Former AZ Superintendent Exposes the Truth About Common Core

**Diane Douglas** (0:00)
I always believed until I became superintendent, that is, that we had too many children in the, I don't call it public education anymore, I call it government schooling.
We have too many kids in the system to give up on it. And so I tried to work from the parent level, from the school board level, and then ultimately as the superintendent to fix it and came to realize it can't be fixed, it's doing exactly what it was created to do, it is not broken.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
Your organization is known worldwide and we certainly appreciate every facet that you do.

**Diane Douglas** (0:36)
I do believe in what you're doing because I've seen it in my family.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:40)
I'm so excited about all the things that, Robert, you guys do with Classical Conversations. It's been a huge blessing for our family.

**Robert Bortins** (0:46)
Grateful for the work at Classical Conversations.

**Diane Douglas** (0:48)
You're a leader and you have been in this movement for a long time.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:51)
We love Classical Conversations. I do feel like I have a debt of gratitude to you, to your family, all of CC for just the fruit that has come from CC.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:03)
I appreciate all that you guys do, both through this wonderful podcast and also through Classical Conversations, which I am convinced is the best education resource out there. Thank you very much for all that you do for the cause of Christ, and for our families, and for our children. I really, really appreciate it.

**Robert Bortins** (1:19)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another informative episode of Refining Rhetoric. And I'm so excited to have Diane Douglas with me today. She endorsed my book, Woke and Weaponized, and I've heard so much about her through my mom, my friend Alex Newman. And I finally get to talk to her face to face, and you get to enjoy the conversation as well.
For those who don't know, she was Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction from 2015 to 2019
By winning election by just a single point, she served two terms on the Peoria Unified School District Governing Board, if I pronounced that correctly, in two years as president, with over 25 years in Arizona's education landscape, beginning with her own daughter and continuing today with her grandson. She has seen the government school system from the inside at every level. Today, she serves on the Educational Advisory Board for public school exit. One of our friends here of the show, Sounding the Alarm about Government-Controlled Education and Helping Parents Find True Alternatives. It's my pleasure to welcome Diane to the show.

**Diane Douglas** (2:23)
Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here and to be able to speak with your audience and to get a chance to meet you, Robert.

**Robert Bortins** (2:30)
Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun, I know. Just give us a little bit of background. I gave some information in the introduction, but just give us a little bit more introduction about yourself, and then we'll just jump into the episode.

**Diane Douglas** (2:44)
Well, I graduated from Rutgers originally. I live in Arizona now, but we moved here from what I fondly referred to as the People's Republic of New Jersey, and we moved here 36 years ago to raise and educate our daughter.
When we were back there, I was a financial analyst, and then we moved out here so I could be a stay-at-home mom and raised my daughter. I did work a little bit part-time. I'm a stained-glass artist, but I'm also, I taught stained-glass for about 15 years, which interestingly taught me so much about education and teaching, but had absolutely no credibility with any of the teachers of Arizona when I went to be superintendent.
But I began studying education. I had, just briefly, I had what I call my three epiphany moments, and the first one was before my own daughter was in school out here, when a friend asked me to find out, help her find out why, her daughter in second grade got all Bs and Cs on her report card, but yet they wanted to hold her back. That was the first time I heard about outcome-based education. And, oh, she passed the tests, but we don't think she learned the material, so we're going to hold her back. The second one was when my own daughter was in kindergarten, and I was volunteering in the classroom, and they did explicit phonics in the Peoria School District in that day. And it was like I was struck by lightning, that I instantaneously knew once I saw them going through the letter sounds, why I struggled with reading all through my schooling, because I was taught with look, say, word memorization, call it whatever you want to. And then the third one was when my daughter was in about 6th grade or 5th grade. No, I'm sorry, 2nd grade. She was in at the time. And I went to a PTA meeting, and the principal said how wonderful it was that 75, 80% of the kids had earned a certificate of merit or higher. And I said to a fellow parent, what is that? What does that mean? It meant not that they had B averages on their report card, but they had all Bs or higher on their report card. 75 or 80% of the kids in 5th through 8th grade. And the financial analyst in me went, holy cow, they're cooking the books. So I started studying the American education system and reading a lot of books on it. Lipsic Connection was one of my first NEA Trojan Horse of Education by Samuel Blummetfeld. I started reading some of these books and learning about our system and where it came from.