Nashville education blogger TC Weber offers a critique of MNPS’s “Every Child Known” slogan in light of the district’s policies and actions.
“Every child known” may actually be more accurate than “every child valued.”
That shift in wording—just one verb—changes everything.
Because when a district knows a child is in danger, knows their history, knows their struggles, knows the warning signs… and still fails them, what does that tell us about the hierarchy of value? What does that tell families? What does it tell students?
Relationships drive effort and loyalty. But relationships can’t be graphed on a data dashboard or condensed into a performance metric, and that’s where the system breaks down.
The modern education machine loves data points—graduation rates, proficiency scores, chronic absenteeism percentages. What it doesn’t love are messy, unquantifiable things like trust, rapport, and empathy.
It also loves micromanagement, often as much as it loves its spreadsheets.
This year MNPS doubled down on its scripted lesson plans, demanding that every class at every grade level in every school be on the same page, every single day. Besides flying in the face of nearly every best practice ever written, it strips teachers of the flexibility—and time—needed to form authentic connections with their students.
The best teachers have always known the importance of relationships. They’ve built them instinctively, often despite the system rather than because of it.
