Jeffco School Protests: Context and Context [View all]

[politicat]

Since 19 September, 2014, teachers and students have been protesting through walkouts and sickouts against the school board's attempt to alter the compensation of teachers without public discussion, and to establish a curriculum review in the teaching of history with the purpose of ensuring that the curriculum does not promote civil disorder or disobedience, and promotes patriotism and civil obedience. Three members of the five member board also want to gut the elementary school health curriculum, though details on that are more sketchy at present. As of today, Sept 25, walkouts and protests are running around 1000 students and their parents at Littleton, and in the upper hundreds at several other sites.

This seemed to come out of nowhere -- Jefferson County is an urban/suburban part of the Denver Metro area. It's the home of Coors Brewing and the Colorado School of Mines. It's Golden, and Littleton. It's a mostly white (90%), mostly comfortably middle class (median household income $67K), mostly educated (70% of adults have at least some college, 95% have graduated from high school) county of half a million people. Poverty is under 10% in the county. In 2012, it went for Obama by 52%, and is considered on the bluer side of the violet spectrum.

Jeffco Public Schools educates about 85,000 students a year in 93 elementary schools (some are K-8), 20 middle schools, 18 high schools, 16 magnet and special services schools, and notably, 12 charter schools. It spends about $5700 a year per student, and runs an average budget of around $500 million per year. In Jeffco schools, 93% graduate and 85% go to at least community college.

It is the 32nd largest school district in the United States, and the full oversight of this enormous district is done by a hired Superintendent and staff, and 5 elected board members with no needed qualifications beyond citizen and registered voter. They don't even have to undergo the same standard background checks required to hire a school bus driver or part-time office clerk -- no fingerprints, no criminal record check. One could have spent a dozen years in a Supermax for armed robbery or murder and still be elected to Jeffco school board. Jeffco holds its school board elections in odd years, which are usually very low turnout years, and the school board is elected to four year terms. Two were elected in 2011, and three were elected in November, 2013.

Those three seem to be the focal point for the board's current hard right shift. Each is uniquely unqualified to oversee primary and secondary education, and all appear to have significant conflicts of interest that, in any other position, would have precluded them from being seated. All seem to have been elected by less than 20% of Jeffco's electorate (given that Colorado votes primarily by mail, this is a low-ish turnout). The one who has received the most attention is Julie Williams, who is part of the Neville family. She received 82,000 votes of 135,000 cast in 2013. She was endorsed by the Republican Party, despite Colorado school board elections being officially non-partisan. In Colorado, the Nevilles have been arch-conservative activists for a while. Her father in law is a former state legislator and current crony; her brother-in-law is running for State Senate Disrict 16; her nephew is the lead lobbyist for Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. Williams herself is a dental technician (or possibly a receptionist at a dental hygiene shop -- it's complicated), with no advanced studies in primary education, pedagogy, history or administration. Given her writing in recent press releases, she may not have gotten a passing grade in ENG101. She is not qualified to have a debate on historigraphy, contextual education, or academic standards.

John Newkirk is an engineer, also endorsed by the Jeffco Republican Party. He opposed a state-wide initiative to raise income taxes to fund public schools, which was on the same ballot as his election to school board. He has familial conflicts of interest -- his sister runs a private pre-school in the town of Evergreen, which has been trying to get full day kindergarten and Pre-K, and would have done so if Amendment 66 had passed. This same sister has been harassing protestors in Evergreen, and has been harassing others on Facebook, going so far as to use her daughter's account when her own was blocked. If Newkirk voted for Jeffco schools to fund Evergreen's full day kindergarten and public pre-K, his sister's business would be damaged. As an engineer with a business background (his election site said that he had run two businesses, but neither seems to come up in public records searches), he has no advanced studies in primary education, pedagogy, history or public administration. He is not qualified to argue on historigraphy, contextual education or academic standards, either.

Ken Witt is an IT professional with a degree in mathematics, also endorsed by Jeffco's Republican Party, who also opposed Amendment 66. His election website claimed that he ran the Aabren Group (a consulting firm) but no record of that company has been found in any state's Corporation Commission. The other company he cites, Turillion, is based in Texas, not Colorado, and produces low-quality, entry-level firewall software that is poorly regarded amongst network professionals for its vulnerabilities and lack of flexibility. He, too, has few qualifications in pedagogy, primary education, history or public administration, and no background in historiography, contextual education or academic standards. Upon becoming a member of the board, he changed his LinkedIn profile to read: "Technology and Security Information Executive - Jeffco Board of Education." This is completely misleading. It also appears that Witt has demanded the district's IT staff turn over the master passwords to him. This would give him access to faculty and staff employment records, student-teacher email, firewalls, and student records.

These three were elected primarily on the strength of money from a PAC called Jeffco Students First Action. As a 501c4, information is a bit limited, though their legal paperwork was filed through the Hackstaff Gessler firm. Gessler, as in Scott Gessler, the conservative Colorado Attorney General who spent his first year in office claiming he could continue to work at Hackstaff Gessler and be AG without any conflicts of interest; who tried to expense his partisan participation at the Republican National Convention; who has fought tooth and nail against mail ballots, open voter registration and the county clerks. Hackstaff Gessler is not a cheap, storefront firm that does simple divorces and wills. If they did the Jeffco Students First Action paperwork, they were either well paid or the PAC is well-connected, or both.

Students First appears to be astroturf -- when their website first appeared, it looked like a template copy of the National Students First site (yep, that Michelle Rhee fiasco that pushes charter schools, privatization and vouchers while breaking the NEA.) No parents who are involved in the schools organized it, and the official head, Sheila Atwell, is not a Jeffco student parent; her children attend private schools.

After the election of these three in November, 2013, relations between the newly reconstituted school board and the Superintendent's office rapidly declined. Cindy Stephenson, who had been Jeffco's Superintendent since 2002, abruptly resigned in February, 2014, stating via Twitter, "I can't lead and manage because I am not respected by this board. I can't make decisions. This board does not respect me." and "I have approached the board and I will be gone by the end of the month. I can't manage this district with this board." She was replaced by Dan McMinimee on July 1, 2014. Hiring McMinimee itself is controversial, since it was a 3/2 board decision -- the two board members elected in 2011 did not approve of McMinimee's hiring. Also of note: during the candidate search process, Ken Witt wanted to put his own hat in the ring for the job, despite having no qualifications to run a half-billion dollar public educational institution serving 85,000 students. He tried to get the qualification requirements altered so that he could be hired.

McMinimee is in over his head. He was an assistant superintendent of secondary education for another school district. Douglas County RE-1 (Castle Rock area, south of Denver) serves 61,000 students in 70 schools. While it is the third-largest district in the state, an assistant superintendent is not as responsible as the person in the top chair, his district was smaller and had fewer and primarily newer schools. He also lacked full responsibilities -- he wasn't required to oversee facilities, purchasing, accounting, curriculum and legal in his previous job. He appears to be entirely cowed by Witt, Williams and Newkirk, and unable to stand up to them.

While Jeffco was without a Superintendent, Witt, Williams and Newkirk hired Brad Miller to serve as their counsel in a backroom deal. Miller appears to be being paid a $7000 a month retainer out of Jeffco District funds to defend the activities of Witt, Williams and Newkirk. Miller is also a co-owner of Charter School Solutions, and as such, has a massive conflict of interest. Miller also appears to have written conflict of interest policies that specifically exempt him and his company.

These three appear to have been elected via the partisan involvement of several local mega-churches: Faith Bible Chapel, Flatirons Community and Crossroads. These three organizations appear to have turned out members to both campaign and vote. If true, this is a major violation of their IRS religious exemptions. Churches are allowed to advocate for specific social policies and legislation, but they are specifically prohibited from endorsing or promoting any specific candidate.

The two major issues at stake in this battle are over teacher compensation and retention, and curriculum standards. Teachers in Jeffco have been without a contract for months now and have not received a raise in years. Currently, first year teachers in Jeffco get $33K a year (or $16.50 an hour, assuming a 40 hour week, which no teacher ever works), in an area where the median first home costs $280K, the cost of living is above 110% of national median, and student loan debt runs $30K. The consultants hired by the board recommended that all teachers rated effective or highly effective receive raises. Witt specifically put out a counter proposal that would raise starting salaries to $38K, but would make it much, much easier to fire older, more experienced teachers (who often have salaries in the $50-60K range.) The most recent proposal would have 40% of a teacher's effectiveness based on student scores on the state's standardized tests and only 20% on peer review. Witt's proposal would require teachers to continuously improve their students' scores from year to year or lose their effectiveness ratings. While Jeffco is a privileged district, Colorado's performance scores for students have leveled out in the past couple years. When compared with all students in the state, 80% of Jeffco students are in the top two quintiles of student performance, as is to be expected of a moderately wealthy, comfortable, stable middle class district. Student performance in the top two quintiles has been stable for twenty years; all improvement has been the students in the lower quintiles. These students are already performing at or above grade level, and at close to their capacity.

Continuous improvement is a great MBA phrase, and it works reasonably well in manufacturing, but eventually, there are no further inefficiencies to trim out of a system. That's true of Jeffco schools. They're a functional system, and their teachers are doing an excellent job. Expecting continuous improvement is like expecting every athlete to beat their own stats every week. It's an unreasonable expectation that will force excellent teachers to leave and will promote inexperienced, improving teachers above those with a deep skill set. It will also place unreasonable expectations on students to outperform the previous year's students, and will overemphasize the standardized tests over actual education.

The curriculum standards are another kettle of fish. History education itself is a tricky and convoluted subject, because the reason we teach history is not to memorize dates and names, but to instill contextual learning. Its entire purpose is to teach critical thinking and integrated systems thought. The fact that most people don't retain most of their primary and secondary education in history after leaving school proves that current methods are ineffective. Currently in the US, what we teach at the K-12 level is political history, rather than social or cultural history. Political history can be fascinating, but it is a dry subject with strong partisan viewpoints. Contextual learning can be taught with any historical subject matter -- the history of transport for car fanatics, history of clothing for fashionistas, food and agricultural history for budding chefs and farmers. In fact, it might be better to give the motorheads transportation-centric history because it engages them in a way that names and dates don't, and they will retain the ability to contextualize long after they have left the classroom. This, as it happens, is how college level history is taught after getting through the overview courses. It is a study of integration and context within specialization, rather than a broad field. In fact, most collegiate level history classes begin with an admonishment to students to dump everything they learned in K-12, because it is so poorly written.

The other issue with history education is that, because we are primarily teaching political history from a broad perspective, partisan issues become magnified. The classic example of this is the many decades in which American History texts de-emphasized the role of slavery as the cause of the Civil War. This was because it was unprofitable for a text publisher to put out a book that would not be bought by Southern states. The history wars are just starting to simmer again, but they're comparable to the wars about creationism and evolution in the sciences. The difference is that science has an objective aspect, while history is the study of context, viewpoint and integration. Without context, integration and viewpoint, the study of history is nothing but names and dates. That's what we've been teaching, and that's why it's failing, and such a battlefield.

We have a structural problem in this country with elected school boards. Parental/community involvement is a necessity, but all too often, we elect people with no qualification or education to run expensive, public interests. They wield enormous power which we, as citizens, too often have too little attention to oversee. We make our boards very small compared to the number of students in the district, and do very little vetting in the election process because their elections are either far down-ballot, or held in odd or off years. Since our media markets are so conglomerated, the amount of time that any news agency has to cover school boards is compacted. Denver metro has 4 network news stations and one newspaper. It has 16 school boards and city councils. They have no way to cover all of the board meetings, council meetings and elections, which means that most voters go to the polls with minimal information and get hardly any after those bodies are seated. It's only when sheer incompetence and malfeasance happens that we notice. This likely means that lesser incompetencies and misappropriations are happening all over, and just skating through.

From my place near the ground, I expect the protests to continue as long as McMinimee, Witt, Williams and Newkirk remain in place. Williams in particular has an amazing talent for storing her feet in her mouth, and appears to be a tragic victim of Dunning Krueger. McMinimee is the product of either the Peter Principle or the Dilbert Principle (he's either been promoted beyond his capabilities and will remain in that place, or he started out beyond his capabilities and continues to be promoted so that he becomes Someone Else's Problem.) Witt appears to be attempting to mine the district for personal profit. Newkirk appears to be doing the same, but for family profit. Given that little verifiable employment history seems to exist for either Witt or Newkirk, I'm not sure either one is actually working. They seem to both have the coded LinkedIn "consultant" and "CEO" tags attached to them -- consulting for nobody, CEO of a one-man shop that never makes a contract.

The children who are organizing these protests aren't stupid -- they're some of the brightest, most engaged children in the state, coming from an excellent district. They know what bullshit smells like, and they're well aware that quite a lot of it has been shoveled in their direction recently. They may not have the deep data to articulate what they're seeing, but they're willing to defend their educations, their teachers, and most importantly, their futures. The AP History class and test, like all AP classes, means that they start college with a few extra bucks in their pockets, because if they don't have to take World Civ, English 101, AmHis 101, Physics 101, and/or Math 101, they aren't paying for that semester. Which means that they come out on the other side with less debt. They will continue to fight for this -- and also, because organizing a protest that brings down a school board really does look good on a college application.




http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_24809131/colorados-neville-family-is-growing-into-political-dynasty
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25737949/jeffco-school-board-names-superintendent-finalist-daniel-mcminimee
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/jeffco-schools-superintendent-abruptly-resigns
http://thejeffcotakeover.blogspot.com/2014_02_01_archive.html

http://co.chalkbeat.org/2014/08/28/jeffco-board-rejects-fact-finder-recommendations-chair-makes-new-compensation-proposal/#.VCRlr2K9KSM
http://wittforjeffcoschools.com/about-ken-witt/
http://coloradopols.com/diary/63166/the-madness-of-julie-williams-2
http://jeffcoschoolboardwatch.org/?p=2313