Who Will Be Top Teacher?
Three candidates vie to lead the public school bureaucracy
Last week I had the opportunity to hear from the three candidates who are running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. This office, established as part of the executive department of the state by the Idaho Constitution, is responsible for 20,000 teachers and more than 300,000 students in the Idaho public school system.
In full disclosure, I am not a big fan of the public school system. I believe it is irreparably broken and needs to be reformed from the ground up. The American public school system was based on the Prussian model that was designed to turn out citizens who were prepared for either the factory or the battlefield. American schools were intended to inculcate good citizenship in our students, which in the 1930s meant believing in God, honoring our founders, and embodying traditional values of hard work, honesty, and a love of liberty.
Today, that same system is used to indoctrinate our children in Marxism, in identity politics, in extreme gender ideology. Today, public schools graduate students who can barely read or write, yet are fully up to date on LGBTQ+ propaganda and Critical Race Theory. They create citizens who hate America, their heritage, and their own parents. The public school system throughout America is in the hands of activists who seek to raise our children to hate our country. These activists work through school boards, teacher unions, lobby groups, and textbook publishers to create an environment where their propaganda can do its work.
You might think that Idaho’s public schools would be safe from this onslaught, but that is not the case. Last week, Anna Miller of The American Mind wrote a scathing article detailing how extreme gender ideology - promotion of homosexuality, normalization of transgenderism, and worse - is being preached to Idaho schoolchildren not only by teacher unions and nonprofits but by the Idaho state government itself! Take a minute to read the whole piece - the situation is far worse than you imagined.
I have my own experience in the public school system. I attended Washington state public schools from kindergarten through graduation, and then worked in a public school district for five years. These are my impressions, my admitted biases about the system:
The top 20% of teachers are awesome people who love children and are passionate about helping them learn.
The bottom 20% of teachers are borderline illiterate but are hard to fire due to regulations and union pressure.
The middle 60% are fine, and are there because it is a reasonably well-paying job with good benefits and summers off, but it is not their passion.
There are conservative teachers, but the system as a whole is very left-wing.
Public schools are a one-size-fits-all model. Advanced students are often held back from what they could achieve, while everyone is pushed to prepare for college, no matter where their talents lie.
Classrooms spend a lot of time on busy work, because by law they must stretch instruction out over 180 days.
Any effort to reform the system meets resistance from the system. Both administrators and teacher unions stymie true reform because they would rather we just dump more money into their pockets and call it good.
Christian conservatives have long decried the malign influence of public schools. Older generations complained when they took prayer and Bible reading out of classrooms. Younger generations have watched as Critical Race Theory and extreme gender ideology became the norm. Yet the public school system remains a crutch for parents who are unable or unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary either to homeschool or pay for a good private school. When schools shut down due to the Covid-19 lockdowns, this should have been the biggest boon to conservative parents in history! We could have utterly destroyed the teacher unions, taken control of our local districts, and remade the system entirely! Alas, instead of taking advantage of the system shooting itself in the foot, parents demanded that schools reopen.
While I would very much like to completely raze the current public school system and rebuild it from scratch, I recognize that is not currently feasible. The system has become part of a massive bureaucracy, and those things are hard to control. The person we elect as State Superintendent for Public Instruction must be willing to make some radical choices to reign in the bureaucracy, remove Marxist propaganda, and give power back to parents and families.
Three candidates are standing for election to the office this year: Incumbent Sherri Ybarra, Debbie Critchfield of Burley, and Branden Durst of Boise.
Sherri Ybarra has spent a long career in public education. She was elected State Superintendent in 2014, succeeding Tom Luna, who has gone on to become Idaho State Republican Party Chairman. Ms. Ybarra was reelected in 2018 and is running for a third term this year. In her appeal to the Ada County Republicans, Ybarra emphasized her experience in the school system, as a teacher, principal, and administrator, and claimed to be the best state superintendent in the nation.
Ms. Ybarra promised to investigate any allegations of Critical Race Theory in Idaho schools, but said that her job was not to police the curricula. That is for communities and school boards, she explained. She boasted about writing a strongly-worded letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland after he said that parents coming to school board meetings were domestic terrorists. Ms. Ybarra did not take any questions from the PCs in attendance, but she did quote President Abraham Lincoln who, in his 1864 reelection campaign, said that a rider should not change horses midstream. She seems to enjoy quoting Lincoln, as she has another quote of his on the front page of her government website.
My impression of Ms. Ybarra is that she is a creature of the system. She has operated inside the public school system for so long that she has no idea what the world looks like outside of it. She seemed mostly unconcerned with the Marxist indoctrination that has taken over our schools, and my sense is that she sees her role as maintaining and expanding the public school bureaucracy rather than reforming it to better serve children and families.
Debbie Critchfield is a school administrator in Cassia County and has been a Republican activist for that region as well. She served on the State Board of Education for seven years, and was president from 2019 to 2021, overseeing the state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
My impression of Ms. Critchfield was that she too is operating from within the system. While her positions sound stronger than Ms. Ybarra’s - Critchfield came out strongly against Critical Race Theory, offered a “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” and said she did not think public schools should be in competition with private or home schools - she did not seem to grasp the gravity of the situation regarding leftist propaganda. When I asked her about how to counter the left’s grand strategy in using teacher unions and nonprofits to control curricula, she went on a tangent about how to control contract negotiations with teacher unions. When another PC asked her if she supported education money following the student, rather than going to the public schools, she refused to give a solid answer, instead talking about figuring out a comprehensive funding model for public schools.
The most egregious answer came when a PC asked about the State Board’s hiring of Marlene Tromp to run Boise State University. Ms. Tromp has been under fire by local conservatives for her entire tenure because of how she has pushed extreme Marxist ideology onto BSU students. Ms. Critchfield’s answer was that social justice simply never came up in their interviews. She explained that Tromp had come to them highly regarded for her administrative experience. Apparently neither Critchfield nor anyone else on the State Board of Education even considered that a Silicon Valley bureaucrat might use her position to push left-wing ideology. That is a massive blind spot, isn’t it? Even worse, Critchfield did not seem to understand the point of the question, as if the controversy was no big deal.
Branden Durst is a former Democratic state legislator, serving in the Idaho State House from 2006 to 2010 and the State Senate from 2010 to 2013. While in office he championed education reform, and is now running for State Superintendent on a radical platform. Last week he outlined his three most important issues: End Common Core, stop Critical Race Theory, and allow money to follow students.
Mr. Durst went as far as to say that Idaho should stop taking federal money for education, a position for which I have long advocated. It is taxpayer money that allows the federal bureaucracy to impose its will upon the states in an end run around the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. I was pleased to hear Durst recognize that problem.
He answered several questions from the audience of PCs. I asked him what concrete steps he could take as State Superintendent to accomplish his goals. He gave three ways - the seat on the State Board of Education (State Superintendent is the only board member that is elected; the other seven are appointed by the governor), influence with the legislature to push good laws, and a bully pulpit to speak directly to parents.
Of the three candidates, only Branden Durst understands the depth of the problem with our public school system. Sherri Ybarra and Debbie Critchfield come across as bureaucrats who would work to maintain the existing system, while Durst would upend it for the benefit of students and parents. Because that is the problem - the system is built for the benefit of teachers, of administrators, of the activists who seek to control our children. It needs disruption, the same sort of disruption that Donald Trump brought to national politics.
The public school system in our country is irreparably broken. Idaho is not immune from the cancer that has long been growing in our classrooms. Conservatives need to retake this institution, and the way we do that is from all sides. We need strong parents who will make their voices heard in school board meetings. We need solid people to run for election to those boards. We need a legislature that will pass laws stopping the propaganda and indoctrination. And we need a State Superintendent who will be a champion for children and families, not a defender of the bureaucracy.
I endorse Branden Durst for this office. Consider voting for him in the primary this May.
Is it possible that Durst is a Democrat Trojan Horse only pretending to be a conservative in the same way Boise Mayor McLean pretended to be moderate when she’s was really just another SJW?