Not A Rubber Stamp After All
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18 responses to “Not A Rubber Stamp After All”
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And may I add that the secretary of education needs to understand her place. She is not the state superintendent, nor does she direct the Board.
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You are better than that.
The Secretary of Education should “understand her place”.
She is the Superintendent’s boss.
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They are both appointed. The Board of Education works with the State Superintendent. The sec of Ed works with the gov to legislate policy at the GA. The board of Ed determines regulations to administer that policy. The state sup oversees that administration.
Mr Sherlock, I was respect you, but doing it right is important. We can’t keep short changing a process that was put in place to protect the people.
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So, Dick. I just read this.
It is apparently your way of congratulating the Governor for appointing strong, independent-minded persons to the Board of Education.
And praising the bi-partisanship you discovered was so valuable immediately after the Democrats lost control in Richmond.
Can I quote you on that?
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Because I do not know what criteria the governor had in mind when he chose his BOE appointees, I am not sure whether I should be congratulating him or not. I am pleased that his appointees are showing some independence and are not accepting, without question, what the administration proposes.
As for your insinuation concerning my sudden conversion to bi-partisanship, you are wrong. I have long thought that opposing a measure simply because it was proposed by someone in the “other” party is not the best way to govern. Bipartisan measures usually result from
compromise, which is an essential component of a healthy democracy. Unfortunately, “compromise” has become a dirty word for strong partisans on both sides. You can quote me on that.-
and we KNOW where Sherlock is on this……
Here we have IMO a GOOD example of governance – that encourages a collaborative approach vice arbitrary dictates from the Governor.
Youngkin is trying to govern as if he had a strong mandate from the voters.
He does not.
The draft is a joke.
It’s full of obvious omissions and errors and reeks of whitewashing in general despite the “tell all of history” words he has uttered.
When your own appointees are telling you this – Youngkin had no choice but to bail and say he was “disappointed”.
So, we’ll see if he has learned.
Now, if he comes back and replaces his appointees with folks more “loyal”, we’ll know where he is headed… Trump/DeSantis style governance.
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In my experience, the claim of “emergency” is often just an excuse to avoid the full, slow and excruciating APA process. Unfortunately, the worst abusers are the General Assembly, who can mandate the expedited process in bills. Recent example, the California Clean Car regulation, which dodged all the public scrutiny and input.
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Rules for thee but not for me.
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I agree with Mr. Haner. The accreditation process, if done through emergency regulations, will be ripped apart every time we get a new administration. Let’s do what we should do, let the process in place address the changes for longevity.
More importantly, let’s not confuse the SOL with accreditation. They are two separate boxes. In one box, is what you teach and learn including no decoupling of the standards and the curriculum framework. In the other is how you hold schools accountable for implementing what should be learned.
The Secretary addressed decoupling the standards and frameworks. Stupid. Anyone who is an educator knows standards without a scope and sequence are useless. She evidently has not taught.
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The Secretary’s bio is at https://www.education.virginia.gov/about-us/
She is not stupid.
I hear from teachers regularly that only teachers are qualified to, pick one:
– be on school boards
– be on Boards of Education
– now, in this comment, be Secretary of EducationBecause only teachers can understand anything about any of those roles.
I on the other hand think that teachers have a role to play in supervisory organizations, but they must not consist exclusively of teachers.
That will bias the decisions of management to one point of view. It denies the perspective of the other stakeholders, especially including parents.
It also can deny depths of knowledge in such fields as instructional technology, systems management, budgeting, data analysis, law, construction, accounting, and others. It narrows the scope of best practices to those teachers know.
It limits outside influence on processes and policies to those sponsored by schools of education, who control teachers’ educations at every step in the school promotion ladder.
State and local school management structures, when considering problems, must be free to consider not only outside voices and experiences, but that teachers may be part of a problem.
It is hard to guarantee that if management is made up of only teachers.
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The Secretary’s bio is at https://www.education.virginia.gov/about-us/
She is not stupid.
I hear from teachers regularly that only teachers are qualified to, pick one:
– be on school boards
– be on Boards of Education
– now, in this comment, be Secretary of EducationBecause only teachers can understand anything about any of those roles.
I on the other hand think that teachers have a role to play in supervisory organizations, but they must not consist exclusively of teachers.
That will bias the decisions of management to one point of view. It denies the perspective of the other stakeholders, especially including parents.
It also can deny depths of knowledge in such fields as instructional technology, systems management, budgeting, data analysis, law, construction, accounting, and others. It narrows the scope of best practices to those teachers know.
It limits outside influence on processes and policies to those sponsored by schools of education, who control teachers’ educations at every step in the school promotion ladder.
State and local school management structures, when considering problems, must be free to consider not only outside voices and experiences, but that teachers may be part of a problem.
It is hard to guarantee that if management is made up of only teachers.
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I didn’t say she was stupid. Decoupling the standards is stupid. You can’t teach without
Goals
Scope
Sequence
&
AssessmentOtherwise you would be Willy nilly all over the internet.
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CO! Cee, oh. Co-CEO. Carlyle didn’t completely trust him. And, of the two, he was the loser. Most companies hiring an executive would, at the very least, request a verifiable resume. Not voters.
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According to the story I read today, the proposed history SOL had blatant factual errors and omitted words like “racism” and “Nazi.”
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This appears to be one of those moments when progress over product is more important. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, process is our most important product. Kudos to the BOE and its vision. Kudos to DH-S for a balanced report.
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Youngkin has brought in many outsiders who do not know the bones of Virginia’s education bureaucracy, laws, and policies. Maybe next time around something can be adopted.
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Aimee Rogstad Guidera has stated – publicly – that her chief goal as Secretary of Education is to “reorient everything to how is education geared towards preparing people for the jobs of today and tomorrow.” Nothing – not a peep – about educating students for democratic citizenship. Why, it’s almost as if she and the governor have no interest in that whatsoever.
Guidera and the state superintendent and Youngkin all seem to have found their “guiding light” in the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing “think” tank dedicated to plutocracy. It has been opposed to raising the minimum wage, to policing and regulating Wall Street, to addressing climate change, to making federal and state taxation fairer, and to public education. Naturally, when reporters asked for emails between AEI and the Youngkin administration, the governor refused to release a slew of them.
Guidera told AEI members that she – and Youngking – should be judged on their performance. “Just watch what we do,” she said.
Well, Youngkin campaigned on the racist lie that Critical Race Theory permeated Virginia’s public schools.
Prior to the election, the NY Times reported this:
“Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls ‘parental rights’ issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism…Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate in Virginia, stoked the resentment and fear of white voters, alarmed by efforts to teach a more critical history of racism in America…he released an ad that was a throwback to the days of banning books, highlighting objections by a white mother and her high-school-age son to ‘Beloved,’ the canonical novel about slavery by the Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.”
The Washington Post reported this:
“Youngkin surged in the late weeks of the race by tapping into a deep well of conservative parental resentment against public school systems. He promised to ban the teaching of critical race theory, an academic approach to racial history that’s not on the Virginia K-12 curriculum….the conservative news media and Republican candidates stirred the stew of anxieties and racial resentments that animate the party’s base — thundering about equity initiatives, books with sexual content and transgender students on sports teams.”
And, again, the NY Times:
“the past half-century of American political history shows that racially coded attacks are how Republicans have been winning elections for decades…Youngkin dragged race into the election, making his vow to ‘ban critical race theory’ a centerpiece of his stump speech and repeating it over the closing weekend — Race is the elephant in the room.”
The Associated Press reported this, on CRT and the the Virginia governor’s race:
“The issue had weight in Virginia, too. A majority of voters there — 7 in 10 — said racism is a serious problem in U.S. society, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of Tuesday’s electorate…The divide along party lines was stark: 78% of Youngkin voters considered the focus on racism in schools to be too much.”
UVA political analyst Larry Sabato described the Youngkin Critical Race Theory strategy this way:
“The operative word is not critical.And it’s not theory. It’s race. What a shock, huh? Race. That is what matters. And that’s why it’s sticks. There’s a lot of, we can call it white backlash, white resistance, whatever you want to call it. It has to do with race. And so we live in a post-factual era … It doesn’t matter that [CRT] isn’t taught in Virginia schools. It’s this generalized attitude that whites are being put upon and we’ve got to do something about it. We being white voters.”
Then, after trashing the history and social science standards written under the previous board of education, standards that has been ENDORSED by the American Historical Association, the Youngkin administration produced
“new” standards with “guiding principles” that highlight Ronald Reagan, who was, in fact, a racist.Hmmm. “Just watch what we do.”
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The “excruciating” Administrative Process Act could drag this out beyond the end of Gov. Youngkin’s term.
I remember how Virginia used to be able to update the state building code in 18 months or so, including hearings. The APA increased the number of hearings and dragged out other processes so that it now takes 3 years or more to amend and adopt a new edition of the International Building Code. The 2018 Virginia Uniform Statewide Building Code didn’t get adopted until a few months after the 2021 IBC was published.
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