Identity and Ideology in the School Boardroom (nber.org) 48
The abstract of a paper on NBER: School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members -- i.e., their ideologies -- forcing researchers to conduct tests based on demographic and professional characteristics -- i.e., identities -- with which ideology is presumed to correlate.
This paper uses new data on the viewpoints and policy actions of school board members, coupled with a regression discontinuity design that generates quasi-random variation in board composition, to establish two results. The first is that the priorities of board members have large causal effects across many domains. For example, the effect of electing an equity-focused board member on test scores for low-income students is roughly equivalent to assigning every such student a teacher who is 0.3 to 0.4 SDs higher in the distribution of teacher value-added. The second is that observing policy priorities is crucial. Identity turns out to be a poor proxy for ideology, with limited governance effects that are fully explained by differences in policy priorities. Our findings challenge the belief that school boards are unimportant, showing that who serves on the board and what they prioritize can have far-reaching consequences for students.
This paper uses new data on the viewpoints and policy actions of school board members, coupled with a regression discontinuity design that generates quasi-random variation in board composition, to establish two results. The first is that the priorities of board members have large causal effects across many domains. For example, the effect of electing an equity-focused board member on test scores for low-income students is roughly equivalent to assigning every such student a teacher who is 0.3 to 0.4 SDs higher in the distribution of teacher value-added. The second is that observing policy priorities is crucial. Identity turns out to be a poor proxy for ideology, with limited governance effects that are fully explained by differences in policy priorities. Our findings challenge the belief that school boards are unimportant, showing that who serves on the board and what they prioritize can have far-reaching consequences for students.
Evangelicals... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Evangelicals... (Score:3)
That would make you fetal alcohol syndrome jesus.
Re:Evangelicals... (Score:5, Informative)
...have known this for a long time. They've slowly ingrained themselves in school and library boards, banning books, forcing education changes in the US. And now we see the results: a largely uneducated and complacent populace, which votes against their own interest, but as long as Jeeeesus is here, all is great again.
Evangelicals and right-wing Republicans have focused on three targets over the last few decades: school boards, state legislatures, and federal judges. The school boards control education, and the Republicans recognize, just like Lenin, that indoctrination of young people has inertia that lasts for a generation. State legislatures control voting maps and direct and indirect methods to exclude undesirable voters. Federal judges are lifetime appointments, and it takes a lifetime to reverse the entrenched biases of existing judges. Furthermore, federal judges and especially Supreme Court justices have free reign to interpret the Constitution and laws however they wish, which is far better than the ebb and flow of legislatures.
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Indeed. This is also a recipe for a slow disaster and does incredible harm. Only deeply malicious people will be part of something like that.
Re:Evangelicals... (Score:4, Insightful)
...have known this for a long time. They've slowly ingrained themselves in school and library boards, banning books, forcing education changes in the US. And now we see the results: a largely uneducated and complacent populace, which votes against their own interest, but as long as Jeeeesus is here, all is great again.
Anti-identitarianism is embraced by many of the world’s religions - judge by character, not identity - and isn’t at all equivalent to identitarianism! Martin Luther King had the right idea, as much as that apparently bothers hard core progressives. To understand why the anti-identitarianism does NOT suffer from identitarianism’s foolishness using your very own “book ban” analogy, take a look at quotes from actual banned books. These books fully embrace the identitarianism at any cost, imposing it on grade schoolers, while discarding the common sense MLK supported:
https://www.newsweek.com/do-th... [newsweek.com]
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"God knows the right wing wants nothing to do with the actual Jesus."
Um, a direct quote from you.
It's not that you make no sense, but, well, actually that's all it is.
Waiting to see the subdomain trump.slashdot.org. You will revel in that.
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And with the precise same amount of proof, I could point to the fact school districts around the country are full of woke-ideologue genderfluid trans teachers, teaching pronouns before math and reading, and having first graders pick their new gender every day.
They're teaching children "Remember, parents are not entitled to know their kidsâ(TM) identities. That knowledge must be earned." (quote from actual teacher training in Eau Claire, WI) https://defendinged.org/incide... [defendinged.org]
And the Left was perfectly fi
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Ah, I see. /Unsurprising
Say x about the right, with no proof, +5 insightful
Say x about the left, even include a link, -1 Troll.
Re: Evangelicals... (Score:3)
Why on earth would only evangelicals know this? Everybody who isn't married to identity politics knows this. As an identity politician once said "If you have a problem figuring out whether youâ(TM)re for me or Trump, then you ainâ(TM)t black"
Re:Evangelicals... (Score:5, Insightful)
...have known this for a long time. They've slowly ingrained themselves in school and library boards, banning books, forcing education changes in the US. And now we see the results: a largely uneducated and complacent populace, which votes against their own interest, but as long as Jeeeesus is here, all is great again.
Do you believe in the principles of democracy, or are you a paternalistic Patrician who wants everyone everywhere to follow your NSH opinions?
The word "ban" has been so completely distorted by political gamesmanship that it no longer means anything. Choosing not to purchase or keep an existing book in your collection is not "banning" that book any more than me choosing not to watch FoxNews or choosing not to keep a Bible left on my doorstep by missionaries is "banning" FoxNews and the Bible.
The local communities who elect school boards and fund school districts that teach their local children have a 100% reasonable, justified, democratic expectation that their democratically-elected Board reps will operate the schools in accordance with the community's democratically-expressed wishes, including how to spend their democratically-allocated library resource budget and where to focus their democratically-selected curriculum. The smear phrase of it "forcing education changes" is deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic.
The phrase "slowly engraining" is the same political smear rhetoric. Elections are how those school boards got "engrained". That's literally what democracy is about -- electing people who will make the policy changes you want. Force example, the will of the people in 2008 was to elect Barack Obama and a Dem congress specifically to "force changes" in line with the Obama/Dem campaign rhetoric. People had a 100% reasonable, justified, democratic expectation that Obama and Congress would operate the USA accordingly. You could also say the recent election of Mamdani in New York is Democrats "slowly engraining themselves into NY city government". Yeah. And? That's what every single election does, every time.
Watching both parties pursue their long patronizing history of "we have save democracy except when it doesn't go the way we want, in which case we ought to use our superior ideas to override democracy" is one of the worst parts of this timeline.
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Thanks for omitting the one important fact: A certain portion of the ideology spectrum are breaking the rules and traditions of leading schools and states while demanding everyone else pretend they're aren't. This year, those people aren't limiting their behaviour to niceties: They are breaking laws.
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Thanks for omitting the one important fact: A certain portion of the ideology spectrum are breaking the rules and traditions of leading schools and states while demanding everyone else pretend they're aren't. This year, those people aren't limiting their behaviour to niceties: They are breaking laws.
This statement is so vague as to be impossible to discuss or know if it follows at all from what has been said previously.
Clarify, possibly with examples, what you're referring to. That way we can determine if the things you have in mind are indeed 100% exclusive to "a certain portion of the ideology spectrum".
Otherwise, they may just be part of the ever-expanding Executive branch which has been steadily enabled by Congressional abdication for decades now. Multiple successive presidential administrations a
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> So long as people keep seeing the capacity for evil only in the Other, and not an innate, universal outgrowth of their own nature, humanity will keep producing Neros and Maos and Stalins and Hitlers and Pots and Mobutus. And also Clintons and Bushes and Bidens and Trumps
You just reiterated the vagueness you were complaining about. But, in my opinion, that vagueness is inevitable without assessing matters of scale, method, and perspective. There’s nuance.
While Obama-Biden accreted and shifted a su
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Interestingly, this does not apply to everybody. Some people develop fact-checking abilities under the most hostile circumstances, namely being brough up in a cult. To be fair, that is the target situations of the evangelicals and they are getting closer to it.
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Well. While from a scientific viewpoint I applaud their demonstration of what can be done, I have morals. These people do not.
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...have known this for a long time. They've slowly ingrained themselves in school and library boards, banning books, forcing education changes in the US. And now we see the results: a largely uneducated and complacent populace, which votes against their own interest, but as long as Jeeeesus is here, all is great again.
I am a lawyer that has specialized for the last 20 years in prosecuting the crimes of institutional and government entities in turning a blind eye to child sexual abuse. Defendants include the Catholic Church, the Federal Government, and California Counties. I can definitively state that you and the most vocal in this thread are off their rocker. Exposure of children to sexual material at a young age is indisputably damaging to their psychological well being. That is the sum total of the "book banning" deb
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are you implying that *all* those books were banned because they contain some sexual content ? First, many were banned with no sexual content at all.
Correct. There may be exceptions but the exceptions do not gobble the concern.
Second, sexual material is harmful to children when it is *forced* upon them; most kids who see a sex scene in a movie or read it in a book or comics will ignore it entirely, or turn their head away in disgust (*), or skip/fast forward... In either case, no harm done. Yes, I've been paying attention to how my kids handle such material. Nothing bigoted or shallow about that. Kids simply won't borrow a library book that doesn't interest them.
False. Curiosity about sex is innate. The ability to process and judge risk is a function of maturity. Therefore, exposure to sexualized material is appropriately regulated by parental discretion not government fiat and leftist religion.
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leftist religion
Yeah. Right. /s
Identity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Identity (Score:1)
Identity is hardwired into the lizard brain. It takes constant mental effort to refrain from using that portion of your mind.
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100% agree. The brain partially determines one’s place in the “power hierarchy” via very deeply wired ancient instincts. This goes WAY back in the evolutionary record. It’s been determined lobsters and humans share the same hardwiring.
Are they in the room with us now? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Our findings challenge the belief that school boards are unimportant"
Who is saying that?
They're frightfully important.
Like towns, there are all levels of varying dynamics - there are strong school admins with rubber-stamp school boards; there are overwhelmingly powerful school boards making critical decisions for tens of thousands of students, and unfortunately, usually beyond culpability for the policies they inflict.
But I don't think anyone has suggested they're unimportant.
Many people worldwide may not
Equity focused types correlate (Score:1)
with rich districts. Where performance skews higher.
More BS.
Yes, elected officials do matter (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, the ones who deal with schools have big impacts on the running of the schools they oversee, for good and for evil. This is somehow surprising?
What the hell is this rant? Who the hell is Styopa? Why should I care about their rambling, clueless, childish opinion?
this does not belong on slashdot (Score:1)
can you keep this culture war stuff out of here? What ever happened to posting about linux distros?
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I think it should be news for nerds and stuff that matters, which this is not.
How was academic achievement measured? (Score:5, Informative)
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Electing an "equity focused board member" probably means changing (dumbing down) curriculum and/or grading scales in order to achieve equal outcomes.
Yep. That tracks, per identitarian “logic”, lowered disparity counts as a win regardless of outcome. That’s a core tenet of Critical Theory. In fact, if outcomes overall improve at all levels, and disparity therefore increases (as it must mathematically), then CT assesses the widened gap as evidence of an “ism” (“racism”, “fascism”, “colonialism”, etc.)
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Electing an "equity focused board member" probably means changing (dumbing down) curriculum and/or grading scales in order to achieve equal outcomes.
Yep. That tracks, per identitarian “logic”, lowered disparity counts as a win regardless of outcome. That’s a core tenet of Critical Theory. In fact, if outcomes overall improve at all levels, and disparity therefore increases (as it must mathematically), then CT assesses the widened gap as evidence of an “ism” (“racism”, “fascism”, “colonialism”, etc.)
Yes, I’m replying to myself, but this really grates on anyone objective who bothers to read CT OGs like Delgado, Crenshaw, Kendi, Foucault, etc. The popularized form of CT and its twin DEI - the 1619, Kendi, or virtually any DEI department form - is just plain nuts.
And the formal academic forms are only slightly “better”. They hedge and use a higher syllable to word ratio - but that’s ultimately just window dressing. Deep down, most of those “academics” all literally unbl
Keep Ideology Out of Schools (Score:2)
religion (Score:2)
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Well, if you let organized evil take over, what kind of outcome can you expect?
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What is organised religion, and do you have proof that it's bad and that it is real and is happening?
Please, I'm religious myself, and I don't want to do anything bad.
The Big Picture - a Case Study (Score:5, Insightful)
California is all-in on imposing the exact same identitarian based equity this school board study tries to tout, yet it’s an all around debacle. It’s plummeted in the national NAEP state rankings, especially in classically underserved demographics, and its colleges are surging remedial classes - 25 percent of whose students got straight As in K-12 math.
What’s going on? Maybe, just maybe, discarding blind justice, standardized testing, long proven teaching methods, and empiricism, then replacing them with “equitably” judging by identity and “narrative is truth”, as identitarianism demands, isn’t such a great idea?
First to set the stage, this isn’t about funding - California spends about twice as much per K-12 student than many other states, and its teachers, like teachers in virtually every state, make significantly more the state’s median salary and have significantly better benefits than the private sector. Second, California’s COVID response is routinely blamed for its K-12 problems, and it certainly deserves part of the blame as shutting its K-12 schools down for almost two years certainly didn’t help, but California’s steady decline goes back about 15 years (well before COVID).
So where does that leave us? Again, maybe, just maybe, California’s broad commitment to identitarian progressive pedagogy policies deserves just a little scrutiny? Let’s look at the top progressive initiatives in K-12:
Mainstreaming: Mix students with widely varying learning levels into the same class. Teachers love this (not).
Seattle Math: This type of curriculum goes by many names. The goal is to limit expectations of mathematically correct answers, and limit rote learning of concepts like “times tables”, in favor of rewarding effort and narrative. This may explain the multi-X increase in new California state college students being directed into remedial math, despite a quarter of these students getting straight As in high school math.
Whole Word Learning : Replace “phonics” - aka sounding out words according to their spelling - with rote recognition of the meaning of whole written words. (California is now reversing away from whole word learning.)
Hire based on identity : Increase the priority of group identity when judging suitability for hiring.
Drop advanced classes : Advanced classes measurably increase disparity, so simply eliminate them.
Teaching college equity : Lower standardized test based admissions requirements for teaching colleges, as these have been shown to decrease admissions of historically underrepresented groups. The corresponding SAT scores of admitted applicants have now been lowered below the median - to the 42nd percentile according to some estimates nationwide. Note that due to SATs now being “easier” than the 1980s by about a hundred points, and the far wider cohort taking SATs, even this “42nd” percentile achievement is significantly less demanding than it was forty years ago.
Restorative justice : Assure punishment for infractions is equally distributed among identity categories. This sounds good in theory until the reality hits: implementations regularly achieve this equity by disassociating the level of correction from the level of the infraction. In other words, deprioritize consequences that are proportional to the infraction if that’d upset this equity. A particularly fun part of this initiative is to ensure victims apologize to aggressors face-to-face (for potentially encouraging aggression) as a way to de-escalate. Whatever could go wrong?
Limit standardized testing : The claim here is that such testing reveals different results for different identities, and therefore must be biased and unhelpful in helping to detect where students need help. In unrelated news, virtually all top tier colleges have reinstated SAT admissions requ
It used to not be this way (Score:3)
Having worked in public schools for 20 years now, the vast majority of school board members just went along with rubber-stamping about 99.9% of everything that was recommended by school officials. They had practically no reason to not trust what was happening in their school. Also, a majority of board members I've worked with didn't have college degrees, so I think some of the materials presented to them might have felt a little over their heads in the first place.
What's really concerning is that, when it comes to policy, at least in our state of Minnesota, there's a Minnesota School Board Association [mnmsba.org] that has actual lawyers that monitor state statutes and craft template policies for school districts to use. Most adopt them without any modifications, because why argue with the lawyers that do this work professionally?
I guess a more accurate title to this paper should be "Usurpation of the School Boardroom".
They needed a study to tell us this? (Score:1)
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The simple issue at play here is trust. People want a syllabus immune to the whims of politics, that they can enforce regardless of who's in power. At the same time, they distrust the enforcers, and disagree about the criteria used to judge syllabi for "political bias." (One's "obvious bias" is another's "objec
"large causal effects across many domains" (Score:2)
Thank you for sparing me the need to read even the summary.