S. H. Knight Science Camp classroom, Albany County, Wyoming.
January 25, 2022
On a totally different topic, and not really related to the election directly, the Wyoming Superintendant of Education recently resigned, which means a new one has to be picked.
That entails forwarding three names chosen by the populist controlled far right Republican Central Committee to the Governor. The Committee has now chosen their three picks. They are:
1. Thomas Kelly, who occupies a position with the American Military University, and who indicated in his application that he relocated to Wyoming, which he did only very recently, from Colorado as Colorado's schools, he asserted, were teaching climate change, mulitple genders and white supremacy.
2. Brian Schroeder, who is an educator by profession and head of Veritas University, a Christian K through 7 school in Cody.
3. Marti Halverson, a far right wing Republican East Coast/Chicago ex pat who arrived in Wyoming in 1996 and who has been in the legislature.
The choices were obviously very political and fit in with the Central Committee's current populist hard right wing view. The last superintendant to fit that bill, who was elected to the position, proved to be highly unpopular with Wyomingites. Nonetheless, the Central Committee's candidates leave the Governor with little choice but to pick somebody far to the right.
Chances are, I'd guess, it will be Schroeder, who appears to be the most qualified and least politicized.
One committee member, Tom Lubnau of Gillette, raised concerns that the process used to pick the candidates was unconstitutional, as the committee is not longer proportionally representative. Given the current atmosphere everywhere, that should be a clear warning that whomever is chosen is likely to end up with their qualifications to hold office challenged in court.
Governor Gordon has five days to pick from amongst the three. Whether he has a choice to send back for a redo I don't know. He does with judicial nominees, but that process is likely different.
Whoever occupies this position will only be doing so until November, or upon their reelection in November.
This entire development sort of nicely tees up the current conflict in the GOP and the state's poltic's in general. Traditionally the WEA, the teachers union, has been one of the very few strong unions in the state and used to have a very strong influence over who occupied this position. None of the candidates in question will have that relationship with the WEA. Jilian Balow had been careful to monitor the spirt of the times, while not diving too deeply into it, but chances are that two out of the three here would not be so restrained.
January 25, 2022 cont.
Tom Lubnau's prediction of a lawsuit was correct. It was filed today, and he's one of the plaitniff's.
This is an extremely interesting development as it would suggest the mainstream part of the GOP is attempting to stage a comeback, and throught he court. With the GOP having just sidelined the Natrona County delegation, and this suit now coming on, the party may be facing a litigation backlash that will be essentially taking on the current leadership.
Anyway a person looks at this, this is going to amount to airing some dirty laundry, and the nominees to the Governor aren't going to get up there quickly. Chances are the court will order a stay on the nominees and this will carry on for at least a little while.
At the same time, a Carbon County Legislature raised the eligibility of a Laramie County Legislature who has been very active as a respected establishment Republican to continue to serve in the Legislature, asserting that redisctricting may have zoned him out of his district. This was raised as an asserted question, but it can't help be noted that the challenge comes from the populsit righ against a legislature who openly spated with Anthony Bouchard of the populsit right. The matter has been referred to the Secretary of State.
January 26, 2022
Federal Judge Skavdahl enjoined the Governor from slecting a Superintendant of Public Education until he could consider the issues in the new suit.
January 27, 2022
The Trib is reporting that the Court ordered the Governor not to make a choice until he "makes a decision" today.
Wrong.
What he did, is to enter a termporary order holding:
ORDERED that Governor Gordon shall not fill the vacant position of Superintendent of Public Instruction with any candidate forwarded to him by the Case 0:22-cv-00016-SWS Document 11 Filed 01/26/22 Page 1 of 2 Defendants prior to issuance of this Court's Order on the Motion for Temporary Restraining Order, which shall be issued no later than 12:00 p.m. MSI on January 27, 2022.
That doesn't mean that the Court will have made a decision on the case. Far from it. The Court, today, will make a decision on the Temporary Restraining Order.
January 28, 2022
Yesterday, the Court lifted its TRO on the basis that the plaintiffs' suit was unlikely to prevail on the merits. Accordingly, Governor Gordon selected Brian Schroeder as the new Superintendent of Public Instruction. Schroeder was fairly clearly the only realistic pick out of the three who were nominated.
Indeed, with the injunction lifted, the Governor was statutorily obligated to make his choice yesterday.
It has to be presumed that Schroeder will announce for this position and run for it, rather than simply choose to occupy it for a few months.
South Pass classroom, 1974.
This drama has now sort of concluded. Brian Schroeder, a recent import to the state of Wyoming who is the head of a Christian academy, will be the new Wyoming Superintended of Education, taking position over Thomas Kelly, another recent import who has a position with the American Military University, a non profit on line university, and Marti Halverson. Kelly moved to Wyoming from Colorado as part of the populist import thing going on, complaining about what he feels is a liberal based deterioration in education, or educational values. The third finalist was Marti Halverson, a far right wing Wyoming politician originally from Chicago.
The names of all of those submitted are:
- Michelle Aldrich
- Megan Degenfelder
- Reagan Kaufman
- Thomas Kelly
- Jayme Lien
- David Northrup
- Joseph Heywood
- Joshua Valk
- Marti Halverson
- Brian Schroeder, Sr.
- Keith Goodenough
- Angela Raber
I don't know who they all are, but to the extent I know something or have learned something, and taking out those already discussed;
Boxelder School, Converse County Wyoming.
Aldrich: She is a professional educator and has been (or is) on the Cheyenne City Council.
Degenfelder: She's' apparently a regulatory specialist with an oil and gas company.
Kaufman: She's a professional educator in Cheyenne.
Lien. Don't know, which doesn't mean anything.
Northrup. Former legislature, maybe a farmer.
Heywood. Educator with Wyoming Virtual Academy.
Valk. Educator with Casper College and a recent arrival.
Goodenough. Long time Natrona County politician.
Raber. Educator at Northern Wyoming Community College.
Okay, now if we assume (and maybe we aren't) that you should be an educator, or maybe a demonstrated administrator, who would we have been looking at.
Aldrich: She is a professional educator and has been (or is) on the Cheyenne City Council.
Kaufman: She's a professional educator in Cheyenne.
Heywood. Educator with Wyoming Virtual Academy.
Valk. Educator with Casper College and a recent arrival.
Kelly.
Raber. Educator at Northern Wyoming Community College.
Schroeder.
Well, two out of those six names made the finalist.
One of the Casper high schools from the air.
Of all three, however, we certainly see political views at work. Gordon was left with three choices, but really two of them were pretty much untenable, really.
Now, here's a dirty little secret of the Wyoming nomination process. Boards very frequently nominate two no goes and one go, knowing that they're not really leaving the Governor with three choices, but only one. You see it all the time. The Central Committee likely knew that there was no way that Gordon was going to pick Halverson and that picking Kelly was highly unlikely. Effectively, they may have simply picked Schroeder and then weighted the dice.
That's politically legit, of course.
But is Schroeder the best choice?
Well, if you have a certain world view, no doubt.
But does this system of choosing a replacement make sense?
No, not really.
It might have at one time.
Bolsler Consolidated School, Bosler Wyoming.
This system was dreamed up when most people didn't graduate high school. The general gist of it was that something around 40%, more or less, of Americans made it all the way through school. A good 60% left school before they were finished. More males left than females, and for a solid reason. They were going to work and, up until really after World War Two, having a high school education didn't give you that much of an advantage if you were going into blue collar work. One local rancher around here, for example, took his kids out of school at 8th grade. By that age, he reasoned, they'd learned everything useful that they were going to that related to their future agricultural career.
Those going on to white collar occupations were more likely to stay in school. Girls were also more likely to stay in as female employment was quite limited and dropping out of school, for most of them, meant domestic employment at home. Who would opt for that if they had anyway to avoid it?
Education, moreover, was extraordinarily local early in the state's history. Towns, like Casper, would hire a teacher who worked for the town. The teacher was nearly always a young woman who had some sort of education. Not too infrequently she simply had a high school education, but relatively early on we began to see "teachers colleges" that specialized in educating teachers. And here's an important clue on the current system.
The western states realized that one of the ways they suffered enormously was from a largely uneducated population. Farming and ranching was fine, but they felt that if they were going to have mines, industry towns and cities, they needed to emphasize education. Education, in facdt, became a huge deal in the West, with Western states being nearly manic about it.
This saw the creation of teachers colleges as part of this movement and concern. Chadron State in Nebraska, for example, was originally a teachers' college. And it also saw the creation of the system we now have, with local school districts and school boards controlling schools locally, and the Wyoming Department of Education heading it up overall.
In a society in which high school graduates were either a minority or a slim majority, and everyone pretty much appreciated the need for education, or at least the classes involved in politics at the time really appreciating it, the system worked very well, and it made a great deal of sense that the head of the whole thing was an elected superintendent. That person had a role that pretty much everyone agreed on, the complete and full education of students and keeping them in school.
Is that still the case?
There's reason to doubt it.
No matter what the cause of it may be, a person doesn't have to be paying all that much attention to realize that over time the number of topics hotly debated as to what will be taught regarding them has expanded enormously, and politically. There were early examples, of course, with the Skopes trial being a prime example. But by and large, in most places in the West, people took the view that a good education was the primary goal. People didn't have a lot of debates about what should be in science books. I don't recall a single kid being dragged out of a science class for discussing evolution. I'm a child of two devout Catholics, but when we came home with a note about "sex ed" in high school, my father read it and put it aside. 100% of the students attended, including all my co religious. It was information, we knew, not a values suggestion.
For that matter, a weirdly disorienting introductory film to the topic was shown to us kids in grade school with no note being sent home at all, perhaps because the film actually taught so little it conveyed no information at all. All I can recall about it was the information that calling girls on the phone caused nervousness (a true fact).
And so on. Nobody stormed the school regarding history, etc. etc.
And when my own kids went, which is pretty recently, the same was all true.
Now they aren't.
Starting with the South, or seemingly starting with Texas, there's been all sorts of fights once again about what is appropriate to teach both scientifically and historically in school. The fight in the sciences is almost always over 1) evolution, and 2) climate change. These are political, not scientific, fights. Nonetheless, within the last decade at least one person ran for a Wyoming school board in recent years whose own children were not sent to public school at all, and probably topic #1 had something to do with that.
We see this in the recent nominees. One of the three nominees had, among his complaints, that the schools in Colorado were "teaching" climate change. Most scientists agree that anthropocentric climate change is happening and is a real threat. If the schools are touching on it, they're reflecting that fact, which is what they're supposed to do. However, many people also confuse their economic views with their scientific ones, and feel that one follows the other.
Now, there's also all sorts of assertions that schools are teaching left wing social items. Maybe some places they are. But here they are not. Nonetheless, the debate's spilled over into the state.
All of this reflects the heavily divided nature of the country right now. The 1619 Project provoked the 1776 Project. Debates rage on Critical Race Theory even if no school in the state is teaching it. And fears that something will happen yield to the certainty that it is in fact happening.
This has caused an open debate to some extent about the schools and what they are teaching. Wyoming's public schools are excellent, and there's no reason to believe that they're teaching subversive anything. To listen to some quarters, however, you'd think the opposite. For a time I ended up on a mailing list, for example, in which almost daily I received emails from the same author on all the horrible books that were in the Gillette schools, in the author's view.
Now, parents have a right, and indeed a duty, to educate their children. This includes making value judgments, but it also includes approaching education, including home education, honestly. The state Superintendent of Education, however, has an obligation to educate everybody's children.
That duty is distinctly different from a parent's duty in certain fundamental ways. In this multicultural society, parents who have distinct cultural views that are not society's overall will have to take up the laboring ore. For this reason, various religions have always sponsored private schools, with Catholic education being a prime example. What the state doesn't have the right to do, however, is to impose distinct cultural views on the population as a whole . . . even though it sort of does has that right.
That last statement, no doubt, at first blush doesn't make a lick of sense. How can that be true? But that's a big part of this debate. The hard left undoubtedly has its own social views, and they are largely at odds with most Americans. That the left has had some impact on education is true. But by and large it has not co-opted it. The fear that it has, however, has lead to a pretty massive counter reaction. So, as an example that's already mentioned, we have some who are arguing for a massive overhaul of historical focus, which has created a counter reaction by those who would present a sanitized heavily patriotic view from solely a right wing prospective.
A really good example of this is provided by way of an advertisement for some sort of educational institution in the pages of a recent sporting journal. Showing what is supposed to be a college classroom, apparently, the professor is telling the students how they'll learn to hate their country in the class, and how "FDR, Karl Marx and Malcolm X will be your new heroes".
That an ad like that ends up in a widely distributed magazine is stunning in and of itself, but the proposition shows how extreme people are now viewing their own history. Marx isn't anyone's hero in the US out of a certain nutty far left caste. FDR, however, was hugely admired by most Americans and still is. To put him in the same camp as Marx is massively absurd. Malcolm X, moreover, is a hero to some Americans including some who are neither Black Muslims or Muslims, and he is a uniquely American character quite frankly who has to be treated subtly to be grasped.
A person may wonder what this has to do with this process, but right now the Wyoming GOP leadership is in the far right camp, and at least a couple of these nominees demonstrate that. The electorate isn't, however, which cuts the other way. But the overall question remains.
In a field which has become increasingly scientific over the years, and which requires professional certification to profess in, does it make sense that this position be a political one?
It might not. It might make more sense that the Superintendent of Education be appointed by the Governor from applicants qualified in their profession, and to serve a term that's staggered with the Governor's so it doesn't automatically change with each change in administration.
