Waiting for the Unraveling
“It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
They say timing is everything, and last week offered prime evidence of that trope.
Up until Friday, the Tennessee Department of Education had been slow to share data connected to the state’s voucher program. But thanks to a classic Friday news dump, we now know a little more.
And that’s the thing about education policy in Tennessee these days — the story is always told through numbers. How many applied, how many were rejected, how many credits earned, how many dollars saved. It looks like accountability, but it’s really an addiction to numbers, a habit of turning human lives into charts and dashboards.
The Voucher Numbers Game
According to TDOE, the state has awarded all 20,000 vouchers for the 2025–26 school year.
10,000 scholarships went to students in households with a “qualified income.”
10,000 universal scholarships went to eligible students regardless of income.
To qualify under income, a family of four had to fall under the $173,000 threshold. Even then, the state rejected 11,000 applicants.
A press release broke things down like this:
21,164 applications for qualified scholarships
21,663 applications for universal scholarships
42,827 total applications
17,516 students waitlisted
On the surface, those numbers make for a tidy headline: “Over 40,000 families applied.” Lawmakers will wave that around as proof of demand, and they’ll use the waitlist as justification for immediate expansion. The numbers aren’t just data points — they’re political talking points.
Applications came in from 94 of 95 counties, and the 20,000 awarded scholarships represent students from 86 counties, with enrollments at 220 out of 241 participating schools, spanning all grade levels. That breadth gives legislators cover to say, “Look, this isn’t just for Memphis, Nashville, or Chattanooga. Everyone wants in.”
But let’s not kid ourselves: the numbers don’t actually tell us who benefits. They just provide ammunition for the next legislative push. And that push is already coming.
What the State Isn’t Telling You
Enjoy this data dump while it lasts—because the most useful information isn’t being collected.
Lawmakers are already touting the 42,827 applications as proof of overwhelming demand, and the 17,516 waitlisted as evidence the program must expand. But those shiny totals leave out the harder truths:
Lawmakers did not require TDOE to track the average income of voucher families. So we don’t know if this program is helping poor families, or simply subsidizing upper-middle-class tuition bills.
Applicants weren’t asked whether their children were already enrolled in private schools, even though projections suggest 65% were. If true, the program isn’t expanding access — it’s shifting who foots the bill.
Voucher recipients must take standardized tests, but the results will never be reported to the state. So we’ll never know whether students actually benefit academically.
In other words, the totals look impressive, but they’re hollow. This is the danger of an overemphasis on numbers — you can generate endless charts and dashboards, but if you don’t ask the right questions, you’re not measuring reality. You’re just manufacturing talking points.
Transparency, TDOE Style
Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds insists the process has been transparent:
“Nobody’s hiding anything. We’re trying to be as responsive as possible. But we also have to recognize that there’s work that’s happening right now in the agency to ensure that these families get what they need.”
And:
“It’s just been a mad scramble. As you know we had a very quick turnaround. Took a lot of work, a lot of manpower. We had volunteers all across the agency that helped with applications. It was a very intense effort to make sure that we did the job.”
That’s the kind of statement that sets off my spidey sense. Volunteers? Who exactly were they? How were they vetted? What kind of access did they have to family data? These aren’t small questions.
And when you drill down, the majority of participating schools are Christian or Catholic institutions. That’s going to spark plenty of conversation in the months ahead.
My bet? The next legislative session will push to expand vouchers to 30,000 students, if not more. Don’t expect it to stay capped for long.
Tenure in the Crosshairs
In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, expect lawmakers to train their fire on tenure. The debate will be framed as free speech vs. indoctrination, but underneath lies a fixation on measuring what can’t always be measured.
Critics like to portray tenure as a lifetime contract — a data point that can be charted and simplified. In reality, it’s a set of protections requiring documentation and due process. But because administrators despise paperwork, they dodge the very steps that make the system fair.
Metro Nashville Public Schools is infamous for this. Policies shift depending on who’s in the room. Documentation, the lifeblood of accountability, is treated as optional. When data collection becomes the obsession, the humanity of teaching — the messy reality that can’t always be captured in a rubric or spreadsheet — gets lost.
And when tenure falls, older teachers become little more than line items on a budget spreadsheet: expensive cells to be replaced with cheaper ones. Once again, the human story is erased by the numbers.
Every Child Known… as Data Points
MNPS loves to boast about every child known. They even turned it into a song.
But in practice, “known” too often means “tracked.” Advanced and gifted students don’t get seen as whole people — they get reduced to numbers.
I’ve heard from students who feel like their aspirations don’t compute within the district’s data model. One girl, after pushing for an advanced math class, was told: “If you are not going to major in math in college, why do you want to take that class?” Translation: her desire didn’t fit the metrics the district values, so it was dismissed.
Gifted kids, who may question tests or disrupt routines, often fall through the cracks because their brilliance doesn’t translate into tidy achievement scores. Advanced students, who might ace the numbers game, still need deeper challenges — but when the system is built to track proficiency percentages, anything beyond “meeting expectations” disappears from view.
And leadership hasn’t helped. When the longtime director of gifted programs retired back in June, the position wasn’t filled. If “every child known” were really a guiding principle, that job would have been prioritized. Instead, the silence speaks volumes: gifted learners don’t move the data needle in ways the district wants to highlight.
As student board rep Hannah Nguyen noted:
“I think we recognize that there are disparities and inequities among schools for post-secondary planning.”
She’s right. Where you go to middle school determines what courses you can access in high school, which shapes your entire trajectory. But instead of addressing that inequity, the district celebrates averages, participation rates, and test score gaps. The bigger story — the individual student who doesn’t fit the model — gets erased in the spreadsheets.
Dual Enrollment vs. AP: The Metrics War
The obsession with numbers shows up clearly in the district’s shift toward dual-enrollment (DE) over Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB). On the surface, all three give high school students access to college-level work. But the way they’re measured tells you why DE is winning the political argument.
Dual Enrollment (DE) produces a college transcript. That’s a neat, bankable number: “X credits earned,” “Y tuition saved.” Lawmakers love those kinds of totals. They look great in a fiscal note or campaign flyer.
Advanced Placement (AP) depends on exam scores, which are unpredictable. Only about 30% of students score a 4 or 5. That statistic gets wielded like a hammer to argue AP isn’t worth the trouble, ignoring the students who thrive under AP’s rigor.
International Baccalaureate (IB) has its own set of performance metrics, but again, the focus tends to be on aggregate pass/fail rates, not on how the program stretches kids intellectually.
It’s all about which program generates the most impressive-looking data, not which actually fits the student.
For kids likely to stay in-state, DE makes practical sense — their credits transfer easily. For students aiming at selective or out-of-state universities, AP or IB carries more weight. But that nuance gets erased because nuance doesn’t fit neatly in a spreadsheet.
What we’re left with is a system where “success” gets defined by totals — credits earned, tuition dollars saved — rather than by whether students are truly prepared for the next level of education. The story isn’t about kids anymore. It’s about numbers.
When Students Lead
Normally, I roll my eyes at student reps on school boards — too often it’s virtue signaling and cosplay governance. But this year’s MNPS student representatives have earned real respect.
During the debate over weapons detection in middle schools, they spoke directly, without hiding behind numbers or jargon. They weren’t armed with charts or dashboards — just their lived experience. And that, ironically, made their testimony more powerful than the flood of statistics usually tossed around the board table.
Superintendent Adrienne Battle tried to dismiss them with a nostalgic anecdote about her own middle school experience — forty years ago. The awkward silence that followed each student’s comments said everything. These kids weren’t reciting data points; they were reminding adults that real people live with these policies.
Battle’s claim that there’s a difference between “weapons detection systems” and “metal detectors” only deepened the confusion. It sounded like another attempt to reframe the debate in technical terms. Meanwhile, the practical question — who is going to staff these machines, given middle schools have fewer personnel than high schools? — was brushed aside.
In Nashville, the default answer is always the same: “Assign it to teachers, they’ll do anything.” That’s not policy — that’s spreadsheet thinking. And the students had the courage to cut through it.
In the end, the board voted to proceed. The numbers were in their favor. But the most honest arguments in the room came from the only two people who refused to speak in numbers at all.
The Thread That Ties It Together
From vouchers to tenure, from advanced academics to weapons detection, the throughline is the same: unraveling.
Education has become obsessed with numbers. Application totals, test scores, credit hours earned, participation rates — all paraded as proof of success. But these figures don’t capture who is being helped, who is being left behind, or how policies actually shape lives.
We mistake dashboards for truth. We celebrate charts while ignoring context. We call it transparency when what we’re really offering is a flood of statistics designed to overwhelm rather than illuminate. In the process, the people at the center — the students, families, and teachers — get reduced to data points in someone else’s spreadsheet.
That’s why the students at the board meeting stood out so sharply. They didn’t quote numbers; they spoke from experience. And in doing so, they reminded us what’s missing: real human perspective.
Makkai had it right:
“When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.”
Things unravel when we start believing the data is the story. Numbers can guide, but they can’t replace the messy, complicated, human truths of education. Until we start centering those truths instead of chasing metrics, we’ll keep mistaking spreadsheets for progress.
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