Ask Smart People Smart Questions is a podcast and event series where we create the context to have bigger conversations about some of the big issues that affect the LGBTQ+ community. This month we’re talking about public education, specifically through the lens of governance. Over the past few years, there’s been an increasing trend of targeted disruptions in school board meetings, so we wanted to bring together a panel of experts to figure out where this is coming from and to learn about the structural problems and solutions at play. We were joined by Richie Taylor, Jeanne Casteen, and Katie Gipson-McLean at the Tempe Public Library on April 26 to record this episode of Ask Smart People Smart Questions Links from the discussion * A Nation at Risk * ESA — Empowerment Scholarship Account * STO — School Tuition Organization * “No Promo Homo” law repealed in 2019 * Lindsay Love explaining her decision not to run for reelection to the Chandler Unified School District Governing Board * Secular AZ * Save Our Schools * CEBV — Civic Engagement Beyond Voting * Support Equality Arizona Schools * Arizona Equals Dawn and Hayden Full Episode Transcript [MUSIC PLAYING] Jeanne Woodbury From Equality, Arizona, you're listening to Ask Smart People Smart Questions, our podcast and event series where we create the context for bigger conversations about the big issues that affect the LGBTQ+ community. This month, we're talking about schools, specifically governance in public education. Over the past few years, there's been a big trend of disruptions to school board meetings. And so we wanted to take a look at where this comes from, who's organizing it and how, what's the history behind some of the big debates about public education in Arizona, and what are some of the structural problems and solutions at play? This conversation was recorded live at the Tempe Public Library on Wednesday, April 26th. but two of our panelists joined remotely through Zoom, so the audio is a little bit different from normal. I'm really grateful to Jeanne Casteen from Secular AZ and Katie Gipson-McClean, a board member in the Creighton Elementary School District, for joining at basically the last minute for this discussion, and to Richie Taylor, who served in the Department of Education for four years and is a current member of our board at Equality Arizona. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, so I want to jump right into it. But first, I'll give a quick preview of our upcoming events in the series. On May 24th, we'll be hosting our next conversation at the Tempe Public Library talking about substance use policy. And in June, we'll be talking about homelessness and the housing crisis. I'm really looking forward to both. And if you want to sign up, you can visit equalityarizona.org/events. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast feed in the podcast player of your choice so that if you can't make it in person, you can still keep up to date with the series. (gentle music) Jeanne Woodbury Yeah, so welcome everyone to Ask Smart People Smart Questions. The topic of the night tonight is school board governance, public education, and this current trend of far-right extremism that we're seeing in school boards across the state. We've got some really great guests with us. We've got Richie Taylor. We've got Katie Gipson-McLean. And we've got Jeanne Casteen. And I'm going to ask them each to say a little quick introduction so that for people listening to the podcast later, you know whose voice is whose. Richie Taylor I'm Richie Taylor. I served for four years as communications director for Superintendent Kathy Hoffman at the Department of Education for her entire term. And I'm happy to be here. Jeanne Woodbury Thank you. Katie, could you introduce yourself? Katie Gipson-McLean My name's Katie Gipson-McLean. My day job is that I'm a public defender for Maricopa County. So I represent folks who are charged with criminal felony charges who can't afford an attorney. And then I do a number of other things outside of work, but one of them being that I'm a member of the Creighton Elementary School District Governing Board, and that's located in East Phoenix. And it's the same elementary school that I attended when I was a kid. Jeanne Woodbury Wonderful. And then our third guest is Jeanne Casteen. Jeanne Casteen Yeah, so my name is Jeanne Casteen. I am the executive director with Secular AZ. I actually used to sit on the governing board of the Creighton School District for eight years, four of which I was the president. So I'm super happy that Katie's here because she is a champion of all things right in Central East Phoenix. Yeah, so I'm, and I'm very passionate about school board issues. Jeanne Woodbury Thanks everyone for joining me. I think that I always like to set up the motivation for this event before we go into the conversation. But basically what I see happening is that there's sort of a copy and paste template of action that's being taken around to a lot of school districts in the Phoenix area and I think increasingly in some other parts of the state where there's a few different things, either people using public comment sections to create controversy around trans-inclusive policies or on the other hand, people trying to antagonize and force out school board members or school superintendents. And I feel like a big reason this is happening or a big motivation for this is that it's a level of government that a lot of people don't understand and that people don't have a lot of insight into, partly just because of how it's structured. There's so many school board districts, and policy decisions for public education are made at so many different levels. So I wanted to have this conversation to talk about not just what's happening, what is it, what does it look like, but also what's the bigger context of school board governance. So the first thing I wanted to talk about, having someone who's worked for Department of Education, having two former/current school board members, I wanted to talk about that chain of governance in public education — what decisions are made where, what all the different constituent parts are. So we've mentioned Department of Education, we've mentioned school boards, but there's more to it than that, right? And I'd love to get kind of an overview of, when you were working in the Department of Education, Richie, for example, what other parts of the system was that department connected to? Richie Taylor So certainly connected, the Department of Education under the direction of the State Board of Education, which is a body appointed by the governor, oversees education policy in the state. Those are decisions like setting the state's education standards, managing federal grants and state funding for schools. So all of the money that the legislature appropriates or the federal government appropriates to our public schools flows to the Department of Education, which oversees and administers those monies, and like I said, sets things like standards. And we can probably get into this a little bit later, but standards are different than curriculum. Curriculum is where a lot of the — standards are very high level. These are the areas that schools should be teaching to. Curriculum is taught to those standards. And so, but the curriculum decisions are made at the local level, at the school district level, by governing boards. And so I think that is one area that is particularly not great understanding in the public is that a lot of those decisions are made at the local level and not necessarily at the state level or the federal level. Jeanne Woodbury Yeah. So for you two who have been on school boards, who are currently on school boards, what does that look like when those standards and then also state funding decisions, and in some cases, legislation that's basically setting curriculum, potentially, what does that look like in terms of your business of setting policy and creating policy at the school board level? Jeanne Casteen So I want to just talk real quick too. I want to give a brief history lesson about No Child Left Behind, the legacy of George Bush and the ideology that schools are failing in America, right? I can't remember the name of the study that was put out, but that was the precursor for the privatization of public schools. And that's really kind of what we're talking about right now. Because in 2000, George W. Bush decided No Child Left Behind was going to be the law of the land. And sadly, for those of us who vote blue, no matter who, right, it was Obama who kind of kept those policies going forward. So in 1995, it was Governor Fife Symington, who decided to kind of open up the pathways for charter schools to be recognized as regular public schools. Funding was different, the accountability was different, the transparency was different. And now we are seeing what his decisions are leading to. And that is just a broad overreach of school vouchers, STOs and all the things that take public money away from private schools. That's all I really wanted to say about that is that this is also, it's not just as simple as all of that, it is a systematic overreach and a systematic degradation of the public schools. Jeanne Woodbury Well, and I think that's really important. I want to talk about that history of, you know, there's what's happening now. There's these anti-trans attacks. There's some other far right extremism, but I think that, you know, there's a longer history and maybe that's the point where it starts. And I do want to get into that. But I think it's important to look at like the structural landscape first, and then see how things are happening in that landscape. Richie Taylor I do think, to Jeanne’s point, that those moves 25, 30 years ago really did change the landscape dramatically for public education, and particularly public education in Arizona. It really did basically create two systems, one
