In my experience local elected boards are collaborative and there isn’t a lot of benefit to the sort of behavior you ascribe to me. While things are probably different in places with more contested partisan politics, I was in an area of essentially one-party rule, everyone was in the same position of essentially having been elected to an almost uncontested seat and were people genuinely interested in making sure the boards ran well.
My guess is the Glenn Youngkin area and the kerfuffle over CRT and the election of far-right lunatics to many Virginia school boards has probably changed that for the worse, I don’t know as I haven’t been involved in politics in over 10 years now in terms of even attending or following local meetings.
As an elected school board member fiduciary oversight is one of the core responsibilities, so caring about how tax dollars are spent is fairly intrinsic to the job.
In my experience we had none of that. All of my fellow members were retired professionals who cared about educational quality. A lot of deference was given to the Superintendant, who is the primary educator we as the board had direct interactions with on a regular basis. If the Superintendant said we needed to approve more teaching positions, or such we generally deferred to him–we certainly would look at his ideas in depth, but it was rare we went against the Superintendant (even though technically his contract was approved by us, and we could decline to renew his contract or even dismiss him in some circumstances.)
It was not entirely unusual for teachers involved in organizing to come to some of the open board meetings and rant or complain about things–they were almost universally ignored.
I was a huge fan of that yes, Scott Walker was a so-so Governor but gutting Wisconsin’s unions was an amazingly pro-student activity that ended the power of one of the worst organized teaching unions in the country in terms of one that protected bad teachers and hurt students. FWIW in Virginia teachers had not had collective bargaining rights since 1977, our teacher’s union had thus been long ago defanged (for the better.) But it still existed and was still a barrier as much as it could be to good educational policy.
Nope. In my case we had no politically notable board members, our school board was quiet and attention paid to it was low. There were certainly board members closer to Richmond or in Richmond that would make local news when they’d grandstand and such, but back then at least that was more associated with the higher population districts where the political stakes were seen as higher. My experience with a more rural district is the board was primarily about function and not pretense or perception.
In other words, you ignored the people most directly involved with educating children, belittling and dismissing their concerns, in favor of the career bureaucrat with a polished machine to tell you what he wanted to hear.
That is, sadly, a pretty conventional approach to being a school board member.
Why is it that, whenever we have a conservative getting Pitted, their go-to stance is that they’re the most (or among the most) intelligent posters on this board?
I missed out on the model of respectful deference by school board members toward professional administrators. In my experience it was not unusual for board members to dress down or otherwise belittle superintendents and other administration personnel. It got downright pathological in one medium-sized school district where board hostility and nit-picking on the tiniest budget detail was a feature of every meeting. Either the board was doing its absolute best to drive out the superintendent so they could pick their own favorite, or they wanted to score as many points as possible to ensure their re-election or make it possible to move on to higher office (sleaze and overweening political ambition tending to co-exist).
That isn’t my position at all. There’s lots of posters on the board at large who are far smarter than myself, but the half dozen or so mouthbreathers who most feverishly participate in threads like this are not among them. The SDMB has a lot of mentally ill / low intelligence / senile posters, and that is mostly what you see in threads like this.
Your attempted rationalization here is self-contradictory. You deny claiming to be particularly smart, but apparently everyone who has criticized you in this thread is “mentally ill”, senile, or stupid.
Furthermore, since I have a long acquaintance with the postings of many of these folks, I can say that this is objectively false, and the claim makes you look like a fool.
I will also mention in passing, speaking only for myself, that what you deride as “personal insults” are not actually personal at all. They are insults against the ideological group that you so vividly and shamelessly represent. On a personal level, you’ve actually made some good and informative posts on this board when the subject isn’t politics. What I loathe is the ideology that you so proudly flaunt – the one that mocks education and educators, the one that rejects social programs like universal health care that have been adopted throughout the civilized world, the one that celebrates gun proliferation as “freedom”, the one that has routinely dismissed the existential problem of climate change. In short, while I have no problem with conservatism in principle, I loathe what contemporary American Republicanism has become – the ideology that is manifestly on the wrong side of history, and I loathe those who continue to promulgate it.
Don’t worry, no one is getting huffy outside of the foamerati that has been crying in this thread since the last school shooting.
I don’t know that I’ve made any claims about my intelligence. Based on testing and my personal experience I am of “above average” intelligence, but I know lots of people smarter, and have encountered plenty of people who are 99th percentile intellect–I don’t have illusions that I am among them. I do have a really good memory and am a voracious and addicted reader, and I read fairly fast–I’ve plowed through on average 1 nonfiction book a week for the last 30 years and I have good recall of many of them. I think being well read is a very different thing from having high general intelligence though. I’m also in my 60s now, and I absolutely think anyone of that age group being honest with themselves has lost at least some of their cognitive abilities as compared to their prime, but I don’t have any obvious signs of senility.
You mean when you showed that you had depths of depravity previously not revealed?
I see now why you positively rejoiced at the below average students and teachers getting slaughtered by your worthy gun toting hero. After all, if they were above average like you, they’d be in private school.
That’s not even the current topic. You got pitted for threadshitting in a thread after you were told that your pet topic (affirmative action) was not the purpose of the thread.
Then, rather than be an adult about it and apologize or even just say nothing, you decided to throw a temper tantrum, saying a bunch of shitty things like an angry drunk person.
This is the SDMB–a place that values learning. You attacked teachers. You decided anyone who disagrees with you must be senile or mentally ill—the latter of which wouldn’t even matter. You acted like a fucking idiot, and people are now pointing and laughing at you.
Go ahead. Try this shit in real life. Get into a public argument with a teacher, and tell them that being a teacher means they must be stupid. Tell everyone who calls you out that they are either mentally ill or senile. See if they think you’re the smart one.
All you have to do is be a man and say “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to come off as an insult. Just because I didn’t have anything to add to the thread topic didn’t mean others might not.”
Because, if you didn’t fucking notice, the thread went on just fine without you. The rest of us did find something to talk about in the OP. We could talk about things on the conceptual level, rather than making yet another thread about affirmative action.
And if you graduated from West Point in 1977 (or 1978, or whatever—see below) how the fuck did you retire from the army *as a mereCaptain* in the early 2000s?
I am apparently not the first person to notice certainly “irregularities” in your stories about service.
Fuck you, you stolen valor lying piece of shit. I don’t care if one of your two stories is true, or neither of them: they certainly can’t both be true.