Tag Archives: School board elections
I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Means…
November 20, 2017 UncategorizedColorado, School board elections, vouchersSheila
Not every policy change is a reform, and I'm getting more than a little annoyed by efforts to paint things like tax cuts and voucher programs as "reforms."
I've explained in previous posts why the abominable tax bill currently being rushed through Congress isn't "reform." In several states, including Indiana, theocrats intent upon taking tax dollars from public school systems and directing those dollars to religious schools have employed a similar tactic, cloaking those efforts in the rhetoric of "educational reform."
Betsy DeVos has frequently referred to one such program, in a county in Colorado, in glowing terms, so it was really satisfying to learn the results of a recent school board election in that county.
On Tuesday night, the longstanding fight over a controversial voucher program in Douglas County, Colorado, appeared to have come to an end. In a local school board election that has found its way into the national debate over voucher programs, four anti-voucher candidates—Chris Schor, Kevin Leung, Anthony Graziano, and Krista Holtzmann—defeated reform-supporting candidates in a landslide.
According to the story in Mother Jones, Douglas County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country. The school district is large, with 67,000 students.
As Politico has put it, the county "has gone further than any district in the nation to reshape public education into a competitive, free-market enterprise." Since 2009, the board has successfully ended a collective bargaining agreement with the local teachers union and enacted a "pay for performance" salary system for teachers.
Its most controversial move, though, came in 2011, when it approved a sweeping school voucher program that aimed to give up to 500 students publicly-funded scholarships to attend participating private schools. The county's voucher program was the first district-created program in the country. Ninety-three percent of the pilot class of scholarship recipients enrolled in religious schools, according to court documents. It sparked outcry from those who argued that it was a diversion of public money away from public schools. Over the next few years, the suburban district in many ways become a model for conservatives looking to reform education nationwide and the group of reform-minded board members received support from national right-wing groups like the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity.
That generous financial support kept pro-voucher commissioners on the school board until an election in 2015, when three members were ousted by opponents of the program. The Board was still majority pro-voucher, 4-3, but their power was weakened.
This month, after a campaign that saw hundreds of thousands of dollars pour in from the Koch brothers, a Republican political committee on behalf of pro-voucher candidates and the teachers' union on behalf of the anti-voucher candidates, the anti-voucher candidates swept to decisive victories in all seven races.
That voters were not swayed by the influx of money and rejected the voucher program was a great outcome. But here's my beef. A spokesperson for the winning slate was quoted as follows:
"Students at every school, students at every grade level and students with varying needs, all of them won tonight because our schools can now continue the return to excellence that began two years ago, after it became clear that reform had failed our children."
Reform didn't fail. An effort to enrich religious schools at the expense of public ones failed.
If I learned one thing in law school and in the practice, it was this: he who frames the issue wins the debate. When political activists accept the other side's framing, they are agreeing to fight on the other guy's turf.
The word "reform" denotes improvement. Tax cuts for rich people at the expense of middle-class Americans isn't "reform." Robbing public schools in order to benefit religious schools isn't "reform." In both cases, it's theft, and with respect to vouchers, it's an effort to circumvent the First Amendment's Separation of Church and State.
Call it what it is.