Governor Kristi Noem’s two appointments to the state Board of Education Standards represent two pillars of the South Dakota Republican Party’s approach to government: cronyism and antipathy to public education.
Last month, Governor Noem named Julie Westra and Phyllis Heineman to the board that works on curriculum standards, teacher certification requirements, and school accreditation.
Real-estater Julie Westra’s experience in education is one three-year term on the Sioux Falls School Board. Her main qualification for this post is that she’s married to Steve Westra, the Governor’s Commissioner of Economic Development. Expect Mrs. Westra to push for career and technical education standards that prepare kids for the well-paying jobs on the feedlots her husband and the Governor are promoting.
Phyllis Heinemann’s experience in education appears to consist of teaching at a private college over 40 years ago. Long after that, she served eight terms in the Legislature. Her signature legislation was her 2016 measure funneling tax dollars away from public schools and into Christian schools via tax breaks for her husband’s insurance industry. Heineman served on the board of “South Dakota Partners in Education,” the private group formed to manage these Christianist-insurer stealth vouchers. (I say “served” because these underminers of public education like to keep their vouchers and their operations stealthy—they haven’t posted a report on how they are diverting public dollars to their theocratic project for two years—so we can’t trust that their list of board members is up to date.)
Noem’s appointments of Westra and Heineman show that experience in public education is not a primary criterion for choosing citizens to manage our schools. Noem and her party want friends of friends and friends of their God, not friends of public education.
As with most republican appointments today, knowledge and experience in a subject is trumped (sorry) by financial interest and ideology.
Wasn’t Steve Westra part of the Blue Ribbon Education study group? I want to say he opposed the final recommendation and organized that opposition in the House.
Yes, O, Steve Westra was on that Blue Ribbon Panel when he was a Rep. from District 13. And yes, Rep. Westra voted against 2016 HB 1182, the sales tax for teacher pay raises, in 2016. Much more important, GOED chief Westra will tell us now, to spend money on factory feedlots rather than teachers and students.
Buckobear, yes, the lesson Republicans want us to draw from the Trump era is that literally any idiot can be put in charge of important government functions.
Alas, Phyllis Heineman is no idiot. She came up with a very smart plan to forward her goal of depriving public schools of money and using tax dollars to promote her religion and her husband’s business.
Cory and Buckobear, isn’t it more insidious than that? Don’t Trump or Trump-like appointments point to the dismantling of public institutions? It is not putting incompetent people at the helm, but putting those at the helm that will undermine the mission (of not the existence) of those institutions.
This is where the “deep state” discussions come in. The rank-and-file of public employees (in this case our school teachers, administrators, and support professionals) take up the slack and do the crucial work that they signed on to do.
Heineman sounds like SD’s version of Betsy DeVoid of All Humanity.
If you want your children to have a first rate education, get them out of SD! RUN!!
This fits here, though it is appropriate for several of these posts regarding SDGOP regressive, ignorance promoting bills.
A wise woman named Jane Jacobs studied democracy on a local level, cities and towns, and worried over its fragility on every level. Her research showed that what is true in Miller is true in Aberdeen is true in Minneapolis is true in Pierre is true in Austin is true in Sacramento is true in our federal government. It is this, via Sheila Kennedy’s blog:
“Dense, varied populations are desirable, Jacobs wrote,
‘because they are the source of immense vitality, and because they do represent, in small geographic compass, a great and exuberant richness of differences and possibilities, many of these differences unique and unpredictable and all the more valuable because they are.’
“If vitality comes from diversity, decline comes from homogeneity. Early indicators of decline in places like [Miller]–a decline we increasingly see in small towns across many states, including Indiana–are :
“cultural xenophobia,” “self-imposed isolation,” and “a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit … to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” She warns of the profligate use of plausible denial in American politics, the idea that “a presentable image makes substance immaterial,” allowing political campaigns “to construct new reality.” She finds further evidence of our hardening cultural sclerosis in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the prioritization of credentials over critical thinking in the educational system, low voter turnout, and the reluctance to develop renewable forms of energy in the face of global ecological collapse.”
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Please read the entire brief essay. It is very much worth your time.
Debbo! We should send a copy of Jane Jacobs’s observations to Senator Novstrup. I suspect he’d just snort and tell us to move Jane Jacobs’s state… but darn it! she lived in Toronto.
“mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview,” has a nearly perfect record of destruction for those who indulge in it.
9I believe that’s what did in the great Arab civilizations. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate heartbreaking irony, if the USA’s leadership disappears for the same cause as our fundamentalists’ perceived greatest bogeyman?
Karma. Damn.