Hypocrisy alert: What a Kansas school board’s rejection of a history textbook really means
19 January
Donald Trump reacts next to Melania Trump during a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024
While we’ve been distracted by the shambles that is American presidential politics, there’s been a change happening in our own backyards that may have a more lasting effect than who is sworn into the Oval Office on Monday.
That change is the partisanship leaching into local elections from the open-air market of national party politics.
The politicization of school boards began by 2020, when some parents became activists against pandemic-era remote classes and mask mandates. The summer protests over the death of George Floyd deepened divisions, especially in rural America, and there was an epidemic of challenges to books in school libraries.
“School board meetings in Kansas, as elsewhere in the country, have become the arena for newly elected, hyper-partisan members fueled by misinformation and narrow agendas,” I wrote in 2022. “These barefaced culture warriors claim vaccines are hoaxes, masks are ineffective, and a secret leftist plot to make white kids feel bad about themselves by teaching unpleasant facts about American history.”
Many studies have determined the COVID vaccines are scientifically sound, safe and effective and that masks work. Sorry, RFK Jr., and good luck with your new job as secretary of health.
American history?
That’s still a battleground in many school districts.
Take the Derby school board.
Derby is a nice town with miles of walking and biking paths. It’s the biggest suburb of Wichita, and it has a high school with 2,185 students, making it the fourth largest in Kansas.
In December, the conservative majority on the board voted 4-3 to ditch a proposed social studies curriculum because of an unfair “bias” against Donald Trump. The curriculum had been recommended by teachers at Derby High School, who spent a year reviewing six social studies programs and ultimately favoring one by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, an American educational publisher with headquarters in Boston.
As reported by KMUW’s Suzanne Perez, some members of the board said they rejected the $400,000 contract with HMH because of statements about anti-racism and diversity on the publisher’s website. At least one also felt the material did not accurately reflect Trump’s first term in office.
“My biggest concern … involved what I would define as bias of omission,” Perez quoted board member Cathy Boote as saying.
A retired elementary school teacher who was elected in 2023, Boote took issue with the material on Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban,” when all immigration and air travel from seven predominately Islamic countries was stopped by executive order.
“Safety was the top priority,” Boote was quoted as saying, “but they leave it sit there, with no explanation, to make you think he was xenophobic.”
Well, yes. That could be one explanation, backed up not only by Trump’s actions but also his words at just about every rally since first coming down that golden escalator. His campaigns, in 2016 and 2024, were built on a foundation that portrayed migrants and minorities as “animals” bent on destroying decent American towns. But that is my take, not HMH’s material, which apparently does not call Trump xenophobic.
For this column, I requested a comment and a copy of the HMH program from Leah Riviere, the publisher’s communications director. I received no immediate response to my email request.
But Boote and her fellow school board conservatives weren’t just disturbed by the history material. They also objected to statements on the publisher’s website that included an opposition to racism and a commitment to diversity and social justice.
For a previous story, Riviere told KMUW that the statement on the HMH website wasn’t meant to be political. The intent was to express support for Black teachers and students and other members of the publisher’s community, including its employees.
“HMH does not advocate for any ideology, political organization or agenda,” she said.
Boote, a Republican who contributed several hundred dollars to Trump’s campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission, clashed with the Derby school officials in 2022. Then, she questioned why the high school’s civics club posted online material that mostly had, at least in her perception, a liberal bias.
“My concern is the indoctrination is so deep that it’s widely accepted, with no regard to law or policy,” the Derby Informer quoted Boote as saying during public comments at a school board meeting.
Boote said school employees should follow policy and state law to avoid using their paid time or educational resources to advocate for a particular candidate or political viewpoint. She also said students should be afforded an opportunity to experience “rich diverse thought.”
Such blustering rings hollow — and hypocritical.
No high school teacher I know would engage in “indoctrination” of students to a political belief. It seems more likely to me that any “liberal bias” represented on the Civics Club Facebook page was caused by the students seeking out speakers they wanted to hear from, and not the club sponsor spoon-feeding students propaganda. Clubs are extracurricular in nature, largely run by students, and hearing from a candidate who brings in a few signs with her is far from an organizational endorsement.
But we probably won’t know for sure what happened, because the school board apparently went into closed session to discuss the matter. The Derby civics Facebook page appears to no longer exist.
On Thursday, I checked the Derby high activities page and found no listing for the Civics Club. Then I called the school office and was told by a staff member that “we don’t have one at the moment.” The staffer said she didn’t know why.
I doubt if Boote would have objected if the Civics Club speakers had swayed conservative. Or if the social sciences teachers had recommended a curriculum that included material that commended Trump for his actions during his first term in office. It is a special kind of hypocrisy to bring a school district to task for having an alleged liberal agenda — and then reject a curriculum that has been recommended by teachers who are experts in the field because it fails to conform to your political worldview.
However HMH’s material presented Trump, it would have been largely irrelevant to the program at Derby; as explained by Kendal Warkentine, co-chair of the Derby social studies department, the administrations of recent presidents aren’t covered in class.
Warkentine was quoted by KMUW by saying the HMH material was “well-written and engaging” and among the best he’d seen.
On Jan. 13, Warkentine, other Derby teachers, and some patrons asked the board to defer to educators on course materials. Kansas is among the states in which curricula is adopted by local school districts instead of being handed down by the state. The Kansas State Department of Education instead sets curricular standards that must be met.
But the conservative majority on the board refused to be swayed. After board member Mark Boline spent about 10 minutes refuting some of the comments Boote had made the month before about the HMH material, Boote said she felt “personally attacked” by Boline.
The message sent by the Derby School Board in rejecting the recommended program and refusing to budge on their decision is this: We don’t trust our teachers.
This lack of trust of experts has become a dangerous refrain in populist politics. From education to vaccines to government efficiency, it threatens to disrupt the operation of government and jeopardize the health and well-being of its citizens in the process.
“The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge,” writes Tom Nichols in his 2017 book. “It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.”
Nichols, a foreign affairs and international security expert, says that among a broad section of the American public, expertise is equated with elites and an attempt to stifle dialogue.
“Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s,” Nichols observes. The relationship between experts and citizens, like nearly everything in a democracy, is built on trust. “… When that trust collapses, experts and laypeople become warring factions.”
We have arrived at an America in which facts don’t really matter. The truth for many of us is what we feel, not what we know. If we feel vaccines are bad, as Nichols points out, then they must be. If a fact is contrary to our political worldview, then it must be wrong. We no longer live in a world of shared fact, but in a superstitious land ruled by emotion. That includes an irrational adherence to religion and a blind devotion to king (or what passes for a king) and country.
It’s as if the advances in science and critical thinking of the last few generations have been swept aside. Our politics, in many ways, harken back to the shambles, the open-air meat market in medieval towns that was about as likely to dish up sickness from contaminated or rotting food as it was sustenance.
The fault is not the Internet, although commercialization has practically extinguished the boon it could have been to news and education; it is not the fault of the politicians who manipulate us into acting against our own best interests, even though they may do so with self-serving intent; and it is certainly not the fault of the “elites” or the liberals, the migrants or the homeless, the socially disenfranchised or the otherwise different, although many modern-day demagogues would have us believe the only thing standing between us and our former supposed “greatness” are these others.
All have been wrongly blamed for society’s ills, at one time or another.
No, the fault is in human nature. Since the time of the Enlightenment we have waged a war of knowledge against ignorance, but through laziness or hypocrisy or common inattention we are periodically dragged back down into the mud beneath the shambles. How long we stay down here is up to us, but we must stand together to have a chance of standing at all.
The actions of the Derby School Board may be a glimpse of things to come. As more school districts surrender to partisan politics, there is a real danger that rural America may be faced with formerly nonpartisan boards that become, in effect, single-party machines aimed at stamping out dissent and squelching critical thought.
Derby has already reached the point where expert opinion is disregarded, teachers are disempowered, and publishers are economically punished for espousing such radical ideas as diversity and equality. The conservative majority has abandoned ideas of cooperation and service in favor of power and political self-interest.
What Boote and her conservative colleagues on the Derby school board have done is to create a climate of fear among teachers. Why risk the teaching of sensitive but needed material about current events when your board is on an indoctrination witch hunt?
When these school administrators police only those ideas they disagree with, that’s not just hypocrisy, but censorship. The say they favor a variety of viewpoints, but their actions allow only the material that matches their political agenda. Who, then, is doing the indoctrinating? It is a question of activism for me, but not for thee.
Is this the kind of school board we want in Kansas? It certainly isn’t the kind of board Derby students deserve.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
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