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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Some facts about the racist massacre in Buffalo. The alleged shooter is 18 years old and just recently bought the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle that he used in the attack legally. According to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Newspaper, a person must be 21 or older to obtain a license to purchase a handgun in New York State. That's a handgun. Anyone 18 or older can purchase a long gun, like a rifle or shotgun without a license and someone can own a long gun at as young as 16. Now, New York City, they remind us, requires permits for long guns and applicants must be 21 or over, that's in the city, but it's younger upstate and no permit or license required.

The gun was purchased legally. Here's how the alleged shooter described this legal weapon, legal in New York, even New York. The gun-- Sorry, here's the quote in the suspect's online posting. He wrote, "There are very few weapons that are easier to use and more effective at killing than firearms, especially the Bushmaster XM-15 I will be using". The gun and its legal status and at his age are one thing. The alleged himself reportedly lives in a largely white suburban community 200 miles from Buffalo. I've seen the number reported and searched for Black communities online to find a place to attack, and then drove all the way to Buffalo to commit his act of terrorism. You've probably heard that.

According to police, he went there just the day before too, that was Friday to scope out the scene, what police are calling a reconnaissance trip. That's how much effort he went to to get away from his mostly white community to kill out of the paranoid belief that there's a conspiracy to replace white people with people of color in America. Replacement theory, as it's known was in his 180-page document. If you think you've heard that before, but aren't sure where, remember the infamous chant from the Charlottesville White Supremacist Rally in 2017, "Jews will not replace us." That's maybe the most well known other expression of the same replacement theory.

Police say, based on the manifesto, the gunman was inspired by the Christ Church, New Zealand massacre, in which a gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in 2019. This becomes another in the growing list of acts of racist and white supremacist, terrorism, and murder in just the last few years. The El Paso Texas Walmart Massacre also 2019, 23 people killed by a gunman who is said to have been motivated by hatred of Latinos. The Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, 2018, 11 people killed there. The church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, 9 Black parishioners gunned down, plus Charlotte trail in 2017, which included a person driving a car into a crowd of people protesting against the Neo-Nazis.

Remember the FBI lists white supremacist terrorism as the main domestic threat in the US for the last number of years, that was even under Trump, that the FBI said that, and here we are again. Of course, there is the social media angle, including what to do about postings like his, the alleged shooter's circulating freely online, or the fact that he was able to livestream his attack which he did on one site. Later in the show, we'll talk to Jonathan Haidt from NYU, who has an Atlantic Magazine article about the prevalence of the most divisive language on social media, which experts once thought social media, that is, would tie people more together.

We'll have hate crimes expert Michael Edison Hayden on the show too, and we'll have Reverend Jackie Lewis, from the Middle Collegiate Church. A lot to preach about and gather about and heal from and decide what active measures to take after this. All those guests are coming up. Last week, we did two call-ins inviting you to share some news from your block or your neighborhood. One for people in New York City, one for people anywhere, but the five boroughs. One of the calls we got was from Anne in Great Neck, who talked about Virginia or Texas, or Florida style culture wars candidates running for school board in elections that will take place tomorrow. Tomorrow's school board elections day in New York state. Here's part of that call.

Anne: What's happened is we have a longtime trustee who is a retired Great Neck teacher who is running for reelection, being opposed by someone who says he's a concerned parent, but he has had to leave, he's been asked to leave library board and school board meetings for not wearing a mask during COVID. He has a long list of books he wants to ban in the schools. He is supported by some religious organizations that are actually actively politicking.

Brian: That call, Anne in Great Neck, Nassau County right over the Queens line, was quickly followed by a few others saying, "Hey, that's going on in my town school board elections too." We took those calls seriously and decided to follow up. Again, the school board elections throughout New York State take place tomorrow, and we'll follow up now with two guests, Gary Stern, education editor and reporter for The Journal News, or lohud.com, lohud for lower Hudson Valley. If you don't know that news organization, his article was called These Culture Wars are Turning School Boards into Political Battlegrounds.

He has details from school board races in New Rochelle, Mayo Pack, Nyack, Pearl River, Lakeland, and other towns north of the city. Craig Burnett is with us as well. I said Ann's call came from Great Neck, Nassau County on Long Island. Craig Burnett is a political science professor at Hofstra on the Island. He was quoted in a news day story on this recently. Professor Burnett and Gary Stern from the Journal News, welcome to WNYC. Thank you for joining us.

Professor Craig Burnett: Thank you for having me.

Brian: Gary, you reported that there are 53 school board elections in Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam counties, and 36 of them are being contested and that's unusually high, what are the school board elections in the three counties usually like? Oh, do we not have Gary? Maybe we only have Professor Burnett's line connected. Is that right?

Gary Stern: Hello? You hear me now?

Brian: Oh yes. Now we got you, Gary. Hi, there.

Gary: I'm sorry. The problem with my headphones. Usually, the elections are very quiet. We have a lot of uncontested races. The incumbents just get reelected again and again, but we've seen an increase in candidates in the last few years. This year there are a lot of candidates running a lot of contested races and a lot of incumbents have dropped out.

Brian: You spend a lot of space in the article on East Chester and Lakeland as communities deeply conflicted over equity policies and other matters and that entire slates of candidates are facing off. For people who don't know the territory, East Chester is just a little north of the city near Yonkers. The Lakeland District covers parts of Northern Westchester County and part of Putnam County. Can you give us a sense of the issues?

Gary: Yes. We've seen a lot of raucous school board meetings and these communities for the last year and a half, two years, the issues are the ones you've heard about around the country. People have questions about the teaching of diversity and equity in the schools, about school boards trying to come up with new policies to address those issues. There have been a lot of questions as well about the teaching of sex education and gender to children. Of course, the COVID policies have come up as well, the wearing of masks in the schools. Folks who have spoken out at these meetings are now running for school board.

Brian: You want to take any one other town? You go through so many specifically in one of your latest articles, New Rochelle, Nyack, Pearl River, Mahopac, want to pick any one and give us the lay of the land a little bit?

Gary: Yes, sure. In Clarkstown in Rocklin County, last year a group of middle school students prepared a lesson about the Black Lives Matter Movement. There were complaints from the community about the lesson before the kids even got a chance to teach it to their peers and the whole lesson wound up getting shelved. The school system, they had meetings with various groups in the community to try to figure out the best way to handle it, and the whole thing just wound up not going forward.

That's one community where people are just not happy. Some think that the lesson should have been told and that the school system made a big mistake by not letting it go forward and others are concerned about what the schools are teaching about race and think that it's just too much.

Brian: Professor Burnett, do you want to give us the Long Island take on this and to teach at Hofstra or just give us a political science professor's take on the bigger picture, school board election suddenly being more contested this year?

Professor Burnett: Sure. It certainly is. These things do come and go. It's not as if people don't get interested in school board elections, but they tend to be a little less interesting to most people. In my view, this is really coming out of what a lot of people experienced during the pandemic. There's a pretty straight line from what people knew in before times. Things kept going along and maybe they didn't like the way their budget was spent, and maybe they'd vote against their budget. Maybe they thought the schools could be doing X, Y, and Z, maybe slightly differently. In terms of my attention to what the school board is doing, as an average voter in my district, I've probably not tuned into this in a major way.

Then the pandemic comes, and what happens is that kids start staying home all of a sudden, and they start having-- on Long Island, we're talking about 124 school districts, 124 different policies, and 124 different reactions, with layers upon layers of government. It becomes very confusing as to why your district is doing this versus that. You hear other districts are doing one thing, but not another. You hear stories like certain kids aren't able to go to school, they're going twice a week, whatever it is, mask mandates, people got interested. The core of what happened is that people started paying attention to the policies as it related to the pandemic in a serious way.

As everybody knows, that got really political over time, and people started to think about what does the mask mean and what does it mean in terms of your political ideology. You've even heard of the woman talking on her comment that really kicked all this off, she's intimating that this person didn't behave this way and that says something about that person. It says about what we should think about. The way she said it, she was saying, "This is what we should really think about this response, and that's what it tells us about that person."

It's only really expanded from there, is that you've had a lot of interest in what would probably be considered benign policies, things about how do we teach the kids, how do we get them into the classroom?

That's the most basic function, to more curricular questions. Now we're tying this because it's become political. It starts reaching into the political space, so it starts grabbing issues that maybe it wasn't grabbing onto before it. That coming along the same line is what was happening starting really in 2014. If you go years and years before is far back, but really the modern movement of people paying attention to the Black Lives Matter Movement, et cetera, it all kicks up around the same time, and it's happening, and that these issues about what people are being taught and critical race theory, really, the media has crept out of this, it all happened at the same time, and the two things came together.

That's what's happening on Long Island and in the elections, I think, in school boards across the country right now, is that you have a convergence of people paying a lot more attention to something they hadn't paid attention to, and a politicization of that institution at the same time.

Brian: Now, listeners, help us report this story. It was a listener who put it in our sites last week, as we replayed that clip. Now you can help further the story, what's happening in tomorrow's school board elections in your town in New York State? Again, the city itself doesn't have school board elections, the mayor runs the schools, but in all the New York suburbs, school board election day is tomorrow. So listeners, 212-433-WNYC, help us report this story. 212-433-9692. How much are culture wars issues taking center stage compared to more ordinary times issues? As our guests were just describing it of budgetary questions or more ordinary curriculum questions, things like that, how much compared to years past?

Help us report this story and really make sure people in your town, no matter what side of anything they're on, know it's happening and what's at stake. 212-433-WNYC, if you're connected in any way to any school board election taking place in New York State school board election day or on New York State school board election day tomorrow. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692, for our guests from the Journal News and from Hofstra University. Let's go back up to Westchester, Rockland and Putnam. Gary, you reported on some liberal groups in Westchester holding an event called the right-wing campaign to invade our school boards.

That makes it sound like it's coming from out of the district, out of the neighborhoods, like Ron DeSantis has mobilized the group to come to Westchester and run for school board. Is it anything like that?

Gary: That's a good question. A lot of people have been concerned about national groups like Save our Schools and Moms for Liberty influencing what's happening at the local level. There is some of that, but there's no doubt that this is a grassroots trend as well. At school board meetings for the last two years, we've seen parents and other longtime community members get up these meetings, stand at the mic, and complain to the school board. Clearly, a lot of them never having done this before, they're not familiar with school board policy, what school boards even necessarily do, but people have been coming out to talk about these issues that concern them.

It's a combination. I'm sure a lot of folks, they're on social media, they may be connected or get talking points from national groups, but it's certainly happening at the local level.

Brian: Any impression about outside groups, or the nationalization of local school board elections on Long Island, Professor Burnett?

Professor Burnett: Yes, I think there is in some sense. Probably the big concern for a lot of people would be, is there a lot of outside money coming in? To some extent, you have to wait until the period of the election has passed until you see where all the money did come and where it was spent, and how, but I don't think they were talking about millions upon millions of dollars flowing in. That's something you would get a sense of a lot earlier than this. I do want to say though, that even though it may not be heavy outside money coming in, there's a lot more coordination going on in the political world than there ever has been before.

You can find the same threads in these sort of groups that you see organizing in a lot of the times opposition to incumbents or just opposition to ideas, and they have similar talking points. Sometimes if you go maybe one level above those groups, you will find that there's a regional coordinating group that may or may not have some tie to a national group. In the case of Long Island, you really do have almost too many elections to try to influence. It'd be a tremendous amount of money, task. In an election format, that really boils down to what we would call in say local politics the friends and neighbor model of voting is that in order to win that contest, it's really turning out your friends and your neighbors to come and vote for you.

How much money can you really bring into a race like that? Are you going to take out your TV advertisements to try to convince your neighbors they should vote for you? At some level, it doesn't really make sense, so you're talking about flyers and things like that, but really, they are hyper-local elections and the candidates in these elections do matter quite a bit.

Brian: As an indication of how quickly things have changed in terms of how politicized they're getting along these cultural lines, the Newsday article that you quoted also mentions that the conservative group, Moms for Liberty has endorsed about 30 candidates for school boards across the island this year. Last year, they did not endorse at all in school board races. Is this a one-year change, a one-year to next year change? Do you think it's more focused on race? Do you think it's more focused on sexual orientation? Certainly, there was a COVID element of it. I think that's fading away as a lot of these mask and even vaccine requirements are coming down now.

Professor Burnett: Yes. The natural cycle of politics is, you go a little bit farther ahead of last year's election, you're in the thick of 2020. Everything was about the 2020 election and its aftermath. As is the case with a lot of organizing groups, you really just try. As a pressure group, you try to exert some pressure on the elected officials already. After all, if you can get what you want by just telling people what you want, that would be the easiest way to do it. When that's not successful, then you have to get organized. I think that's the phase at which we're in now, is that instead of getting what they wanted last year, and there was a lot of confusion, but as this new school year rolled around, there was still dissatisfaction.

That's enough lead time to get organized, make sure that you get the signatures to get your name on the ballot, and then do the kinds of coordinating things that you see happening now where you can give an endorsement for 30 people and perhaps even some campaign financing along with that. It does take time. The first step is to work with the people who are there. Sometimes you can get what you want. It's good expertise as well that you may have to give up as a result.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Ally in Dobbs Ferry, Hudson River town, north of the city in Westchester. Hi, Ally, you're on WNYC.

Allie: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. I think that the culture war that's going on broadly is playing out very much so in each of these suburbs and certainly here in Dobbs Ferry. It's a village that's changed a lot over the past decade, and there have been a lot of issues that have been divisive with newcomers from the city falling on one side and folks who've lived here for generations typically on the other. The clearest example of the impact of the culture wars on our village is that we have a fully contested school board election for the first time in memory. There are three open seats out of seven and six candidates running. Three of them have been staunch supporters of our district DEI initiatives. The other three are clearly antagonistic.

They make nods to diversity, but use coded language to signal to their supporters that they actually plan to undercut all the progress we've made. They also nod to diversity without acknowledging that diversity in the absence of equity and inclusion is essentially meaningless. The thing that has me terrified is that out of 8,000 or so registered voters in Dobbs Ferry our school board elections have typically turned out about 600 people. The last time there was even one seat contested that election was decided by five votes and so it's really been a focus of mine and a lot of people who really care about this in our village to inform the voters and really drive turnout. I'm cautiously optimistic for tomorrow, but it's really scary.

Brian: I see the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion in the news articles about this too. You're saying some of the conservative groups are okay with diversity, but they rebel against equity and inclusion. Can you draw that distinction in terms of how you see it and how you think they see it?

Allie: Absolutely. The three candidates who acknowledge that they need to say the word diversity, have respectively talked about how they teach in the New York City schools, which are diverse, they were in the military, which is diverse, and they were born in Queens, which is the most diverse place, essentially on Earth. They don't have any plans for how to actually achieve equity and inclusion in our community. They have said that they want to hire teachers who are highly qualified, not teachers based on their race or background. Of course, the school board only considers highly qualified teachers, but it's really important, especially in a community that's as diverse as ours, that we have teachers who reflect the district's population. That's just one example.

Brian: Allie, thank you very much for the report from Dobbs Ferry. Gary Stein, education editor for The Journal News. Let me go back to you as someone who covers education in Westchester. How much do you think race is an issue in these elections in the way that Allie was describing or any other way?

Gary: No, I think race is clearly the main issue. In New York, the State Board of Regents is pushing every school district to adopt what they call The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan. The idea is to look at everything from what's in the curriculum that reflects or doesn't reflect students from different backgrounds, what's in the textbooks, the library books, how hiring practices can be updated to produce more diversified staffs. Some schools have really taken us on, but that's where the criticism is coming in from those who think that this is racializing everything that happens in the schools.

We've heard some of the candidates say that these are issues that should be taught at home, that families teach values to kids and that the school should be sticking to the basics, to academics. I do think race is the main thing. You have some schools now, they talk about tackling anti-racism, and looking at systemic racism in different parts of how a school system operates, and other school districts are really gun shy because they're getting called out at meetings.

Brian: Professor Burnett, if some of the conservative school board candidates are reacting against the idea of reaching out to try to include more diverse teaching staff in places like Westchester and on Long Island, well, you teach at Hofstra on the island. Seeing that a Hofstra study from 2019 found, according to the study's language they use the word minorities, minorities account for 45% of public school students on Long Island, but just a little more than 8% of the teaching staff. Yet to hear the caller from Westchester's report and Gary from The Journal News reaffirming it, there's a reaction against reaching out to try to staff the schools with some more teachers of color.

Professor Burnett: Yes, it's a tough issue because you have downstream problems that are contributing to this too. It isn't always the case that any school district can just simply have a perfect pool of candidates either. Some candidates running for school board may have concerns about what it is the parameters should be and they strongly feel they don't want [unintelligible 00:26:08] parameters put on the selection process. This is a real problem that people are going to struggle to get around because there isn't an equitable pool of people, you don't have proof.

I'll just tease this out for people. If you have 45% students of color, you're very unlikely graduating 45% teachers of color at the same time. There is this problem of how do you try to make a school district more representative in terms of the staffing when you don't necessarily have the ability to have a pool of staffing that's the same way. In that case, you have some individuals who say, "Wait a minute, to what extent do we value the makeup of our staffing versus what we think we should just be hiring based on ability or whatever?" That's an age-old argument. That's something that goes back throughout time and there's no different than what the rub is against affirmative action.

In many ways, part of the problem from an education perspective, and this is true at the higher education level, where we feel this in even worse capacities, is that we need to do better about getting people into the professions that we would like to see change. To give some credence to the argument of the caller that came in, there are studies that talk about how this is an important issue. When that study came out in 2019, it was pretty drastic that the island is clearly changing and it's changing drastically in some areas. Yet, because of the way that it is people get tenure, and they tend to stay at the school district.

Things that we like, stable teachers that would give you a whole career, that means that that race of that person isn't going to change for 20 years and so you're running up against this stubborn statistic and you have downstream problems at the same time. Nobody is really sure how to do this in a frictionless way and that's, I think, what bubbles up on these kinds of elections more than anything else. There are real systemic problems that are not solvable overnight.

Brian: Yes. By the way, just as a footnote, because this conversation is really about the school districts in the suburbs. A Daily News story from 2020, noted that 56% of the teachers in the New York City schools were white two years ago, so it's probably around the same now. 56% of the teachers were white, only 15% of the student population in the New York City public schools is white. What's different is that there isn't a backlash that apparently is taking place in some of the suburban communities.

All right, we're going to take a break and we have other people waiting on the phones to report on culture wars playing out in their New York state school board elections. That is the local school district school board elections on New York state school board election day tomorrow. We'll take more of those calls and stay with our guests for another little while before we go explicitly to talk about Buffalo right after this.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we continue to talk about culture wars issues breaking out more than in most years in the local school board elections taking place around New York State tomorrow with Gary Stein, Education Editor and Reporter for The Journal News or lohud.com, which covers Westchester and Rockland and Putnam counties. His article is called These Culture Wars are Turning School Boards into Political Battlegrounds. He has details from a lot of school board races North of the city and Craig Burnett, Political Science Professor at Hofstra on Long Island, Who's watching things out there as well as nationally. I mentioned earlier that one of the main towns that Gary's article reports on is Eastchester, which weirdly is in Westchester. Janet is calling from Eastchester. Janet, you're on WNYC. Hi, there.

Janet: Hi, how are you?

Brian: Good. What's going on?

Janet: Can you hear me?

Brian: I can hear you just fine, Janet. Hi, what's going on?

Janet: Yes, thank you. Eastchester is a very, very divided town. What's happening in this particular election is that one side is politicizing it. This is all about the politics, the national politics of school boards, of banning books, of ugly commentary about history being taught that is too divisive. Then there's another side to this slate of people that are running that are focused on education. Some of this idea that this is a culture war, I think that's being nice. We have people defending the use of the N-word at a public rally. We have people that are making fun of trans kids.

This is really, maybe you want to call it a culture war, but from where I sit, this should be about taking care of all kids. As a mom to two Black daughters in the school system, I can only tell you this has been shockingly upsetting.

Brian: What's the teaching history part of this as you see it, Janet?

Janet: Okay. Let me give you an example, a bunch of parents at our youngest, the Waverly school proposed banning Ruby Bridges because white people looked angry and ugly. The response was, "We don't want our kids learning about a history that presents white people in a bad light. This is shaming white kids," when nothing could be further from the truth. I've been knocking on doors and I've heard that from residents. We can't shame our white kids. They're teaching CRT. No, they're not teaching CRT. That's absolutely not true

Brian: Critical Race Theory.

Janet: We talked about DEI, which is diversity equity inclusion, yesterday I was told, "You know what? If they're concerned about DEI, this is like an 80% white town. Why don't they move to Mount Vernon?"

Brian: There you go. Janet, thank you. By the way, we had the author of Ruby Bridges it's Jacqueline Woodson, right? On the show on Martin Luther King day. She was talking about the banning trend with that book, if you want to go back and listen to that on our archives, you might find it interesting since you brought up Ruby Bridges. Thank you very much. Gary, reporting on Westchester, you heard Janet's story there. Part of your article suggests that the conservative groups say reading and writing and math should be taught in the schools, not values or anything about sexuality which is for the home.

What struck me was the question, why did they just say reading and math and not social studies, which is usually the other core subject in the lower grades, science too, I guess, but certainly social studies. Do they not want American history taught because of the prevalence of racism in the actual story in addition to the good stuff in the actual story?

Gary: Brian, I think people on both sides of this thing would tell you that they think history should be taught. They just have different ideas of what credible history is and what should be taught to kids. I did a story a couple of months ago about Eastchester specifically, and the battle over racial issues there. Most of the folks there, the PTA, the teachers union, a lot of parents who spoke, they think that it's time to teach a more accurate depiction of American history.

There are a lot of people who came to the meetings, like the folks we see in other communities say that they want history to be taught in a way to unify students, not to create divisions by making it seem like race has been a focal point of the development of the country. It's an ideological split about what should be taught. Of course, a lot of people with a liberal point of view would say that that's just all nonsense and that what these folks are saying is basically, "Let's cover up the truth and just prevent an all-white-oriented version of history." That's where the divide is.

Brian: Let's take one more call. James in New Rochelle. You're on WNYC. Hi, James, thanks for calling in. Okay, I think we're having a problem with our phones. Professor Burnett, I'll go to you for a closing question then. Sorry listeners, we'll have to reset the phones for the next segment. We got a little into the racial aspects there with the last couple of callers, but what about the sexuality aspects as well? How close are platforms in any of the New York school board elections to the Florida so-called, don't say gay law or parents' rights law that seem to want LGBTQ families marginalized?

Professor Burnett: Yes. This to me, they're packaged in the same way. I think you'll find that there's a difference of opinion about what-- Let's think about the context of New York, especially as we think about the context of say the Lower Hudson or Long Island even your more conservative elements so those people who would traditionally vote Republican. They're New York Republican, they're not as Southern as in conservative, as you would find down in certain other states where it's much more a part of the culture here. Diversity is really something that is actually celebrated and is historically very celebrated in New York. This is the city of immigrants.

There's a long history of people starting out in New York City and then flying out into the suburbs and turning into enclaves and then melting in some fashion into the space around them. It's hard to think that in a state like ours, in a place like ours where most people have a background with a story like this, that there is a sort of hard opposition to other people being here, yet I do think it comes down to resources. It comes down to change and whether you're talking about questions about whether sexuality should be taught in the school, to what extent should we talk about trans rights, and the rights of students to use certain bathrooms.

That, it seems to be a lot more muted up here as you find in other parts of the country. I take that to be mostly about the culture here and that this is New York City, is where gay rights really started and it's just sort of continued on from there.

Brian: You know what? I think we fixed our phone. I'm going to give James in New Rochelle that shot to shout out what's going on in the New Rochelle school district race that too was cited in the lohud article. Hi, James. You're on WNYC.

James: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having me

Brian: What you got from New Rochelle?

James: Yes. In New Rochelle, we have exactly what we've been talking about today. We've got three candidates running for two seats, two of them support the CRSSE, culturally responsive sustaining framework from New York state. One does not. Steve Mayo is a far-right candidate running on the same program as all the folks around the country, very fake grassroots campaign and he is obscuring what he's about. He's a big part of save our school's Westchester anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti-CRT which is not taught in our schools. We have CRSSE. The other two candidates have come out very strongly for quality education. One of the candidates, David Peters, stands very strongly in the belief that equity is a path to excellence.

When all students have all the opportunities and no one is left behind, that's good for everybody no matter what the color of your skin is. We all deserve an accurate, honest, and high-quality public education. That's what I think David stands for, the other candidate sort of in the middle, and Steve Mayo absolutely does not.

Brian: Thank you very much. We're going to wrap it up there. The bottom line folks here is who runs the schools is a matter of electoral democracy in New York state in pretty much everywhere, but New York City. In New York City, it's a matter of electoral democracy, but in the sense that there is mayoral control of the schools, that's up for renewal in Albany. We'll see if it continues that way, but it's going to continue that way almost certainly. The mayor runs the one million student school district in New York City. Elsewhere in the state, school boards are elected and tomorrow is school board election day around New York State.

If you're on one side or another of some of these culture war questions which are breaking out more than in most years in school board elections this year or if you just want to vote for other reasons, now you're a little more informed that this is taking place even if you didn't know, before you can get your mind around the school board elections in your town and New York state and decide if you want to participate tomorrow. That's why we did the segment. We thank Gary Stern Education Editor and Reporter for The Journal News and Craig Burnett Political Science Professor at Hofstra. Thank you both so much for joining us. It was very enlightening.

Professor Burnett: My pleasure.

Gary: Glad to be here.

 

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