I have been asking myself that question since before the Gypsy Super in my own district made it clear he did not think he answered to anyone. It is consistent with stories I have been hearing from other school districts. Even in other states. It is an issue with that duplicitous district charter agreement we have talked about previously that appears to be a deliberate distortion of expressed taxpayer wishes. It also comes up sometimes when I am in a meeting and hear a school board member use an official ed term in a way that tells me that someone has misled them on the actual meaning of the term.

I think of school board members as custodians of the public interest in how the district operates. Fiduciaries of how all that taxpayer money is spent and what vision for the students is being pushed. That’s why I find the fact that the accreditors feel free to threaten them for differences in policy or holding public meetings or dictating who may be their lawyers to be so alarming. And that was before I discovered the alliance between accreditation and UNESCO’s formal push away from the transmission of knowledge.

That the accreditors were the enforcers for an international commitment to limit what individuals can know or do. To almost literally place mental chains and shackles upon the human mind. To make it politically malleable and subject to the herd instinct. I don’t know why I was surprised to learn that it was the accreditors who ran the 8 Year Study we have talked about that launched outcomes based education and the use of education as an assault weapon to transform the essence of what had made America great. Quietly and without our permission. The accreditation process then has for decades been a cobra ready to pounce to promote a radically different social vision for America. And now globally.

So when I got the opportunity to listen in on what school board and legislative candidates supposedly needed to know about education put on by the state school board association, I cleared my afternoon and went. Fresh notebook and pack of pens in hand. And what did I hear? “Must defer to the superintendent. Must defer to the superintendent” over and over again. Like a mantra. In fact creating that belief and expectation seemed to have been a primary purpose of the meeting in the first place.

When you elect a school board member do you expect that their authority is limited to the budget and taxes and hiring and firing the super? Now after everything I have written about the real incentives and conflicts of interest and agenda for education, it is scary for both the students and the taxpayers if the accreditors and supers have that level of discretion. Truthfully it gives them an unfettered ability to mount an internal coup against the very concept of the individual and the rational mind. The essence of what our economy and existing society and the US Constitution are all based on. You don’t need to amend the US Constitution if you simply use the schools to make emotion primary, limit facts and literacy, stress vocational skills, and push a collectivist mindset. Plus the idea that some mysterious “common good” is paramount over what an individual can do.

Being the intrepid reporter of education that I am, I could only take so much. Especially when the speaker said school board members are the only politicians in America with mandatory training now. 15 hours the first year after election and 9 hours annually after that. All I could think of was that is where the “must defer” mantra was coming from. It also explained how parents elect someone and a year later their board decisions are 180 degrees from what they campaigned on. So I asked:”who did the training?” The state school board association that was already pushing the deference mantra “for the good of the children” was one answer. Law firms was another. Oh good, I thought, the drafter of the charter is then briefing the board on their responsibilities.

I remembered Frederic Bastiat’s famous analysis from more than 200 years ago:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men together in a society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

I think that describes education in an era of Gypsy Supers and personally intrusive legislation and accreditation and duplicitous charters and deferential school boards quite well. So I made the observation that the obligation of training coupled with the real agenda of the accreditors would explain why I was suddenly hearing so many stories of school supers behaving as if they were dictators. An offput presenter responded that the Super “was the CEO of the district.” Wrong answer. I didn’t say this then but I am telling you now. An Educational Leadership degree, especially a doctorate, is absolutely and explicitly NOT about educational administration.

Maybe I should have added education professors to the title. If they credential supers to impose radical political theories in classrooms by pretending they are pedagogy and learning theories, are the profs really in charge? Do ed profs get to decide what kind of America we are going to be in the 21st century? I already knew that the Educational Leadership degree rejected an administration orientation. Its recipients are to use the degree to have the power to push Human Development Theory. I know you will be shocked that phrase took me back to John Dewey and his goals and forward back to UNESCO’s.

But I also happened to have a March 2007 document from Vanderbilt called “Assessing Learner-Centered Leadership: Connections to Research, Professional Standards, and Current Practices”. It laid out how to use the degree to advance the radical change students to change society vision. It especially noted using the degree to push this new vision for learning and the social learning emphasis.

So once again I ask the question: why are school board members being told to defer to supers and accreditors given these political realities? Who then can protect students and taxpayers from being victimized?

New Reader Alert: I originally came up with the name Gypsy Super and Gypsy Principal for reasons explained in this earlier post.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/gypsy-principals-gypsy-supers-and-engrenage-3-more-superb-things-to-know/

It explains the lucrative phenomenon quite well. Engrenage is a term that describes the breaking into pieces of the controversial elements so it is much more difficult to see the big picture of the desired cultural, political, and economic transformation. It also allows people “just doing their job” to be pushing something much more far reaching in impact than they may appreciate. Engrenage refers to gearing because the pieces still work together even if that is not commonly appreciated.