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Initially Encouraging

The Nashville Public Education Foundation (NPEF) issued a press release today on the heels of Gov. Bill Lee announcing his proposed new funding formula for schools. The gist is that NPEF is encouraged by the transparency and potential overall funding boost. There are, however, questions about accountability elements and an incentive fund.

Here’s the full press release from NPEF:

The long-awaited announcement of a new student-based funding formula in the state of Tennessee is being applauded by the Nashville Public Education Foundation (NPEF) for its focus on students’ needs and its transparent and simplified structure.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) Commissioner Penny Schwinn shared proposed legislation for the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement formula (TISA) today.

“The Governor pledged to put students first with his new proposal and we believe he has done that,” said Katie Cour, President and CEO of the Nashville Public Education Foundation. “The new formula provides additional funding for economically disadvantaged students as well as students with unique learning needs, neither of which were adequately addressed under the former funding formula.”

Though overall, NPEF is encouraged by the Governor’s plan, a few aspects of the formula deserve greater clarity for Nashvillians in particular. Specifically, it is unclear how much additional weight English Learners will receive under the new plan. Nashville is home to the state’s largest EL population and research shows that these students need a substantially larger investment to support their success.

Under the proposal, districts with low-performing schools could face corrective actions that have not yet been detailed. While NPEF supports accountability structures that reinforce student and school success, the new plan moves some accountability decisions from the TDOE to an ad hoc legislative committee. NPEF will be monitoring the effectiveness of this accountability shift.

“The new formula is significantly more transparent than the complex and onerous BEP,” said Cour. “While we applaud this transparency, we are uncertain how the plan’s shift in accountability will play out. We will continue to monitor any potential impacts of changes to accountability on Nashville’s governance structure.” NPEF has consistently advocated for an overhaul of the state’s education funding formula and stressed the needs for 1) significantly increasing the percent of GDP that Tennessee invests in K-12 education; 2) making any increase permanent and recurring; 3) ensuring any new formula specifically addresses fiscal capacity of Tennessee municipalities; 4) designing a student-based funding formula that allocates funding based on the needs of individual students; and 5) establishing clear transparency around policy governance and decision making. NPEF proudly served as a contributing member of the Education Foundations Subcommittee for the TDOE-led funding review process.

Seeking to engage Nashvillians with essential data to make informed demands and decisions, last year NPEF released an informational Policy Brief outlining the complexities, challenges, inadequacies, and consequences of Tennessee’s current Basic Education Program (BEP) funding formula for schools. Titled “Funding Our Schools: How Tennessee’s Funding Formula Fails to Meet the Needs of Nashville’s Students,” the brief encouraged Tennessee to fully adopt the recommendations of its own BEP Review Committee and called on the community to advocate for increased funding for the state’s schools.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

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Cardoza-Moore in the House?

It seems that Laurie Cardoza-Moore is interested in becoming a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Here’s more on Moore:

Laurie Cardoza-Millions!

Her business model?

Well, her 2017 IRS 990 form offers some insight.

That year, Moore’s group – Proclaiming Justice to the Nations (PJTN) raised just over $1 million.

What’d she do with the cash?

Well, she paid herself $130,000. Then, she paid her husband’s business $67,000. There was a business “office expense” for occupancy at just over $49,000. She runs PJTN from her home, so that means she’s paying her mortgage with the cash. That’s $200,000 in payments to Moore and her husband, and another 50,000 a year to cover their mortgage. Then, there’s another $26,000 paid to Moore as an “occupancy expense.” Oh, and there’s $41,000 on “meals and entertainment.” Finally, her two kids received a total of around $2000 from the organization for “contract labor” that year.

Peddling ignorance is quite profitable, it seems. After all, that’s just one year of her “thriving” business.

And there’s also this:

Is This Who We Want on the Textbook Commission?

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today renewed its call for Tennessee to drop consideration of anti-Muslim activist and possible 9/11 truther Laurie Cardoza-Moore to that state’s Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission. Cardoza-Moore leads the Franklin, Tenn., group Proclaiming Justice to the Nations (PJTN).

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A Call for Local Control

The Williamson County school board voted unanimously to oppose Gov. Lee’s plan to allow charter schools to bypass local school boards and appeal directly to Lee’s state charter commission.

That Lee continues to aggressively push a privatization agenda should come as no surprise:

SHOCKING!

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A Child of Fear

Students in Williamson County spoke out against censorship at a recent school board meeting. The move is likely preemptive as groups like Moms for Liberty seek to have books removed from school libraries and/or curriculum.

The Smackdown with Eric Welch

Here’s footage from the board meeting:

https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1496199268306194437?s=20&t=pzXV-dIN-lindI63kiIkeA

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Manufactured Teachers?

Knox County is down to two finalists to become the district’s next Superintendent.

The choices are current Knox County Assistant Superintendent and Chief Academic Officer Jon Rysewyk and Bradley County Superintendent Linda Cash.

During a forum with both candidates, WBIR reports that Rysewyk made this statement:

“The new name of the game isn’t recruiting — it’s how to build alternative pipelines to manufacture high-quality teachers,”

That’s an interesting way to put the development of teaching talent – the intentional recruitment and retention strategies used to attract PEOPLE to the profession. Not sure exactly where teachers are manufactured.

The statement from Rysewyk reminded me of yet another story out of Knox County:

Shiny, Happy Teachers

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Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

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1000 Cuts

A Williamson County teacher explains what it is like to be a teacher in Tennessee right now:

https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1494768171294863362?s=20&t=HdIBTWSPVC6Z8btGFt1UlA

Of course, the legislature is responding in the only way they know how:

Temporary Insanity?

This type of attack has been going on for more than a decade now:

Do We Really Have to Do This?

Make no mistake. These cuts are intentional. The forces of privatization are using all the tools to erode the teaching profession and set public schools up to fail. The nail in the coffin will likely be a new state funding formula that paves a path for a voucher scheme.

The BEP Voucher Plan
food man people woman
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

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The Smackdown with Eric Welch

Wherein a Williamson County School Board member takes Moms for McCarthyism to school:

Keep reading – it’s pretty great!

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Temporary Insanity?

House Bill 1901 sponsored by Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver (and in the Senate by Sen. Joey Hensley) would allow for the granting of temporary teaching licenses to individuals not otherwise trained in order to address the growing teacher shortage in Tennessee.

The Teacher Shortage Crisis is Here

Rep. John Ray Clemmons raised some serious questions about this idea when the bill came up for discussion in House subcommittee:

https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1494409669330227202?s=20&t=C9k6zQ6wHQ15Ks4ePqeigw

Clemmons raised some great points. The idea that TN will solve the teacher shortage by issuing licenses to any breathing adult is ludicrous. It is also in keeping with the current philosophy of those governing the state – setting up public schools for failure to enable a privatization agenda.

Exceptionally Bad

Since Gov. Bill Haslam fought to end collective bargaining and then gutted BEP reforms, the majority party in Tennessee has been working diligently toward a singular goal: Give public money to private entities to run schools.

BEP. BEP 2.0. BEP 1.5?

The perpetrators of this fraud have even had some help along the way:

Bill Frist and the BEP
street performer standing on a stool
Photo by Ronê Ferreira on Pexels.com

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$8 Million

That’s how much groups seeking to privatize Tennessee’s public schools are spending lobbying the General Assembly, according to an analysis by NewsChannel5.

In a story on lobbying expenditures, NewsChannel5 noted that among the “big spenders” were school privatization groups:

Privatization groups pushing charter schools and school vouchers: just under $8 million over the past five years.

With Gov. Bill Lee at the helm, it seems that big money is paying off. Just last month, Lee announced plans to hand over millions in Tennessee tax dollars to a private, Christian college in Michigan to run a network of 50-100 charter schools in the state.

Exceptionally Bad

As 2022 is an election year, these special interests seeking to access Tennessee’s treasury to advance their financial interests will also have an opportunity to make campaign contributions. This means they can wine and dine lawmakers and the Governor during the legislative session and then cozy up to them by way of campaign cash in election season.

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About Hillsdale

Gov. Bill Lee is proposing to hand over millions in Tennessee tax dollars to a private, Christian college in Michigan to run between 50-100 “charter schools” in the state.

Exceptionally Bad

Lee wants charter schools because they won’t need a voucher plan to be funded – they can just apply for charters (possibly directly from a state charter authorizer, bypassing local school boards) – and then receive public money.

Sure, handing over public money to a private entity to run schools is problematic. But what is Hillsdale all about? I mean, if TN is going to go down this road, we should certainly understand more about the college that has been chosen by Lee to run schools.

Good news! Peter Greene digs into Hillsdale and offers a useful exploration of the history of Hillsdale and how it runs the schools it runs.

Here are some highlights:

[Hillsdale President Larry] Arnn has been a Trump supporter, and the college has fallen right into MAGAland as well. Or as Politico Magazine put it in 2018Trump University never died. It’s located in the middle of bucolic southern Michigan, halfway between Lansing and Fort Wayne, 100 miles and a world away from Detroit.

The college uses Trump mailing lists to raise money. They used to sponsor Rush Limbaugh’s show. They get grads placed on the staff of legislators such as Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy. In 2017, for some reason, Senator Pat Toomey created a little piece of tax reform that would have carved out a tax treat for Hillsdale alone.

If you want to see Hillsdale really letting its freak flag fly, scan through its newsletter Imprimis, with articles like “The Disaster at Our Southern Border” (VP Harris’s report is “bunk”), “The January 6 Insurrection Hoax” (Donald Trump was awesome and robbed and Jan 6 has been overhyped as part of a vast conspiracy), and an explanation of inflation that rests on Milton Friedman’s awesomeness. All of these, it should be noted, are versions of lectures delivered at the college. 

It should come as no surprise that Hillsdale is home to a lot of privatizing thought about education, like a 2018 piece by Professor Gary Wolfram explaining why schools should be run via the free market. And then-secretary Betsy DeVos made Hillsdale the site of one of her most explicit speeches arguing that schools should be taken back from the government and run by free-market Christianity.

This line from Politico may more clearly explain Lee’s enthusiasm for Hillsdale:

Trump University never died. It’s located in the middle of bucolic southern Michigan, halfway between Lansing and Fort Wayne, 100 miles and a world away from Detroit.

READ MORE from Greene on the Hillsdale experiment Bill Lee wants in Tennessee.

Where Bill Stands
EPA/ANTONIO LACERDA

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