Word Games
Word Games
The SC Superintendent candidate won’t take a consistent position on her own qualifications, or much else
“Our ‘yes’ vote on Amendment 1 is a vote to make the key question of the superintendent’s ‘job interview’ what he knows about education and fixing complicated systems, not how good a politician he is or how much money he can raise” (Ellen Weaver and Jim DeMint, 2018).
“Ellen believes letters behind your name do not necessarily equal effective leadership” (Ryan Gillespie, Weaver’s campaign manager, 2022).
“What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is only important because it convinces them of consistency in time” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism).
Below is the course of study, according to Bob Jones University, for the master’s program Ellen Weaver says she completed between April and early October of 2022. (That’s about 6 months; the program is 33 credit hours. People have been understandably very skeptical, enough people that The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission, which accredits BJU, opened an investigation.) She has said that she will announce the degree at an event at “Freedom Farm” hosted by Stephanie Berquist, a Lexington “parental autonomy” activist who has called for the resignation of her district’s superintendent and, from what I can understand, the dissolution of the elected school board in favor of a district run directly by “the parents”.
The program also requires students to “build [a] leadership portfolio with coursework and practical hands-on experience such as working under the supervision of a school administrator.” It will be fascinating to see whether and/ or how Weaver met this requirement, which sounds like a reduced version of the lengthy internship process most public school educators have to complete to obtain certification. (It should be noted that, despite some superficial similarities to traditional education leadership programs, BJU states that “This program is designed to expand your skillset and extend your professional reach, but does not lead to state licensure.”)
Weaver has frequently downplayed the value of professional training and education during the campaign. The closest she has come to a substantive policy position on teacher retention was when she told a reporter (in a rare interview with the “mainstream media”):
I’ve never once heard a teacher tell me that it was that third-year pedagogy class that made them a great teacher. They always talk about another teacher that mentored them or a principal who coached them. So, I think that if we can find more ways to get teachers into the classroom earlier, we’ll have a better chance of equipping them with real world skills that they need to not only enter the classroom but to stay in the classroom.
In other words, her big idea for finding more qualified teachers is to change the meaning of the word qualified, a rhetorical move that has also been central to her sales pitch for herself as superintendent. This new line of reasoning is explicitly at odds with her longtime support of the controversial Read to Succeed law, which requires additional coursework for teacher certification and recertification as the only mechanism to try to make teachers better at teaching literacy. South Carolina teachers have been struggling for years with these additional course requirements, which are not generally possible to complete at the break-the-sound-barrier pace or with the school-officials-over-your-program-donated-to-your-campaign flexibility of Weaver’s BJU master’s (Randy Page, the BJU President’s Chief of Staff, has donated $200 to Weaver’s campaign). (The law also, problematically, requires third graders who don’t score highly enough on a standardized test to be held back, a policy NCTE says is harmful and research suggests isn’t effective.) So Ellen has either changed her mind since then about the importance of coursework, or she doesn’t believe what she’s saying.
Either way, she had a very different tune in 2018 when she was pushing for the very failed constitutional change that ended up establishing the requirement which her campaign has suggested repeatedly isn’t that important, saying in June, on her website, “My experience has prepared me to lead on day one” (though in March she did say the requirement was “perfectly reasonable”— and also that she was enrolled at Western Governor’s University, not BJU).
In 2018, Weaver and her mentor Jim DeMint published an op-ed in the Greenville Journal, where they supported a constitutional amendment to make the position of SC Superintendent of Education one appointed by the governor:
This year, the General Assembly successfully passed a law that would require any future appointed superintendents to have at least a master’s degree and “substantive and broad-based experience” in public education or operational and financial management in a field like finance, economics, accounting, law, or business.
Our “yes” vote on Amendment 1 is a vote to make the key question of the superintendent’s “job interview” what he knows about education and fixing complicated systems, not how good a politician he is or how much money he can raise.
The amendment failed by a wide margin, but the law requiring the masters degree qualification and education or business experience (another element Weaver— who went into insider politics right after completing her last Bob Jones degree, a political science bachelors— would seem to lack) remained in effect. It’s difficult to believe Weaver didn’t know this, as she was chair of the Education Oversight at the time (having been appointed by Senator John Courson who shortly thereafter pled guilty to misconduct in office and resigned).
Weaver’s campaign would later, apparently disingenuously, suggest they somehow didn’t know about and/ or didn’t approve of the master’s requirement before Weaver filed, suggesting that a “strong backbone” was more important than a degree. She seemed to downplay the requirement she had praised four years earlier as merely a “legal requirement”.
Like almost all public school teachers, I worked much longer than six months and completed a full-time internship (teaching all day, for free, with the help of one of those “teacher mentors” Weaver referenced, while taking two graduate courses) in order to meet the qualifications to be a teacher. Lisa Ellis, Weaver’s opponent, has two master’s degrees, including one in organizational leadership, and a degree in education.
The widespread narrative that Weaver couldn’t have possible gotten her degree has not been aided by her refusal— and BJU’s— to answer any substantive questions about how she got it. Basically: it was flexible, I worked hard, take my word for it.
And even if Weaver somehow took the time over the last six months to not only complete 33 hours of real coursework, and to work with a mentor school administrator, she still did so at Bob Jones University, a school with a segregationist past so checkered that it arguably ignited the anti-abortion movement.
According to religious historian Randall Ballmer, Bob Jones University clung to an official segregationist policy even after the Nixon administration ended the practice of tax exemptions for segregated schools, trying to skirt the government’s requirements by first admitting one Black student (who quickly quit, presumably because being on an all-White campus that wanted to be segregated was terrifying) and later admitting only married Black students, out of fear that Black and White students would intermarry or have sexual relationships.
Weaver attended a BJU as an undergraduate that was still a deeply racist place: a formal policy against interracial relationships was still in effect on the campus. This did not happen in the distant past: the policy did not end until the year 2000, just before Weaver graduated.
BJU didn’t apologize for its history of segregation— or for founder Bob Jones’ position that its racist policy was “scriptural”— until 14 years ago, long after Weaver had received her first diploma.
While I don’t know that a college-aged person should be held completely responsible for the policies of their college, Weaver the middle-aged woman has chosen to return to BJU again, to get a fast-track diploma her campaign has at times presented as something of a technicality. And she has returned to this explicitly-racist-at-least-up-to-2008 school in order to become the leader of an extremely racially and culturally diverse school system, where the majority of students are nonwhite.
Perhaps it should not be surprising, then, that she has joined with increasingly radical voices to stamp out “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in schools (even suggesting in an interview excerpted below that she would consider rejecting federal funding— which makes up about $1 billion of the state’s education budget, in order to do so), to promote school vouchers that the legislature would have allowed to fund schools that discriminate against students with disabilities, and to paint schools that serve most minority students in the state as a part of a “status quo” that must be destroyed.
I agree with 2018 Ellen Weaver on this, at least: the office of Superintendent of Education should be filled based on what the candidate knows about “education and fixing complicated systems,” and not about how good she is at politics or how much money she has raised. Weaver likely didn’t intend for those words to be applied to a career political insider and “think tank” leader like herself, who crushed her primary opponent— an experienced teacher leader and educator— in large part because of $750,000 in attack ads from a voucher-loving Pennsylvania billionaire with no interest in the impacts of the election on South Carolina’s 800,000 public school students, and because of a willingness to embrace radical “anti-woke” and “parental choice” talking points. As one commenter on her graduate announcement wrote, “You’re making it harder to be a teacher. Quite honestly, that’s the opposite of what teachers and our children need right now. Speak truth in love…win on your morals, your platform, not low-rent propaganda. Set a good example there too.”
In all likelihood, Weaver was just using the “job interview” metaphor to justify allowing the governor to appoint the superintendent (which, it turns out, she now wants to be herself); the law was simply a way to placate those concerned about what that would mean for schools in a state long run by men and women whose main education goal is to slash funding and withhold resources.
But like it or not, Weaver’s 2018 words, if not her intent, were right on the money, and they described an ideal candidate who explicitly lacks her own most prominent qualities— deep pockets full of special interest money and a willingness to play cynical word games to advance her corporate voucher agenda— and who instead most closely resembles her opponent, my friend Lisa Ellis.
With her 22 years of teaching experience and two master’s degrees— one in organizational leadership— Lisa is the obvious candidate to pass the “job interview” Weaver and DeMint envisioned happening with the governor; because the constitutional amendment failed, it is the people of South Carolina, instead, who must conduct the interview.
Lisa can win, but she faces an uphill battle. Please encourage your friends and family to consider a vote for the candidate who wants to help save our education system, which— due to a worsening teacher recruitment and retention crisis and a partisan war on the very idea of public education as a democratic institution striving to serve all students and the state— is seriously in peril.
Lisa’s name will appear on the ballot twice, because she was nominated by both the Democratic Party and former Superintendent Jim Rex’s Alliance Party. You can select her for either party, and all votes will go to Lisa, not the party (just as they do in all elections for all candidates, including non-fusion candidates). Despite Weaver’s suggestions to the contrary, fusion candidacy is very straightforward: in a democracy, people elect people, not parties. As SC’s official election website explains, “A candidate may be nominated by more than one political party. Such candidates are commonly referred to as ‘fusion candidates.’” There have been fusion candidates in SC since at least 1874, when one of them ran for governor. Just make sure that if you vote for Lisa or any other fusion candidate, you select their name only once— the vote will count for the person, either way.
Early voting begins October 24. Election Day is Tuesday, November 8. Visit scvotes.gov for more information, to check your registration, and to see your sample ballot and polling location. For more information on Lisa, visit lisaforsc.com.
