It takes a special kind of opportunist to actively seek the endorsement of one of the two major political parties and, once elected, publicly repudiate the idea that you belong to that party. But, then again, Liz Bradsher has made it clear she’s that kind of a special opportunist.
In an article in today’s Fairfax Station Patch, Bradsher admits to having greater political ambitions, but can’t give a straight answer to anything else – except that she is not a Republican. When asked if she had greater political ambitions, she first responds with a wishy-washy “I might,” and when asked if she was a Democrat, she responds with another semi-answer of “Maybe.” But when she was asked if she was a Republican, the answer was one of the only answers she gave unequivocally: “No.”
Not a Republican? So why did she campaign as the Republican endorsed candidate? Why did she actively seek our endorsement when she ran in 2007? Why does she still to this day have on the front page of her campaign website a list of endorsements including the “Republican Party?”. The answer is simple – running as a Republican was an easy way to win in Springfield. But following the Clifton school close debacle, and her angering of Del. Tim Hugo and Supervisor Pat Herrity – along with many rank and file Republicans including myself – she knows that Nancy Pelosi has a better chance of getting the Republican endorsement next year than she does.
Rumors have been swirling around about the possibility of Bradsher attempting to run against against Pat Herrity for Springfield Supervisor next year. I can only say that nothing would make me happier – I can’t think of a better way for the Republican party to unite around Pat after the difficult primary we had last June. Bradsher’s behavior in office, coupled with her blatant backstabbing of her own constituents in the Clifton school closing debate, have made her one of the least popular figures in Springfield. If she were even able to convince the Democrats to nominate her – which I doubt – she’d be trying to win an election in a district that went heavily for Keith Fimian and Bob McDonnell. That, coupled with her unpopular stance on Clifton, her condescending and brash attitude, and her party flip-flopping, leaves her with no real base of support.
The article, frankly, is the best evidence I’ve seen yet that Bradsher’s delusions of grandeur are leading her to want to take on Pat Herrity next year. She specifically attacks Herrity, who tried to champion keeping Clifton open because Clifton’s own school board representative had turned her back on them, saying “I told [the Clifton parents] that this was a School Board issue. It wasn’t an issue for the Board of Supervisors. And if they [advocated through Pat Herrity] it was going to be a detriment to them, because he does not make the decision and he does not have a good relationship with the School Board.” Perhaps the reason the Clifton parents went to Herrity was simply because they knew their own School Board representative wasn’t advocating for them?
Bradsher’s entire attitude on this issue is pathetic. She says in the interview, “And I can guarantee you … this is the first time someone said no to Clifton.” That’s not the tone one expects from an elected official – certainly not an elected official speaking about her own constituents. She had a duty to represent her constituents. Not the school board, not the entire FCPS. She represents Springfield. And the voters in Springfield support Clifton and we supported the effort to save Clifton’s school. We expect that our elected representative is going to care more about us than about folks in the rest of the county who have their own representation. I find it laughable that Tina Hone, a Democrat and at-large member of the board, voted to keep Clifton open and Bradsher didn’t. If anyone has the best interests of the entire county at heart, it would be Tina Hone – she represents the entire county.
Bradsher is going the way of Arlen Specter. She’s turned her back on her constituents, and now she’s turning her back on the party that put her in office. And she seems to be doing so in order to line herself up for a run for Supervisor against Pat Herrity. The politics of personal ambition. It seems clear to me, based on her attitude and her actions, that she’s not in this for anyone but herself.
And that’s just sad.
Brian,
I’m going to stick my neck out here and hazard a guess that you don’t like Liz Bradsher very much. To me, she is what we have become fond of calling “a teachable moment.”
The School Board is supposed to be non-partisan. Liz is a poster child for why we shouldn’t have political party “endorsements” for SB candidates. This process attracts too many people who are interested in being elected to the SB primarily as a gateway to higher office and only have a secondary interest in the county schools, if that. In Providence District where I live, John Jennison was a textbook (no pun intended) example of that last year. Fortunately, the voters saw right through him and soundly defeated him.
You and I disagreed on the closing of Clifton Elementary. To me, that was political suicide on the part of Liz. However, it is instructive to consider why she voted the way she did. Was she an out-of-touch politician just following the recommendation of the FCPS staff or was she a courageous public official taking an unpopular stand that was in the overall best interest of the county? Either way, political considerations trumped the economic analysis and she will likely lose her SB seat because of it.
All the more reason to de-politicize the county School Board. After all, we don’t elect the regents and trustees of our public universities. Why do we need an elected School Board? Popular opinion is often not the best management policy.
I don’t believe in the idea of a non-partisan office – the only good reason for them around here is to get around the Hatch Act.
School Board, like any other elected office, can be a springboard to higher office. Steve Hunt is an obvious example, as is Kaye Kory. Bradsher looks like she wants to follow in the line of officials who got their start at school board and moved up from there.
I don’t like Liz, that is true. From the things I’ve read and heard, she strikes me as exactly the wrong kind of person to run for office – someone in it only for themselves, and someone who doesn’t have the patience that holding elected office requires.
I wasn’t in Fairfax for the debates over changing the School Board from an appointed to elected body, but I am always going to be in favor of greater democracy.
All I want or expect from those who get elected is simple: representative government. We didn’t elect Bradsher to represent FCPS or the entire county. We elected her to represent Springfield. She wasn’t the deciding vote on closing Clifton, so there’s no good reason why she should have voted against her constituents. And her response, as noted in this article, is repugnant. She’s treating and speaking to her constituents like they’re her children. I find that offensive.
Read that interview – if you don’t come away from it thinking the woman is unfit to hold public office, I’ll be surprised.
Brian,
I agree that the woman is unfit to hold elected office. However, I question whether every public office should be elected. Representative democracy is certainly a noble ideal, but it does not necessarily always produce the most desirable results. Judges, for example, are not elected in most states and in the states where they are elected they typically have problems with judicial independence. Pardon and parole boards are rarely, if ever, elected for obvious reasons. In Virginia, our county executives are not elected while in Maryland they are. Look how well that has worked out lately.
My point is that in Virginia we have a Board of Supervisors who control the county school budget. We don’t need an elected School Board that is expected to be more responsive to their “constituents” than to the overall greater good of the county school system.
Yes, Liz could have voted to keep CES open and the SB would have closed it anyway. That would have been a very smart, and morally coward, course of action for her to take. As for her people skills, I agree that they cannot be described adequately without using the verb “sucks.”
Brian, with all due respect to federal employees, I don’t believe that allowing them to run in school board elections is a sufficient reason to have the hypocrisy of having so-called non-partisan elections become completely dependent on the Democrats and Republicans. If you want to criticize a candidate endorsed by the Republicans for not being a Republican, then you have pretty much admitted that “non-partisan” school board elections are a fraud. Candidates endorsed by the firefighters don’t have to be firefighters. Candidates endorsed by the Fairfax Education Association or the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers don’t have to be teachers. It is rather arrogant for Republican or Democratic activists to complain that school board members or candidates are insufficiently subservient to the local political party committees.
Virginia,
Actually it is even worse than what you describe. In order to compete for the Democratic endorsement in Fairfax County, each candidate must sign a loyalty pledge that they will not run without the Democratic endorsement and that they will support the candidate who does receive it. I’m not sure of how the Republican mechanism works, but I am confident that it has the same effect.
Both political parties have worked to hijack the “non-partisan” school board elections in Fairfax County. And it stinks. There is no role for partisan politics in setting education policy for our public schools or in managing their resources as provided by the BOS. What will be next, party endorsements for which candidate gets selected for principal positions by the superintendent?
HisRoc,
You are right that there should be no place for partisan politics in school board elections. You are even more right in going to the fundamental problem–as you said earlier, “We don’t need an elected School Board…”
Here is the population of Fairfax County in 2009: 1,037,605.
This is more than the population of the following states:
Montana 902,195
Delaware 783,600
South Dakota 754,844
North Dakota 642,200
Alaska 626,932
Vermont 608,827
District of Columbia 572,059
Wyoming 493,782
Think of the time and money spent on Senate races in these states. How much effort should the at-large candidates for the Fairfax County school board put into their election campaigns? Do we really want to go all out and make an even bigger political production of school board elections in Fairfax County? Should we spend the amount of money the Senators in these states spend to be elected? Would this really have anything to do with education? School board elections may make some sense in small school districts where people basically know the people who are running. I don’t think they are very helpful in Fairfax County.
Virginia, I agree that it would be best if we simply made these positions partisan and allowed for the usual vetting process that all candidates receive through the party nomination process.
HisRoc, I’m unsure about the loyalty oath part, but I do know that the endorsement decisions in the FCRC are made in the magisterial district in a magisterial district mass meeting – the recommendation is then voted on by the entire FCRC, but in my experience those votes have been a rubber stamp – the real work is done in the magisterial districts. We don’t simply hand out endorsements to candidates who do not ask for them, so Bradsher had to actively seek the endorsement, and I understand she did and had the blessing and support of a Republican member of the House of Delegates (not Tim Hugo).
While the population of Fairfax County may outweigh many of those states you listed, the actual powers of the School Board are not even close to the power of a Senate race – the School Board doesn’t even have the power to tax like some other school boards do across the country. So the chances of those races turning into massive spending races is minimal.
I don’t have a problem with the democratic process, and frankly I think if School Board electeds actually acted and thought like elected officials, many of the issues out there – like Bradsher’s abysmal handling of this issue both before and after – would go away.
No matter what the powers of an individual office are, the mechanics of how to seek support from voters are similar. That is what gives party-endorsed candidates such an edge. Lisa Murkowski’s accomplishment in winning the Alaskan Senate race as a write-in candidate is very unusual. It is not worth the effort for an individual to try to run for school board without having a party endorsement. “Nonpartisan” school board elections prohibit voters from selecting candidates in a primary or convention. So the influence of local party committees can be higher in nonpartisan elections than in partisan elections in Fairfax County.
I agree with you, Virginia. I guess our solutions are simply different – you’d rather go back to appointed boards, I’d rather have partisan elections.
Either would be a better system than we one we have now. I think in that regard we can agree!
Yes, I agree!
Brian,
It was Virginia who brought up the comparisons of populations and the election of US Senators, not me. I think that her point is that it is almost impossible to get elected to any public office without a political party backing.
My point is this: we had this big hullabaloo in Fairfax County over whether the School Board should be appointed or elected after the General Assembly opened it up to the voters in 1992. The opponents to an elected school board objected that it would politicize the School Board and inject local politics into decisions regarding management of the public schools. The compromise was that we would have non-partisan elections for the School Board with no party nominations.
So far so good, but then the party “endorsement” mechanism crept into the process. Today, use of the term endorsement versus nomination is a fig leaf. We have partisan school board elections, an end state that was never approved in the referendum.
Today in Virginia there are 111 elected school boards and 24 appointed. Since elected school boards are a relatively recent phenomenon, there has been only preliminary academic research or comparison of the two. However, what has been done is not promising. One preliminary study done by Randolph Macon College has found that there is no significant difference in per student spending. However, the authors cite other works that show a rising tension over budgets between the elected school boards and their governing bodies, the BOS in the case of counties. These works predict that elected school boards will seek their own taxation authority at some point in the future.
So, we passed a referendum to have a non-partisan School Board but we have a partisan School Board whose candidates are selected by political parties. And we have academic research that indicates that it is only a matter of time before the elected School Board will attempt to usurp the taxation authority of the Board of Supervisors as it relates to the FCPS budget, currently approximately 65% of the total county operating budget.
Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? It has nothing to do with representative democracy. It is about 65% of the total county taxation being directed not by the Board of Supervisors but by a lower elected body with sub-optimal interests.
It occurs to me that it might be helpful to post a couple of references that my argument, above, is based on. The second link in particular is not an easy read, but the content will scare the crap out of you. In a nutshell, the author did a case study of an unnamed Virginia county with an elected school board. His findings on the problems that arose because of partisan political differences should cause any one to be concerned, particularly his findings on the role played by special interest groups. Skim through the paper and ask yourself this question: is this who I want directing two-thirds of my county taxes? And one final point on that: does anyone think that the Board of Supervisors and the School Board would cooperate to keep total taxes at the same level between the two taxation authorities? That would defeat the whole purpose of giving the School Board its own taxation authority.
http://www.roanoke.edu/business/SEINFORMS%202008%20-%20Proceedings/proc/p080526004.pdf
http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED396449.pdf
The whole idea that you could devise any system of elected local governance would be non-partisan was a pipe dream to start with.
If it’s elected, it must be partisan. The parties are the primary organized mechanisms for generating the personnel and financial resources necessary to make a successful run for office.
Even if the school board were appointed, it could not help but become equally captive to either the FCPS administration or the partisan politics of the Board of Supervisors. Political appointees can be expected to reflect the partisanship of the elected officials which appoint them – especially on a board as important as the school board.
There’s simply no way around partisanship in the process. The only thing you can hope to do is either be honest about that partisanship and/or seek to mitigate its impacts by broadening the number and types of people brought to the table.
I consider it a hopeful sign that the parents’ groups have become increasingly orgnaized for electoral politics over the past several years – even though I don’t agree with many of their current policy initiatives (such as SLEEP). Do you think a woman like Patty Reed, running on the REPUBLICAN endorsement, would have had any chance of winning a school board seat in Democratic Providence without them?
We’re a long ways from having parent groups organized on school isues from being able to elect their own school board representatives in the absence of a party endorsement, but they now play extremely important roles now as tie-breakers between the party endorsed candidates.
Frankly, that’s probably as good as it’s going to get.
School board elections are always the most contentious. Read the LITTLE HOUSE books and you’ll see it even back then.
Here’s my story of post-partisanship. My father ran for school board in the 1980′s. We lived in a very working class, very Catholic town, and my father was a very Protestant, college academic. The Democratic Party machine (and I’m talking machine….) told him there was no way they would support his candidacy over a Catholic candidate. (Most of the Democrats at this time were fighting to lower taxes.) The Republican party approached my father and asked if he would run under their party. My father pointed out that he was a life-long Democrat, would probably vote to continue to raise taxes, and was pro-teacher and, most importantly, pro-student. (He had three daughters in the system, after all.) The Republicans didn’t care — they were glad to have a candidate run for the first time in a decade.
So he ran as a Republican. To the surprise of no one, he lost. But when a vacancy came up on the school board the next year, my father was appointed to the seat. From then on out, he ran as a Democrat (supporting an incumbent trumped even a Catholic) and continued to have strong support from many Republicans, who had always seen him as an honest and decent citizen trying to make the world he lived in better for as many as possible. He served on the school board for many years, and it remains a significant part of his life’s story.
(This also means that I have actively worked on a Republican campaign!!)
So I’ve personally seen all permutations of school board chaos. What it taught me is that having good people who care about educating students within the larger context of the community we all live in trumps a label or a process every time.
Gretchen,
That is a great story about your father. You sound like you’re very proud of him and rightfully so.
Fairfax Partisan,
I agree that you can’t eliminate partisanship altogether, but you can certainly dampen its effect on school board decisions. Some appointed school boards in Virginia are appointed by a bi-partisan commission that is in turn appointed by the governing body (BOS, city/town council, etc.). Additionally, all SB members are appointed at-large. That method means that the SB members are not directly beholden to any elected politician nor do they have a geographical “constituency” that they feel that they must be responsive to.
It is hardly perfect, but I feel that it would be better than what we have now. I will grant you that it would work much more smoothly in a smaller jurisdiction where everyone knows everyone else, but you could make it work in Fairfax County. After all, it is an improvement on the method we use to select judges, who are chosen directly by our GA delegations.
The numbers do not bear out.
Repeatedly, this has been put forth as a ‘fiscal conservative’ pursuit of Bradsher’s (as if she was attempting to solidify her reputation in that regard).
Spending $15-$18M minimum while shuffling the students in this craft project of cutting apart schools and neighborhoods to glue them back together, to gain a handful of seats more than exist at Clifton’s elementary school has no merit and certainly isn’t ‘fiscally conservative’.
The SB members who have closed ranks to protect her do the voters and residents they represent a disservice.
When the school system legitimately presents facts and data to the residents, then we can legitimately provide input. Until then, the entire boundary study is illegitimate and the families and tax payers are mere pawns in a game FCPS and the school board are playing.
I think an important reason for party involvement in School Board elections is being overlooked here. The alternative would be a big free-for-all election. What if you had seven candidates running and some fringe group’s choice could win with 21% of the vote?
I’d be all in favor of partisan elections to insure that the winner has something at least close to majority support. Yes, you could have runoffs or a cumulative voting system, but those alternatives are unlikely to be adopted.
I’ve always thought it hilarious when people say the business of the School Board is “too important” to have partisan politics get involved. Yes, we should leave the partisanship to trivial matters like two simultaneous wars, a $13 trillion debt, impending bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare — you know, the little stuff like that. Those are such minor matters compared to the Clifton Elementary School!
Marcus,
I take your point, but I think if there is anywhere where party identification becomes permeable, it’s at the school board level. School board decisions affect us at an immediate and personal level, unlike most federal and even state decisions. (Yes, I know, we political junkies can argue that, but none of us are typical, or we wouldn’t be reading and posting on blogs.)
For instance, take the Clifton decision. I can think of a “conservative” position for closing it — it would be more cost efficient for tax paying citizens. I can also think of a “liberal” position for closing it — perhaps by shifting the students, we could create more diverse learning environments. But neither of those arguments really gets to the heart of the matter, does it? As someone who thinks community schools should be kept open, what does that make me? In the end, even as partisan as I am, my first and foremost position is what is the best for the students. And in the end, that would have meant keeping the school open.
Gretchen, just because you’ve got partisan elections doesn’t mean the decisions need to break down on a typical conservative/liberal spectrum.
I think have the party attached would make it easier to identify what the general beliefs of the candidate are, but it’s hard to overlay typical partisan positions on a job that doesn’t implicate the typical issues that one expects to hear from in a partisan election.
I would like to think that the Clifton decision would have been one of those no brainer areas that both parties support because it’s the right thing to do.
Regardless of what party a person affiliates themselves with, when a voter goes to the polls to elect a School Board Member it is to elect someone that they feel will represent the public and their children NOT someone who will act in their own selfish interest. From the emails that were FOIA’d it appears Liz Bradsher pushed to close Clifton to push West Springfield High School up the queue in the hope of garnering future votes for herself. Closing Clifton is not a fiscally conservative decision when you consider (1) the majority of the renovations they cited were wants not needs and (2) the additions they will now have to add to other schools will cost more than what was possibly needed for Clifton. That cost will now be footed by all the taxpayers. When she made such a poor decision that is now going to impact THOUSANDS of children and their families both inside and outside of Clifton, that is NOT representing the public.
Mathalicious and CliftonParent,
Thank you for reinforcing my point. A non-partisan, appointed school board would have no interest in or motivation for playing special interest games or currying favor with voter blocks.
HisRoc, I don’t buy that argument. A School Board member is a School Board member – even if they’re non-partisan and appointed, that doesn’t mean that no one who takes that job will ever want to use it as a springboard for an elected office down the road.
Having a partisan system isn’t a problem if you elect the right people to the job. Bradsher is not one of those.
Brian,
It would make a very interesting doctoral dissertation to explore how many appointed school board members seek higher office versus how many elected members do so and what their motivations for doing so are. The only question is whether the discipline would be Political Science or Education.
I want to jump in here and defend FCDC for a minute. I was active in politics in 1995 when this all started. Here’s the back story:
After the voters approved the referendum to go to an elected school board the first elections were set for November, 1995. At that time Fairfax County was still very strong for the GOP- voted for Bush in 92, Dole in 96, the only big exceptions to that rule countywide in the past few years then had been Chuck Robb over Ollie North (duh), Don Beyer over Mike Farris in 93 (while Allen/Gilmore were also winning) and Doug Wilder’s historic election as Governor in 89 along with his ticket. Otherwise, with a decent R candidate (I’m stretching by calling Allen decent here) the R’s could reliably win Fairfax.
After Tom Davis defeated Leslie Byrne, Kate Hanley was narrowly elected in a special election as Chairman of the Board. Republicans thought it was a fluke, especially because she won after Elaine McConnell totally imploded complaining about the Washington Blade being in libraries.
Point being, the GOP fully expected to retake the Board of Supervisors that November election (5-5 after Hanley’s election and Connolly’s election to replace her). So the FCRC made the first move and endorsed a slate of candidates for the School Board and announced they would be on the FCRC sample ballot.
FCDC agonized at a couple meetings over whether it would also make endorsements after that. They finally decided to do so, but very reluctant. I don’t think it would have even passed there, except candidates were pushing very hard for it- because without an endorsement and a listing on the sample ballot those candidates were toast against the Republicans who would know who to vote for. Anyone who has stood outside the polls before knows some voters take both sample ballots, some take neither, and some take one or the other. In that final group without endorsing, Republicans would know their candidate and Democrats would be forced to guess at theirs.
The end result was a disaster for the GOP as their candidates talked mostly about books with naughty passages in school libraries, and restricting sex ed classes, etc. etc instead of anything important to what the board does. Voters elected Dems to 2 of 3 at-large positions (within 1,000 votes of a sweep but Mychele Brickner ran a strong campaign and was on top of the ballot and narrowly beat Isis Castro for the third spot) and they elected Dems in Braddock, Dranesville, Hunter Mill, Mason, Providence, and Mt. Vernon. Republicans won Lee (in a fluke where 2 Dems ran, and the Republican slipped in by about 100 votes), and their strongholds in Springfield and Sully.
In the second elections in 1999, Republicans won 5 of 12 seats (the most they ever have won) in a fluke- Kate Hanley was unopposed for Chairman by the GOP and the big legislative contests were in western Fairfax- which skewed turnout up there and helped Republicans win 2 of 3 countywide seats. In addition, the Republicans won re-election in Lee and Sully and picked up Braddock. They would have pulled even, but the GOP member in Springfield was Carter Thomas and he (besides being a jackass) got into a fight with the student school board rep that needed to be broken up. Cathy Belter beat him, which kept the board 7-5 Dem.
In 03 and 07 the Democrats won 10 of 12 seats, with Republicans winning one at-large and Braddock in 03, and Braddock/Springfield with the South County Bitch in 07.
Here’s my point. If you want to blame someone for these elections becoming partisan, it’s the FCRC, which made the partisan by trying to make a political power play in 1995. I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle now, I think the only way it’s possible is if FCRC apologizes for making the first endorsements in 1995 and offers not to make endorsements in the future if the Democrats do not do so. I still think its a long shot, as Dems will be loathe to give up endorsements when they have carried every general election with their endorsees, but it’s the only way I can think of to even have a chance at removing this ridiculous partisanship from these elections.
End. Rant.
I am proud to say that I voted against an elected school board.
One additional point on the democrats’ loyalty oath. Any candidate seeking the democrats’ endorsement must promise to ONLY support other democrat candidates. They are forbidden from supporting any other candidate for school board or any other office. In the past it was not uncommon for school board candidates to seek endorsements from both parties. The loyalty oath prohibits that. It also prohibits all of their candidates from supporting any republican candidates. That’s going to be tough for people like Sandy Evans who might want to support Patty Reed. She is prohibited from doing that by her party.
Tina Hone is the only school board member who consistently cares about her constituents. What a shame that she won’t run next year.
The more damning problem with a “non-partisan” and unelected school board is that, without the parties and other groups that organize public support involved in the process, bureaucratic powers will inevitably play an even greater role in channeling the school board.
Someone like Liz Bradsher, who has kept the powers that be in the FCPS bureaucracy happy while pissing off her constituents, could remain in power for a very very long time under a system that isolates her from public outcry.
Elected school boards may be openly partisan at times and may even be extremely out of touch (such as the current school board), but the voters retain the right and the power to toss them all out on their asses.
And, as parent groups organized around specific issues become a more prevalent part of the electoral and policy process for the school board, the parties are losing their monolithic role anyhow.
Since Not Larry Sabato suggests an admission of error, why not ask the General Assembly to admit it made an error in setting the rules for school board elections. These rules need to be changed to reflect the role of political parties or to allow runoff elections of nonpartisan candidates.
I disagree with a Fairfax Partisan’s comment that the parties are losing their monolithic role. Parent groups and teacher groups have only one realistic chance of having an endorsed candidate that wins–choosing one of the two candidates selected by the two political parties in a given district. Members of the advocacy groups can also join their local political party committees to influence the party endorsements. That doesn’t weaken the role of the political parties at all. I don’t think this convoluted system is better than the simply having the supervisor appoint the school board member. The supervisor is politically accountable and would have a self-interest in replacing a school board member who seemed to be out of touch.
Fairfax Partisan,
NLS brings up some details that I was alluding to when I posted the link to the academic case study of an unnamed county in Virginia with an elected school board. While it is desirable to have school board members accountable to voters, the reality is that directly elected board members are more responsive to special interest groups rather than voters at large. That is why you get these white-knuckled struggles over what books can be in the library, what sex education can be taught in what grade, and whether or not creationism belongs in science classes. Appointed school board members are more insulted from these niche issues. However, they are not appointed for life and can be removed by the elected representatives of the people, the BOS, if they stray off the reservation.
Unfortunately, most of the debate here on elected versus appointed school boards is clouded by the emotionally-charged fight on whether or not to close Clifton Elementary. That is an argument that will never be settled because each side is convinced of the righteousness of their position and confident that the other side is motivated by greed or maliciousness. Those kinds of disagreements are common when you are dealing with public schools and all the more reason to depoliticize the school board to the greatest extent possible.
correction, “insulated,” not “insulted” (but the first draft almost works as well)
But in the end, I still think the biggest divide in school board races are those with children (or those who advocate for children, their own or otherwise) and those who do not have children, or advocate for them.
I probably come down on the more partisan side rather than less partisan, mostly because I don’t believe in objectivity and things like “non-partisan.” But I do recognize that the divides for school board are unique in American politics that make the party structure behave very oddly.
I swear it sounds like you guys are discussing a foreign country! We have an appointed school board in Norfolk. The parties get involved in council races, much less the selection of school board members.
What a difference a few hundred miles makes.
Ha! Sometimes I wonder, Vivian.
Well, I misspoke. I meant to say the parties never get involved.
Vivian,
We are speaking about a foreign country. I was born in Norfolk and raised in Prince Anne County. Have you ever wondered why the Virginia Welcoming Center on I-95 South is below the Rappahannock River? That is where Virginia starts and The Peoples’ Demokratic Republic of NoVa ends. Of course, NoVa includes Alexandria, better known as East San Francisco…
Well, that was supposed to be Princess Anne County. See, I can do it too.
While public officials should be able to represent the public, lots of voters like to have endorsed candidates because it gives them an idea of who might closely align with their values and makes their voting choices easier.
When any politician changes parties mid-way through their term, it is like indirectly saying their values have changed and it is a betrayal against those that put them into office. To many people that ultimately seems more like a substance of character issue not a party issue.
I’m not involved in the details of Republican party politics in Springfield, but anyone following the school board in general has noticed that various party leaders/activists have been publicly saying that they would not endorse Liz Bradsher again. Well that is their right. However, it hardly seems fair to then question Ms. Bradsher’s character on the specific point of whether she wants to go around waving the Republican banner at this time. It would be rather silly for Ms. Bradsher to write to the Springfield Republican Committee asking for an endorsement. Who can criticize her character for not writing to this committee and asking for a new endorsement?
Furthermore, this whole controversy illustrates the advantages of having the supervisor for each magisterial district appoint the school board member. Clearly the school board member would want to work closely with the supervisor. If the supervisor strongly advised the school board member to vote a certain way, the school board member would naturally want to give a very serious consideration to agreeing with this recommendation. However, the school board member would still have the right to vote in a different manner, knowing that such a vote could jeopardize his or her chances of being reappointed to another term.
In the current setup where the school board member is elected independently, if people want to criticize lack of party loyalty, then they should scold Ms. Bradsher’s Republican critics. Why aren’t these critics showing deference to the Republican-endorsed school board representative?
My comment was meant to be more general and broad based than Springfield politics or Liz Bradsher. When a politician switches parties, it raises some questions with some voters. Arlen Specter is a case in point. The issue would be the same whether they went from being a Democrat to a Republican or vice versa.
Wow, The Thread That Wouldn’t Die.
CliftonParent,
Sometimes an elected official changes parties not because of a lack of committed “values” or a lack of integrity. Sometimes the party they belong to leaves them. I’m no big fan of Arlen Specter, but he is a poor example of the point that you are trying to make. He was always a Rockefeller Republican–fiscal conservative, social moderate, labor-union friendly. He didn’t change; the Republican Party moved right, abandoned its fiscal principles, and made social conservatism a litmus test of membership. When he was challenged in his own party by a neo-conservative he had to fish or cut bait.
End of story.
BTW, the Democrats did the same thing to dozens of their elected officials in the South in the 1960s. They moved the party to the left and forced Southern Democrats to either become Republicans or extinct. I know, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were the right thing to do in the long run. But in the long run we are all dead, as Keynes famously said.