DAVIS: Culture Commands in Public Education

by Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

I suppose I’m buying beer and cheese fries this week.

A bit of trash-talking about the superiority of the Naval Academy (we’re a Marine Corps family, of course Navy’s better), with someone who cherishes West Point and grunts, and that’s what you get when you make a bet on the Army-Navy game and come up on the short end of the scoreboard.

It’s all good-natured fun.

As my neighbor, a Vietnam Vet (Army) and combat veteran tells me often, the ribbing between the branches is fierce, but when the battle’s on, there’s no finer, more united, fighting force in the world.

If only those of us in politics could learn to fight like those in the military. Good-natured ribbing in peace time, yet united in battle when the stakes are highest.

Editing Minutes to Correct Books: The Last Chapters
of an Orwellian Majority

This past week, Adele Uphaus broke two major stories about what happens when the team you march with — the Spotsylvania Tea Party, in this case — becomes more important than the enemy we face: poor education.

For two years, the Spotsylvania School Board majority of Kirk Twigg, Lisa Phelps, April Gillespie, and Rabih Abuismail have voted in lockstep on book banning, hired and supported the hiring of supremely unqualified people (Mark Taylor and Jon Russell, among others) while giving the proverbial middle finger to anyone who disagrees with them, specifically those who sport blue jackets instead of red jackets, or red-jacketed people whose attire had been branded with the Scarlet Letters RINO.

When they were embarrassed at the polls on November 7, what happened? As Uphaus exposed this past week, they first brought in Kirk Cameron and SkyTree books, who openly cheered the end of Scholastic Books in Spotsylvania.

Per Cameron:

The superintendent of the district is so excited about this; they have gotten rid of Scholastic, and they have put in SkyTree book fairs.

And that’s just one of the questionable aspects of this party that Superintendent Mark Taylor hosted.

For an encore to this most recent fiasco, Lisa Phelps placed on the agenda for Monday night’s board meeting altered minutes from meetings that happened over a year ago. Uphaus’ bombshell report is sure to cause debate Monday night when Phelps tries to move these altered documents through on the Consent Agenda.

Among the changes? Minutes from the September 22, 2022 meeting that were originally brought for approval in November before being tabled had correctly noted that Twigg had officers remove William Scheff for expressing his thoughts about Taylor as superintendent.

In the new version up for approval Monday? The reference to the removal is now omitted.

The rest of the changes Uphaus brought forward are worth repeating here.

Other changes to the draft minutes for the September 12, 2022, meeting include the removal of a comment Phelps made about a board member winning a car at a YMCA raffle, and the removal of a comment made by board member April Gillespie accusing board member Nicole Cole of being racist.

Several changes have also been made to the minutes for the September 15 meeting, at which the board went into closed session to discuss Taylor’s contract. The original draft minutes state that after returning from the closed session, the board discussed social media posts made to Taylor’s social media account expressing anti-LGBTQ and anti-public-school views.

The draft minutes attached to the agenda for Monday do not mention this discussion.

Changes to the minutes for the September 16 meeting include the removal of details of a discussion the board had concerning a letter from Taylor’s daughter expressing doubts about his ability to serve in the role of superintendent; the removal of some details concerning Shelley’s objection to entering into closed session to discuss Taylor’s contract; and the removal of specific points of concern expressed by Shelley, Cole and board member Lorita Daniels about some provisions in Taylor’s contract.

This type of rewriting history is Orwellian. And it’s dumb. It doesn’t erase the historical record. It just spins a yarn they can point to as “official” when the inevitable backlash comes.

It’s the best explanation I can come up with for a blatantly political act that one would find cooked up not in a well-written James Bond novel, but in the less-than-serious-and-beyond-funny worlds of the Captain Underpants and the Diary of A Wimpy Kid stories — two series of books filled with such terrifying information the school district is probably still reviewing the titles for all we know.

Politics is Easy; Governing is Hard

In January the battle lines in Spotsylvania will shift, as a new majority — Megan Jackson, Belen Rodas, Nicole Cole, Carol Medawar, and Lorita Daniels — governs the gavel.

What tactics will the new leadership deploy?

April Gillespie, who previously marched with the out-going board but showed herself capable of a more-democratic impulse on the nights Phelps disappeared and Gillespie had to run the show, has previously yielded the gavel responsibly and with respect for a wide range of voices. As the tide is turning, she has shown an interest in working cooperatively.

How the incoming leaders treat her will be our first clue to how things will go in the coming months.

Yet how the new leaders deal with Taylor and Russell — both of whom cannot reasonably believe they’re going to hold their current jobs into 2025 — will be another indicator.

My colleague Shaun Kenney wrote smartly about this recently.

First and foremost, if the termination of Dr. Baker was considered to be all of the evil things it was said to be — fascism, segregation, racism, bigotry, Christian Nationalism, etc. — then doing the exact same thing in the exact same way (or worse) would not only forfeit every inch of the moral high ground, but far worse it would confirm every drop of criticism leveled at the apparatus of public education in Spotsylvania County.

If this is really about power rather than education, and if it really was about who is in power and who is not? Then a return to normal isn’t a return to a uniparty education perspective.

Second and perhaps more damning, if this incoming majority chooses to repudiate how it campaigned? Then buckle up for a long two years. Satisfying as it might be to reach down and pay Taylor and those whom he brought in with their own coin, in one instant the new board will confirm the criticism of every crank and blowhard defending the old one — that this was indeed all about political power and indoctrination, not professionalism and education for its own sake.

On this point, Kenney is quite right.

Spotsylvania is a conservative-leaning county, and regardless of how people reading this column may feel, the fact remains that a substantial percentage — perhaps even a majority — of people in this county feel that the school boards which have preceded the disaster of Twigg, Phelps, Gillespie, and Abuismail were not exactly sensitive to their issues and concerns.

“Perception is reality,” as the old political mantra goes.

So it remains absolutely vital that the incoming Spotsylvania School Board leadership hear from those who feel unheard and dismissed by the current school system.

Does this mean Spotsylvania’s book-banner extraordinaire be given carte blanche to again begin her single-minded effort to remove everything she doesn’t like from library shelves based on a deeply flawed reading of Virginia State Code?

Of course not.

There’s a wealth of ground between anything goes on library shelves and burn anything that even suggests teenagers are sexual beings (SPOILER ALERT: like it or not, teenagers are sexual beings).

The temptation to reach for the partisan will be strong, yet it should be avoided at all cost. Finding solutions that meet the common good — not the highest good — should be the new SCPS board’s lodestar.

An example of what happens when elected officials yield to that temptation? Look no further than the leadership exiting stage right in January. The present conservative majority ran on the common good: school finance. As soon as it gained power, they reached for their perceived highest good: culture wars.

The Task of Finding the Common Good in Public Education

So what precisely does the common good look like in Spotsylvania?

That is for this community to decide and for the incoming Board to sort out.

Allow me to suggest, however, that both community and the incoming leadership for Spotsylvania County Public Schools take some time to read the editorial page of Sunday’s Washington Post.

The Post’s editorial board wrote a piece titled: “APs don’t help the many kids who fail. But ditching them isn’t the answer.”

For decades, AP exams have been held as a model of academic achievement in high school. But there’s a problem:

More than $22 million in taxpayers’ money every year gets spent on test fees for low-income students who emerge with what is essentially a failing grade. That hardly benefits the high-schoolers in question, who leave the courses with neither a college credit nor, presumably, a firm understanding of college-level material — taken together, the point of AP classes. And it doesn’t benefit the federal and state entities funneling funds toward that end. It benefits only the College Board.

Should we end AP in schools?

No, says the Post. Instead, aid the low-income students who can benefit from the exam but aren’t prepared for the rigor the courses require.

Who is leading the way? The Post points to two Deep Red states (Deep Red in terms of who controls the government, anyway) for the answer: Texas and North Carolina.

The aim is to identify kids who have the potential to excel as soon as possible — and then give them the support they need to do it. That will require screening for talent, already common practice among the affluent but less so in lower-income public schools. North Carolina and Texas both recently instituted rules by which students who score in the top tier on the state test in a subject are automatically placed in an advanced course for that subject the following term. This is a smart step.

Good ideas are good ideas. They cross political boundaries.

It’s time to stop using political parties as our lodestar. They push us towards fanatical and perceived highest goods which seek to clarify and divide, which in turns steers us toward the petty hatreds and siloed thinking tearing at the fabric of our community.

Look no further than social media — or the comments section — if you need evidence.

What should guide us? Preparing children to become productive, respectful, inclusive, and literate adults. Everything else is secondary.

Have the debates, pick at one another (good-naturedly), offer competing evidence, and argue for your position.

Yet in that same breath, have the courage and the confidence to listen deeply to those who disagree, understand why they are where they are, build a relationship around that which guides us towards common solutions for common goods — and where there is division, how we disagree matters a great deal more than the disagreement itself.

In short, don’t make perfect the enemy of the (common) good.

Our men and women in uniform understand this culture. Shouldn’t we?

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-Martin Davis, Editor