Enough About Politics, Lets Talk About the Politics
“If we're to be at war, we might as well entertain one another.”
― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War
Fourth of July serves as a marker for the middle of summer. In political circles, it means the next election is drawing close. Primaries are held the first week of August.
Flipping through social media reveals candidates pounding the pavement and scooping up ice cream at local festivals and firework shows. You start to get a sense of who's falling into what position.
Nationally, things are a mess. Whispers about President Biden's cognizant abilities have circled for months, and now they've grown into a full-blown conversation.
Some folks call for him to withdraw from the race and turn things over to a younger candidate. That's all well and good, but it's a little late in the game for that kind of change.
Coupled with the Biden turmoil, some are floating the idea that if Biden goes, Trump follows and we get all new candidates. I wouldn't put too much stock in that idea.
A big problem with the latter proposal is that neither party has built a deep bench. Who would among them would be capable of winning a national race?
As attractive to the base as they are, Harris, Buttigieg, Newsome, and Booker are not winning a general election. The right has...who?
Haley, Cruz, and DeSantis ain't going to be any better than their counterparts on the Left.
We've kinda painted ourselves in a box through our commitment to hyper-partisanship.
Biden's potential withdrawal would create even larger issues. If he's not capable of running for re-election, how is he capable of running the country. Questions of who knew what and when would immediately follow any withdrawal. With a little over three months left before Election Day, the aftermath would be pure chaos.
A bigger question for me is not whether he has the cognizant strength to campaign, but whether he can serve another four years. I don't think anyone knows the answer to that one.
This is an unprecedented Presidential race on so many levels.
Locally, things seem to be a bit more stable. Three women running to represent Tennessee in Washington are waging campaigns of varying success.
Former Mayor Megan Barry is simply a campaigning machine. She is everywhere and while she heavily criticizes her opponent, she also delivers positive news and updates. She is fully capable of defeating her opponent, US Representative Mark Green, in November's general election. Green shows little inclination that he wants to be re-elected and Barry is simply outworking him.
Knoxville Representative Gloria Johnson is running against US Representative Marsha Blackburn. Initially, she seemed to be making a lot of headway, but lately, things have quieted. Hopefully, energy will pick up as we head to the November election.
Nashville councilwoman Courtney Johnson, a Republican, is trying her best to unseat incumbent US Representative Andy Ogles, also a Republican. The moderate Republican has faced an uphill battle, but fundraising numbers released today are cause for optimism for her supporters.
According to Axios Nashville, Johnson has raked in $715K over the last three months.
While Barry is cause for optimism, the rest is bad news for voucher opponents.
Vouchers were defeated during the last session, but Governor Lee has sworn that he will bring them back. Don't be surprised if these incumbents who were non-supportive in an election year, suddenly become proponents in an off year.
According to Axios Nashville, Johnson raked in $715K over the last quarter.
Johnston now has over $500,000 cash on hand to bankroll her campaign for the stretch run. In addition to her own fundraising efforts, an outside group called Conservatives With Character has been airing anti-Ogles television ads for about the last two weeks.
Ogles only has about $95K on hand, The Tennessean reported last week that Ogles' re-election effort relies on the Americans for Prosperity political group for financial support.
Johnson enjoys the support of Nashville's business community. Her challenge remains with those communities outside of Davidson County.
It's worth noting that this will only be the second election for the newly drawn District 5.
As for those campaigning on the state level, three months ago I felt that the incumbents might be in trouble this year. They seemed better at crafting drama than they were at crafting policy, and it wasn't a stretch to think voters had grown weary of the sitcom that had become the State General Assembly.
There was plenty of bad policy to draw the ire of voters. Surely parents were still pissed about the recently passed third-grade retention law, especially since many fourth-graders were at risk.
Nope. The coverage this year has paled in comparison to last year. School reopens in about a month and there is barely a mention of how many kids are at risk of being held back.
Several laws went into effect on July 1, including the ones allowing teachers to carry guns and one that includes mandatory year-long expulsion for students who assault teachers. That should inspire some conversation, right?
Not so much.
On the other hand, I see that the Republican leadership, who crafted most of these laws, has coalesced into a united front. They support each other in joint appearances and do what's necessary to win re-election. They are also garnering a ton of financial support from the political PAC Americans for Prosperity.
They feel comfortable enough to endorse both former President Trump and Representative Ogles.
For their part, AFP is doing more than writing checks. They are routinely sending out canvasing groups to drum up support for their groups.
We talk about the modern age, and the power of the internet, but as a one-time candidate, let me assure you, there is nothing more important than door-knocking. There is a direct correlation between the number of doors knocked, and your odds of winning.
Mailers also matter, and AFP is supplying the fuel to flood mailboxes.
A sweep by incumbents means a rehash of last year's voucher fight. You better believe it won't include this year's proposed benefits. It's going to be a pure kick-in-the-teeth policy.
So, if opponents are serious about blocking vouchers, they probably need to find a way to be more effective on the campaign trail. It's not enough to just find candidates to compete. You need to find the right candidates and give those candidates a fighting chance at victory.
Posting on the internet about how vouchers are evil and the state general assembly is filled with racists and misogynists to your 100 friends who already agree with that sentiment, is not an effective strategy. It might make you feel good, but it ain't drawing new people to the table. Just saying.
Time is quickly shortening to flip some seats in the Tennessee Assembly, and I just don't see a wave of new legislators grabbing new seats.
If you were one of those folks who were pulling out all the stops to oppose voucher legislation in the Spring, you need to be among the loudest people in the room supporting new officials.
Otherwise, it was nothing but sound and fury signifying nothing.
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Over the last ten years, I have written extensively about the canard that is the Science of Reading and how Tennessee used the initiative to grow private interests in Tennessee public schools. Now someone else has picked up the narrative.
Writing for the University of Chicago Press Journals, Elena Aydarova, uses Tennessee as a case study for how "SOR reforms served as a catalyst for advancing the interests of private sector actors and monopolizing the market with curriculum materials and consulting services aligned with Common Core State Standards (CCSS), even in the states that moved away from these standards, such as Tennessee."
She further notes, "This performative move of seeking to address a “literacy crisis” through a change in policy priorities ultimately increased the profits of the companies that supported both CCSS and SOR advocacy."
She then delves into just how it all unfolded in Tennessee.
"In the most recent iteration of the reading wars, advocacy groups have promoted systematic and explicit phonics instruction under the banner of SOR. Gabriel’s (2020) analysis of testimonies supporting SOR approaches showed that parents urged legislators to direct public funding toward private tutoring for students with dyslexia. She described these narratives as “salvation by privatization”—how individuals overcame their reading difficulties after they received tutoring from private companies. In a similar vein, Gabriel and Woulfin (2017) observed how public testimonies supporting SOR legislation focused on the services offered by tutors, consultants, and other private providers. This framing aligned SOR legislation with other market-based reforms that advance the privatization of public education."
She exposes the role of so-called non-profits in the adoption of a universal curriculum.
"Philanthropic foundations have played a prominent role in the spread of privatization agendas. Operating as hubs, around which IOs center, and as spokes, philanthropies set marked-based reform agendas in motion (Scott and Jabbar 2014). The networks that bring together various IOs have grown in power to the point where “federal, state, and local policymakers are granting them both authority and financial resources to carry out policy agendas” (Scott et al. 2017, 26). Decades of coordinated IO advocacy efforts have turned privatization and marketization of education into common sense (Schneider and Berkshire 2020), so that even policy formation itself has been increasingly conducted by external actors, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Foundation for Excellence in Education (ExcelinEd), and other organizations (Anderson and Donchik 2016; Cummings et al. 2023; Lubienski 2016)."
According to the author, supporters pushed things through the use of a performative strategy.
"According to Goffman (1974, 124), “a performance … is that arrangement which transforms an individual into a stage performer … that can be looked to for engaging behavior by persons in an ‘audience’ role.” Focusing on educational policy, Smith et al. (2004) described policy making as resembling “theater, complete with directors, stages, casts of actors, narrative plots, and (most importantly) a curtain that separates the action onstage (what the audience has access to) from backstage where ‘real allocation of values’ takes place” (Smith et al. 2004, 11). In the context of neoliberal transformations and expansion of private interests into the public sector, what comes to matter most in policy-making circles is not evidence, facts, or data but convincing performance. As Wedel (2009, 40–41) explained, “Performing is an essential ingredient in today’s public sphere, often at the expense of objectivity, expertise, and accurate information.”
Analysis of policy as performance departs from assumptions of linearity and rationality often ascribed to policy processes. This theoretical framing allows researchers to interrogate what is obscured by the public presentations of policy problems or proposed measures to address them. For example, Koyama (2010, 10) noted how “policy is so much more that it appears.” Her analysis of accountability policies applied to low-performing schools showed how public funding was directed to cover private tutoring, supporting the growing industry of providers that used failure for their own profit. Koyama’s (2010) work, along with others (Aydarova 2019; Wright 2005), suggests that policy presentations, justifications, and problem constructions are performative moves that seek to convince the audience to accept reformers’ definition of reality (Goffman 1974). Those performative moves can conceal, obscure, or distort the actual agendas behind advocacy or policy formation (Aydarova 2019, 2022).
Along these lines, even though it is common to examine policy conceptualization as an attempt to solve a problem, Edelman (1988, 22) argued that “the striking characteristic of the link between political problems and solutions in everyday life is that the solution typically comes first, chronologically and psychologically.” With the solution coming first, policy performances staged for the audience can focus on offering problems to go with the solution or stating justifications for the chosen course of action. At the same time, intense focus on problems, such as a “literacy crisis,” draws attention away from the growing involvement of external actors in policy formation (Aydarova 2019). Although parents, educators, and citizens direct their pleas for change toward public officials, those actors are not always the only ones engaged in developing and promoting reforms. Understanding policy as performance affords an opportunity to trace the involvement of other actors whose presence can be obscured by institutionalized arrangements of power."
Aydarova is less snarky than I, but she's definitely bringing the receipts.
Some may dismiss recent actions by pointing to the success of students on the state's standardized testing. Maybe, but keep in mind, that growth has been minimal and the tests administered to students are not transparent to stakeholders. There is no way of ensuring that the tests are of a similar degree of difficulty year over year, other than taking the word of the vendor and the TDOE.
There is a lot to unpack here and too much to cite, but I encourage you to read the piece in its entirety.
My only criticism is that the author tries to paint efforts as a partisan issue. I would argue that the only party that Schwinn, Lee. and SCORE swear fidelity too is the money party.
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Here's an interesting one for you. Shortly after leaving Governor Lee's cabinet as Commissioner of Education, Penny Schwinn created a new company called Bexley Group LLC.
According to the listing with the Secretary of State, the principal office was initially listed as her home in Nashville. A couple of months later, she changed the address to a Knoxville location. Last month, she changed it again.
The new address is 611 Commerce Street. If the address sounds familiar, it should. It's the same location, with different suites, as Blake Harris and Associates. One of Harris's associates is Brent Easley, another former Governor Lee cabinet member. Easley was once employed by both TnnesseeCan and StudentsFirst.
Does this possible coincidence mean anything?
I don't know, but I do know that it is very difficult to pin down information on what the Bexley Group does. The best I can tell they specialize in talent acquisition. This is ironic because Schwinn was never any good at attracting or retaining talent. In fact, just the opposite was true,
Schwinn is currently employed by the University of Florida as the VP for PK-12, pre-bachelor program. She pulls in about $375K for that gig, Parents at the University's P.K. Yonge school are frustrated with her after a proposed change to the school's admissions process.
Schwinn wants to make the school a top 10 high school in the state but feels to do so she needs to change admissions to an academically selective process.
One concerned student who spoke at a meeting in the Spring is in 11th grade and has been a student there since kindergarten.
“Being a lifer at PK has been a really beautiful experience for me,” shared Abigail Pruden.
Although she has loved being a student there, she feels this proposal would restructure everything about P.K. Yonge.
“Some of my best friends have learning disabilities, IEPs, 504 plans and wouldn’t get into this selective high school that they’re proposing,” shared Pruden.
That's our Penny.
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The TDOE is handing out federal money again.
Yesterday they announced over $2.6 million in Perkins Reserve Grant (PRG) grant funds have been awarded to 55 school districts for the 2024-25 school year to support Career and Technical Education (CTE) across the state.
The PRG grant awards support the implementation of programs of study aligned with emerging technology in regionally identified high-skill, high-wage, and/or in-demand occupations or industries, implement STEM in all CTE classrooms, and increase support for special education students. Additionally, the PRG grant opportunity is designed to support districts in rural areas and maintain high CTE student participation rates.
“Career and technical education plays an important role in every student's academic journey,” said Lizzette Reynolds, Commissioner of Education. “We look forward to seeing how districts utilize these grant funds to implement STEM curriculum, create career exploration opportunities for elementary and middle school students, and inform students on growing and new careers.”
I wonder if anybody asked Reynolds what Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton had to say about this award.
As recently as last month, Sexton was voicing support for Tennessee to continue its consideration of rejecting federal funds. The Speaker cited tax breaks created this session as evidence that his idea was feasible.
Remember, the state doesn't get to select which federal monies it chooses to accept, and which it rejects.
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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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