In two tweets, Metro Nashville Councilmember John Rutherford explains the school privatization agenda by way of charter schools:
They then appeal to the state where approval is nearly certain and state approval means they fall under the state rather than MNPS. The state has essentially disincentivized local approval, circumvented local authority and further eroded public education. 2/2
The call Rutherford received and his summary of it in two tweets makes it abundantly clear: The agenda is to circumvent local school boards and allow the state to funnel public money to private entities.
Lee even outlined such a scheme in his State of the State:
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’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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Gov. Bill Lee made clear in his State of the State that he is a proponent of an alternative history known as “American exceptionalism.”
This theory is grounded in a sort of American evangelicalism – and certainly has strong ties to far-right Christian movements. To advance his “exceptionalism agenda” Lee has announced a partnership with conservative Hillsdale College – a private, Christian school in Michigan. Yes, Tennessee is such a great example of exceptionalism that we have to turn to a private college from Michigan to “properly” teach history.
Here’s a note on that from Lee’s speech:
Two years ago, I traveled to Hillsdale College to participate in a Presidents Day celebration and spend time with champions of American exceptionalism.
For decades, Hillsdale College has been the standard bearer in quality curriculum and the responsibility of preserving American liberty.
I believe their efforts are a good fit for Tennessee, and we are formalizing a partnership with Hillsdale to expand their approach to civics education and K-12 education.
WPLN reports that public education advocates are raising concerns about the transfer of Tennessee tax dollars to a private, religious institution:
Lee has made a deal with a conservative college to open about 50 charter schools in the state.
Lee has made a deal with Hillsdale College, a small Christian liberal arts school in Michigan, to bring their civic education and K-12 curriculum to Tennessee.
Beth Brown, the [Tennessee Education] association’s president, says there is no need to bring in outsiders to implement a new curriculum or to set aside $32 million for new charter schools, a key element in the proposal.
“The concern is that we’re taking taxpayer dollars and we’re going to take those taxpayer dollars away from our public schools and give them to private entities,” said Brown.
It’s noteworthy, too, that Lee cited Ronald Reagan in his address:
I recently watched President Reagan’s farewell address, made just before he left office in January of 1989.
As many other Presidents have done, his farewell address includes a warning to the American people.
He reminds us that what we want to have in this country is “informed patriotism.”
Lee claims that he has been inspired by Reagan’s words. This inspiration is ostensibly the impetus for the focus on an American exceptionalism curriculum from Hillsdale College.
Of course, Reagan is no stranger to efforts to dismantle public education and turn schools over to those on the extreme right of the political spectrum.
In fact, a June piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by education journalists Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider point out that today’s privatization movement has roots in Reaganism:
This crusade against public higher education eerily presaged today’s school culture wars. Where Reagan made a target of ethnic studies and tried to keep Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party, from teaching philosophy at UCLA, today’s bogeyman is critical race theory or CRT — a legal theory that has become a vague catchall for grievances of the sort that Reagan weaponized so effectively. To date, laws aimed at restricting how public school teachers talk about race and racism have been proposed in 22 states and signed into law in five.
Public schools, GOP leaders have argued, are teaching children to believe that the country is inherently bad. But just as Reagan used his anti-campus campaign to undermine support for public higher education, his disciples are motivated by a similar cause. For a Republican party that has grown increasingly hostile to public education, the K-12 culture war is also an opportunity to advance the cause of school privatization.
State legislators, meanwhile, have introduced a flurry of bills aimed at cutting funds from schools with curricula that the GOP deems unacceptable. In Michigan, a proposed measure would cut 5% of funding if school districts teach “anti-American” ideas about race in America, material from the 1619 Project, or critical race theory. In Tennessee, a new law empowers the state’s education chief to withhold funds from schools found to be teaching components of critical race theory.
The constant drumbeat that public schools are indoctrinating children, however, serves as a powerful nudge to parents to flee them. If their tax dollars are paying for something they’re opposed to, then maybe privatization isn’t such a terrible idea after all. This was Reagan’s move.
This, then, gets to the heart of Lee’s education “reform” agenda. He’s overhauling the school funding formula (BEP) to make it “student-centered.” While his voucher scheme languishes in the courts, Lee is taking the first steps to create a new funding formula that builds a bridge to vouchers. Don’t like all the “indoctrination” at your local school? Take that state money and hand it over to a Hillsdale charter school that proudly evangelizes about America’s “good old days.”
Here’s how he phrases it in the speech:
I’m proposing an innovative approach that sets aside dollars for each student, based on their individual needs, and these dollars will be used in whatever public school they attend.
Guess what? Hillsdale’s charter schools would be public schools under Tennessee law – Lee is proposing handing over state money to a private, religious college to run “public” schools.
Ronald Reagan would most certainly be very proud of the division and discord Lee is sowing in the name of turning public money over to private, right-wing Christian school operators.
Nate Rau in Axios highlights conversations happening at the Nashville Chamber of Commerce regarding moving Nashville from an elected to an appointed School Board.
The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce is considering a push for a major change to Nashville public schools — switching from an elected school board to one where members are appointed.
The chamber hashad high-level talks on the topic with key education stakeholders, including the school board chair.
Not surprisingly, some Board members are not at all happy with this move. To be clear, the idea of appointed school board members was also floated by pro-charter former Mayor Karl Dean.
Here’s current board member Abigail Tylor talking about this latest effort to shift power away from the people:
We have to take a minute and think about why any group – be it the state or our own chamber – would want to take away local control from the people and make the school board appointed. Would the outcome be better for students if parents weren’t allowed to vote for who they think best represents their interests? Would it be better for students if the board was no longer required to have a representative from each area of the city? Would it be better for students to only have people able to garner enough attention from the mayor to get appointed?
We actually already have a blueprint of what happens under appointed leadership. The State has the power to appoint who oversees the Achievement School District (ASD) because they claimed they knew the people who could make the best educational decisions for the worst performing schools. Within three years, the appointed superintendent who started the ASD left, admitting they cannot do any better than the locally controlled schools. He wrote, “As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.” He also admitted to underestimating the needs of struggling schools and, in the end, did not provide the gains he was so sure he knew he could produce. Were those students served better under appointed leadership? The answer has been, and continues to be, no.
That’s the crux of it. Politicians who have never studied educational policy and have no experience working in schools constantly underestimate the true needs of our schools. The people who know what our schools need are the ones living it – the people who work in our schools and see the needs every day and the people whose children are in our schools and know what their children need to succeed.
Is it that the Nashville Chamber really thinks the mayor would do a better job choosing a school board than the voters, or is it that they want to consolidate power and control over schools regardless of what’s truly best for our students?
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
Gov. Bill Lee won approval of a “super charter commission” back in 2019. Now, that commission is imposing an unwanted charter school on Nashville.
The Commission voted today to overturn the decision by the MNPS School Board to reject the charter application from Nashville Classical, which already operates an elementary and middle school in East Nashville. The new school is proposed for West Nashville.
Nate Rau has a great explainer on the fight over Nashville Classical in the Tennessee Lookout.
Nashville Classical, which has already been rejected once by the school board with a 7-1 vote, submitted its appeal last week.
But, the starting point for the local debate over Nashville Classical’s application is a new state law that says the Nashville school board’s decision is functionally irrelevant. If the appeal is rejected, as expected, the school can simply appeal to the new Republican-backed state charter school commission, which would likely grant its approval. Unless a political meteor strikes and creates some unforeseen circumstance, Nashville Classical will be open to enrolling kindergarten beginning next year.
This was written back in June. Now, here we are in mid-October, and Nashville Classical has gained the predicted approval from the Charter Commission.
This should come as no surprise given Gov. Lee’s strong penchant for privatization.
School Board member Abigail Tylor is speaking out on the decision, but the reality is this type of top-down privatization is exactly what Bill Lee wants and exactly why the super charter commission was started.
Terribly disappointing outcome. The commission ruled against both local control and community will. It's disingenuous for them to claim this school is in the best interest of MNPS and district 9 when they don't live here & they heard directly from community members against NC2. https://t.co/Crm61NYzJ7
In 2012, Tennessee’s began a scheme known as the Achievement School District, or ASD. The goal was simple and bold: Take a handful of schools in the bottom 5 percent of student achievement, according to state test scores, and move those schools into the top 25 percent in student achievement in just five years.
This miraculous shift, officials claimed, would be accomplished by placing schools under a new state agency, which would then determine an intervention strategy that might include turning a standard public school over to a charter operator. Any school anywhere in the state would be eligible, so long as it was on the “priority schools” list. As a whole, the schools would be governed by their own “district,” complete with a superintendent who reported directly to the commissioner of education.
Tennessee’s commissioner of education at the time, Kevin Huffman, hired charter operator Chris Barbic to run the new district. Barbic’s arrival coincided with the takeover of a first cohort of schools by the ASD, along with the unveiling of his plan to generate the expected turnaround.
So what was that plan, exactly?
Well, of course, it was to turn all the priority schools over to charter operators. After all, Barbic reasoned, other charter school leaders would know just what to do with entire schools from urban districts with high levels of entrenched poverty.
But the charter school plan had another, more sinister impact. Tennessee’s charter school law gave charter operators ten year charters from the granting district. Since the ASD had taken over the local schools (most of them in Memphis), the ASD was now the charter-granting district. Now, schools in the ASD would not be eligible to return to their home districts for ten years, rather than the five years envisioned in the initial ASD legislation.
By executing the charter switch, Huffman and Barbic had immediately doubled the amount of time they would have to produce results with their education experiment, even though both of them would be gone by the time the ten-year period was up.
Still, the plan was bold and its promises were big. Almost immediately, there were problems.
Some charter operators dropped out, and new operators swooped in. A series of directors attempted to run the rapidly sinking ship.
There were even Thunderdome-like contests early on to decide which schools would be handed over to charter operators, despite parent and community objections.
In 2020, New York City math teacher and popular blogger Gary Rubinstein, who tracked the ASD from its inception, reported the ASD’s “initial promise” to take over the bottom 5 percent of schools and “catapult them into the top 25 percent in five years” had “completely failed . . . . Chris Barbic resigned, Kevin Huffman resigned, Barbic’s replacement resigned. Of the thirty schools, they nearly all stayed in the bottom 5 percent except a few that catapulted into the bottom 10 percent.”
When Barbic resigned after just a few years on the job, Chalkbeatreported, he “offered a dim prognosis” on the fate of the ASD. “As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results,” he wrote. “I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.”
Still, the ASD muddled forward. Now, the failed experiment is at the end of its run. Multiple groups of students have traveled in and out of charter doors with the end result being disruption, displacement, and discouraging results.
As the tenth year runs out, questions remain about exactly how to transition the schools back to their districts. Funny, it always seemed so easy to just move students and their families to charter schools and then to other charter schools as reformers scrambled to manipulate student populations in search of ever-elusive results.
Even so, it seemed as if the ASD had reached its end.
In March, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Repubican, announced yet another plan to continue the district. More specifically, Lee wants to allow a handful of his personal favorite charter operators to continue to manage some select ASD schools.
Not content to let a really bad idea die, Lee is backing legislation that would allow some schools to move from the ASD to the jurisdiction of the state’s relatively new Charter School Commission. That Commission was created by Lee in his first year as governor in order to circumvent the rejection of charter schools by local school boards.
Another piece of legislation, which has stalled for now, would allow Lee’s commissioner of education to take over an entire district by firing the director of schools and replacing the elected school board. This circumvention of democracy was widely seen as a way for Lee to send a message to the outspoken school boards in Memphis and Nashville that they’d better fall in line or else.
Of course, it hasn’t been lost on observers that Memphis and Nashville are suing the state, challenging the adequacy of the school funding formula. While the legislation is on hold for now, the point is clear: Districts are to do what the governor says and stay quiet when they disagree.
In fact, at a recent press event discussing the use of federal stimulus funds by local districts, Lee suggested that the state’s department of education would be watching districts to ensure they spent the money the right way. House Education Committee Chair Mark White went one step further, saying that he would be expecting tremendous jumps in student performance in exchange for this money.
Education advocates around the country should beware these sorts of moves—power grabs cloaked in the guise of “assistance or guidance,” legislation to extend failed reform models, and/or the repackaging of proven reform failures as something shiny and new.
On Friday afternoon before Mother’s Day weekend and just after the Tennessee General Assembly had adjourned, the Tennessee Department of Education announced 15 grants for charter school applicants – including grants for charter applications in several districts that do not currently authorize any charter schools – Rutherford County, Montgomery County, Millington Municipal, Fayette County, and Williamson County. The grants would allow applicants to plan and design their applications, and the applicants could ultimately bypass local school districts and receive charter authorization from Gov. Lee’s “Super Charter Commission.” The grants could also result in usurping the authority of elected school boards in Shelby, Hamilton, and Davidson counties.
Today, the Tennessee Department of Education announced that 15 applicants have been awarded subgrants under the Charter School Expansion Grant. These funds are intended to support sponsors throughout the planning, design, application, and potential launch of new charter schools in the state.
These subgrants will fund up to 8,800 new high-quality charter school seats that, subject to authorizer approval, will be available to students in five districts that currently do not have any charter schools and in three districts that already authorize charter schools.
Subgrants totaling $6.3 million were awarded primarily from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER), which is the second GEER grant designed specifically to support charter schools, with additional funds from the Charter School Program grant.
And, the key line about subverting the will of voters in these districts:
The review process for charter school applications for the 2022-23 school year is ongoing and the subgrant awards are contingent upon approval of the proposed charter school by the applicants’ respective school districts or, if an appeal occurs, the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission. (emphasis added).
That’s right, school privatization is coming to Tennessee in suburban and rural districts whether voters want it or not. While Lee’s voucher scheme is bogged down in court, Lee is acting unilaterally to charterize Tennessee’s public schools.
This is exactly what Memphis state Rep. Antonio Parkinson said would happen back in 2019:
No word yet from Republican lawmakers in Fayette, Montgomery, Rutherford, or Williamson counties on how they feel about Lee pushing charters in their areas without seeking legislative approval.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
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Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is no fan of public schools as he makes clear time and again. Whether it is advancing voucher schemes, creating charter school slush funds, or refusing to invest in our underfunded public schools, Lee is working tirelessly to undermine public education in our state.
Now, Lee is seeking to reward charter schools in Memphis and trap more schools in the failed Achievement School District.
When Tennessee started taking over low-performing schools and matching most with charter operators in 2012, the plan was to return the schools to their home districts when they improved in an estimated five years.
Now Gov. Bill Lee is proposing other options for schools that have remained in the state’s turnaround program for nearly 10 years — most notably to let some of the higher-performing ones move from one state-run district to another.
Under legislation introduced this week, Lee proposed letting some charter schools bypass their original district when leaving Tennessee’s Achievement School District, also known as the ASD. Instead, they could apply to move directly to the state’s new charter school commission, which the governor helped to create.
It’s not like we couldn’t see this coming. In fact, warnings about Lee’s aggressive stance about privatization came early. In 2018, I noted:
Even though as early as 2016, Bill Lee was extolling the virtues of school voucher schemes and even though he’s a long-time supporter of Betsy DeVos’s pro-voucher Tennessee Federation for Children and even though he has appointed not one, but two voucher vultures to high level posts in his Administration, it is somehow treated as “news” that Bill Lee plans to move forward with a voucher scheme agenda in 2019.
In addition to the failure of the ASD to do, well, anything there’s also ample evidence of the failure of charter schools. Never mind the facts, though, Lee is committed to privatizing at all costs.
In 2019, I noted that charter schools in Tennessee and elsewhere are the “God That Failed” – taking money while yielding little in the way of results. Then, I suggested that in spite of all the evidence, Tennessee would continue down this path:
In other words, poverty matters. And, making the investments to combat it matters, too.
In other words, money matters. Districts with concentrated poverty face two challenges: Students with significant economic needs AND the inability of the district to generate the revenue necessary to adequately invest in schools.
But, by all means, let’s continue to worship at the feet of the Charter God hoping that our faith in “free markets” will be enough to move the needle for the kids who most need the opportunities provided by public education.
Plus, there was this great video demonstrating what must be the typical conversation around the Lee Administration’s privatization war room:
Remember when education advocates warned that Lee’s charter commission would grow, expand, and take over more schools and we were told that we were just being silly? Well, here’s how that seems to be turning out:
If the ASD bill passes, the commission’s role will expand, and its portfolio of charter schools is likely to grow. (The entity currently oversees three schools in Nashville and one in Memphis.) For now, the commission’s authority is limited as an appellate authorizer of charter organizations deemed to be high quality but rejected by local school boards.
What’s also interesting is the propensity of Tennessee policymakers to do a lot of talking that results in little action that helps students:
Tennessee leaders have been talking for years about how to exit ASD schools that haven’t met early improvement goals acknowledged now as too lofty. But because the transition involves everything from people and property to finances and governance, the state has found it almost as hard to transition schools out of the ASD as it was to take them over.
It’s as if there is no one leading anything other than the charge privatize public schools at all costs. ASD running into problems? Here’s an idea: Let’s let it continue to plague poor communities with little regard to actual results.
Will Gov. Lee creates confusion by attacking Confucius, our schools have real needs. Needs he seems content to ignore. This is not an accident, it’s an intentional act designed to decimate public schools. At this point, with a state experiencing a huge surplus (likely over $2 billion this year alone), refusing to fund public schools is a policy choice. It’s a choice that keeps being made over and over again. Sadly, it’s a choice that is made while some so-called public school supporters stand by and also indicate support for Lee.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
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