Onward, Christian Charters

A Christian charter school operator in Knox County is suing because it wants public money to operate a clearly religious “public” school.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel has more:

A new Christian nonprofit attempting to operate a charter school in Knoxville has sued the Knox County Board of Education, asserting the board discriminated against the nonprofit because state and local policies won’t allow “unapologetically Christian” schools to apply.

I suspect that since state dollars flow to explicitly religious private schools by way of vouchers, there’s really little difference when the state and/or a local school board sends funds to an explicitly religious charter school.

Wilberforce Academy is hardly the first openly religious school to offer the pretense of being a fully “public” charter school.

Hillsdale is in on the game, too:

Charter schools affiliated with Christian Nationalist outfit Hillsdale College made multiple charter school applications in an attempt to access millions in taxpayer cash:

Five proposed charter schools affiliated with controversial Michigan-based Hillsdale College would drain more than $17 million from Tennessee suburban and rural public schools during their first year of operation and roughly $35 million per year at maximum enrollment, according to a new fiscal analysis by Public School Partners (PSP) and Charter Fiscal Impact.

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$1.6 Billion in Repairs

That’s what’s needed in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, according to a story from Chalkbeat:

MSCS leaders are expected to present initial plans on Dec. 16 for what could be a decade-long process of school closures and renovations. This comes after an independent study found this spring that Memphis schools need over $1.6 billion in maintenance repairs over the next 10 years.

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A Note on Test Scores

A Nashville education blogger ponders the deeper meaning of all the horn-tooting over “Reward Schools.”

A comparison of this year’s list with previous years shows designations change constantly—Reward one year, not-Reward the next. The only thing consistent is that Priority Schools almost never escape the list.

Many have been on it for a decade or more.
They serve low-income, multi-cultural, multilingual communities.
We know—have known—that external factors shape internal results.

Yet we cling to these lists like they’re diagnostic tools rather than PR instruments.

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On Acting and School Administration

Nashville education blogger TC Weber talks about what passes for leadership in school system central offices:

Most district administrators began their journey as classroom teachers. They know kids. They know learning. They know what works and what absolutely does not. Deep down—buried under layers of jargon, compliance documents, and motivational posters—they recognize the absurdity of much of what they’re pushing.

Nobody who has spent more than 10 minutes with actual children believes that forcing every kid to be on the same page at the same time in the same way is a kid-centered practice. It’s not even an adult-centered practice. It’s a bureaucrat-centered practice.

No one with chalk dust buried in their bloodstream believes loading down a teacher with mandates, trainings, videos, forms, surveys, dashboards, rubrics, walk-throughs, and “fidelity checks” is a recipe for success. It’s a recipe for burnout, and we’ve watched that soufflé collapse again and again.

Go ahead, read it all>

cityscape of nashville tennessee at dawn
Photo by Cesar G on Pexels.com

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