Culture

By Dani Heba

Angry parents have called them pedophiles. The legislature has tried to ban their curricula. And constant competition from charter schools and voucher programs has depressed their enrollments. These are just some of the challenges recounted by Maricopa County school board members this April.

Verbal assaults and threats are probably the most constant battle for these Arizona school board members. But Arizona’s school boards also are at the forefront of America’s growing culture wars and the push for privatization.

“When I got on the board, I was labeled the Planned Parenthood plant,” said Lindsay Love, a school board member for the Chandler Unified School District. “I was the one that Planned Parenthood planted there to sexualize kids, to increase their abortion mill revenue.”

She even received death threats for advocating pandemic policies, such as COVID-19 mask mandates. The threats and harassment were so severe that Love has decided not to run for another term on the board.

To be clear, Love was not planted on her school board by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., the reproductive healthcare organization that provides women with access to a variety of healthcare services, including abortion. Nor is she the only one who reported being harassed.

“We had to have a police detail on our homes because they were threatening to come to our houses,” said Michelle Fahy, a school board member in the Kyrene Elementary School District.

These stories, unfathomable just a few years ago, are reflective of growing school-board polarization nationwide.

In 2018, when the so-called Red for Ed movement peaked, parents rallied to teachers’ defense, advocating for increased school spending and better teacher pay. However, since 2020, when Christopher Rufo first weaponized critical race theory, legislators and parents have shifted their focus toward cultural conflicts.

Within months, the tables were turned on public schools, teachers and school boards. By 2021, education had emerged as voters’ top concern, even ahead of economic issues, with a majority of voters saying that public schools are on the wrong track.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education didn’t help. Schools shut down for long periods of time, and when they reopened, many children didn’t return and those who did were required to wear face masks.

In November 2021, concerns about education—both COVID-19 school closures and critical race theory–propelled Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee, to victory in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, despite Virginia voting solidly Democratic one year earlier. (Critical race theory isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools.)

“The pandemic really was their opportunity,” Love said, to attack school boards and to push both privatization and the culture wars.

Arizona continues to put forward new legislation that is likely to stoke the culture wars. The Arizona House passed a critical race theory ban in 2021; but it was struck down by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that the measure had been unconstitutionally added to the state budget. A new version of the bill was recently passed by the Arizona House and is awaiting a vote in the state Senate. At the same time, Arizona voters could be asked to vote on a ballot measure in November that would amend the state’s constitution to effectively include a ban on critical race theory.

Additionally, Arizona has passed laws requiring student athletes to compete in sports according to their biological sex, and is proposing a bill to change the state’s sex-ed curriculum to focus on biological sex rather than gender identity.

Brian Garcia, the president of Tempe Union High School District school board, said the situation got so tense in his district, at one point, that a school-board initiative aimed at providing school students with mental health resources was almost quashed when protesters tried, falsely, to tie the issue to critical race theory.

The program to improve mental-health services, including providing students with better access to counselors, was eventually adopted by the board.

However, not all Arizona school boards experienced such controversy. Board members in poorer neighborhoods, especially those that are majority Black and Brown, often experience less cultural controversy.

“We didn’t have those problems,” said Redeem Robinson, who recently served as a school board member in the Balsz Elementary School District, which also includes a sizable Somali immigrant population. “Our school district is working class,” he added, noting that families are too busy to pay attention to the culture wars.

Robinson, who resigned from his board in 2021, also mentioned that his school district taught “The 1619 Project,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times writer whose work is at the center of the critical-race-theory hysteria.

Ylenia Aguilar, a school board member from the Osborn Elementary School District, another poor district with a largely Black and Latino population, agrees. We celebrate “all histories, African American, Mex-American, Native American and Asian American histories,” said Aguilar who is serving her second term on the school board.

Fahy, the school board member from the Kyrene Elementary School District, notes that these controversies regarding the culture wars bolster state measures that undercut funding for Arizona’s public schools, which she argues is Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s ultimate goal: “To dismantle public education,” Fahy said.

Fahy notes that vouchers, which provide money for Arizona students to attend private and religious schools, can benefit children with special needs who cannot always get the services they need in the state’s underfunded public-education system. But, the vouchers principally subsidize the well-to-do.

As middle-class families use vouchers to send their children to private schools, Fahy’s school district has seen declining enrollment, a trend that she says is expected to continue.

“We’ve had our demographer predict declining enrollment for years,” Fahy said.

However, with schools returning to in-person instruction and the end of Covid-19 mandates, at least debates about the pandemic have subsided.

“I feel like we’re just now starting to talk about normal stuff again, which feels really good,” Fahy said. “We’re back to school, we’re not wearing masks, people are kind of adapting, we’re going back to doing normal stuff, normal promotion ceremonies, not so much Zoom.”

 

By Malina Seenarine

When it comes to school funding, Arizona public schools rank near the bottom of the nation. The state’s push to privatize education, which includes for-profit charter schools and voucher programs, has spawned a new way to funnel public-school funds to private hands—one that has gained traction during the pandemic: microschools.

A one-room learning experience that typically includes 5-20 students and takes place in a private home, microschools incorporate online learning programs supervised by an adult, typically a parent. Microschools operate in a “legal grey space” with “no regulatory framework,” said Charles Siler, a communication’s consultant and public-school advocate. Those who run microschools are not required to have any teacher training nor are the schools required to adhere to the state’s curriculum. In Arizona, most microschools are paid for by the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, a voucher program that diverts per-pupil funding from public schools.

Microschools got a big boost during the pandemic.

“Through the pandemic, I saw the need for parents and students to have a different school-choice option, one that really customized and personalized the learning for the parent and the student,” said Tamara Becker, creator of Adamo Education, which operates a K-8 microschool in Fountain Hills, outside Scottsdale, and is planning to open another one next school year.

While most microschools are run by lone operators, Becker runs her program through a large—and financially troubled–charter network, Edkey, for which she served as the assistant superintendent for eight years prior to founding Adamo Education.

Becker became interested in the microschool movement in 2018 through a group that joined EdKey, Primavera Online School. Becker left the charter network, first, to become executive director of Primavera, and then, after two years, to found Adamo Education in 2021.

Unlike most microschools, Adamo hires teachers to teach cohorts of 12 students each. The teachers are expected to follow the same students as they advance from grade to grade. According to Becker, educators at Adamo need to have Arizona teacher-certification credentials and undergo a security check.

For the fall 2022 school year, Becker is expected to open another microschool location in Queen Creek, outside Chandler.

Microschools, however, are controversial. One of the biggest players in Arizona microschools is Prenda, a company that markets the microschool concept to families and provides an online curriculum for parents running them. In May 2020 Prenda had just three microschools operating in Maricopa County but, by the fall, the number had grown to 25. Prenda currently has over 400 microschools and 4,000 students in Arizona and a few other states.

According to an April 2021 report in The Arizona Republic, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office last year launched an investigation into the relationship between Prenda and one of its partners, Edkey, the charter-school network with which Adamo is also affiliated. The investigation, in turn, grew out of a fraud complaint by a charter-school watchdog and, at the very least, highlights the lack of oversight among microschools.

“The oversight is zero,” says Dawn Penich-Thacker, a public school advocate for Save Our Schools Arizona and a professor at Arizona State University. Penich-Thacker points out that even if the person who signs up to start a microschool receives training and a background check—and not all do–most microschools operate inside a private home, and there is no information known about the other people in the house.

Becker has heard the concerns about the lack of oversight. Recently she had the executive director and assistant director for the state board of charter schools visit her microschool. “They were very pleased to see all the things that we were doing, because it does align to what the State Board for Charter Schools expects from their charter operators.”

That’s not quite what the Arizona State Board of Charter Schools reports. “Our staff has visited Adamo briefly, but a full review has not been conducted at this time,” wrote Serena Campas, assistant director of policy development and government relations at the state board, in an email. An Adamo spokeswoman  confirmed in a follow-up email: the school’s “annual review is scheduled for next year.”

Still, some parents appreciate the personal attention their kids receive from microschools and feel that, especially during the Covid pandemic, they are safer in these small settings than in traditional classrooms. “It felt a little more safe because there was less students in the classroom,” said Kylie Chamblee, mother of two and education coordinator at Black Mothers Forum microschools, which her children attend.

Black Mothers Forum started as an advocacy group in 2016. Its original mission was to unite and educate mothers who said Black and Brown children in their community face police brutality. The members of the group came together to advocate for children who, they felt, also were being poorly treated by the school district. In 2021, the group began to build microschools in the Phoenix area, and currently has three locations.

When Chamblee moved to Arizona in June 2020 she enrolled her daughter in Primavera’s first-grade online program for a semester before discovering the Black Mothers Forum’s mission and the microschools they were launching. Chamblee, who has a master’s degree in education, saw her kids struggling in a virtual setting and wanted to get them into a classroom. “As a parent, it was really important that the kids got attention, closer attention,” she said, adding that they also needed to be back with their peers.

As the network’s education coordinator, Chamblee says most kids come into the Black Forum microschools behind academically. But, because of smaller class sizes, she is able to create “close-knit” relationships with the parents to understand the challenges students are facing. “What we really aim to do is really identify those foundational pieces where the students are struggling, and really catch them up,” said Chamblee, adding that she has “seen so much growth” with her own children

Even as restrictions put in place by the pandemic begin to ease, the long-term effects of school closures are likely to shape the future of children for some time to come. How microschools will fare in a post-pandemic world is still uncertain. For now, although they are still largely untested, they don’t seem to be losing momentum. Microschools are spreading nationwide.

By Jahlil Rush 

For years, Charles Siler was a poster child for American conservatism. The son of Evangelical Christians, Siler enlisted in the military and later attended George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, a bastion of conservative thinking.

After graduating from college, Siler moved to Arizona and joined the Goldwater Institute, a conservative, libertarian-leaning political think tank, where he became a lobbyist.

Like most conservatives, he believed the path to societal betterment was via free markets and not government spending.

“I saw government agencies as little more than hives of self-serving bureaucrats looking for ways to increase their budgets by robbing more and more money from taxpayers, all the while standing in the way of innovation and success,” Siler wrote in a blog post.

But, while working for the Goldwater Institute, Siler had an epiphany that would transform him into a liberal crusader. Siler says he came to the realization that conservative policies, like school privatization, were not well received by a majority of Americans, and that they failed to deliver on their promised improvements.

“Pro-privatization groups fight with incredible vigor to block any efforts to collect data on privatization programs,” Siler said. “When data was available, I could see myself that the programs I was selling rarely seemed to produce academic benefits for students, even as they increased inequity.”

Siler knows whereof he speaks. He worked closely with conservative figures like Clint Bolick, a former Goldwater Institute operative who played a key role in pushing the narrative that Critical Race Theory was being taught in schools; Bolick is now an Associate Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court.

“Critical race theory is just the latest vehicle for the right-wing grievance industrial complex,” said Siler. “When I was working at the Goldwater Institute one of the biggest challenges that I faced was how do we take these really unpopular ideas and frame them as broadly popular. This is where the culture wars really come into play… as a smokescreen to advance their political goals.”

Siler’s political transformation came to fruition when he reunited with Dawn Penich-Thacker, his former boss from the military and co-founder of  Save Our Schools Arizona, a non-profit organization that advocates for public schools. At the time of their reunion, in 2017, Siler and Penich-Thacker found themselves on opposite sides of a panel debating school vouchers in Arizona schools.

“That encounter marked the resumption of my friendship with Dawn,” Siler said. “It also forced me to engage in a much more critical examination of school privatization than I’d ever done before.”

Siler saw his encounter as a chance to reevaluate school-privatization policies after listening to how passionately she talked about how charter schools were negatively impacting families.

When Arizona state legislators added a universal school-voucher measure to the ballot in 2018, Siler teamed up with Save Our Schools, during the midterm elections, to help defeat the voucher measure. The 2018 attempt failed to pass the state’s legislature. Republican Sen. Paul Boyer blamed the 2018 failure on the public’s fear of imposing a permanent limit on how many vouchers could be provided in the future.

In February 2022, the Arizona Senate voted to expand the state’s school voucher program through Senate Bill 1657. The bill is now pending in the Arizona House.

But there is one way in which Siler has held true to his Goldwater pedigree. Siler noted that one way in which conservatives are better than Democrats is in strategizing. He credits Republicans for their ability to hone in on specific issues that matter to the conservative base. Siler cites recent nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, leading to a 6-3 conservative majority, as well as President Donald Trump appointing nearly three quarters of current sitting federal judges.

“The right has a laser focus on its objectives,” Siler said, much more so than Democrats. “They have very local, economic concerns that align a lot with very progressive people. But they do a lot of these issues through a lens that is filled with bigotry and bias.”

Another big difference between Democrats and Republicans is how they use funding, said Siler. While Republicans have more money, they are also smarter about the way they invest it, seeding small political entities that make a big impact.

Jaynie Parrish, Executive Director of the Navajo County Democrats, shared a similar sentiment. She argued that the local Democratic party would have gotten much more bang for its buck if it had invested directly in groups like hers, which helped turn Arizona purple in 2020.

“Give us more money to hire people, let us manage it,” said Parrish, noting that Native communities are “frustrated” because the Democrats aren’t sufficiently trusting, and capitalizing on, the network Native Democrats have established.

Charlie Fisher, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party, makes a case that the Democratic party is a big party that serves a broad range of interests.

“The Democratic Party truly is a coalition,” said Fisher. “We really are a big tent,” which makes coordination more difficult.

Siler warns that the Democrats risk losing the war on messaging, and sites public education as an example. He notes that for the past 20 years Democrats have been praised for their positions on issues like education.

But in a November 2021 released Morning Consult poll, the Democratic lead on education decreased to 7 points from 20 points in January 2021. And a Wall Street Journal poll, this March, showed the Democrats lead on education at just 5 points.

“So the culture wars stuff is a way to motivate people to have animus and hostility towards their public schools, so that they start actively looking for a way out, or for a way to get into the system by being elected to their school boards, and then destroying the public schools from within,” Siler said.

As for Siler, his goal now is to use the same legal strategies that have been so successful for conservatives in the interest of progressive causes.

By Gabriel Rivera and Noel Stevens

This winter, a Starbucks unionization initiative that began in the bright blue city of Buffalo, New York, and has since spread nationwide, took an unlikely detour to Mesa, Arizona, where dozens of Starbucks employees successfully challenged the state’s enduring anti-union culture.

After a months-long struggle, the Mesa store became the first Starbucks outside of New York and the third nationwide to unionize—though over 200 of the franchise’s outlets are now organizing. For guidance, the Mesa store turned to Buffalo.

The Buffalo organizers took the Mesa team through the company’s union-busting playbook, explaining the tactics the company would use to try to foil its organizing effort, and the two stores stayed in contact throughout the process.

“It was kind of terrifying,” said Tyler Ralston, a shift leader who began the Mesa unionization effort last November with co-workers Michelle Heiduk and Liz Alanna. “We didn’t know if we were going to lose our jobs or not.”

Arizona is both a “right-to-work” and an “at-will” state, meaning the employees who participated in the unionization effort could have been fired for their collective actions without any realistic legal recourse. The organizers were, however, protected by the National Labor Relations Act,

Federal oversight under the Biden administration has facilitated a unionization wave sweeping the nation. Earlier this month, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Starbucks, concurring with allegations made by Starbucks Workers United, a coalition of Starbucks storefronts actively organizing nationwide.

The act came after the NLRB found merit in the union’s claims that Starbucks surveilled, intimidated and threatened employees to dissuade them from organizing.

Caught in the maw of Starbucks’ union-busting efforts last winter, the Mesa store needed all the help it could get.

The number of staff allowed on each shift was slashed, leaving only two employees to run the entire store on occasion. The company also disabled the gratuity option on its app for the Mesa location, so when customers placed their orders remotely, employees often didn’t receive tips. Upper management even cleared out the back rooms of the store and closed off what was formerly a break room.

“It showed us the power that corporate has over the working class, and how much we don’t have a voice here in our own store,” Ralston said.

Brittany Harrison, the location’s former store manager, was fired for taking a stand against Starbucks’ union-busting practices, despite not being involved with the actual unionization process. She was pregnant at the time, and her firing helped fuel the store’s determination to unionize.

In February, the Mesa location officially prevailed. Now, the union is fighting for better pay, a more consistent credit card tipping system, better enforcement of LGBTQ+ protections and guaranteed maternity leave.

Future negotiations between the Mesa store and the coffee giant will have to involve a new agreement on wages, as Starbucks recently announced raises for all its employees except unionized workers.

Starbucks Workers United denounced the decision as the latest move by the company to punish employees who have unionized and dissuade partners from organizing, in addition to other standard union-busting practices like threatening to fire staff.

All three principal organizers at the Mesa Starbucks still work there. No other employees, besides the former store manager, have been fired for their involvement in unionizing.

Other stores haven’t been so lucky. At a store in Scottsdale, the firing of 19-year-old Laila Dalton for attempting to unionize made national headlines.

“It was really sad because she is someone that loves Starbucks, loves her store, loves her people, loves the community and they lost someone that was like a champion for them,” said Ralston, who communicated with Dalton after her dismissal.

The unionization trend has yet to reach many Starbucks partners. Of the almost 9,000 Starbucks-owned locations nationwide, just over 250 have filed for unionization or successfully unionized.

Khayla, who is a barista at a Starbucks in Tempe, which is home to Arizona State University, chose to withhold her last name and said awareness of unionization efforts varies greatly by store. After conferring with her coworkers, Khayla relayed that most of them hadn’t considered unionizing even though the store is in a liberal college town.

“It just goes over most people’s heads,” she said.

But Ralston is hopeful all company-owned locations will eventually unionize. Expanding the grassroots support system started in Buffalo, he encourages employees of Starbucks or any other company to contact them on social media if they are interested in unionizing.

“We’re always looking to help people,” Ralston said, noting the message he wants to send other would-be Starbucks organizers is: “We know what you’re going through and we’re here for you.”