It should come as no surprise that Governor Bill Lee is pursuing an aggressive agenda of school privatization complete with a fast-growing voucher program, additional money for charter schools, and a way for charter operators to bypass the accountability of local school boards. Now, however, it seems Lee has enlisted co-conspirators from the school district likely to be most negatively impacted by his agenda.
Senator Brian Kelsey and Rep. Mark White have agreed to carry Lee’s legislation creating a state charter authorizer. It’s a bill some critics are calling the worst charter legislation in the nation.
State Sen. Brian Kelsey, a Germantown Republican, and State Rep. Mark White, a Memphis Republican who chairs the House Education Committee, are carrying Senate Bill 796 and House Bill 940, one of the signature pieces of Gov. Bill Lee’s K-12 education initiative.
White didn’t want to use the word “bypass” but acknowledged the legislation would remove the step for charter applicants to go to the Tennessee Board of Education if turned down by local boards.
“But basically, yeah, you would come to the state without going through that process,” White said.
The change is significant because current law requires a charter operator to first apply to the local board of education to determine if the proposed charter is a good fit for the district. The case of Rocketship in Nashville is a good example:
In summary, with no additional state accountability data to consider, and no compelling evidence presented that provides confidence in the review team, converting an existing low-performing school before Rocketship has demonstrated academic success on state accountability measures would not be in the best interests of the students, the district, or the community.
If Governor Lee’s proposal is successful, schools like Rocketship will now be able to circumvent local input altogether. In this case, MNPS identified key problems with Rocketship and decided an expansion was not in the best interests of the students of the district.
It’s not yet clear whether there is broad support for circumventing local school boards. The legislation did pass a hurdle today, clearing a House subcommittee and moving forward in the process.
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A new group aims to unify Tennessee teachers in advocating for public education, following a blueprint that led to teacher strikes that rocked states like Arizona, Kentucky and West Virginia.
They are following a blueprint established by teachers in states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Arizona where grassroots efforts outside of union organization resulted in massive teacher work stoppages.
The article notes the group includes current TEA local affiliate leader Tikeila Rucker of Memphis as well as former Knox County Education Association President Lauren Sorenson and Amanda Kail, a candidate for President of Metro Nashville Education Association.
While the three leaders say they aren’t necessarily planning a strike, they indicated that as the group grows, a strike may be an option.
Issues such as persistently low teacher pay, over-testing, and the diversion of public funds to private schools by way of vouchers have caused concerns among teachers.
Tennessee Teachers United plans to raise these issues with key policymakers while organizing across the state to build support among teachers.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
The Tennessee Education Association is raising concerns about Gov. Bill Lee’s school privatization agenda. More from a recent article posted on the TEA website:
In his State of the State address, Gov. Bill Lee announced his intent to allocate more than one-fifth of his K-12 education budget to advance privatization in Tennessee. His proposed budget includes more than $25 million for education savings accounts and $12 million for a charter school building slush fund.
“TEA has serious concerns about the governor’s plan to fund a program that is essentially private school vouchers with even less accountability that are more susceptible to fraud and abuse,” said TEA President Beth Brown. “At a time when classrooms lack needed resources and teachers are digging into their own pockets to buy classroom supplies, it is discouraging to see funding going to something proven to harm student achievement in other states.”
The increase in the building fund for private charter operators is partnered with a proposal to make it easier for new charter schools to be approved. While details on this are still not final, TEA strongly opposes any charter legislation that limits the authority of the locally elected school board to be the final voice on new charter school applications.
“Charter schools need to be a local decision, because local taxpayers bear a majority of the costs,” Brown said. “Also, local boards of education better understand the needs of their district and are better equipped to make the right decision for the students they serve.”
Both charter schools and any form of private school vouchers have proven to destabilize public school budgets and negatively impact existing classrooms. These privatization schemes also have a track record of harming student achievement.
“We have seen in other states where students in voucher programs and unaccountable charter schools are not keeping up with their peers in traditional public schools,” Brown said. “There are many proven ways to improve public education for all schools; unfortunately, the governor is choosing to invest significant resources in two dangerous paths.”
The more than $35 million currently slated for education savings accounts and rapid charter expansion would be better used in ways proven to increase student performance, like reducing class sizes and updating text books and classroom technology.
“As a rural educator, I understand the assumption that these risks will only impact metro areas, but that is simply untrue,” said Brown. “Educators and public education advocates from every corner of the state need to stand together to defeat every single attempt to privatize education. If passed, these proposals would erode the foundation of all public schools.”
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Below is the official position statement of the Tennessee PTA on Trauma Informed Communities:
As the momentum grows for Tennessee to be a trauma informed state and build awareness within our communities about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), Tennessee PTA is supportive of the efforts our state government, business world, advocates, insurers, and academia and nonprofit foundations for the initiative of our state to be a national model of how a state can promote culture change.
Tennessee PTA board of managers believes that any substantiated or admitted allegations of sexual misconduct, spouse abuse, or habitual drug abuser of any member of a decision-making body in educational affairs cannot participate and are not allowed to be a part of the process that contributes to the welfare, health, safety and education of children. This perspective aids in focusing on the root causes of the systemic issues that run rampant through individuals, families and communities when the issues go unaddressed.
Tennessee PTA board of managers believes the exploitation of youth degrades humans and damages the cognitive, social and emotional development of the individual and has adverse consequences for the individual, family and community in which citizens live.
As a state who is working toward leading a National Model of being trauma informed about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) we must be mindful of the collective affects the community has on individual situations that lead to Adverse Community Environments.
Tennessee PTA board of managers advocates for policies and programs to help meet the basic needs of children and families. We promote research, training and public education to strengthen proactive and responsive factors that buffer indicators for sexual abuse while also directly addressing the root causes of individual situations.
As a major advocacy agent for youth, parents and educators we applaud the state in the progressive strides of raising awareness and implementing strategies that support appropriate responses to ACEs.
We continue to encourage our state government and all individuals in the educational arena to reflect the ideals of the true nature of appropriately responding to the root causes and publicly mirroring those behaviors in order to model the desired behaviors this state is aiming to provide for the Nation.
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A new organization of Tennessee teachers has formed in response to persistent underfunding of schools and over-testing of students. Chris Brooks of Labor Notes has more:
Tennessee teachers have taken a pummeling over the years.
They’re
grossly underpaid and their professional autonomy has been stripped away. Their
students are over-tested and their schools underfunded.
But
what has been the collective response?
To
lie low.
Keep
their heads down.
This
is especially true of the leadership in their union, the Tennessee Education
Association. They’ve pursued a strategy of “it’s better to be at the table than
on the menu.”
This
strategy emphasizes access over confrontation. They hope that small incremental
change will be possible through a combination of lobbying and writing checks to
political campaigns. And since the union isn’t being adversarial, isn’t pushing
too hard or too fast, they hope they won’t be a target for political
retribution.
Those
hopes have been misplaced.
Across
the state, conditions in schools have only gotten worse. Tennessee consistently
ranks near the bottom of the country in per-pupil spending. Experienced and
qualified teachers are leaving the profession in droves.
Now,
newly elected Governor Bill Lee is taking direct aim at public education. He
just announced a state budget that doubles funding for charter schools and is pushing lawmakers to approve $25 million for vouchers. Governor Lee’s disastrous
privatization agenda will further drain resources from schools that are already
struggling to get by.
The
lesson here is that we can’t incrementally lobby our way out of the hole we are
in.
Lying
low doesn’t work, but there is another way.
All
across the country, teachers are supercharging the routine of lobbying and
elections with a far more powerful tool: they are going out on strike.
Teachers
in West Virginia, Arizona, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Kentucky have used
collective action to transform the political landscape. They’ve decimated
charter and voucher legislation, stopped further spending cuts, and pushed
policies that actually benefit student outcomes: lower class sizes, more nurses
and counselors, an end to toxic testing, and paying teachers adequately so
school systems can retain them for more than a few years.
There
is clear tangible evidence that strikes work. A new report from the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities found
that “protests by teachers and others last year helped lead to
substantial increases in school funding in Arizona, North Carolina, Oklahoma,
and West Virginia.”
It
didn’t matter that striking is illegal in many of these states or that the
state government is dominated by anti-union Republicans.
When
teachers found the courage to strike they found out that the community—and often
even their boss—had their back
With
so many school districts struggling to make ends meet, striking teachers found
that their demands for increased state funding had the support of their local administrators.
Because superintendents closed their schools during the nine-day West Virginia
strike, teachers didn’t lose pay and the strike rolled on.
Parents
know that issues like class size and funding matter. It’s common sense. Would
you rather your child be in a classroom with twenty other students or forty? Do
you want your child to be taught by a capable, qualified professional or to be
endlessly drilled in preparation for a high-stakes test?
Unsurprisingly,
teachers everywhere have received an outpouring of support from parents and
community members when they hit the picket lines.
“This
group is for any public school educator who is tired of their students’ needs
being put last and is tired of their voices being ignored,” said Lauren
Sorensen, a second grade teacher at Halls Elementary School in Knox County and a
longtime leader in her local union. “If you are ready to organize and act, then
join us.”
The
group was formed following a video call organized by Labor
Notes
between Tennessee teacher activists and two of the rank-and-file organizers of
the statewide walkouts in Arizona and West Virginia (see video below).
Tennessee
teachers face the same issues and challenges as teachers in West Virginia and
Arizona—and they are just as resourceful.
They just have to ask themselves: are they going to keep lying low or are they going to start fighting back?
Chris Brooks is a former organizer with the Tennessee Education Association and currently works as an organizer and staff writer for Labor Notes.
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That’s how Nashville school board member Will Pinkston describes Gov. Bill Lee’s proposals to expand charter schools and enact a voucher program. Pinkston’s comments come via The Washington Post and the education column of Valerie Strauss.
Here’s some of what Pinkston has to say:
In Tennessee, our state constitution guarantees “a system of free public schools” — not a system of taxpayer-funded private schools, which is what you’d be creating with vouchers. Setting aside the unconstitutional nature of vouchers, it’s just bad policy at a time when the state is already underfunding our public schools. If your plan is enacted, it will likely end up in court.
Gov. Lee: Tennessee is ranked in the bottom seven states in America when it comes to per-pupil funding. Let’s instead have a conversation focused on large-scale priorities like dramatically improving teacher pay, expanding early childhood education, and committing to adequate funding for all public schools — not privatizing our school systems vis-à-vis charters and vouchers.
It’s time for testing in Tennessee again. Or, at least, it’s time for schools to begin the time-honored tradition of having students take practice tests to ensure that the state’s testing vendor is getting the job done and the online testing system will work.
Surprising exactly no one, some schools are reporting problems with the testing platform as their students begin practice testing. At least one school reported that at least half the students were unable to access the TNReady test during practice today.
This should definitely encourage students, teachers, and parents as we approach the test-heavy month of April.
Last year, we heard about dump trucks and hackers causing TNReady problems. It’s not clear what the planned excuses are this year.
Certainly, our new Commissioner of Education is working with her team of school choice advocates to devise this year’s round of fake TNReady stories. Then, they’ll come up with lies to tell the General Assembly so no real policy change takes place.
Seriously, though, if your school is or has been engaged in TNReady practice testing, I’d love to know how it’s going. Are you having problems? What are they? Let me know at andy@tnedreport.com
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A Knox County parent has refused to allow her children take the state’s failed TNReady tests each of the last four years. WBIR has more:
A Knox County parent says she has refused to let her kids take TNReady exams for four years. Elizabeth MacTavish and her husband are educators, and she understands the stress of standardized testing as both a parent and a teacher.
We are spending millions of dollars on a test that is neither reliable nor valid, the testing companies that we’ve been using continually fail,” MacTavish said. Over the past few years, TNReady has had some problems. In 2016 the original online testing system failed. In 2017 about 1,700 tests were scored incorrectly. In 2018, the state comptroller’s office says there were login delays, slow servers, and software bugs. Now, the state is looking for a new vendor for TNReady testing. Tuesday, it issued a request for proposal for next school year. The Department of Education expects the new contract to be $20 million each year. It’s current contract with Questar is $30 million.
Former Commissioner of Education Candice McQueen, who presided over all the failed iterations of TNReady, perpetuated the myth that not testing annually would result in a penalty from the federal government. In fact, that’s not entirely accurate:
There’s just one problem: The federal government has not (yet) penalized a single district for failing to hit the 95% benchmark. In fact, in the face of significant opt-outs in New York last year (including one district where 89% of students opted-out), the U.S. Department of Education communicated a clear message to New York state education leaders: Districts and states will not suffer a loss of federal dollars due to high test refusal rates. The USDOE left it up to New York to decide whether or not to penalize districts financially.
Current Commissioner Penny Schwinn has demonstrated she’s not actually listening to parents and teachers as she travels around the state and visits schools. Instead, she is determined to continue to pursue a testing model that has failed students, teachers, and schools across the state.
More than 80% of teachers believe the state should move to the ACT suite of assessments to replace TNReady. A similar number believe TNReady does not accurately reflect student ability.
For now, the state marches on and nothing changes. But, if more parents took the refusal approach, the state could be forced to truly reckon with a broken system.
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For the second year in a row, a committee in the Tennessee General Assembly has essentially endorsed lunch-shaming.
Here’s more on yesterday’s shocking vote:
Republicans voted 4-2 to defeat The Tennessee Hunger-Free Students Act—a bill with three measures to ensure students can eat school lunches and not be punished when parents fail to pay meal fees or a meal debt.
The bill sponsor Rep. John Ray Clemmons, D-Nashville, District 55, said the bill would stop school employees from throwing away a served meal if the student could not pay and would also prohibit schools from punishing or shaming students who accumulated a meal debt.
“We certainly do not want to have a child stigmatized or punished in any way for simply incurring a lunch debt at no fault of their own,” Clemmons said. “We have had incidents in recent years in Tennessee where students have been treated adversely or stigmatized in some manner. Whether it’s placed or made to eat in the principal’s office and eat a peanut butter sandwich by themselves simply because they had a lunch debt or being prevented from going on field trips because of a lunch debt.
Last year, an education subcommittee also rejected a bill sponsored by Clemmons that would have prevented lunch shaming. Every legislator who has opposed this bill in the last two sessions has been a Republican.
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If Tennessee teachers really want to improve the state’s overall investment in schools, including in teacher compensation, they may need to walk off the job.
A new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicates that in states that have seen recent teacher protests, investment in public education has improved significantly.
In four states where teachers walked out of their classrooms in protest last year, education spending is up, helping to make up for deep cuts in those states in the wake of the Great Recession.
That’s according to a new analysis that suggests the walkouts and strikes made a difference in Oklahoma, Arizona, West Virginia, and North Carolina. The report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, found that baseline state funding jumped 19 percent in Oklahoma last year, while North Carolina and West Virginia both saw 3 percent upticks.
Tennessee’s overall investment in public education is 44th nationally and we actually spend less per pupil in inflation-adjusted dollars than we did in 2010. Additionally, the rate of pay increases for our teachers is relatively small and lags behind the national average:
Average teacher salaries in the United States improved by about 4% from the Haslam Promise until this year. Average teacher salaries in Tennessee improved by just under 2% over the same time period. So, since Bill Haslam promised teachers we’d be the fastest improving in teacher pay, we’ve actually been improving at a rate that’s half the national average. No, we’re not the slowest improving state in teacher pay, but we’re also not even improving at the average rate.
It seems unlikely this will change until policymakers are made uncomfortable. One sure way to cause discomfort is through a massive protest or job action. Tennessee teachers who are tired of the status quo may well need to take to the streets to see real change for them and for their students.
daguerreotype, circa 1852, on display as part of ‘ California Gold Rush’. The Jaunts column will pay a visit to the California Oil Museum in Santa Paula previewing the new exhibit, California Gold Rush. DIGITAL IMAGE SHOT ON 10.31.2000 (Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
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