Nancy Flanagan describes the political battles that have descended on school boards. Elected members probably thought they ran for office so as to oversee the budget and represent their constituents. They didn’t know that they would be constantly targeted by angry mobs, fighting over masking, vaccination mandates, and critical race theory.
She writes:
I am stunned by the vicious nature of the anti-mask, anti-vax protests—like this one in Oregon, which left the veteran superintendent, who simply followed state law, weeping as he was fired. Or this one—where parents literally pushed their unmasked teenagers past school administrators blocking the way.
How do parents expect their children to respect the rules and authority necessary for safe and productive schooling when those same parents are physically pushing the students to disobey?
The answer is: They don’t, anymore.
And it’s gone way beyond hot tempers at a school board meeting. There are firings and shouting and pushing and shoving. There are also death threats and other aggressions. There’s been a national paradigm shift around whom to trust, and who’s in charge.
Open the link and read the entire post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Meanwhile, one single East Kentucky school district loses 3 and posts this 9/20/21.
“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm we have lost a dear friend and colleague this afternoon due to a covid related illness,” Lee County Superintendent Sarah Wasson told the Lexington Herald-Leader. Wasson went on to praise Estes, whom she described as “a special part of the Lee County family for over 31 years.”
Estes’ death came just a little over a week after school custodian Bill Bailey died from COVID-19 complications. And just a few weeks before that, in late August, instructional assistant Heather Antle succumbed to the virus.
and across the nation so many states/districts wonder why all sorts of school personnel are giving up their jobs…
Well, schools are just consumer products now. The parents aren’t getting exactly what they want when they want it so they refuse to follow the rules or compromise on behalf of the whole school community at all.
It’s now the school’s job to accomodate every single demand from every single customer with no regard for the other students. That’s “parent power”. The loudest and most demanding customers run the school.
It’s an absolute disaster for students, and as an operating theory it will never, ever work- not even in private schools let alone public schools- but it’s fashionable and aligns with the ideology of markets so who cares about the students?
Markets will sort it all out. Just offer 15 options with no regard for quality or need or demand and the various tribes will sort themselves out into like-minded camps. We won’t have public schools or communities anymore but we’ll have a “market” of sorts, they’ll all just be government contractors.
That is THE problem. Your insightful comment nailed it. Thank you Chiara and Diane. Thank you. Truth is medicinal.
Let me add a theory. I think a great deal of what discord we are experiencing in 2021 is can be blamed on toilet paper. Toilet paper is to blame for many of our woes. In March and April of 2020, everyone in this country endured a traumatic event. We went to market and saw the toilet paper shelves empty. And the flour, and the rice, and the pasta… We saw the terrified and crazed looks on fellow customers’ faces while they gazed on the empty shelves and some left with enough toilet paper to last into 2025, others empty handed. It affected us. It made us all at least a little more self-concerned, less social. Forget you, what about MY morning ablutions! We became less concerned with others at that time. The result was violent riots, an attack on the Capitol, fights in supermarkets over silliness, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. We forgot everything we learned in kindergarten. We forgot how to share. We became, to the detriment of all, overly concerned about wiping our own asses.
Ed reformers lobbied for massive new voucher programs last year. Perhaps the disruptive political activist parents could go try these stunts at a private school board meeting and see how it goes.
We gave the anti-public school crowd a publicly financed voucher so they could attempt to find a school that is solely focused on their child and their child alone, without regard for anyone else at the school. It’s a ridiculous theory and it won’t work but they should go try it. They should take a voucher and go. The vast majority of public school parents and students aren’t storming school board meetings and getting arrested. Can they get on with their work or must we entertain this political campaign for another six months?
They can go storm private school board meetings and demand not to follow any rules. They’ll find they’ll be kicked out of those schools in three days. Only public schools have to put up with this nonsense.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
Couldn’t put Humpty together again,
WITH
Crystal-balling:
“members probably thought…They didn’t know…”
OR
Confirmation bias:
(When you seek to confirm what you believe,
so much so that you miss anything that
doesn’t align with your beliefs.)
I/We are the bright star at the center of
communities, states, and the nation.
I/We own the keys to the kingdom of tax
dollars taken for “education”.
Any interruption, of cultivating individuals
with true vision, and any interruption in
funding, is a black/white, us vs. them, win-lose
paradigm.
In the shuffling madness of the D vs R paradigm,
runs the all-time losers, the CHILDREN.
It’s ugly, and a terrible example to set for children.
D blames R, R blames D, yet the shit keeps going.
Perhaps it time to leave the crystal balls and
confirmation bias at the door and STOP
starting your pitch with: Hey numb skull, listen
up, hey animal, get jabbled.
Division STILL doesn’t work…
I believe we are in end stage capitalism and the pandemic has only complicated matters. People are just bat s–t crazy nowadays. It’s all just me me me/mine mine mine. Democracy is about “We”, competition is about “me”. To live in a Democracy, people need to realize that their freedoms and liberties come with responsibilities. We are supposed to be living in a Democracy of ordered freedoms/liberties….not personal autonomy.
The pandemic has definitely brought out the crazies– compounded by Trump encouraging followers to believe ‘we wuz robbed.’ But I think there’s actually some kind of democratic impulse behind these small-town protests. (More below in separate post).
The lady who started Moms for Liberty in TN doesn’t even have children in the public school system, yet she and her crazy crowd are combing through history textbooks and marking pages that they feel are related to teaching CRT. It’s likely this same group is pushing the anti-mask and anti-vax nonsense, too. It’s a crazy world when adults don’t care if children get seriously ill and/or die.
A culture war against masks and CRT are part of the right wing’s effort to undermine public education and sow seeds of doubt about a key democratic institution. It serves the interests of groups like ALEC or The Heritage Foundation.
and while the ‘larger’ media won’t admit it, the anti-mask, anit-CRT protesting is well organized and strategically funded
Yes, but… the examples Flanagan cites look different to me. These are tiny towns struggling internally over these issues, under national political radar. (More in separate post below).
I,ME,MINE!
’tis America!
Thou shalt covet thy neighbor’s everything.
I’ve been skeptical of publicized rowdy school board mtgs. Some have been instigated by astro-turfers, plus the media keeps chewing on the same few incidents so how widespread is it. Flanagan’s two examples are different.
Adrian, OR: pop 200, rural farming community. Its schdist draws from the surrounding area: PK-13 total enrollment 300. These folks shop & eat out 10 mis away in Parma, ID (pop 2000) – no mask mandate there. But the covid risk in the county (Malheur, pop 31k) is severe. The supt was between a rock & a hard place, many in community spoke up for him. The mask mandate was not enforced, merely coaxed. The unhappy contingent was looking for open defiance of state mandates. Schbd listens because any loss of enrollment could easily close their schools. OR School Board Assoc says “masks have become a crystalizing agent for parents’ and educators’ anger, fear and helplessness in the face of COVID-19’s upheaval. The passions are intensified in rural Oregon, where residents already feel ignored by Salem lawmakers” http://www.osba.org/News-Center/Announcements/2021/20210902Adrian.aspx
Manchester, MI is a village, pop 1900, founded as a mill town in the early 1800’s. Biggest local event the annual Chicken Broil. Median income for a family $54k, with 5% poverty. The high school has 312 kids; 24 protested. There was actually no pushing, but plenty of egging on from parents in background. The students were ushered to an isolated room per covid protocol, where they sat out their school day.
The anxiety over loss of ‘personal freedom’ is playing out in small towns like these as a democratic impulse. You can go to Manchester MI’s FB page [Adrian OR too small to even have one] and read the comments of townfolk– not some big FB group that would attract organizing astroturfers. Obviously totally misguided when applied to a public health crisis. But they borrow the language of peaceful organized protest, and are coming from a place of requiring those they elected to represent their concerns. They sound like they just woke up to being ‘activist.’ I suspect both towns are representative of long-simmering rural discontent with state legislatures that they view as favoring urban concerns over theirs.
3 former teacher union presidents have founded the Guild Schools, which is a charter public school authorizer. Two of the founders of this group are former Minneapolis Federation of Teachers presidents They were so frustrated by how innovative teachers were treated by Minneapolis and other districts that they decided to create opportunities for educators to create new public chartered schools. More info here:
https://www.guildschools.org/
One of the multiple sources of the chartering idea was the 1968 essay by African American civil rights legend, psychologist Kenneth Clark. He was one a co-author of the “Doll Test” used in the US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board.
By 1968, Clark was so frustrated with local school boards that he proposed creation of new public schools outside the control of local school boards. He urged that unions and other organizations be allowed to create new public schools open to all, independent of local boards.
Here’s a link to the article, which I read as a college student in 1968 and found inspiring.
https://www.hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard-educational-review-volume-38,-issue-1/herarticle/_1081
That plus experiences in a local district alternative and other experience of fellow district alternative public schools helped lead to the first chartering legislation here in Minnesota.
If you have a chance to read the Kenneth Clark article and information about the Guild, I’d be interested in your reactions. Incidentally, our 3 children all attended urban district public schools, K-12. Our older daughter currently teaches in the urban district from which she graduated.
Incidentally Diane, thanks for posting the story of the $300,000+ settlement that a group of Oakland residents have received from their local board.
This list serve often shares information that I’ve not seen anywhere else.
What a shame that the charter idea has been so corrupted by its advocates. Joe, didn’t you help draft the Minnesota charter law that allows charters to be opened by non-educators and to exclude teachers’ unions. As you know, the legendary Al Shanker turned against charters as he saw the influx of edubusinesses and religious zealots opening charters. If he were alive today, he would be appallled by the endless scandals in the charter sector, where grifters flourish without transparency or accountability.
Factually, the Mn charter law
1. explicitly allows teachers to create and join unions if they want to. Some do, and have done so. Others have developed a new form of governance in which the teachers working in a school are a majority of the members of the school’s board of directors. This is a different form of teacher empowerment – it’s growing both here and around the country.
2. Explicitly requires licensed educators to be involved in creation of a chartered public school and explicitly requires teachers in these schools to be licensed educators.
Diane – It appears you’re not interested in the Minnesota and Mpls Federation of Teacher leaders who are so frustrated with districts leadership that they are empowering educators to create new public schools. That’s unfortunate. Some people reading this might want to check out their work. https://www.guildschools.org/
Also appears you’re not responding to the recommendations from civil right legend Kenneth Clark – who had a LOT more to do with chartering than Shanker.
What Shanker proposed was what already was happening – allowing district educators to create new options within districts. Like many district educators around the country and watched as central office administrators and/or school boards sometimes destroyed or damaged what we worked so hard to create.
There still are some wonderful district options – some of which our organization has celebrated in workshops, publications and newspaper columns.
One of things I find encouraging are the number of collaborations between district & charter educators, working to reduce youth experiencing homeless, increase the number of high school students earning college credits, sharing ways to reach youngsters experiencing deep challenges, and successfully challenging terrible policies of the NCAA.