Brown Shirts to the Right, Green Shirts to the Left
“It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol
As a public, we don't do nuance well, if we do it all.
Our policy conversations tend to be filled with t-shirt slogans and sweeping generalizations. Rarely do we dive under the surface in promoting our positions. Content to fling emotionally charged statements at each other, we dedicate more attention to winning rather than developing solutions.
Equally concerning is the move to politicize everything, and a lack of willingness to defer from the party line. Strangely this phenomenon occurs even as the number of Americans who identify as independent reaches a record high.
Nowhere is the allegiance to party over policy more apparent than in the Tennessee General Assembly.
With two weeks remaining in this session, legislators are facing a ton of pending legislation with little time to hear it. What will get passed and what gets left behind, is likely dependent on who strikes the most emotional chords.
Earlier this week the State Senate passed a bill that would allow teachers who meet certain criteria to carry guns to school.
The primary arguments in support of this legislation are that your Second Amendment rights don't end at the schoolhouse door and that smaller rural districts are unable to fill Student Resource Officer positions, thus putting kids at risk.
When it comes to the latter, I can't imagine the challenges faced by those living in a small rural county. Since I don't live in a small rural community and haven't done so for decades, I feel unqualified to definitively say, if it's a bad idea. It doesn't really sound like a great idea to me, but again, I don't know all the variables.
The proposed bill allowing teachers to be armed passed in the Senate amid a chaotic scene in the gallery. A couple hundred protesters, including parents from the Covenant School, disrupted proceedings by loudly expressing their displeasure at the proposed bill. At one point, Lt. Governor Randy McNally ordered the clearing of the gallery, after several of his warnings went unheeded.
Down on the Senate floor, State Senator London Lamar (D-Nashville) held her infant while telling fellow lawmakers, "“It is really hard, even as a new mom standing here, to have to be composed on a piece of legislation that I know puts my son’s life at risk.”
Compelling political theater, but not really true to reality.
Contained in the bill is a provision that states, that before any teacher can pack heat, the district supervisor must sign off on the policy.
That ain't happening Nashville. Nor Memphis, Clarksville, Hamilton County, Williamson County, Maryville, or 95% of the other counties in Tennessee.
It may happen in one of those small rural communities, and if it does, I have to assume that it happens out of a sense of need and a sense of everyone knowing everyone and feeling comfortable with the idea.
I don't think it's a good idea, but then again, I'm not a member of that community. As such I don't feel any more compelled to tell them how to conduct their lives than I do to let them dictate to me how I should live in Nashville.
If things go horribly awry, as I suspect they might, that's on them, not me. In a democratic society, we have the right to make decisions I don't agree with as well as those I support.
As for the Covenant parents, my heart aches for them, but I continue to fail to understand how being a victim of a horrific gun crime makes you an expert on gun laws.
Again no disrespect, but how does going through such a tragedy earn you more political clout than someone who never went through such an ordeal?
This whole debate also sidesteps the much bigger danger involving guns and children. School shootings involving automatic weapons remain our primary focus, despite the majority of gun instances involving a handgun as opposed to automatic weapons.
I am not sure anybody has the stomach to tackle limiting access to handguns on a scale that will impact student safety.
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As I mentioned earlier in the week, Governor Lee's voucher bill is on life support. Legislation in both government bodies has been held up in their respective financial committees for three weeks, while lawmakers look for a way to reconcile the two bills.
I'm told that there has been some progress in reaching a compromise on the two bills, but there still remain a few hurdles to overcome.
Even if the bills become aligned, there is no guarantee that they will pass their respective finance committees. The challenge in the House is larger than that in the Senate.
One sticking point appears to be the Senate's insistence on voucher recipients taking some form of annual state-approved test allowing for the measurement of the program's academic success. The House version has no such provision.
This is part of the whole "accountability" argument put forth by voucher opponents. They insistently demand that private schools face the same level of accountability that public schools do. It's an argument that is disingenuous and public school proponents better hope that they never face the level of accountability private schools are subject to.
Besides, teachers and students, public schools rarely face any accountability. Money is never taken and schools are never closed.
The Tennessee Achievement School district hasn't taken over a school in 5 years. While an abject failure, the ASD did interject some real accountability into the equation.
Some would argue that the rhetoric around low-performing schools encourages families to seek alternative options, thereby costing the local district needed funding. Maybe, but somehow public school leaders never do any self-evaluation over why enrollment continually shrinks.
Still, somehow, even as enrollments decline, district funding finds ways to increase.
Take Metro Nashville Public Schools as an example. This week they submitted a budget of $1.27 billion for the 2024 - 2025 school year. That's an increase of $63 million. That number could grow as the Mayor crafts the city budget.
Granted the district makes a strong argument for the increase, but missing from the budget presentation is the number of projected students enrolled for the coming school year.
A glance at MNPS's open enrollment portal shows that the district has lost about 3k students over the last 5 years, and there is no evidence to support an assumption that the trend won't continue. Keep in mind when looking at the portal data that MNPS doesn't separate charter schools from traditional schools, so the true shift is likely even greater.
MNPS has a tendency to take every criticism as being misguided and unfounded. I can't remember the last time I heard a district leader say, "After careful review, we've realized that our policy is not correct and we've decided to change course as a result."
A couple prime opportunities currently exist in which the district could practice transparency and responsiveness.
The first is around plans for changing the grade structure at Martin Luther King Academic Magnet School. Opposition to the plan by the community has been pretty strong, while the district has remained unresponsive.
The other opportunity is with recent errors in the district's enrollment lottery for Magnet School. The district has purportedly overenrolled 6th graders for the upcoming school year. Repeated inquiries to MNPS about the issue have been ignored. Privately parents are being told, Yeah that happened, but that'll work out. Once again, a little transparency would instill trust and make it harder to poach students. But it's a practice MNPS fails to engage in.
The district spends millions of dollars in Social Emotion Learning, yet leadership fails to practice the basic tenets themselves.
Maybe MNPS Equity administrator Ashford Hughes could take a break from his social media posts, and host some workshops on admitting when you are wrong, and how to say I'm sorry.
That would go further in fostering a community of inclusion, than his frequent posts on ensuring "that each student feels recognized and valued, fostering a strong sense of belonging and academic excellence on their educational journey. "
Part of valuing people is recognizing and crediting their concerns, and not just summerly dismissing them. Listening to them, and hearing them is how you foster a sense of belonging. When was the last time MNPS responded to any voices but their own?
Sans practice it just becomes words.
Private schools, on the other hand, face incredible scrutiny from parents and require administrators to be responsive. You don't think a parent drops $20k a year and then never asks another question. Endowments are created and dismantled based on performance. Losing students translates directly into lost revenue and adjustments.
Yet we want them to subject themselves to an assessment that we regularly recognize as being flawed.
The idea that a standardized test is going to be able to factor out all the elements of a child's academic progress, is a bit ludicrous. A child not getting stability at home is going to face the same challenges in a private school as they do in a traditional school.
On the flip side, some students will thrive in a classroom that is devoid of distractions. Some kids will suffer from social anxiety. There are a multitude of factors that enter into a child's performance on a standardized exam.
We've come to accept the limitations of standardized tests to accurately reflect student learning. Yet, voucher opponents insist on applying the same test to kids who accept a voucher to a private school.
If the test is inadequate in one circumstance it's inadequate in all circumstances.
A better idea would be to lift testing requirements on all students and look for a better model to measure performance.
Sssshhh...don't tell anybody, but there is stuff in the House version that addresses that very subject.
It should be a fun week next week, full of public posturing with little nuance.
The good news is that we are likely to get to do it again next year.
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Speaking of accountability, Tennessee's recently passed literacy act includes a provision to retain 3rd-grade students who fail to meet adequate performance levels. On the third grade level, there are provisions - retakes, alternative tests, tutoring, summer school - that allow at-risk students to avoid retention.
Because of those exemptions, 1.25% of last year's third graders were held back under the new law. That translates to just under 900 kids.
What many overlooked, was the requirement that those who took advantage of the tutoring or summer school option had to show adequate growth in their fourth-grade year in order to pass to 5th grade. If we are going to invest in tutoring and summer school, might as well make sure it is effective, right?
Not according to the public, parents and schools hate the idea.
What we are talking about here is roughly 12k kids, with the TDOE estimating as many as 6K of those could be retained.
At first glance. I would argue that a 50% success rate doesn't make a great case for the effectiveness of tutoring and summer school. But remember, we don't do nuance, so all the focus is on the 6 thousand kids.
This week a bill advanced to the House floor that would widen the criteria for determining retention.
The results from a local state-approved benchmark test could be considered as well.
The bill introduced by Representative Gary Hicks (R-Rogersville) would also allow for parents and districts to meet to decide on retention.
Any kid who receives an accommodation, and is passed on to fifth grade, is required to enroll in tutoring or summer school. In other words, another dose of the same medicine that didn't work last year.
Being an election year, the bill is likely to pass next week in both bodies. Though not without reservations from the Senate, as voiced by Education Committee Chair State Senator Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol).
"We set a line years ago, and it’s a tough line," Lundberg said. "I don’t want 6,000 people to fail. I don’t want 3,000. I don’t want 300. But some are going to fail, and moving them along just because these are difficult conversations for parents to have and teachers to have, that’s a problem."
Also of note, is the emerging role of Hicks as a counterweight to Governor Lee's education policies. Hicks has been a strong and vocal opponent of Governor Lee's voucher plan. The Representative hails from the same community as recently named National Teacher of the Year Missy Testerman. So maybe she exerting a little influence.
Like Todd Warner (R-Chappell Hill), also a vocal voucher opponent, Hicks is running unopposed in upcoming state elections, which frees him up to speak his mind.
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Several years ago, when the Science of Reading first took off, I warned about the dangers of assuming there was only one way to teach reading. I've always advocated for putting more tools in a teacher's hands, as opposed to taking tools away.
My objections were largely ignored and states, including Tennessee, rushed to adopt materials reflective of the Science of Reading.
Of late, there has been some revaluation and some familiar problems have begun to arise.
Education writer Peter Greene looks at how Common Core opened the door to the state-imposed curriculum.
"It was one of the big objections to the Core itself-- how dare the federal and state governments dictate what and how will be taught in local schools. The local control of school districts was an inviolable feature, a given part of How Schools Work. Sure, there were state departments of education providing some oversight and accountability, and they often had programs they wanted to push. But if you are a Teacher Of A Certain Age, you remember state-run professional development as an attempt to sell the idea, an attempt that implicitly accepted that it was up to the district and the teachers to buy the idea, or not."
The Washington Post has a piece tracking how different states have passed laws to impose certain curricular and instructional requirements on what should be taught (or not). We could also discuss the moves in various states to push Science of Reading laws, mandating a particular type of instruction for reading.
This is especially problematic in light of a recent summary by The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado on research about the current “Science of Reading” fad. The summary finds that the “science” is missing. SoR has turned into another “miracle cure” that is being imposed and mandated by legislatures, anticipating a dramatic result in which “no child is left behind.”
The summary includes a close examination of Tennessee’s Literacy Success Act (LSA). NEPC Fellow Elena Aydarova of the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed videos of legislative meetings and debates, stakeholder interviews, and examinations of bills, policy reports, media coverage, and other documents associated with the LSA, which was passed in 2021.
Aydarova found little evidence that advocates, intermediaries, or legislators grounded their support in anything resembling scientific evidence. Instead, “science of reading” becomes a catch-all phrase representing a grab bag of priorities and beliefs: “[I]n advocates’ testimonies and in legislative deliberations, neuroscience as SOR’s foundational element was reduced to vague references to ‘brain’ and was often accompanied by casual excuses that speakers did not know what ‘it all’ meant.”
She goes on to note that motivations for supporting SOR reforms range from commercial to ideological. For instance, Aydarova notes that after the passage of The Literacy Success Act in 2021, nearly half of Tennessee’s school districts adopted curricula promoted by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. This campaign, supported by curriculum companies such as Amplify and wealthy backers such as the Charles Koch Foundation, added SOR wording to its marketing effort as the curriculum it had originally supported fell out of favor due to its association with Common Core State Standards, which had become politically unpopular in many states.
In her opinion, legislators focused more on reading instruction than out-of-school factors.
Aydarova's research supports Greene's argument against having curriculum and instruction decisions made by legislators.
Per Greene:
It's not a good idea for a variety of reasons. Legislatures favor people who are good at politics, not people who are good at teaching. Legislatures are far too removed from classrooms to know what the hell they're talking about. And the whole exercise is one more way to reduce teacher autonomy and cut their professional judgment out of the equation.
Can't say I disagree.
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Per usual, I need to rattle the cup a little bit before I head out the door.
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