Fed up with the Madison school district? Conservative agitator, former county board supervisor, and now write-in school board candidate David Blaska says he’s “the antidote.” He launched a protest campaign in February against his former opponent Ali Muldrow, who beat him in a landslide in 2019. She declined to comment on Blaska’s write-in campaign.
“We hear a lot about the importance of diversity by this current board. I’ll bring diversity in two ways. One: The relatively unimportant color of my skin. And two: My educational philosophy,” says Blaska. “I’m the only candidate running for school board who wants to stop the woke pedagogy that has taken over the district.”
Blaska says Madison liberals may be too scared to admit it publicly, but behind closed doors they agree that the district has lost its way. He wants to return SROs to the four big high schools, put teachers back in charge of the classroom and principals back in charge of schools, and abolish former superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s Behavior Education Plan, which he calls “an incomprehensible disaster.” And he wants the district to “quit teaching that Madison is institutionally racist, that some kids are implicitly biased, and that success depends on racial ‘privilege.’”
“There’s no white way to teach or Black way to learn. It all starts with discipline. Kids learn when mom or dad says, ‘Have you done your homework?’” says Blaska. “There are kids that are coming to school and they’ve never been read to and there are no books in the house. I get that. I do. But now the schools have given up on discipline, too. Discipline is the foundation for learning. It requires attention. It requires good behavior. It requires showing up and sticktoitiveness. When we don’t teach discipline, we don’t teach anything.”
Before the filing deadline to run for school board, Blaska says he and like-minded voters — whom he swears are mostly liberals — tried to recruit candidates for the three school board seats on the ballot this spring. They even urged former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz to run.
“We were looking for candidates who could win. My compatriots and I tried to find a minority person to run because we know plenty of minority parents aren’t happy with the district’s leadership, either. We obviously came up short, ” says Blaska, who despite his claims of camaraderie still regularly mocks liberals on his blog. “I got to the point where I said I would settle for a Norwegian.”
Blaska says he’s kicking himself for not filing the paperwork to appear on the ballot like he did in 2019. Since attending a recent candidate forum, he thinks voters have come around to his perspective after giving “candidates who virtue-signal” a chance in recent elections.
“We’ve seen what promoting a culture of blame has accomplished. You can blame my great-great-grandfather, you can blame me or supposedly racist teachers all you want. It hasn’t closed the achievement gap. It hasn’t closed the discipline gap. It’s Black students who have suffered the most,” says Blaska. “The data says it all. Woke don’t work.”
Check out our Q&A with all school board candidates. The post was recently updated to include answers from Blaska.
