The school board in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Now we can all breathe a sigh of relief — we finally know what seven members who are supposed to be running a public school district think about an international issue that has nothing to do with their jobs.
This type of divisive virtue signaling is plaguing school districts across the nation and degrading public education.
The media have widely reported that Ann Arbor’s resolution is among the first of its kind. There’s a reason for that — because it doesn’t make sense. These school board members, while wasting time and neglecting their actual job to improve quality education for the district’s 17,000 students, are extending their views into foreign policy matters that have no bearing on their day-to-day responsibilities. In the words of the former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, “Do your job!”
Perhaps the most laughable part of this resolution is the board’s acknowledgment of its lack of influence in foreign policy. It reads, “Understanding its limited role in international affairs, expresses its support for seeking peaceful resolutions to conflicts wherever they may occur.”
Wait a second: Does this mean that, as the Israel Defense Forces responded to the Oct. 7 massacre of their citizens, military leadership wasn’t waiting with bated breath to find out what Ann Arbor’s school board members think they should do moving forward?
The school board members explicitly admitted their lack of impact but still divided the community and wasted several hours debating the merit of a useless resolution. After a five-hour meeting and 120 public comments, four board members voted for the resolution, one against, and two abstained. Meanwhile, 2,000 Ann Arbor residents signed a petition against the resolution that had circulated in the community in the days leading up to the meeting.
This is the sort of polemics we expect from the Oscars. But it’s much worse on school board daises than at Hollywood’s awards ceremonies. The nongermane virtue signaling at school board meetings is taxpayer-funded and threatens quality public education for children. What the two platforms seem to have in common, however, is they attract childish, self-aggrandizing narcissists with little genuine interest in the public good.
Rima Mohammad, the president of the school board and daughter of Palestinian refugees, for example, was the main advocate for this resolution. School board elections in Michigan are nonpartisan, but Washtenaw County’s Democratic Party and Planned Parenthood are among the organizations that endorsed Mohammad. During her campaign, she expressed that diversity, equity, inclusion and the notoriously racist “anti-racist” ideology would inform her decision-making for the district responsible for an annual budget of $331 million.
In other words, Mohammad was clear during her campaign that as a school board member, she intended to politicize public education in Ann Arbor. Her campaign is a cautionary tale. Voters need to pay attention to school board races and not simply march to the orders of a political party’s sample ballot.
Mohammad, like so many other local school board politicians across the nation, is leveraging her identity and likely using this opportunity to get attention and campaign donations as she plots her next move toward a larger stage.
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Meanwhile, across the country, on a multitude of standardized tests, American students continue to perform worse academically following teachers union-pushed prolonged pandemic school closures. The National Assessment of Educational Progress’ long-term trend assessment, for example, shows that 13-year-old students performed nine points lower in math and four points lower in reading from 2020 to 2023.
With divisive and worthless actions such as the ceasefire resolution, it’s clear that narcissistic and attention-seeking school board members are not interested in doing their actual jobs. They should instead focus on pandemic learning loss recovery and fundamental educational excellence for their district’s students.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, a member of the Coalition for TJ, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.