Accountabaloney Attends School Boards for Academic Exellence Training

Be Prepared for MisNAEPery

What I Learned at the SBAE Summit

Last week, I attended the School Boards for Academic Excellence (SBAE) Education Policy & Training Summit in Orlando. The SBAE is a right wing, anti-woke school board association whose goal appears (from my observances) to be: 1.) create a National Conservative School Board Association that will compete with the National School Board Association (NSBA) and (probably more important) 2.) create a network of state education policy institutes, becoming a clearing house of conservative education policy that could be implemented at the local school board level. They describe themselves as a national capacity-building organization and it seems they want to become the ALEC of Education. (By the way, ALEC was in attendance.)

The story they tell is that after some success in getting conservative school board members elected, it became apparent that just getting hard-right school board members into office was not enough. State and National School Board Associations were teaching new board members to be a rubberstamp for their superintendents and newly elected conservative board members needed supports created so they could to advance their conservative agenda at the local level. SBAE was formed about a year ago and they can provide sample policies, attorneys to help write new or amend current policies, and they can link board members to conservative organizations willing to recommend ideologically alligned school board attorneys or audit curriculum to determine whether it is “appropriate.” And they are very well funded (The 3-day conference included multiple meals and cost just $150.)

The summit was open to state network organization leaders and school board members and was designed to “empower organizational leaders and school board members to become reformers for academic excellence in their school districts.” There were maybe 75 attendees, about half were school board members, the rest were vendors and state policy organizations like the Freedom Foundation, the Civics Alliance, the Indiana Family Institute, Massachusetts Family Institute and the Wyoming Family Alliance.

[I want to make clear that I met many sincere and dedicated individuals and enjoyed many conversations. There were frequent digs at “Tampon Tim” by the guy from Minnesota and frequent references to “indoctrination” but a few of the sessions were quite good. The sessions on Chronic Absenteeism and Legislative Advocacy were very informative. The session on Parlimentary Procedure was good, even though it was framed a “Defensive Combat for Minority-Member School Boards.” The other attendees from Florida never challenged my presence there.]

It became clear almost immediately that a major goal was move away conservative school board members away from culture war issues (they said “WOKE is dead”) and focus on student proficiency levels to label public schools as failing in order to advance their conservative agenda. We were taught that every school board candidate should understand that “student achievement results are really much lower than what they’ve been told” and our election campaign should be focused on improving student outcomes. We were told “all states have low proficiency levels” and that state assessments (and even Jeb Bush’s Florida A-F School grade system) “create a false sense of high achievement.” (Also, more money was not going to make a difference, of course.) Board members were encouraged to use stagnant test scores to justify eliminating DEI programs, for example.

I am certain many conservative ed policy folks are eagerly waiting to spin Wednesday’s NAEP results, whatever they may be.