It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. In January 1991, after an 18-month nationwide search, the Institute for Development of Educational Activities (/I/D/E/A/) invited two public school systems in Michigan to participate in a long-term systemic reform initiative. The project—Communities for Developing Minds (CDM)—was intended to increase the application of thinking processes districtwide. Several leading national experts were to assist in the effort. Separately and unanimously, the school boards in Adrian and Blissfield, Michigan, voted to accept the invitation.
In a scenario increasingly familiar throughout the country, “concerned parents” almost immediately began raising objections. Their initial concerns centered on the lack of community input, the potential cost, and the perceived experimental nature of the project. Within three months, the concerned parents organized into two opposition groups: Public Education Awareness Forum (PEAF) in Adrian and Citizens for Quality Education (CQE) in Blissfield. Their spokespersons and circulated materials were identical.
The opposition mobilized quickly and effectively. New charges against the Institute and the CDM project emerged through letters to the editor, public forums, radio talk shows, and flyers. The reform process was identified with New Age religion, secular humanism, moral relativism, one-world government, invasion of family privacy, witchcraft, satanism, and anti-Americanism.
By the summer of 1991, public pressure became so intense that the boards of both districts reviewed their decisions. Both the Adrian and the Blissfield board votes were unanimous. Adrian stood firm, while Blissfield withdrew from the project. The aftermath of the respective decisions is instructive for all districts facing similar dilemmas. Within several months, challenges to Adrian's participation in the project abated; opposition to Blissfield's curriculum and pedagogy remained steady.
After two years, public confidence in the Adrian schools has returned. Evidence of this support is found in the most recent school board elections. Six candidates, three supported by the board and three endorsed by the opposition to reform, ran for three seats. The opposition candidates finished fourth, fifth, and sixth.
In contrast, public confidence in the Blissfield schools remained low for two years. Voters refused to pass both a millage renewal and an increase. Two opposition leaders were elected to the seven-person school board. A well-respected principal with 20 years of service to the district left in 1992, and the highly regarded superintendent of 14 years resigned in early 1993.
Through the persistent work of a citizens group supportive of the educational reforms, the millage renewal passed in a later election, but the increase again failed. Blissfield now faces a financial crisis more severe than at any time in the past. While public confidence is slowly increasing—a moderate incumbent narrowly defeated an opposition candidate in the latest election—the opposition has taken its toll on teacher morale and administration leadership. A once-confident district no longer outwardly pursues reform efforts.
The controversies in Adrian and Blissfield are particularly instructive examples of organized opposition to systemic school reforms. The tactics used by the two citizens groups, PEAF and CQE, have appeared with increasing frequency across the nation. The responses of the two school boards are an excellent contrast. They illustrate the effectiveness of particular strategies in addressing this opposition.
It Was the Best of Times
Adrian and Blissfield are located 12 miles apart in rural Lenawee County in the extreme southeastern corner of Michigan. With a population of slightly under 100,000, the county includes 11 public school systems and 1 conservative Evangelical Christian K–12 system. Adrian is the largest district in the county with about 5,000 students. Blissfield is middle-sized with about 1,500.
/I/D/E/A/ selected both districts for the Communities for Developing Minds project for several reasons: geographically and demographically, they are quintessentially middle-America; they were enthusiastically and historically committed to staff development; their excellent instructional programs were supported by relatively stable administrations and school boards; and the districts enjoyed considerable community support.
The administrations of both districts were excited about the potential of the CDM project to bring national recognition to their educational programs. More important, they looked ahead to providing their students the best instruction possible.
It Was the Worst of Times
The challenge to CDM caught the districts' boards and administrators off guard. Although they had mentioned the project to their staff and communities, few teachers and fewer citizens knew what it was about. Both districts simply assumed that their announcements would be accepted with the same trust that had historically defined their community relations. They were wrong.
The opposition groups seized on the districts' lack of preparation by filling the void with their own explanations of the project. PEAF and CQE, the two citizens groups, used scare tactics and emotional appeals to spread fear and distrust about the CDM project. Their materials portrayed the project's sponsor as an “outside” New Age organization that was going to transform “our students” into “extreme liberals.” The tactics, based on Robert Simonds' Public School Awareness Committee kit worked: public suspicion and fear intensified.
Having sparked the communities' misgivings, the opposition fanned the flame through board meetings, local media, and public meetings. Not anticipating any opposition, the two districts were ill-prepared to respond. They were further immobilized by the nature of the charges, as the educators and board members had no understanding of the worldview espoused by the citizens groups.
The Opposition's Identity
In “documenting” their charges, the opposition's choice of spokespersons, language, and materials revealed their true identity. At the first public meetings of the citizens groups, the speakers were two local conservative Evangelical Christian ministers, the staff director from the Christian Family Centre and K–12 school, a local attorney (who later ran and was defeated for the school board in Blissfield), a gospel singer who presented herself as an educator, and a political staffer from the office of the local state representative—a former Fundamentalist minister. The meeting was structured so that no open discussion or questioning of the speakers was permitted.
The language used in these and later presentations included frequent references to the anti-Christian, -family, and -American nature of /I/D/E/A/, NEA, Ted Sizer, Art Costa, John Goodlad, and ASCD. According to the opposition speakers, values education equaled moral relativism. Affective education invaded the sanctity of the family. Global education promoted one-world government, and multiculturalism destroyed patriotism. The arguments against outcome-based education had not yet been clearly developed.
The materials were generated from five identifiable sources: Carol Belt's unpublished jeremiad against school reform, “Educational Restructuring of America—Education or Indoctrination”; Eric Buehrer's The New Age Masquerade: The Hidden Agenda in Your Child's Classroom; articles critical of the Impressions reading series published in James Dobson's Focus on the Family's Citizen; James Dobson and Gary Bauer's Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of our Kids; and Pat Robertson's The New World Order.
An analysis of the opposition's leaders, language, and materials clearly identify PEAF and CQE with the Christian Right—a loose-knit network of theopolitical activists seeking to extend their religious and moral values to the larger society. While not all school opponents are connected with the Christian Right, a large number of challenges to public schools within the last two years have represented this ideological viewpoint.
How the Districts Responded
The Adrian and Blissfield administrations tried to counteract public concern through newspaper articles that explained the Communities for Developing Minds project. Although factually informative, these articles did not calm the suspicions of the general public.
The first significant difference in how the school boards reacted to outside pressure was the districts' responses to opposition petitions. In Blissfield, the board was intimidated. The two petitions, totaling 700+ signatures, demanded immediate and permanent disassociation with /I/D/E/A/. This represented more people than had voted in the last school board election.
Instead of taking the petitions under review, the board immediately took a vote on continued association with the Institute. The vote was unanimous: /I/D/E/A/ was out. (Actually, the vote was anticlimactic. Because of the hostile environment in Blissfield and the board's failure to stand firm, the Institute withdrew its invitation to the Blissfield schools.) After the vote, the board president said he hoped the decision to officially withdraw from the project would begin to heal the deep community divisions. It did not. Two years later, Blissfield residents were still seeking to repair divisions in the community through a plea in the weekly paper.
In Adrian, new Superintendent Al Meloy made it clear that all petitions would be warmly received. But instead of being intimidated by the 2,446 signatures on four different documents, Meloy and his staff compared the signatures to the total number of residents in the district: the number represented slightly less than 8 percent. Further, when compared only with registered voters, the percentage was about 15 percent. At the next board meeting, Meloy presented elaborate charts showing that the actual strength of the opposition was less than 10 percent of actual voters. Meloy's matter-of-fact approach and his insistence on civility in board meetings significantly reduced the pressure on the board.
While the petition analysis provided a good understanding of the opposition's strength, it did little to sway public opinion about Communities for Developing Minds. That began to change with a series of articles I wrote for the local Adrian newspaper as a “concerned” private citizen, based on a research paper I had previously prepared for the school administrations. By the time the articles appeared, Blissfield had already decided to withdraw from the project.
The four-part newspaper series presented the challenges in their theopolitical context using common language about everyday examples. The articles identified the sources of the PEAF/CQE materials, their strategies, and the worldview that gave their charges meaning. The articles had their intended effect. Since the beliefs and values of the Christian Right are not those of mainstream Americans (even mainstream Evangelical Christians), the public began to treat PEAF and CQE materials with some suspicion. These articles provided the school districts with a window of opportunity to make their case to the public.
Blissfield's board did not take advantage of the window and remained defensive. The opponents consistently pressed the board to show that no vestige of /I/D/E/A/ was still present. In later months, the board was forced to defend grading policies, new math and health curriculums, and a driver's education policy.
In Adrian, the district took advantage of the opportunity by launching an effective communications strategy to demonstrate the nature of the curricular and pedagogical changes. The superintendent, assistant superintendent for instruction, school board members, teachers, staff, and community participants in the CDM project made themselves available to community and church groups. The superintendent even volunteered to meet with people in their homes. At open houses in each of the district's instructional buildings, teachers also provided examples of the curriculum.
The district's exhaustive commitment was rewarded. For the first time, the Adrian community began to feel comfortable with the project. As the school year passed and the project's “external staff” worked in the community, no significant opposition was voiced at board meetings or in the schools.
Affirming the Democratic Process
Controversies like those in Adrian and Blissfield can happen anywhere. School administrators need to be prepared before the opposition confronts them. Marjorie Ledell and Arleen Arnsparger provide excellent communications strategies to help districts vulnerable to these challenges. In their recent book, they emphasize that schools must respond to criticism in a way that affirms rather than frustrates the democratic process. Christian Right (and other) critics of public education have every right to participate in decision-making processes affecting education. However, districts must insist that such criticism does, in fact, enter into the arena of public discussion and democratic debate.
In Blissfield, the democratic process was defeated by the opposition's pressure tactics. No substantive public discussion or survey of public opinion of Communities for Developing Minds ever took place. To avoid such situations, school administrators and boards must generate and adhere to policies that are driven by students' needs and that promote fair, structured discussion. School officials also need to remember that democracy means that “you, like everyone else, contribute only a part of the final product.”
The Adrian strategy opened the discussion to include both the community and the opposition. It worked because the school officials became informed about the nature and strength of the opposition. Understanding the context of the debate, they were able to form effective strategies to address the fears of the general public and the charges of the opposition.
Educators need to understand that public trust is not as deep as it used to be. When challenges do arise, welcome the opposition into open and structured discussion. In fact, insist on it. Structure the discussion so arguments can be responded to with counterarguments and evidence with counterevidence. Push each other to the point at which the basic assumptions of the positions become revealed.
When this occurs, unreasonable Christian Right opposition will alienate itself from the general public. Such a strategy provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate the value of critical thinking and multicultural debate to strengthening American democracy.
