NO! Local voters clearly rebuked most local school districts by refusing to fund their various levies. Most especially, the breathtakingly arrogant proposal for a perpetual levy in Coeur d’Alene failed to garner the 55% of the vote needed to become a permanent fixture in our lives.
I am thrilled! The complacent self-satisfaction of our local educational Nomenklatura needed a stern rebuke. Their pretensions to be experts defending civilized schooling from the ignorant masses is truly insufferable.
Certain board members, superintendents, administrators, bureaucrats, union bosses, and educators who expected deference have instead been denied. Neither their paper qualifications nor their professional expertise in the educational establishment were sufficient to overawe the populace.
Truly reflective educators would ask themselves where they went wrong. Curiosity about what they might have done to lose the public’s trust could bring about a useful self-criticism that could lead to positive change.
I suspect that none of this reappraisal will be done where it is most needed. These elite educators will likely interpret the closeness of the votes as carrying no mandate demanding them to change.
More than this, the voters are not cognizant of today’s wider professional education culture and its standards. Instead of questioning the fundamental assumptions of contemporary pedagogical practice, these leading lights will most likely see the problem as being one of mere marketing.
Resentfully, the disciples of pedagogical groupthink will forge ahead with their agenda for educational revolution. The Emperor’s New Clothes are simply splendid; if only the local yokels had the sophistication to appreciate their superior aesthetic?!
Unfortunately, most of these leaders have prospered precisely because of their loyalty to the fashionable philosophies within today’s educational establishment. These experts are almost constitutionally incapable of the kind of objectivity, curiosity, and humility that is necessary for worthwhile self-assessment.
Those entrusted to manage our public schools know that they are right. In their self-righteousness, they see no reason to change anything about themselves or the system that commands their chief loyalty.
Instead, they will continue to work to transform us, our kids, our society, and its traditional values from what we authentically are into what they deem we ought to be. Expect them to refine their messaging to justify what they are selling.
Their new rebranding will inevitably take the form of ad hominem wailing that citizens “don’t care about the children”. This calumny is almost never true. What we, who intend to take back our schools, want to save is every student from their bizarre social experiments and their indoctrination that is masqueraded as education.
Zealots do not engage in a sober reconsideration of their own assumptions and practices. Once they have embraced a dogma as the one true faith, a person can neither be reasoned nor negotiated with. They can only be steadfastly opposed and their policies defeated.
It is not a personality that reform-minded citizens oppose. It is a network of like-minded activists who have successfully converted their pet theories into the widely-accepted standards of the educational profession.
For us to reclaim our schools from Apparatchiks who have been consolidating their power for generations, we will need many more electoral victories.
Everything about the current educational system must be reconsidered and reformed. From Teacher Certification to student vouchers, from school law to the involvement of Federal and State bureaucracies, from curricular design to testing, and from discipline to emotional support; everything must be re-examined to reveal hidden agendas.
Until real power is taken from bloated government bureaucracies and returned to classroom teachers, building Principals, and parents, every student will be an involuntary test subject at the mercy of would-be social engineers bent on building their visionary utopia. Defeating most of our local levies was a good beginning. For the sake of every student, and for the future of a recognizable America, our fight to reclaim our schools from these unrepentant radicals has only just begun!
