The criminal legal system is closely entangled with schools and education policy. This article is the final story in a three-part series, in the run-up to Nov. 3, about local elections where education issues are at stake. Here are the first and second stories of this series.

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The Wake County, North Carolina, public school system was once renowned as a model of successful integration, standing apart from so many school districts that had failed to realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, a slate of conservative candidates took over the Wake County school board and set out to dismantle the district’s diversity policy that determined how students were assigned to schools. Though Democrats regained control of the board in 2011, they never restored the policy. Now a slate of five conservative candidates is vying to win a majority on the nine-seat board on Nov. 3, and some have shown a clear antipathy toward racial equity.

“If they get elected, I definitely think that there could potentially be some challenge to the equity work that has been done in the district,” said Letha Muhammad, executive director of Education Justice Alliance, a local group that advocates for Black and Latinx families, as well as families of disabled children, within the Wake County school system. Muhammad said some of the candidates have been pandering to conservatives by using “inflammatory language” to drum up controversy over the district’s racial equity policies and curriculum.

Gregory Hahn, a Navy veteran who is running for the school board’s District 2 seat, includes “curriculum transparency” as a key tenet of his platform. On his website, Hahn says:  “School systems across the country are adopting Black Lives Matter curriculum at an alarming rate, indoctrinating our children to achieve Marxist objectives.” He criticizes the Teaching Tolerance curriculum developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center because the organization is “known for including conservative organizations on its list of ‘hate groups.’” And he’s adamantly in favor of keeping police in schools, an issue that school board members have been weighing since a video of a school police officer slamming a young girl to the ground was shared widely in 2017. Hahn is even endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, which does not typically get involved in school board races.

Rachel Mills, a real estate agent and former press secretary for former U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas, is running in District 7 and taking a similar tack. Her website states that she won’t be “a rubber stamp for misguided Marxist agendas.” In a Facebook post, she referenced the district’s website for racial equity resources as an example of what she doesn’t support. When asked how educators should approach teaching history and current events in a time of heightened racial tension, Mills wrote in an email to The Appeal: Political Report that “we owe our kids the truth about these issues with a clear emphasis on reliable, hard data and original sources.” She was the only conservative candidate to respond to requests for comment.

Two other candidates—Steve Bergstrom and Karent Carter—are also advocating for issues like “transparency” and a “return to traditional education,” but without going into specific detail.

“It’s not clear,” said Muhammad about this kind of rhetoric. “I think that’s also a tactic.”

Deborah Prickett, who is running in District 1, was among the conservative candidates on the school board a decade ago. Now, though, her position on diversity in school assignments is not as explicit. During a PTA forum with District 1 incumbent Heather Scott, a moderator asked if the candidates would support a policy to ensure that every school would have a diverse student population. Prickett deflected by saying that she “believes all children should have access to good schools.” 

But many locals believe Prickett would continue her crusade against diversity policies if she took office again. The editorial board of the News & Observer in Raleigh endorsed Scott, writing that Prickett’s “acrimonious leadership led to explosive meetings, demonstrations, and arrests of protesters. There’s no need to revisit that era.”

If Wake County does, it’s possible that the school district’s progress toward racial equity could be eroded.

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The current Wake County Public School System was formed in 1976 when the largely Black Raleigh City Schools merged with the suburban, white Wake County schools. This created a large and diverse school system that, at the time, business leaders believed would safeguard the county’s economy from the effect of “white flight.” Individual schools were diverse too, thanks to a school assignment policy based on race.

In light of federal courts striking down other school districts’ race-based student assignment policies, in 2000, Wake County school district administrators used new benchmarks based on economic and academic factors instead. No more than 40 percent of students at any school could receive free and reduced lunch, and only 25 percent of students could be low-performing academically.

In effect, the new approach maintained racial diversity and it drew national attention; there were articles in major media outlets and two books written about the diversity policy. 

Wake County also became renowned nationwide for academic achievement and teacher quality. The schools, along with the generally low cost of living compared to other regions, contributed to a population explosion. Between 2000 and 2010, the county’s population grew by over 40 percent, and this made the school assignment process increasingly complicated.

A chorus of complaints steadily grew among suburban families. Parents concerned about the school board’s decision to convert some schools to a year-round academic calendar formed an advocacy group called Wake CARES. The group sued the school board over the issue and lost. But observant GOP leaders invited the disgruntled parents into a new political movement that was sweeping the country.

After Obama’s historic presidential win in 2008, and the economic downturn caused by the housing market crash, predominantly white and middle- to upper-class conservatives—like those of Wake CARES—began seeking ways to regain political control. The Tea Party became their vehicle, and it began by concentrating on local elections, including school boards.

Multimillionaire GOP megadonor Art Pope was a lightning rod for building conservative power in North Carolina. In 2009, Pope donated $15,000 to the Wake GOP during the school board race. A cohort of five conservative candidates ran on the promise of ending the district’s diversity policy.

All five, including Prickett, won their races and quickly worked to change how students were assigned to schools. Their plan eliminated the diversity clause in the assignment policy and focused on sending students to neighborhood schools instead of busing, though kids in some majority Black areas would still be bused far away. Superintendent Del Burns resigned in protest, and said the plan was an attempt to carve the district into “have” and “have not” subdistricts. 

Activists from the NAACP and the Southern Coalition of Social Justice, as well as parents, students, and teachers, held protests during school board meetings and eventually filed a legal complaint against the school system. The case, which also concerned racial disparities in school discipline. was taken on by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and made national news. The accreditation board, AdvancED, also considered revoking the Wake County Public School System’s credentials. 

What was once a national example of a successful diversity policy and school performance had become a cautionary tale.

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In 2011, Democrats ousted most of the Wake County school board’s conservative members, but they had made an indelible mark. In January 2012, a compromise school assignment policy went into effect. It gave parents more power to send their children to the school of their choice, and it emphasized attending schools close to home. It didn’t include provisions to ensure diversity.

Since then, Wake County school board members have not attempted to reinstate the diversity policy, but they have taken other steps toward addressing racial equity. The board created the Office of Equity Affairs as part of a settlement in connection with the complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education. The office provides “cultural proficiency training” to teachers and administrators, and works to eliminate racial disparities in discipline. The move rankled conservatives who felt it was a waste of funding. 

The school board has also revised a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the district and local law enforcement agencies to improve how school police do their jobs. The law enforcement MOU has drawn criticism from community members who want police removed from schools. After renewing the MOU in 2017, the board admitted the document needed a broader overhaul, “We’re not going to hold up the MOU, but we absolutely agree that there’s some work to do,” Monika Johnson-Hostler told the News & Observer at the time.

The MOU was up for renewal again this summer, as Black Lives Matter protests rocked the country. At a June board meeting, community members sent in comments calling for an end to the SRO program and thousands have signed a petition. But even after admitting that they could have done more to engage the community,  a majority of board members voted to renew the MOU for one year, rather than the usual 3 years, to give them time to gain stakeholder input. The decision drew protests from several activist groups that want police-free schools, including Education Justice Alliance and the Wake County Black Student Coalition. 

District 2 incumbent Monika Johnston-Holster, who is running against Hahn, was the only board member who voted against renewing the MOU. She gave an impassioned speech criticizing the board for failing to move forward with a Peacebuilders program and other alternatives to policing that community members support.

“This vote is really about the consistency of requests asking us to make a change and we haven’t done that,” she said. “I think for me, this is really about my own children who are in my life, who at the end of the day will look back at these videos [of police brutality] and say, ‘Where are you on the right side of history?’”

Though discipline and policing have become the primary focus of the district’s equity initiatives, Scott, the District 1 incumbent, told the Political Report that administrators were starting to return to the issue of diversity in school assignments before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 

“Last year, the [Wake County Public School System] started to explore using census data to shape student assignment,” she said in an email. “This would help us consider different ways of reducing the number of students receiving free and reduced lunch at specific schools, which would also help address questions of how best to provide equitable programming and support across the system.” 

Now the future of that effort is on the line. In many ways, 2020 mirrors the social and political climate of 2008. There is a global upheaval in the form of COVID-19, there is racial unrest since the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others sparked a worldwide protest for Black lives, and there is a rise in populist nationalism as a reaction to these crises. Similar to the Republican school board candidate slate of 2009, the 2020 challengers joined other conservative parents in airing frustrations about issues like math curriculum and the delayed opening of public schools because of the pandemic which, combined with complaints about Black Lives Matter, created an appetite for candidates with extreme positions on racial justice in education.

But there’s another similarity: Many Raleigh community members are ready to fight for their public schools. Education Justice Alliance held a candidate forum and has been working to educate people about the school board election. Muhammad says the group will continue to organize beyond Nov. 3.

“It would require us to mobilize our families, our parents, and our students,” she said , “if folks got into office who were [against] the things that we know are important, like equity in the schools and addressing the over-criminalization of Black and brown students, and the removal of school resource officers.”

The post This School Board Election Could Ramp Up Resegregation in North Carolina appeared first on Bolts.

The criminal legal system is closely entangled with schools and education policy. This article is the second in a three-part series, in the run-up to Nov. 3, about local elections where education issues are at stake. You can read the first story in the series here.

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When Ivan Penich cast an early ballot this fall, he voted to send President Trump back to the White House for a second term. Then the Mesa, Arizona, resident gave a thumbs-up to a ballot measure that would raise taxes for the state’s wealthiest residents to increase funding to public schools. Penich, a 69-year-old Army veteran and the operator of a dental lab, says his rationale was straightforward. “My grandchildren deserve a good education like my daughter had.”

According to recent polling, a commanding number of voters share Penich’s sentiments. Proposition 208, which would levy a 3.5 percent tax on Arizonans earning more than $250,000 to pay teachers more and hire more of them, is supported by 60 percent of registered voters, including one-third of Republicans.

That taxing the rich to pay for schools would emerge as a cause with bipartisan support in 2020 is not a complete surprise. More Arizonans now identify education, not immigration, as the top priority facing the state, reflecting mounting concern with schools that are notoriously underfunded, teachers who are poorly paid, and a teacher shortage crisis so severe that 28 percent of the state’s classrooms lack a permanent teacher.

Education has become a potent political issue since #RedforEd protests shone a harsh light on the condition of Arizona’s schools in 2018. After a historic teacher strike, educators doubled down on electoral organizing. Democrats gained four seats in the state House of Representatives that year. Now they’re poised to tip the House and possibly the Senate in their favor. If they succeed, voter dissatisfaction with the GOP’s embrace of controversial policies aimed at dismantling, defunding, and privatizing education will be a major reason.

A similar pattern is playing out in other key battleground states, including Michigan and Texas. In these states and others, the gulf between voters who believe in taxpayer-funded public education and GOP candidates who are hostile to it has created an opening for Democrats.

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For decades, Arizona has been a petri dish for free market education experiments. Charter schools, publicly funded private schools, education savings accounts that allow parents to spend taxpayer funds on a dizzying array of education “options” with little state oversight or accountability—the Grand Canyon State has them all. The latest innovation to take off, “micro schools” managed by a for-profit company called Prenda, replaces teachers with untrained and unlicensed “guides” who oversee five to 10 students within their own homes. The company, which denies that it is a school, is raking in millions of dollars through Arizona’s expansive school choice programs.

As school choice offerings in the state have ballooned, they have increasingly competed for funding with traditional public schools. “It all comes out of the same funding bucket, and the bucket wasn’t that big to begin with,” said Sharon Kirsch, research director for the grassroots public education advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona. 

The push for free-market education reforms has typically been justified in terms of greater academic achievement. Proponents of charter school expansion, for example, point to test score gains in math and English among students attending urban charters. Critics cite the downsides of the free-market experiment, including greater segregation and charter schools’ track record of harsh disciplinary practices that fuel the school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionately affecting nonwhite students and those with disabilities. But Arizona’s school choice debate has been far less focused on results. The lack of oversight and accountability that are a feature of the state’s school voucher program have made it virtually impossible to answer basic questions about how students are faring academically, or even which private schools are benefiting from taxpayer funds. 

That hands-off, regulation-free vision is precisely what an array of deep-pocketed interest groups in Arizona are pushing. Organizations like the Americans for Prosperity, funded by Charles Koch and the American Federation for Children, founded by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are a major presence in the state. More recent arrivals to the school choice lobbying space include Yes Every Kid, which is another Koch project, and Love Your School, an offshoot of the right-wing Center for Arizona Policy.

Said Kirsch: “I’m not sure most people have any idea that these groups are essentially running education policy in Arizona.”

Americans for Prosperity and the American Federation for Children were behind a 2018 ballot measure, which Arizonans trounced, that would have made every student in the state eligible for a private school voucher. Yet despite clear antipathy—one Arizona Republic columnist wrote that voters “stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it”—Republicans have forged ahead with efforts to grow the voucher program. This year, they enacted controversial legislation to allow a handful of students from the Navajo Nation to attend a private religious school in New Mexico at the expense of Arizona taxpayers.

Kate Brophy McGee, Republican state senator for Arizona’s 28th District, opposed previous voucher expansion efforts, but she was a key “yes” vote this time around. She characterized the bill as a necessary effort to help the Navajo students. But public school advocates—including the legislative Indigenous Peoples Caucus—saw something more ominous: the latest in a long-running effort by the GOP to defund, dismantle and privatize the state’s public schools.

“You have a used-to-be moderate candidate in a moderate district taking more extreme positions on education because of pressure from the party,” said Charles Siler, a former lobbyist for the pro-voucher Goldwater Institute who now works with Save Our Schools Arizona. “The party has shifted its platform to be more antagonistic towards public schools while the voter base hasn’t shifted, at least not to the same extent… That’s created a big opportunity for Democrats.”

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When Christine Porter Marsh ran against McGee in 2018, she came within 267 votes of unseating the GOP incumbent. This year, the former Arizona teacher of the year is challenging McGee again in one of the state’s most-watched races, and she’s confident that she’ll emerge victorious.

Marsh, who teaches English at a Scottsdale middle school has good reason to feel optimistic. The suburban Phoenix district where she grew up and now aspires to represent is in the throes of a demographic transition. The district’s affluent enclaves—and longtime GOP strongholds—including Arcadia, Biltmore, and Paradise Valley, are trending bluer as new residents move in. In the last six years, voter rolls in this part of Maricopa County have swelled by 17,000, three quarters of whom are Democrats.

Marsh says that frustration with the GOP’s complete abdication of funding public education is fueling a political realignment in the district and across the state. “People are fed up and they’re beginning to see that that systemic disinvestment is not an accident,” Marsh said.

The Arizona GOP is also in the throes of a Trump-era transformation that has played out in the education arena. A recent Arizona Republic investigation documented the outsize influence of the far-right Patriot Movement on the state’s Republican Party. In just a few years, the group has evolved from a handful of loud online voices falsely warning of an imminent Muslim invasion to an influential force on state policy, including successfully pressuring Governor Doug Ducey to declare the state reopened for business even as the COVID-19 pandemic rages.

When thousands of teachers walked out of schools in 2018 under the banner of #RedforEd, their call for higher teacher pay and more funding for Arizona schools won strong public support. But the monthlong protests also spurred a countermovement: Purple for Parents, an offshoot of the Patriot Movement. The parent activists have targeted school district diversity and equity initiatives, which they say are marginalizing white people. They’ve also led a backlash against comprehensive sex education in K-12 schools, painting it as a conspiracy to push kids to identify as lesbian, gay, or transgender.

“They’ve been going around to all of the school boards pushing for no sex education, no equity, diversity and inclusion,” said Chandler school board member Lindsay Love. Chandler, a suburb southeast of Phoenix, is in District 17, where voters elected their first Democratic state representative in 2018, and where Democrats are heavily investing to flip a state Senate seat. Love, who ran for school board in 2018 as a progressive underdog and became the first Black woman to win a seat, says the Purple for Parents protests are fueled by more than objection to district policies. “Our Tea Party Republican groups are having this last grand stand against changes that are taking place in Arizona.”

The activists’ extreme rhetoric on schools is pushing away a subset of Republican voters who send their children to public schools. “People see what happens in their schools, they know their teachers. They hear this extreme rhetoric about kids being groomed for sex trafficking or Shariah marriage and they know that it’s not true,” said Siler. “Republicans can’t win when their rhetoric is so contrary to what people experience in their own lives.”

That dynamic is shaping a state representative race in nearby District 23, a heavily Republican district that includes most of Scottsdale and all of Fountain Hills. Two years ago Democrat Eric Kurland came within three percentage points of winning the seat. Today, the former elementary school teacher is convinced that victory is within his grasp. 

Kurland is aided by the GOP’s sharp shift to the right. One of his previous opponents, Jay Lawrence, whose penchant for outrageous comments drew the attention of John Oliver’s HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” lost to a primary challenger who ran to his right. Kurland will now face off against businessman Joseph Chaplik, whose campaign platform includes opposition to comprehensive sex education in schools, and John Kavanaugh, a Republican incumbent, in race for two seats.

Demographic changes in this suburban district are also a factor. “Our demographic mimics what has happened around the country where voters have flipped,” said Kurland, adding that District 23 has had an influx of voters who are highly involved in their local public schools.

To voters who are drawn to eastern Maricopa County in part because of its top-rated schools, the GOP’s hostility to public schools offers little. Kurland says the embrace of his “Time for a Teacher” message by voters in the district is also a sign of exhaustion with two decades of GOP dominance in Arizona that has pushed schools and teachers to the brink.

After polling this fall showed Kurland as the favorite to win the district, an Arizona political news site fired off a warning to Republicans: “If LD [Legislative District] 23 is in play, everywhere is in play.”

“I really feel like this is a moment from my fifth-grade science curriculum where you’re talking about for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. We’ve been under the thumb of one-party rule in Arizona for so long,” said Kurland.

The post How an Education Crisis Is Spurring a Seismic Shift in Arizona Politics appeared first on Bolts.