We won! What now?: The underside of school board election victories
We won — because we have WISRED. WISRED does for our local elections what partisan registration does for us on the national level.
“No more” is so palpable in Waukesha County, that a conservative candidate for any local public office here need only be included on a WISRED election flyer to secure victory. In their third year of existence, this past election cycle, the WISRED turf-out rate hit 90%, and I was swept into office as a member of the Pewaukee Board of Education.
School board election victories are tied to the public’s belief that a change in leadership will fix our public schools. If we, those of us who are profoundly aware of the ugly underbelly of these schools, are unable to impress upon the public the magnitude of their misconception of the problem, these victories will be of little permanent consequence.
Ours is a school district of glass-enclosed classrooms, motion-triggered lighting systems, and a Colosseum-esque football stadium. The state’s report card for our district shows a 10-year flatline for academic achievement: 42% of our students cannot read at grade level. The other 58% are on the school’s academic honor roll.
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On paper, we have a 5-2 majority. And have had it for two years. The 85-page annual budget report, which is the focus of $200,000-per-year administrators over a period of eight months, is submitted for approval to a largely dazed, $4,000-per-year school board. Check registers, usually 70 pages of 700+ items the district is poised to purchase each month, are submitted for our approval 72 hours prior. Is $97,000 for 25 days of substitute teaching an appropriate amount for a 270-teacher school district?
At $36 million annually, our district budget, like our district, is one of the smaller ones in the county. Even so, it is too easy, if not almost necessary, to let an efficient administration carry on. Two of our five WISRED-supported members have succumbed to that ease. So, the administrator, district CFO, and curriculum director sit at the head of our board table. It is their agenda.
My other two fellow conservatives did not come in with an alternative vision for public support of education, nor any idea how to fix what we have. Are the age-inappropriate lessons in the K-12 curriculum related to the sharp increases in student anxiety, drug use, and suicide? If we bring in a classic curriculum, how can we guarantee that the teaching staff we are compelled to hire by the state, a staff trained by the state, will not bring the new curriculum back in line with that of the state?
The public’s’ strong objection to our school’s Black Lives Matter social sciences curriculum was fixed by slapping a new label on it. Where administrators once spoke of Common Core and Critical Race Theory, they now speak of emotional-social learning, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Gender ideology is not spoken of; it is just there. There is a barn-style playhouse in our third-grade classroom, and rumors of furries. I don’t know if the rumors are true. Worse, I don’t have a reason to doubt them. Concern over this mind-snapping turn in public education is everywhere but in the minds of our school administrators. In terms of the visceral-tightening that accompanies it, the question, are there furries in your classroom, is almost indistinguishable from, are you molesting my child?
What is not rumor is the transgender participation policy of the WIAA (Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association), of which our district is a member; and pages 5 and 6 of our district’s NonDiscrimination Procedures.
“For those who can read, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of the material handicaps to earning a living entailed by functional illiteracy,” writes public education scholar E. P. Cubberley. He knew this in 1935. Our district’s literacy rate is 58%; state-wide, it is 40%. In Milwaukee’s school district, it is 20%. Most children can be taught to read before they leave kindergarten, notes Larry Arnn, president of the privately-funded Hillsdale College. By most, the president means 95%. By kindergarten, the president means those K5 classes found within one of the nearly 100 public charter schools the college supports. Who are these 40-percenter public education experts?
Our public education system is a 150-year unbroken line of movement toward a monopoly of uniformly-administered state-run schools — toward a vision of that expanded scope and centralized authority that is instinctively sought by every government bureaucracy that has ever existed. In 1960, America had a population of 150 million, and 200,000 local school districts. Today, America has a population of 360 million, and 24,000 school districts. Milwaukee’s school district, 70,000 children, is larger than the city of Pewaukee. The number of nomination signatures required to run for its board, 400, is the same as that required to run for our state senate.
As night follows day, the school voucher expansion currently on offer will be accompanied by a rollout of the necessary government rules to drive all voucher-accepting schools into conformity with state-run schools, producing the educrat’s long-desired extinction of all competition to state-run education — and reducing this expansion cure to a placebo. The first of these rules will be to require that all teachers in voucher-accepting schools be licensed by the state.
The private sector may say no, as it has said for many years in Milwaukee, where 27,000 eligible students sit on a waitlist with 200 million dollars of vouchers in their pockets.
The private sector’s appetite for vouchers, when issued as competition to government-run schools (the Milton Friedman voucher), is, and will remain, a function of space — between a private school’s financial bellybutton and its spine. Seventy years after the 1955 introduction of the Friedman voucher, the incursion of the country’s first choice program into the monopoly of government-run schools is but a wedge. The 40-percenters are first, and foremost, the guardians of the unbroken line.
Any American who has ever critically reflected on our public education system is eventually struck by its singular absurdity: a system which has no direct knowledge of limited self-government, whose well-heeled existence depends on the exact opposite, cannot possibly be the means by which we preserve the blessings of such a government to our posterity.
We fund a system that is, by its nature, inclined to acclimate our posterity to bureaucratic compulsion, and “expert” rule. On the heels of their overwhelming victories, WISRED is warning our overwhelmingly-conservative county that the majority of our young voters are not voting our way.
What now? Unless there is a follow-on to our election victories, a clearly articulated alternative, something to move toward, something to change to, the new boards will eventually be ground down to exhaustion, and all the marginal adjustments made will eventually be reversed.
Parent-centered public support of education, where all monies annually collected by the government in support of education are uniformly, universally and exclusively distributed to parents for exclusive use on K-12 education of their choosing, where compulsion is replaced by encouragement, and where our publicly-governed local school competes on an equal footing with all other school options, is a uniquely American form of public support for education.
A charter public school, which operates under far more local control than its district public school counterpart, is a stepping-stone toward this alternative. District public schools can be converted into charter public schools, almost seamlessly, by a school board resolved to do so.
In the meantime, a school board with a strong reform majority can speak plainly to its constituents. Until such time as we can report to this community that the board has control of, and faith in, all that occurs within our local schools, the board recommends extreme watchfulness on the part of parents, and if it is at all possible, the removal of your children from these schools.
A 150-year-old system whose 2023 pinnacles of achievement include the first generation-wide decline in IQ scores, kindergarten sex “experts,” and mutilation-affirming educators, is an irredeemable system.
May God grant us the courage to take this 150-year-old embodiment of our civic pride into our hands, face it for what it is, and end it.
Mary Larson holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Mount Mary College and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Marquette University. Mary’s experience in the teaching profession includes K-12 math and science at University Lake School, math and science at Bryant Stratton and Waukesha County technical colleges, and high school math in the Shorewood School District. She also served as a gymnastics coach for the Wauwatosa West High School girls’ gymnastics team. Most recently, Mary deployed to the Mediterranean Sea with the U.S. Navy as a math instructor in their College Afloat program, and, in like capacity, deployed three times to the Eastern Pacific Ocean with the U.S. Coast Guard. Mary is a former executive search consultant and past president of Robert E. Larson & Associates, Inc., and a past president of the Data Processing Management Association – Milwaukee Chapter.
