After being caught flatfooted with ZERO distaster recovery planning BEFORE the Covid 19 Pandemic and then completely destroying the education of thousands of SDUSD Students for almost 2 years, the lies and blundering have continued in the corrupt Superintendent Selection “process”.

According to a press release from the SDUSD Propaganda Department, the  Superintendent Selection “process” has been “postponed” indefinitely…not that it makes any dfference to the outcome.  The predetermined Superintendent  decision via a useless community forum to meet the current interim Supt. Dud candidate and the second preselected illegitimate Tricky Dick Superintendent candidate Dud is just prolonging the disgusting Tricky Dick Superintendent Selection sham and is a complete waste of time for ALL SDUSD Stakeholders.

Today Sunday Reads features a commentary that can be applied directly to the SDUSD Board of Education from Mr. Chester Finn, Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus, Thomas B. Fordham Institute regarding the politization of LEA Board’s of Education nationally.

We have featured the complete Fordham Institute “Flypaper” commentary but we strongly urge our readers to click on the title (in red) and read the full dispatch for themselves.

Republicans and School Boards

By Chester E. Finn, Jr.  1.6.2022

Recent months have brought much hand-wringing and ink spilling over the possibility that hordes of Republicans are gearing up to plunge into local school board elections, this as part of their discovery that public education is rich with political opportunity (cue incoming Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, his campaign advisors, and observant GOP strategists).

Good thing or bad? Likely to succeed or not? Of course, it’s early days and way too soon to tell. All that’s really clear, besides the Virginia gubernatorial contest, is that school boards have become exceptionally contentious and that a nontrivial number of long-serving members are heading for the exits. The Atlantic reported seventy resignations in Minnesota alone between summer 2020 and autumn 2021 compared with fewer than twenty in a typical pre-Covid year. Recall campaigns against sitting board members are more frequent. And board meetings themselves have had enough angry protests that the head of the National School Boards Association famously sought federal help, leading Attorney General Merrick Garland to alert the Justice Department—or, in the words of critics, to “deploy the FBI.” This then led to an infamous memo from Montana’s acting U.S. attorney detailing the many ways that federal laws can be invoked to suppress such protests and punish the perpetrators.

Why all the agitation and seeming political potential? The big reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is millions of parents angry over school shutdowns, learning interruptions, and other education malfunctions associated with Covid, inflamed in some places by the ruckus over schools’ handling of race in general and “critical race theory” in particular. As The Atlantic’s Adam Harris sees it, “Although that [CRT] fight has garnered a lot of attention, the current animus toward school boards, and the members who sit on them, goes back to the start of the pandemic, when many schools shut down, prompting intense anger from some parents.”

In normal times, we tend to think of school boards as quiet backwaters, produced by thinly attended off-cycle elections and without much to do beyond hiring (and occasionally micromanaging) the superintendent and producing an annual budget. But that’s not quite right, as University of Chicago political scientist William Howell explained to Harris: “They’ve been places where issues involving race, involving our obligations to the less advantaged, involving citizenship and immigration status” have been sorted out, “and they invite all kinds of attention: threats, lobbying, and, of course, some positive engagement from people who want to be helpful. But boy, that temperature will often go up.”

Today it’s up for sure—which doesn’t necessarily mean that a lot of different people, notably people in Republican clothes, will soon be elected to serve on America’s thousands of local school boards. Though moves are underway in several states to turn school board elections into partisan affairs, around most of the country they remain nonpartisan, a legacy of the original expectation that this form of governance would not only preserve local control of the schools but it would also insulate public education from the messy dealmaking and logrolling and corruption of conventional politics while inducing each community’s leading citizens—the best and the brightest, the great and the good, call them what you like—to engage selflessly in the vital civic work of educating the next generation as well as possible.

I’ve long lamented how far school boards in many places have slipped from that pedestal, how their ranks have filled instead with aspiring politicians, fellow travelers of the teacher union, and revenge-minded former employees of the school system itself; how their off-cycle elections have yielded thin turnouts that could easily be manipulated by adult interests (often the union) with selfish agendas; and how the occasional slate of earnest reformers gets ousted at the next election by reactionary forces of the status quo. I’ve also lauded alternative arrangements such as mayoral control (though I’m more mindful than I once was that their achievements, too, can be undone by the next election).

Because I don’t think they work as intended, and because so often they’re barriers to needed reforms, I’m not nearly as troubled as some, including my friend, Harvard’s astute Martin West, by the prospect that GOP strategists are eying local school boards as an opportunity to make a difference. If enough get elected, they may at least shake up a complacent status quo and stodgy bureaucracy and offer a substantial counterweight to the unions and others that—visibly and vividly during the Covid plague—have pressed for decisions that served the interests of the school system’s adult employees far more than the interests of children and families.

Yes, they’ll doubtless cause missteps and excesses of their own, especially if the newcomers intrude farther than board members should into curricular matters. It’s great to mandate that primary teachers follow reading science, phonics and all, when introducing Kindergartners and first graders to the first and most fundamental of the three R’s. It’s great to insist that history and civics give patriotism its due. But history and civics also bring the risk of further polarization, particularly if board members go beyond asking for “the whole story” and insist on just the good parts. Pushing back against CRT and 1619 in the K–12 curriculum is one thing, but neglecting inclusion and tolerance is quite another.

We might reasonably hope, however, that Republican board members (along with right-thinking Democrats and independents) will also push their school systems to stick with high academic standards, clear metrics of achievement, and results-driven school accountability. And we should be able to count on them to support school choice, whether within the district, between districts, or by welcoming (and authorizing) the independent public schools we know as charters. That would be a seismic change in a great many places—and one that is apt to do poor and minority youngsters more good in the long run than a steady infusion of CRT, 1619, and other dubious curricular changes made in the name of equity.

All of which is to say that a purposeful GOP quest to infiltrate local school boards could turn out to be a good thing but only so long as it goes beyond political opportunism, manages to keep schools open, and incorporates the thoroughgoing overhaul that so many of them and their school systems sorely need.

District Deeds Synopsis

We initially hesitated to use this Fordham Institute commentary in Sunday Reads this week.  Over almost eight years we have recused ourselves from political commentary and focused on the business of SDUSD education.

As a registered “No Party Preference” in California, we are not advocates in any way of one political party over another.

However this commentary struck a nerve with us.

Three months ago on October, 3, 2021 ih our Sunday Reads titled “The Poisonous Legacy of the San Diego Unified School District and California Department of Education!” we provided the folowing as our “Quote of the Week”:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” – Lord Acton

In many past posts we have highlighted the fact that SDUSD Stakeholders have been subjected to super Democrat Majorities from the SDUSD School board, to the San Diego City Council, to the California State Legislature and Governor to the Federal government Department of Education, the Congress, and the Presidency.

This Democrat Party supermajority at most and sometimes all governmental levels have created a total lack of honesty, transparency, accountability and  horrible educational results in the SDUSD over the last eight years

Mr. Finn wrote how “non-partisan” school boards have evolved into political tools dedicated to serving the careers of adults (like Tricky Dick Barrera and Cindy Marten) instead of serving Students and their families:

“I’ve long lamented how far school boards in many places have slipped from that pedestal, how their ranks have filled instead with aspiring politicians, fellow travelers of the teacher union, and revenge-minded former employees of the school system itself; how their off-cycle elections have yielded thin turnouts that could easily be manipulated by adult interests (often the union) with selfish agendas; and how the occasional slate of earnest reformers gets ousted at the next election by reactionary forces of the status quo.”

District Deeds has “lamented” for almost eight years how the SDUSD School Board as been completely corrupted by the absolute power of the absolute Democrat Majority Trustees.

But there is an election later this year and, with the recent move to “District Only Elections“, it opens the door to NEW Board of Education Trustees in District “B” (Beiser) and District “C” (McQuary):

Unfortunately the absolute power Democrat Party is moving ahead to nominate more of “the usual suspects”.

The “menu” of SDUSD Board of Education Candidates will surely include former or current union backed Teachers (to pump up Teacher salary and benefits), Building Trade and other Labor Union minions (to channel billions of dollars of City Proposal S and Z money to specific unionized vendors) and Democrat Empty Suits who wil ask “How High” when Trustee Tricky Dick Barrera tells them to jump.

Mr. Finn mentions his hopes in Republicans along with “right-thinking Democrats and independents” to:

“push their school systems to stick with high academic standards, clear metrics of achievement, and results-driven school accountability. And we should be able to count on them to support school choice, whether within the district, between districts, or by welcoming (and authorizing) the independent public schools we know as charters. That would be a seismic change in a great many places—and one that is apt to do poor and minority youngsters more good in the long run”

District Deeds has the same hopes as Mr. Finn.

We may sound naive, but we KNOW there are many, many SDUSD Stakeholders from ALL parties (including SDUSD employees) that are capable of being fully honest, transparent and accountable along with being 100% dedicated to STUDENTS education over political party or personal career/financial gain.

We urge all of those HONEST SDUSD Stakeholders from ALL parties to throw their hat in the ring and run for the SDUSD Board of Education!

The more the merrier!

But if you have been bought out by politician endorsements, political parties, special interest groups or other groups/organizations dedicated to furthering the political/financial aspriations of adults, PLEASE DON”T BOTHER!

This is our chance to change the corrupt SDUSD into a REAL School district that fully educates ALL Students.  We don’t have time for self serving Tricky Dick Barrera minions or scalawags.

Let’s do this!