Hearing They Hear Not, Neither Do They Understand

Seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.—Matthew 13:13

Remember how we worked all last summer and fall to elect three new school board members?  And the main reason, as with many school districts across the country, was the pushing of racist Critical Race Theory ideas in our schools? Well, now’s the time for the payoff/fallout. On Monday was the first down-to-business school board work meeting (formal board meeting happened Thursday night; more on that later). In Monday’s meeting, board members talked about the equity audit that the previous board signed a resolution to do and then spent money on. Results are back, and a presentation was given at that work meeting.

I have not been able to see the results, beyond the presentation, which was scant on details. I did find the presentation, which I believe was given last April to the previous board prior to their ordering the audit. [I found it here, but could not pass along the link itself, because it has been moved, but clicking on the link downloaded the file for me to look at.) And I found this article, which is informative but pretty much devoid of data. During the meeting the public didn’t get to see the details. And even board members didn’t seem to have access to the raw data and methodology, which was glossed over in the presentation. That was a real problem for several board members, particularly the data-driven ones: new members Scott Henry and Luke Scanlon and board president Tom Jackson. (I’m noting Jackson in particular, because he had no problem expressing these flaws in the study Monday night, but seemed indifferent to them on Thursday night.)

But here’s one of the problems of our times: you can say something benign and well-reasoned, and someone will take offense and claim you said something that you didn’t.

That problem has hit Scott Henry this week, following his comments on Monday. He even made the front page of the Houston Chronicle. Harris County Judge (administrator) Lina Hidalgo passed along her uninformed assessment that he said black teachers cause low graduation rates in Houston’s humongous, scandal-ridden, downtown school district, Houston ISD (independent school district).

from Houston Chronicle, January 13, 2022, pp. A-1 and A-6

Did he say that? No. Did he say something that a reasonable person would construe to mean that? No. But there were a lot of unreasonable people at Thursday’s formal board meeting. Hidalgo held court (er, a press conference) out front, surrounded by news media and a crowd of sign holders letting us know that black teachers were good people—something no one had disputed. Hidalgo never came inside for the meeting, where she would have been given a forum to speak; it was all about the media for her.

But the room was packed inside. I got there a mere ten minutes early and signed up to speak, just in case. The system has always been that, during public comments, up to 10 people, chosen randomly from those who sign up, get to speak for 2 minutes each on topics related to the agenda. And then 10 people (also chosen randomly from those signed up) can speak during community comment time with the same limitations. Usually that’s where we get to speak. But since the equity audit was on the agenda, that’s what I signed up to speak on. And they changed the rules as of this meeting. As many as signed up were allowed to speak. I was next to last in that public comment segment. I didn’t count; I’m guessing around 30 spoke. The meeting started at 6:00. Public comment began shortly afterward. I spoke about 8:30, I think. You can look it up, but I feel awkward about how I looked and sounded on camera, so I’m not linking to the spot. Two minutes isn’t long enough to accomplish much of a point, but I was there as moral support.

Anyway, what turned out to be a minority of us came to support Scott Henry from the pitchfork wielders who were calling for him to resign over his “racist” comments.

CFISD Board Member Scott Henry, at work meeting January 10, 2022
screenshot from here

Here’s the troublesome segment, about 10 minutes into his 12 minutes of comment:

Scott Henry: You mentioned talking about people that look like us, and things, which I would like to remind people: our teachers are our most important asset within our district. I love our teachers. I love what they do for us every day. My kiddo loves her teachers. But I looked online. You were talking earlier about people that look like us. And we have such a hard time getting teachers. I know it’s such a hard job. You have a hard job getting teachers. Very hard. People just don’t want to be teachers anymore. I get that. It’s hard. But Cy-Fair has, what, 13% black teachers. I know you mentioned that earlier. Do you know what the statewide average is for black teachers?

Audit Results Presenter: Not at this moment, sir.

Scott Henry: 10%. I looked it up. The statewide average for black teachers is 10%. Houston ISD, which y’all used as the shining example—you know what their average number, percentage of black teachers is? 36%. I looked that up. You know what their dropout rate is? 4% I don’t want to be 4%. I don’t want to be HISD. I want to be a shining example. I want to be the district standard. I want to be the place, the premium place where people go to be. And, quite frankly, we have a limited budget with limited resources. We have a great place. And let’s don’t mess it up for everyone else.

I highlighted the part the media quoted. He was following up on an earlier part of his comments, referring to one recommendation of the equity audit asserting that Cy-Fair ISD needed to increase the percentage of black teachers, because students need to see someone who looks like them as their teacher in order to improve discipline problem and graduation rates. And the audit referred to Houston ISD as a glowing example in this regard. 

You can see there is nothing in his comments saying anything bad about black teachers. He’s pointing out that we’re already above the state average, and that’s a good thing. But their recommendation—especially when they hold up Houston ISD as their “glowing example”—doesn’t indicate that following this recommendation would lead to better outcomes.

So what he’s saying is, we shouldn’t use race as the basis for our hiring; it won’t get us the results we want, namely fewer discipline problems (talked about earlier) and lower dropout rates. His 4% number was a misspeak, by the way; HISD’s rate is considerably higher than that, and is higher than Cy-Fair’s, despite their higher percentage of black teachers, which was the point. By the way, he was also called out for denigrating another school district. But that's not what he was doing; HISD needs no help doing that. What Scott Henry is doing is pointing out the flaws in the audit report, which multiple times held up HISD as the model to follow.

Incidentally, no one at the Monday meeting gasped or exclaimed audibly when he said this. No one was appalled. But someone apparently found it useful enough to twist, to stir up the thousands who weren't there Monday and probably still haven't heard his whole comments.

The offended hordes at the meeting heard: “I hate black teachers. We should fire them. Black teachers cause higher dropout rates.” You can listen to the public comments for yourself. I’m not exaggerating. They were calling for his lynching—OK, bad choice of metaphors; literally they called for him to resign or be fired for that horrible thing he said, which showed how racist he is. That horrible message was, as you can see, “Let’s not be racist.”

It’s strange how we can be in the same room, hearing the same words, and hear completely different things—opposite things. Someone said, derisively, “And then you’ll celebrate Martin Luther King on Monday….” Oddly, MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech offers the hope that we can judge people on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin—just as Scott Henry had suggested for our hiring of teachers. The actual racists refer to the idea of a colorblind society as being white supremacist and are in the process of canceling MLK. That’s how skewed they are.

Here’s the problem with an equity audit: equity, in CRT-speak, means equal outcomes. What they are looking for are things that look unbalanced for one race in particular, and then they attribute the cause as being systemic racism. And then they make recommendations that will install contracts with their prescribed vendors to stir up more such “evidence.” It’s a racket. We taxpayers get stuck with the bill for putting CRT in our schools—even after the legislature outlawed that this past session.

In Monday’s meeting, board member Julie Hinaman tried to clear up misconceptions about the meaning of the word equity, in defense of their calling for the audit last year. She gave this definition:

Educational equity is about ensuring all students are successful. It’s about removing barriers to student success. It’s about working to close the achievement gaps. So, it’s about two things: resources—do all students have the resources that they need to be successful? And are we removing barriers that are preventing them from being successful?

series of slides in the presentation given to the Board prior to doing the equity audit,
given by Dr. Roger Cleveland of Millennium Learning Concepts,
from presentation found here

I’m not against ensuring that all students have the resources they need to succeed. That should be an obvious funding priority. But I think we need to be more precise about removing the barriers preventing their success. One of the biggest barriers is a dysfunctional family situation, and schools are not the solution to that problem; they are pretty much no more than pressure on a gaping wound in those cases. New board member Luke Scanlon had pointed out that some students literally have survival as a goal. Just live through another day.

Sometimes that disadvantage looks like a socioeconomic problem—families that don’t make enough money lead to students with worse outcomes. But when you look deeper, you see that the problem isn’t just money; that’s a symptom. The problem is broken homes, no father in the home, unstable situations at home.

Sometimes that problem looks like a racial problem. But when you look at the data, you find that black children are more likely to be born out of wedlock and more likely to live with a single parent. That is not caused by white racism against blacks in our schools; it isn’t solvable by eliminating every particle of racism.

If schools have a role, it could be teaching the importance of following the formula for rising above poverty in America: stay in school through high school, get a job, wait until marriage for sex, wait until marriage to have children. That formula works for every race in our society. If we’re failing to pass along that basic fact, we’re doing a disservice.

But, while it’s arguable that Great Society policies have led to more fatherless homes in the black demographic, the barrier isn’t caused by “systemic racism” among the population in Cy-Fair ISD.

When we have a problem with black students being 19% of the school population but 40% of the discipline problems, measured as suspensions, that doesn’t mean we should discipline the individual troublemakers less because of their race; it might mean that we need to discipline them more. Or find better discipline approaches. Saying, “Oh, they’re black and therefore disadvantaged, so let’s let them get away with whatever they want,” is telling them the rules don’t apply to them. That’s not a good thing to teach them. Luke Scanlon suggested that, from his experience, holding them accountable, in meaningful ways, gets them to be higher achievers. I’d say giving in to their tyranny-because-of-color not only harms the remaining students, it harms them even more.

So, we can recognize some students lack what other students have at home. But we shouldn’t be handicapping those fortunate students just so we can close up an achievement gap. The problem is not that there is a gap that should be closed; the problem is that there are children who are achieving less than they could, and we need to look at ways to bring them up.

Imagine a solution where we end up doing something that helps the lower achievers that also happens to help high achievers, the gap won’t close. But the real objective would be met—getting each child closer to potential. Focusing on closing the gap is like climbing a ladder that’s up against the wrong wall.

I don’t know what the board is going to do about the equity audit and its recommendations. Hopefully our new board members will stand strong against this actual racist infiltration, which is what we elected them to do. And maybe they’ll be able to sway some of the others. An angry horde calling you racist—and staking out your home and sending death threats to you and your family (yes, those things happened this week to Scott Henry)—is a scary thing to stand up to. This is what we elected them to do.

We’re praying they can do it. Literally, many friends together prayed at a certain hour today (and also continually) to lift up Scott Henry. May God protect him—and any others in this battle of ideas that is affecting our next generation in the schools.

We Won Some Battles in the Ongoing Idea War

We Won Our School Board Races

It’s a day for celebration. Here in Northwest Houston we took back three seats on our school board from Critical Race Theory supporters: one racist-and-race-baiting instigator and another couple of go-along-to-get-along-ers. It took a lot of work. More from me as a precinct chair than I’m used to, and far more from a number of concerned citizens/parents.

image from campaign materials

My friend Bill, the organizer of the block walking, went every weekend for the past three months (after the time spent vetting and choosing candidates to get behind). And then the past 2-3 weeks, he and recruits have done block walking every day.

As of last Thursday, they had touched 20,102 homes—and then you add whatever they did Thursday evening through Monday of that final weekend.

I’m a miserable failure at block walking. But I did contact by phone, email, or both, close to the number of Republican voters who came out from my precinct. I haven’t yet done a deep enough dive to see whether the very ones I contacted were the ones who voted, but I know at least some of them are. Of course I don’t know how they voted, but I hope that was time well spent. I also did some persuading beyond our precinct, with this blog (here, here, and here) and social media and just talking to friends. And I put up yard signs. I always felt like there was more to do, but I maxed out and ended up sick (not COVID) for the final couple of weeks.

Nevertheless, our outcome was good enough.

Back in July, when we were planning how things might go, we were hoping to consolidate behind one candidate for each of the three races. Our district has no runoff. Whoever wins, even by a single vote, is the winner. That favors the incumbent, with name recognition and connection to the teachers. Maybe that’s why the incumbents have all been in office for nearly two decades.

The consolidating happened for two of the positions. There were actually four candidates for each of those races, but they consisted of Democrat or Independent candidates, in addition to the nominal Republican incumbents that we wanted out. So we weren’t dividing any conservative votes. (Note: the school board is nonpartisan on the ballot, but knowing party affiliation is informative for people who want to get rid of the Critical Race Theory and LGBT agendas.)

The worrisome race was the one we most wanted to win, because the incumbent was the writer of the pro-CRT resolution the board had all signed last year. And, despite being a pastor, he’s a pretty despicable human being. That race had six candidates (the report chart below from ABC 13 News leaves out Todd LeCompte; I don’t know why; the county’s official count shows him getting 659 votes, or 1.85%). The incumbent and one other were Democrats; the others all proclaimed to be Republican/conservative, but one stood out among the others. We went with Natalie Blasingame.

An additional good candidate actually bowed out before the drop-out deadline, but the others stayed in the race. That made strategy, originally based on a two-or-three-person race, more challenging, because the conservative vote could be divided. But the logical answer seemed to be, “Just campaign harder.” It helped that the Harris County Republican Party decided to endorse our candidates. (They did endorsements for other school districts as well.) We had to do some persuading in that position 5 race, but to not endorse would have been a real detriment to anyone trying to beat that awful incumbent.

It also helped that a conservative group in our part of town independently interviewed the candidates and had them respond in length to a questionnaire, which they published. That group only endorses when a supermajority independently go for a particular candidate; in this case, they all went with our candidate, 100%.

Other endorsements came in as well. Every time people went through the trouble to learn about the candidates, they would see how well prepared our candidates were. As for those position 5 candidates who didn’t win this time, I hope some of them will consider that we have four more positions on the ballot two years from now—and all the incumbents signed that CRT resolution.

As for numbers, here’s the report from our local ABC 13 News:

When I got home, around 10:30 Tuesday night, after working the polls and turning in our materials after a long line wait at NRG stadium, I checked online for results, and at that point it was obvious we had won positions 6 and 7. But Dr. Blasingame was behind the incumbent by 118 votes. However, that was when only about 26% of votes had been counted. By the time I got to bed, Blasingame was in the lead by 169 with 36% of the vote counted. It seemed to me that she was trending by the early morning hour that I got to bed. By Wednesday morning, when 100% were counted, all three had won and we could fully celebrate.

Here’s my conclusion: it takes a lot of time, attention, and work to get a school board you can trust. But when it comes to threats to our children, people do finally wake up and take action. It took some monumental effort on the part of some. But that effort spread to others, who influenced their friends and neighbors. People want to be able to trust their schools. If they can’t, they will act rather than succumb.

While it starts with parents and children, community really does tend to choose The Good when they can see clearly what that is. And people’s eyes are beginning to open.

 

Other Battles Won

Texas House Seat

Meanwhile, in San Antonio, another upset was taking place. A 75% Hispanic district was just won by a Republican in a special election. Congratulations to John Luhan. Maybe Dems have been premature in their calculations to turn Texas blue:

·       “Texas District, Roughly 75% Hispanic, Turns Red For GOP” Hank Berrien for The Daily Wire, November 3, 2021. 

 

Virginia Governor

And nationally it was a bigger day than you would expect for an off-year election.

In Virginia—where Loudon County schools have been a big issue lately—Glenn Youngkin succeeded in winning the governorship over incumbent Terry McAuliffe, who had recently said we shouldn’t be allowing parents to decide what their kids are taught in schools. Ben Shapiro summed it up in a couple of tweets:

tweet images found here

As VP Harris said, possibly accurately, the way this November election goes, so goes the nation in 2022 and 2024:

·       “Kamala Harris warns McAuliffe loss could doom Dems in 2022, 2024” Steven Nelson for New York Post, October 29, 2021. 

 

Virginia Lieutenant Governor

Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor was also a big win: Winsome Sears, who is a pro-Second-Amendment woman, who happens to be black, is confusing the media, who want to label all that has happened this election on “white supremacy”; she doesn’t fit their narrative. Maybe they need a new narrative. Her acceptance speech is uplifting and oh, so American!

Newly elected VA Lt. Governor Winsome Sears
gives her acceptance speech.
screenshot from here

·       “Watch: Here's the Speech from Virginia's First Black Lt. Governor CNN And MSNBC Didn't Show. She's Republican” Brodigan for Louder with Crowder, November 3, 2021. 

·       “Marine vet Winsome Sears celebrates win in Virginia lieutenant governor race with 'USA' chant, says she's 'living proof' of American dream in patriotic speech” Chris Pandolfo for The Blaze, November 3, 2021. 

·       “Winsome Sears, Virginia’s Next LieutenantGovernor, Makes History as First Black Woman to Win Statewide” Fred Lucas for The Daily Signal, November 3, 2021. 

·       “Lt. Gov of Virginia Winsome Sears challenges Joy Reid to have her on MSNBC if she's 'woman enough'” Libby Emmons for American News, November 3, 2021. 

New Jersey Truck Driver Wins Senate

Other wins include a New Jersey truck driver who spent only $153 on his campaign for state Senate, taking out the sitting Senate president:

·       “New Jersey truck driver Edward Durr defeats state Senate president, longtime Dem” Houston Keene for Fox News, November 4, 2021. 

·       “Republican truck driver Edward Durr defeats powerful Democratic NJ state Senate president; historic victory called 'stunning and shocking'” Dave Urbanski for The Blaze, November 4, 2021. 

·       “UPDATE: The GOP trucker who spent $153 on his campaign just unseated the NJ senate president” Joel Abbott for Not the Bee, November 4, 2021.

 

Massachusetts School Board

And former teacher in Massachusetts, ousted because he had attended the January 6 rally and was subsequently slandered as a domestic terrorist, made it onto the school board:

·       “Teacher forced out after January 6 photo wins seat on school board in Massachusetts” by Hannah Nightingale for American News, November 3, 2021. 

 

Newark City Council

In the New Jersey city of Newark, Republicans took over the entire city council:

·       “Republicans sweep Newark elections, eliminate Democrats from council” Kent Mallett for Newark Advocate, November 3, 2021. 

 

Minneapolis Keeps Police Department

Minneapolis went against the advice of their Rep. Ilan Omar and decided not to defund their police department and replace it with some social workers:

·       “Minneapolis voters reject ballot measure to dismantle police and replace with new agency” Clare Hymes for CBS News, November 3, 2021. 

 

The Celebration

There’s a lot of celebrating going on. But the satire site The Babylon Bee has been having way too much fun. Here is some of their post-election hilarity:

·       “Dems Announce Plan To Call People Racist Even Harder” The Babylon Bee, November 4, 2021. 

·       “McAuliffe Blames Loss On Low 3AM Ballot Turnout” The Babylon Bee, November 4, 2021. 

·       “McAuliffe: ‘I’ll Be Back And I’ll Get Your Children If It’s The Last Thing I Do!’” The Babylon Bee, November 3, 2021. 

·       “'Racism! COVID! Trump!' Screams McAuliffe Over And Over In Desperate Last-Minute Appeal” The Babylon Bee, November 2, 2021. 

·       “Terry McAuliffe Baffled That Telling Parents The State Owns Their Children Wasn't A Winning Strategy” The Babylon Bee, November 2, 2021.  This one contained a surprisingly accurate quote (still satire):

o   "It's so weird," a crestfallen McAuliffe told reporters. "We pulled out all the stops: we told parents that we own their children's minds, that they're wards of the state, and that their children should read horrific LGBTQ+ pornography in their school libraries, and it just didn't seem to connect with the people for some reason."

 

Others are enjoying the celebration without even needing to turn to satire:

·       “Watch how depressed all the ‘objective’ CNN hosts were as the Virginia results rolled in” Not the Bee, November 3, 2021. 

·       This tweet thread from Dinesh D’Souza and Gad Saad:

 

The war, of course, is never over. But it’s nice to celebrate some wins—and relish some good cheer in the hope that the tide might be turning.

 

 

 

The Critical School Board Races, Part II

In Part I we talked about what we’re fighting in our current school board races, and also who we’re fighting. Today we’ll talk more about who we’re fighting with—who are the candidates to vote for.

Where the school board meetings are held
image from Google maps

A bit of background. I pulled my kids out of this school district, Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, 21 years ago to homeschool. We had a 9^th grader, 7^th grader, and 2^nd grader at that point. This means we’d been parents of public school students for 10 years (kindergarten plus 9 grades), so we hadn’t been against all public schooling. We had, in fact, had some very good public school experiences—before moving here. By spring of our second school year here we’d had enough. Despite a few teachers who meant well and tried hard, and a music teacher we felt honored to have experienced, the schools at all three levels did not meet the needs of our kids, all of whom qualified as gifted, which by the way is a form of special education that often gets overlooked. You need to teach these kids not only more, but in a different way. Our previous school district had done that very well, so we knew what that looked like.

We chose this district because of its high rating—it still has a high rating. But by comparison it felt backward, stodgy, and, well, stupid. Some infuriating rules made me think, No one this stupid should be allowed anywhere near the education of students.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of decent teachers trying to do a good job for the students they love. And for many families that is enough. But it does mean the leadership overall isn’t what it ought to be.

So we pulled our children out—and educated them at our own expense and effort, which meant limiting the income of our family. We had to pay tax money for the schools that had failed our kids. And I’m telling you it still infuriates me when someone says, “I believe in public schools,” as if it’s a religion. Or, “Our tax money is for public school students only; if someone chooses something else, fine, but this is where the tax money goes.”

After pulling our kids out, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to our school district, except to try to be an informed voter on school board races. But this year has gotten my attention.

screenshot from a recent school board meeting

Last spring people started asking the school board why certain things were being taught—things that could fit under the ideological umbrella of Critical Race Theory. I don’t care whose kids are being educated; I don’t want my tax dollars to go toward inculcating that divisive and America-hating ideology.

So that meant looking at changing out the school board. The district uses a nonpartisan no-runoff ballot; whoever gets the most votes wins. That favors the incumbent. The timing is in an off year. This year on our ballot there is nothing but school board and the state propositions. It’s traditionally very low turnout. But the incumbents can put out student and teacher handouts reminding them to go vote in the school board election. So the people most likely to vote for an incumbent—because they’ve heard of them—are more likely to vote. That’s a lot to go up against.

But we’ve had some energetic people working to find candidates, vet them, and campaign for them. I’ve been joining in that effort. I’m pleased with our choices. Now we just have to get people who care about kids and our country to get out and vote.

The Endorsements

OK. So, who should we vote for?

There are three races, positions 5, 6, and 7. These are all at-large. In other words, everyone in the district votes for all of the positions. While this is nonpartisan, voting history as well as actions can tell us something about the candidates and incumbents. The precinct chairs doing the vetting only considered Republicans, because that at least gives us a common starting place.

Last night the Harris County Republican Party voted to endorse:

·         Dr. Natalie Blasingame for position 5.

·         Scott Henry for position 6.

·         Luke Scanlon for position 7.

image from campaign literature

That’s kind of a big deal. And it wasn’t easy to accomplish. Normally that body doesn’t endorse during primaries. But this doesn’t have a primary. And in our district it doesn’t have a runoff. So the Local Government Committee did their vetting and interviewing of candidates (this is in addition to the vetting we precinct chairs in the district had been doing). The Republican incumbents in positions 6 and 7 didn’t show, so it was easy to endorse the challengers. I told a little about these two in Part I. I've got some yard signs for Scott Henry in my car if you want one.

But position 5 was harder. For position 5 there are actually six candidates, 2-3 of them are Republican (depending on how you read their voting history). The incumbent is the divisive ultra-Democrat we talked about in the last post, the one who tweeted out racist anti-white, anti-any-religion-but-his, tweets pretty regularly. (There's a sampling in Part I.) So he’s the biggest target. The LG Committee knew that, but didn’t want to set up a situation where they endorsed a candidate and then a different candidate got traction in the race. I also hope that doesn’t happen. But if we didn’t act, it was very unlikely we could coalesce around a candidate to beat the incumbent.

So we had to amend their recommendation and make the case for endorsing Natalie Blasingame. I had my 1 minute of fame giving one of the speeches. A friend, Bill Ely, had done the work of getting a whip count of the precinct chairs in our school district:

o   76 precincts, 74 precinct chairs

o   4 Abstain

o   3 for Courtney Spradley

o   50 for Natalie Blasingame

o   17 not reported

o   68% of all precinct chairs support Blasingame

o   94% of reporting precinct chairs support Blasingame

Add to that, we got an additional short speech from a member of the LG Committee, from outside our district, who said Natalie Blasingame was the most impressive and prepared school board candidate he had ever met. By far.

There’s another election for CFISD Board Trustees in two years, where four positions will be on the ballot. I hope some of the candidates who didn’t get our full support this time will consider running then. 

Natalie Blasingame has run before. More than once. I voted for her in 2015, 2017, and 2019. This is the first time she has run with grassroots support, and that's happening because of the attention to CRT in our schools—a topic she not only opposes but can recognize. It's about time we elected her.

The Stakeholders Question

There’s a question I like to ask school board candidates, about the priority of stakeholders. Dr. Blasingame is the first one who really seemed to understand. Her answer, paraphrased from my notes: Parents are the first stakeholders, including community members who are not currently parents of our students.

Students are not stakeholders; students are the why, the reason we have schools. Our school board doesn’t take orders from students, although it should listen to them to find out how well our schools are doing. We need to meet each child’s individual needs.

She didn’t mention teachers as stakeholders either. They’re not; they are the employees we hire to accomplish our mission to “produce graduates who have skills, knowledge and attitudes to become accomplished citizens.*” The district words their stated vision and mission this way:

Our vision at CFISD is formed by the acronym LEAD: to learn, empower, achieve, dream. LEAD.

Our mission is to maximize every student’s potential through rigorous and relevant learning experiences, preparing students to be 21^st Century global leaders.

I'm not sure every student ought to be a world leader; an accomplished citizen will do. Anyway, as I ask the priorities question, it’s amazing to me how many school board candidates think they should do what the teachers want—not realizing that often means the teachers’ unions, or maybe some pressure group selling something or promoting an ideology. Often candidates think they’re giving an understanding answer when they say the children are the priority stakeholders, even though we know that’s not who they’re listening to. Natalie understands this better than any candidate I’ve asked.

The Choice Issue

My other big issue is school choice. Public schools are not an end unto themselves; they are a means toward an end. We pay our property taxes not to fund public schools, but to fund the education of the next generation. That means the taxes are meant to go for the education of every child—as their parents see fit.

I said that to Natalie, and she said, “Exactly.” She is full of creative ideas to meet needs—according to what parents want for their child. She’s had to do some creative work to get what she needed for her own daughter when the schools wouldn’t provide what she wanted.

And every child is different. You might manage a factory aiming at the middle and eliminating the exceptions. But you can’t get every child to reach their potential that way. She’s more than about attaching the money to the child; she’d first like to offer creative ideas within the school system—since that’s what the school’s mission is supposed to be. Then, if the schools can’t come up with a way to meet a family’s needs, that’s when you give them the money to get what they need.

One of the innovations she’d like to try is strands. You could have a teacher and parents of enough students who all ask for, say, a Christian strand. All willing, the schools provide the place and the support, and the parents get what they want from a teacher who gets to teach what she/he wants. You could do strands for STEM, or technology, or language immersion. Not every student wants to have these things, but why not offer them for those who do? We have classrooms. The cost per student and per teacher is essentially the same. What’s stopping us?

Dr. Blasingame has been a teacher, assistant principal, principal, and assistant superintendent. Some people might worry about having an insider, but in this case I don’t think that’s a problem. She’s an out-of-the-box thinker who happens to know how the system works. And she knows where the system doesn’t work.

She’s committed to improving communication between the board and the community. Right now that’s pretty dismal. But she says you can form a committee for anything you want information on, so that puts you in touch with the community. You just have to want that two-way communication.

When she says she’s about Choice, Voice, and Values, I believe her.

Now we just have to get to work, get the word out, and get people to the polls.

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* The quote comes from The Eden Conspiracy, by Joe Harless. I wrote about it here.