Daily Bread for 12.31.21: Educational Movements Destructive or Ineffectual

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 34.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:31 PM for 9h 05m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 6.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1879, Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

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 Rory Linnane reports Despite setbacks in elections, organizers behind school board recall efforts say it’s ‘just the beginning’:

By one metric, an explosive two years of recall attempts against school board members in multiple Wisconsin districts have failed: None of the 36 targeted members were unseated by special elections.

But recall organizers suggest that metric does not concern them. They’re thinking bigger.

Already, many school board members have resigned after being threatened with recalls. Others are feeling burned out by the relentless vitriol. And the coalitions that sprung up to organize the recalls are not letting up; they’re adapting.

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For as many community members as signed on to recalls in Wisconsin, more of them resisted. Some agreed with recall organizers on the issues but felt recalls were unduly expensive and inappropriate. Many others stood by their school board members’ decisions for being in line with public health guidance and the best available research on the emerging virus.

Voters also said they worried about efforts to erase the role of racism from U.S. history, seeing the approach as weakening students’ education and dangerous for the future. They also worried the groundswell to narrow curricula and limit access to books would further marginalize students who already lack representation.

Further, while the leaders of school board recall elections in Wisconsin came from the communities they organized in, out-of-state influences have been abundant.

While organizers insist on the grassroots nature of their efforts, others have questioned the role of outside funders and networks, depicting the local groups as being closer to “Astroturf” — a term referring to groups whose roots are not in fact local but made to appear that way by outside organizers.

Linnane reports on these concerns euphemistically; it’s book-banning and closet-confining that these extreme populists have in mind. See A Frenzy of Book Banning and Conservative school board wins may deliver chilling effect on racial equity efforts.

Kleefisch’s political action committee made a Whitewater candidate endorsement in April, and later spent much of the fall fighting (but losing) a destructive battle in the Mequon-Thiensville School District. Kleefisch will cause as much trouble as she feels she needs to cause to advance her own gubernatorial candidacy. She has, however, nothing to offer Whitewater except a horror-reel of distractions, exaggerations, and prevarications.

But if these extreme populists are destructive, then what of the conventional reply to them? It has been wasteful and tame. No one improves education for the many with astroturf for the few. No one advances education by pretending what they did is not what they did. No one solves educational problems by implementing a policy of ‘positivity’ on social media.

Those who have received a formal education should show, through their actions each day, a respect for inquiry and evidence. It does not require any formal schooling — whether high school, undergraduate, graduate, or professional — merely to assert that all is well.

As one can guess, this libertarian blogger would not have been a supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal economics. I am, however, much an admirer of the candor with which the New Dealers described the economic conditions they faced. They were right to describe the Depression fully. In their stark accounts, they showed respect for their fellow Americans. See What the New Dealers Got Right – What Whitewater’s Local Notables Got Wrong. For this, one sees, and rightly appreciates, Roosevelt’s greatness.

Whitewater will overcome her educational challenges not through good appearances but rather through good deeds.

Good deeds, however, often (and for this community do) require firm positions and hard choices. Whitewater deserves nothing less.

For Berlin Zoo animals, the tastiest Christmas leftovers are the trees: