to charter operators. Board member Olivia Holmes Oxendine is certain that what failed in Tennessee will succeed in North Carolina, even though Tennessee had many additional millions in Race to the Top funding.
Since when did conservatives become enemies of local control?
Can’t they come up with a better idea than to copy the plan that failed in Tennessee?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am unclear about whether the TN program was indeed a failure given the difference between the stated goals and the actual goals of reformers. If they sought to disrupt the normal political process, ruin any hope of having good public education, and push millions of dollars into their own pockets, then the TN ASD was not so bad.
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Their stated goal was to pick the lowest performing schools in Tennessee, hand them over to charter operators, and raise them to the top 20% of schools in the state in five years.
Every school in the initial cohort remains in the bottom 5-6%.
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My answer to the headline: When they figured they could make a buck (many, many bucks) and exercise power.
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I swear there are certain word that send my comments straight into the ether. I’ll try to re-type my comment without any offending words.
Anyway, the answer about “when” is “whenever it has suited their convenience”. Even as Southern states were arguing for “states rights” in regard to slavery, they were simultaneously arguing against states’ rights when it was inconvenient, such as other states’ rights to refuse to return run away slaves.
Today we often see this surrounding so-called “moral” issues. You want your school to teach Christianity? Well, that should be a local issue. You want your school to be more inclusive of LGBTQ individuals? Well, now, let’s just shut that nonsense down at the state level (or, preferably, federal).
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When I read your title, my response was “Duh, when they got external control.” The “local control” and “states rights” arguments are used against the GOP’s opponents. They don’t give a fig when such arguments are used against them.
For example, they are absolutely against the federal government intruding into our personal lives … unless it is about abortion, burning the flag, kneeling during the playing of the national anthem, what kind of sex is allowed between consenting adults, or using free speech to protest their actions, then ‘Something has to be done!” GOP controlled states stepped in to ban local jurisdictions from banning fracking in Texas, why? Uh, cause it lowered profits? Really, why? Well, our corporate sponsors told us to.
The GOP carried a bill and got it passed to defang the DEA’s enforcement of our drug laws. Why? The DEA was nipping at the heals of the opioid manufacturers who were making megabucks selling illegal amounts all around the Southern U.S. (The DEms helped on that one because: campaign donations.)
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Gates is right –public education was a confused muddle of good and bad stuff before he took control. But now it’s uniformly bad, thanks to his wretched tests and standards. Wise central control would have been a blessing, but we got unwise central control Bring back the muddle.
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Many conservatives today have been supporters of ALEC’s agenda, and they have abandoned their traditional support for local rule. Instead, they support voter suppression, laws promoting corporate power and the free market, privatization of education, and suppression of workers rights and unions. North Carolina has been a model for ALEC backed legislation. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/North_Carolina_ALEC_Politicians
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Since I moved to North Carolina I have discovered many are willing to sell their soul to the devil on a moments notice. Christians abandon Jesus, Law and order people abandon the law and local control advocates now advocate against local control.
The reality is the line from the political left to the political right is not a straight one. It is a circle. The further one goes to the right, they circle around to become the far left that is similar to communism and dictatorships.
Fully involved is the confirmation bias. They believe what they want to believe at the time and find evidence to support that. As their ideas are all over the spectrum, there is no telling where they will end up other than they will find excuses to vote GOP and shoot themselves in the foot to prove their loyalty.
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The name they’ve actually settled on here in NC is the “Innovative School District”, which is about as Orwellian as it can be. Of course, their first attempt at school takeover seems to have fallen entirely flat. After a drawn-out process in which several localities (including my own city of Durham) successfully resisted takeover by popular pressure, they finally settled on exactly one school (Southside-Ashpole Elementary) in Robeson county. Now it is being reported that the local district is looking at closing the school rather than allowing it to be taken over. So the brand spanking new “Innovative School District” may turn out to be a district with no schools, which is certainly a way to prevent it from being the same kind of miserable failure that the Tennessee “Achievement School District” has been.
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If there’s anything that conservative Republicans ARE, it’s that they are incredibly dogmatic, narrow-minded.
There is an extensive body of psychological research that details the connections between dogmatism and conservatism and authoritarianism. The conclusions that emerge from that body of research offer a disturbing prospect for effective democratic governance when a political party is comprised of ideologues opposed to the core values of democracy. And that’s exactly what we have today.
Milton Rokeach described and explained the essence of dogmatism in his classic work, The Open and Closed Mind. Rokeach noted that all people have belief and disbelief systems, and those systems can be more “open” or more “closed.” An individual’s perception can be characterized as “open” or “closed” based on “the extent to which the person can receive, evaluate, and act on relevant information unencumbered by irrelevant factors…arising from within the person or from the outside.”
People with more open belief-disbelief systems have a more defined knowledge base and have a higher degree of consistency between what they say they believe and how they behave. Their core beliefs provide a framework for perceiving the world as a friendly place. They tend to be more trusting of others. Authority is not seen as absolute. Actions are governed more by inner, self-actualizing forces than by external pressures.
People with more closed belief-disbelief systems not only exhibit less consistency between what they say and do, but also there’s less differentiation within the disbelief system. That is, those who are more closed-minded tend NOT to know very much about what it is they disbelieve. Authority is viewed as more absolute (remember the Bush administration arguing that the president’s commander-in-chief- powers were virtually unlimited?), and the core beliefs provide a framework for perceiving the world as a more threatening place in which one cannot be very trusting of others. Rokeach points out that people can be encouraged “to accept or to form closed systems of thinking and believing in proportion to the degree in which they are made to feel alone, isolated, and helpless [threatened] in the world in which they live.” Think Fox news. Rokeach explains that such feelings often lead to the quest for “power and status,” identification with absolute authority and “a cause,” and “the moral condemnation” of those one deems inferior or different.
More recently, four psychologists conducted a meta-analysis of more than 80 studies on political conservatism performed in a dozen countries. They found –– consistent with Rokeach’s work on dogmatism –– that “people embrace political conservatism (at least in part) because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty.” It helps these people “to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity; and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals.” But in a democratic society based on values like equality, justice, and tolerance, it creates a dangerous paradox. The researchers noted that “conservatives share a tendency to rationalize existing institutions, especially those that maintain hierarchical authority,” and that “conservatism as an ideological belief system has embodied many things, including the desire for order and stability…adherence to preexisting social norms…punishment of deviants, and endorsement of social and economic inequality.” They note that dogmatism is “indicative of closed-mindedness,” and while those on the left can be dogmatic, “the highest dogmatism scores are still obtained for conservatives.”
Those who score highly on scales designed to measure dogmatism also “score higher in prejudice, and wish they could pass laws limiting the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, and other freedoms guaranteed in the Bill ofRights. They want to impose strict limitations on abortion, they favor capital punishment, and they oppose tougher gun control laws.” They are not prone to cognitive reflection and critical thinking. In a nutshell, conservative perception is summarized well by a comment George W. Bush made at a conference of world leaders: “I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right.” Or in Trump’s claim regarding political gridlock that, “I alone can fix it.” We will be paying for their ineptitude and repudiation of democratic values for quite some time.
In an April, 2012 column in The Washington Post, long-time, respected Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein pointed the finger of blame for gridlock in government at conservative Republicans in Congress. They wrote:
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional…we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition…the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right.”
See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html?hpid=z2
Former Nebraskan Republican senator Chuck Hagel called his brethren “ideological,” “narrow” and “intolerant.” A long-serving Republican Capitol Hill staffer called them an “apocalyptic cult” and “intensely authoritarian.”
To simplify it a bit, conservatives –– which means most of the current crop of Republicans, and perhaps especially Trump –– tend to be highly dogmatic. And that’s highly problematic in a democratic republic that was created on a platform of values that include popular sovereignty, freedoms for all citizens, equality, justice, tolerance, and promoting the general welfare of society. Conservatives are opposed to them all.
Indeed, it was conservative presidents operating under conservative supply-side economic policies that piled up debt and broke the economy — and refused to take any responsibility for it. It is conservatives Republicans who’ve made every effort to suppress voting. It is conservatives who oppose gay marriage and abortion rights. Conservatives argued that George W. Bush had unlimited powers as commander-in-chief, launched a war on manufactured and manipulated “intelligence,” refused to pay for it, and bungled it badly. Trump is “upset” and angry that he cannot simply order the Department of Justice to go after people he doesn’t like. Conservatives deny the science behind global warming and evolution. Conservatives today represent corporations and plutocrats, and are obstructing policies and programs that represent a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
The link below illustrates what conservative policies have given us. It isn’t pretty, nor is it healthy.
But this startling inequality is not enough for them. They want even more. And that’s what makes them so very dangerous. To the economy, both national and global, and to the Republic.
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Here’s an example, from today’s Washington Post:
“Trump on Friday repeatedly called on the Department of Justice and FBI to investigate his Democratic political opponents, a breach of the traditional executive branch boundaries designed to prevent the criminal justice system from becoming politicized…Trump urged federal law enforcement to ‘do what is right and proper’ by launching criminal probes of former presidential rival Hillary Clinton and her party — a surprising use of his bully pulpit considering he acknowledged a day earlier that presidents are not supposed to intervene in such decisions.”
“Trump also called for probing the deleted emails from Clinton’s private server while she was secretary of state, as well as the sale of a uranium company to Russia…Trump has long been irritated, and at times outright angry, with Attorney General Jeff Sessions for refusing to prosecute Clinton and for not better protecting him from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s wide-ranging probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president’s advisers have said.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-breaches-boundaries-by-saying-doj-should-be-going-after-democrats/2017/11/03/1c157c08-c0aa-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpdoj-725pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.2a271d4adb8d
And the Republic be damned.
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