Pennridge school board hires consultant with ties to conservative college to review curriculum

The Pennridge school board voted Wednesday to hire a consultant with ties to the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan to review the district’s curriculum, prompting outrage from community members who accused the board of trying to impose its politics on students.

The contract with Vermilion Education, which also drew pushback from teachers, was approved by a 5-4 vote. It comes as the district has been considering Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum — described by the Christian college as demonstrating how America’s founding principles make the United States “an exceptionally good country.”

Board members in support of the contract said they were trying to improve the district’s curriculum, which some suggested wasn’t meeting their aims.

“Our end goal is that every single kid who leaves Pennridge loves this country and understands our constitution,” said board member Ricki Chaikin. “Right now, that’s not happening.”

But a chorus of critics questioned the need to bring in Vermilion, a firm established in December by a former employee of Hillsdale. The college has pledged to fight “leftist academics” and has been embraced by such Republicans as former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The employee who started Vermilion, Jordan Adams, graduated from Hillsdale in 2013 and has taught at a Hillsdale-affiliated charter school and a “classical Catholic school.” He then returned to Hillsdale to work for its initiative trying to grow a network of charter schools using the college’s curriculum.

While working for Hillsdale, Adams was tapped by Florida to review proposed math textbooks, many of which the state rejected last year for containing “prohibited topics.” Adams, then a civic education specialist, was involved in flagging content that could violate Florida’s ban on teaching critical race theory, according to WTFS, the ABC affiliate in Tampa Bay.

Adams cited content in the book Stats: Modeling the World about racial profiling, discrimination in magnet school admissions, and the racial demographics of the New York Police Department not matching the community’s, which he said might violate Florida’s ban, the Washington Post reported.

During a 2020 panel discussion at the National Archives, Adams praised Hillsdale professor Wilfred McClay and his book, Land of Hope, saying McClay “doesn’t grab attention solely with scandal and outrage, as Zinn or 1619 might do” — referring to Howard Zinn, author of The People’s History of the United States, and the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which centered slavery in America’s origin story.

“That’s the easy way out, a way that kills off a student’s natural sense of wonder, and more often than not turns molehills into mountains,” Adams said.

In an email Thursday, Adams said that Vermilion was “committed to a nonpartisan, ideology-free education for each and every student. Vermilion’s services to school boards reflect this commitment.” He did not respond to a question about whether the firm was working with other public school districts, and where.

The Sarasota, Fla., school board recently voted down a contract with Vermilion after public protest there.

In Pennridge, parents argued Vermilion’s hiring would instead bring ideology into the curriculum — voicing concern about Hillsdale’s political connections and the “whitewashing” of history. (Historians have criticized Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum as ideologically driven; one, Sean Wilentz of Princeton, told The Inquirer earlier this year that the curriculum “fundamentally distorts modern American history into a crusade of righteous conservative patriots against heretical big-government liberals.”)

The school board has waged “a relentless crusade against anything that might possibly or remotely be considered woke, instead of focusing on the quality of our children’s education,” parent Emily Smith said.

Others questioned Adams’ qualifications as compared with those of the district’s own teachers — who expressed anger that they weren’t consulted.

Angela Schoettle, a Pennridge High School social studies teacher who said she was speaking on behalf of many of her colleagues, said teachers were already frustrated that the board previously moved to reduce social studies credit requirements from four credits to three, despite widespread opposition.

At least eight teachers “have been spending hours upon hours” rewriting the ninth-grade social studies curriculum “to try to meet the board’s impractical expectations,” Schoettle said. Now, with the hiring of an outside reviewer, “all those efforts could possibly be for nothing. ... Clearly, the school board has no trust and respect in us as professionals.”

Though the school board’s nine members were elected as Republicans, the board in recent months has been divided. The four members who voted against the contract said it was added to the agenda just 24 hours before the meeting, with no notice to them of the proposal to hire Vermilion.

Ahead of the vote, board member Ron Wurz said the board was poised to sign a contract with someone who was “unqualified and definitely partisan” to shape the district’s curriculum.

“You wouldn’t believe this is happening, but it is,” Wurz said.

Joan Cullen, the board’s former president, criticized the contract’s open-ended nature: Under the agreement, the district will pay Vermilion $125 an hour for “reviewing and developing curricula,” along with travel costs. The contract provides no time frame for completion of the work.

“There’s no apparent limit to those expenses,” Cullen said.

Board members in favor said the district previously had hired consultants at far greater hourly rates — including two at $600 an hour, vice president Megan Banis-Clemens said — without any pushback.

Jordan Blomgren, another board member, said the board had approved a speaker at a recent teacher in-service session from California State University — “where you could also say that’s coming from a more liberal or activist school” — who charged $9,000 for the day.

Adams has “plenty of credentials,” Blomgren said, including a “decade of firsthand education experience,” serving as a social studies department chair, and visiting “dozens of schools across the country.”

Blomgren said the board was sharing details of the contract with the community, acknowledging that she ran on a platform of transparency.

“I was also elected to get the bias out of our curriculum,” she said.