Tennessee, Exemplar for Meritocratic Rot

A recent news story in the Tennessean found that the most recent TN standardized test scores show remarkable disparities between affluent and poor school districts across the state:

Out of the subjects we analyzed, Algebra II saw the largest performance gap with a staggering 72-percentage-point spread. Williamson County Schools posted a 74% proficiency rate, while Humboldt City Schools came in at 2%. Geometry came in second for disparities with a 71-point spread between Williamson County Schools, which saw 76% proficiency, and 2% proficiency rate for Humboldt City Schools.

The city of Humboldt is shared by both Gibson and Madison Counties. Gibson County is ranked #33 in household income, and Madison County comes in at #45. Williamson County, on the other hand, is ranked #1 in household income.

Not only are income gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged school systems reflected in test scores, but the same gaps are found within districts when comparing scores of "economically disadvantaged" students with students who are "non-disadvantaged." 

The first chart below shows proficiency rates of "economically non-disadvantaged” students in 30 of Tennessee’s 151 school districts.

Now compare those scores with the second chart below, which shows proficiency rates for “economically disadvantaged” students in those same school districts. Within the same school district, disparities in scores between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students vary by 30-50+ percent.  

While not alone among states where such vast inequities exist, Tennessee offers a perfect example of an education system built on a rotted meritocracy based on flawed and outdated assessments of educational worth, i.e. standardized tests.  Promoted as scientifically objective, these rankings are trumpeted and blindly celebrated by high-performing rich communities like Williamson County, while citizens of poor districts like Humboldt are eager to find someone to blame for their shortcomings.

Those "someones" are almost always identified as those lazy teachers and parents in the lowest scoring schools, the ones you know, with a disproportionate number of economically disadvantaged students. And the disadvantaged students? Having been indoctrinated to believe that because the same test is given the same way to every student on the same day, and is, therefore, a fair reflection of what every student should know, then they end up, implicitly or explicitly, blaming themselves. That, or rejecting school outright.

And, thus, the poisonous meritocracy rolls on, with no one the wiser, neither the non-disadvantaged citizens who continue to celebrate the parents and children and teachers in their communities who deserve to reap the rewards for their diligence and hard work, or the disadvantaged citizens who continue to blame the poorest parents, children, and teachers in their communities for their test score failures.

Without such a system in place, it would be much harder for the upper classes to climb their way over the less fortunate and, thus, claim their well-deserved top spots in colleges and careers. That’s why it is critical for both neocon and neolib meritocrats to bond together once more to 1) promote another generation of universal high stakes testing in K-12, and 2) to re-assert the critical importance of ACT and SAT in college admissions.

TN Parents File Lawsuit to Stop Bill Lee’s School Voucher Privatization Plan

Lawsuit Alleges Tennessee's School Voucher Program is Unconstitutional nashvillebanner.com/2025/11/21/t...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) November 21, 2025 at 8:06 AM

Bill Lee Loses School Voucher Battle, Again

Two days after a stunning repudiation of the Governor by production workers who voted 3-1 for unionization at the VW plant in Chattanooga, Bill Lee has surrendered once again to the reality that parents, school boards, teachers, and students do not want taxpayer money going to fund private schools, de-fund public schools, breach the separation of church and state, and rebuild the apartheid system of education in Tennessee.

It seems that Lee's failure this year could be due to his plan to keep the voucher scheme details secret, even from the Republican legislature, until the last minute, thus avoiding scrutiny from the public.  With the Senate and the House in the dark about Lee's Christian Nationalist scheme, each chamber moved forward with its own version of school coupons, thus making it impossible for all parties to come together at the last minute to shove through the Koch Bro scheme:

While Lee announced his vision for the program in November, he delayed releasing specific details on the plan until well into 2024. By that time, House and Senate Republicans had devised vastly different versions of the plan, and each chamber appeared entrenched in their positions.

So its back to the heifer barn for Bill Lee, where he will stand by for new voucher plans to be devised by his brain trust at Backwards U.

Bill Lee Breaks Law To Appoint Perjurer, Lizzette Reynolds

Even though Tennessee's unqualified Education Commissioner collects over $21,000 per month to wreck the State's public schools with Bill Lee's proposed school voucher scheme, she, nonethless, chose to lie on an official state document about her length of service in order to receive a tuition waiver from UT Martin, where she is now enrolled in order to gain certification as a teacher.  Reynolds became a state employee on July 1, 2023, and on August 14 she swore that she had been a state employee for six months.

Reynolds perjured herself a second time when she submitted another of the same form in November, 2023.

You see, Bill Lee made history by being the first Tennessee governor ignore and, thus, break state law by appointing someone as education commission who has no teaching experience, school admin experience, and who lacks certification in either:

According to the century-old law, the education commissioner “shall be a person of literary and scientific attainments and of skill and experience in school administration,” and “qualified to teach in the school of the highest standing over which the commissioner has authority.”

TN School Voucher Bill Will Cost Taxpayers Billions, Part 2

As with most school privatization plans, Tennessee legislators can count on a stable of bare-knuckled billionaires and millionaires to provide the cash to drive the current school voucher scheme that appears destined to become law--unless citizens who support public education raise enough hell to stop it.

The legislation (HB1183/SB0503) will provide, during the 2024-25 school year, just over $7,000 in state funding for 20,000 of Tennessee's just over one million K-12 students (including private school students). In Year 2 (2025-26), any or all of the parents of Tennessee's one million+ students may sign up.

Of the 20,000, half will be made available to students whose families’ income are below 300% of the federal poverty level, students with disabilities, and those who meet eligibility requirements for the existing ESA pilot program. The remaining 10,000 will be made available to any student currently entitled to attend a public school. 

Beginning in the 2025-26 school year, eligibility for the program would be opened to all Tennessee students, regardless of income or previous school enrollment. If demand exceeds available funding, previously enrolled program participants, low-income students, and students enrolled in public schools would be prioritized.

Based on conservative estimates of the Tennessee General Assembly Fiscal Review Committee, the costs will be staggering:

The total amount of scholarships awarded will result in an increase in state expenditures
estimated to be:

o $141,500,000 (20,000 x $7,075) in FY24-25;
o $343,147,000 (47,000 x $7,301) in FY25-26; and
o Exceeding $343,147,000 in FY26-27 and subsequent years.

If the voucher scheme led to 10 percent of Tennessee students in private schools by 2027 and moving forward, that would mean an additional $700,000,000+ every year for a state that is ranked 44th among states for K-12 funding.

How Will Local Education Agencies (LEAs) Be Affected?

Because the Republican voucher scheme does not include a hold-harmless provision, local school systems will be required to absorb the loss of state funding for their students who move to private schools. The information below is from the Tennessee General Assembly Fiscal Review Committee's Fiscal Memorandum, dated February 26, 2024:

The proposed legislation does not contain a hold-harmless provision for LEAs that
experience a decrease in local revenue due to students leaving the LEA to attend private
schools . . . .

Based on school voucher data from other states, the scholarships available to students
who are not subject to household income restrictions will be awarded to 60 percent of
students from private schools and to 40 percent of students from public schools . . . .

The total local decrease in revenue and decrease in state expenditures is estimated as
follows:

$101,525,200 ($89,905,200 + $11,620,000) in FY25-26; and

Exceeding $140,710,480 ($124,598,880+ $16,111,600) in FY26-27 and
subsequent years.

A loss in TISA funding would not necessarily be offset by avoiding the cost of educating
the student. Any offset or decrease in local expenditures would depend upon whether
certain cost-savings could be realized through staff reductions or service and resource
reductions.

However, it is assumed that LEAs will maintain spending levels despite a decrease in
student enrollment (pp. 3-5). 

In short, school systems who lose 10-15 percent of their students still must maintain physical plants, transportation systems, maintenance programs, and instructional programs for 85-90 percent of remaining students.  For a largely rural state, these costs could be devastating to budgets that are already bare bones.

 Do Vouchers Offer Improved Test Scores?

This new voucher scheme will be layered on top of the previous one that was implemented during the 2022-23 school year.  The data from Spring 2023 state tests demonstrate that the current push for school privatization is not driven by a desire for academic improvement:

In 2023, only 11.3% of program participants scored proficient on the math section of TCAP, compared to 33.7% of public school students. Similarly in English language arts, 22.8% of ESA recipients scored proficient, while 38% of public school students hit the benchmark.

 

Part 2: TN Voucher "Plan" Features Big Government with No Fiscal or Program Accountability

As promised in Part 1 yesterday, Gov. Bill Lee announced his latest planned school voucher scam in Nashville.  Alongside him was fellow unholy-rolling governor, Sarah H. Sanders of Arkansas infamy. 

Today I would like to present some research findings that clearly show the negative effects of school voucher programs on student achievement and student well-being. We know that Bill Lee and his Tennessee Taliban legislative supermajority don't, or can't, read research, but I am hoping that someone will translate the findings into something they might understand: Them voucher thangs ain't workin'.

Some clips are below from Brookings, which includes links to the research studies, themselves:

Part of the push for ESA vouchers comes from the lingering frustration over the pandemic-era school closures and concern over learning loss as measured by standardized tests. But on that question, the last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy. Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations.

 Another link, with Executive Summary below:

Executive Summary
Vouchers to pay for students to attend private schools continue to command public attention. The current administration has proposed vouchers in its budget, and more than half of states are operating or have proposed voucher programs. Four recent rigorous studies—in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio—used different research designs and reached the same result: on average, students that use vouchers to attend private schools do less well on tests than similar students that do not attend private schools. The Louisiana and Indiana studies offer some hints that negative effects may diminish over time. Whether effects ever will become positive is unclear. Test scores are not the only education outcome and some observers have downplayed them, citing older evidence that voucher programs increase high school graduation and college-going. We lack evidence that the current generation of voucher programs will yield these longer-term outcomes. We also lack evidence of how public schools and private schools differ in their instructional and teaching strategies that would explain negative effects on test scores. Both questions should be high on the research agenda.

From Time Magazine, with a clip below:

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

 

TN Voucher "Plan" Features Big Government with No Fiscal or Program Accountability

Each of ruby red states in the new Old Confederacy has its own niche attraction for Westerners and Northerners looking to move to a fascist-friendly community where narrowness of thought is highly valued if it happens to run in the same rut as the white male protestant power structure.  While all of the red states offer haven for white nationalists, anti-intellectuals, and conspiracy theorists, Florida is particularly attractive to those angry anti-vaxxers and anti-wokesters, while states like Tennessee and Arkansas draw thousands of Christian nationalist transplants each year who would be happy to jettison Constitutional guarantees against the establishment of a state religion. And as long anti-social media remains unhindered from expanding financial empires based the perpetuation of ignorance, divisiveness, and toxic myth, then the state of the Union will continue to suffer, even as disunion grows like cancer.

As Tennessee's governor, Bill Lee, seeks to further promote immigration of white Christians, a top governmental priority is the provision of state funds for parents to enroll their children in religious schools or other private schools at public expense. And so today, Lee will announce a proposed new program that will offer 20,000 parents next year a school voucher worth about $7,000 for tuition, books, uniforms, etc. In 2025-26, Lee plans to include all of 1 million students in Tennessee who are now eligible for free public schools, "regardless of income or previous school enrollment."

Now when we do a little back of the envelope math, you can see that the cost during the first year is going to run the State $140,000,000 on top of the normal allocation for public schools, including transportation, lunches, construction, maintenance, libraries, salaries, etc. 

Let's assume, after Year One, that 10 percent of the State's school-age parents decide to choose vouchers over public schools, where their kids now have athletic teams, theater, music, special ed, technical education--most of which will go bye-bye when their children enroll in the old Pizza Hut at the strip mall that has been turned into the Bill Lee Christian Nationalist Elementary School of Lee (Robert E.) County.

It's easy to see that the cost would be over the moon--$700,000,000 every year for 10 percent of TN's school children. That would be almost 15 percent of TN's contribution to the annual K-12 budget. All the while, the State must continue to fund the public schools that are not going away just because they lose 10 percent of the student body.  And it will lose most of the federal funding for the 100,000 students who end up in private schools.

What new taxes will be imposed on Tennesseans to pay for this fantasy thought disorder? 

And what about curriculum and standards?  

What about teacher qualifications?

Is Bill Lee prepared to put a resource officer in each of the Christian madrassas that he plans to open, just like in the public schools? 

Does Bill Lee have a plan to make sure children gain the necessary academic, social, and life skills to succeed at work and/or to go to college? 

Where's the accountability? Where is Bill Lee's and the Republican Supermajority's accountability?

It is way past time for the teacher unions, parents, grandparents, and other concerned citizens to fight, fight, fight the further erosion of another of our cherished institutions: public schools.  Let me know if you are engaged in an organized effort or would like to get involved: 

james.horn@cambridgecollege.edu

 

 

Gov. Bill Lee to Sacrifice Third Graders to Help Him in 2024?

Revised January 24, 2020

Prior to this week, the last time a Tennessee governor brought the General Assembly into Special Session to pass education legislation was January 2010, and it was all about getting more federal money to pay for the schools that state politicians are unwilling to support.  

Responding to call by Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), the TN legislature quickly met in January 2010 and passed into state law the necessary policies that would make the state a shoo-in for a half-billion dollar federal grant to be provided by Obama's Race to to the Top (RttT).  A core component of Tennessee's half-baked program was to use the money for a test score based teacher evaluation scheme, which added to Tennessee's reputation as an educational laughingstock.

Just this week, Governor Bill Lee (R), has ridden herd over another special session on education, this one ostensibly to address 1) what educational snake oil salesmen call the Covid-related "learning loss," and 2) the reading proficiency emergency at Tennessee's elementary schools.

Since "learning loss" scam is covered in this recent post, let me focus for a moment on Bill Lee's other manufactured crisis, reading literacy. 

Less than two years ago, Lee's Commissioner of Education, Penny Schwinn was providing this spin on recent NAEP results for Chalkbeat:

Tennessee jumped from 34th to 25th in fourth-grade math and moved up three spots to 31st in fourth-grade reading, according to calculations provided by the state education department. For eighth-graders, Tennessee now ranks 30th in both reading and math, up from 38th and 35th, respectively.

Legislation introduced this week by Lee's team adopts an entirely different spin on reading proficiency by TN students:

(3) In 2019, Tennessee's third grade English language arts proficiency rate was thirty-six and nine-tenths percent (36.9%);

(4) In 2019, Tennessee's eighth grade English language arts proficiency rate was twenty-seven and one-tenth percent (27.1%); and

(5) In 2019, Tennessee ranked thirty-first in the nation in fourth grade reading proficiency and thirtieth in eighth grade reading proficiency.

A couple of things are notable about these claims.  First, there are no third grade proficiency rates provided by NAEP.  Grade 4 rates, check.  Grade 8 rates, check.  No grade 3.  

Second, the mendacious and misleading NAEP proficiency rates cited by Lee's folks are simply wrong: 4th grade proficiency in 2019, according to NAEP, was 35%, and 8th grade proficiency was 32%.  

The reason that Lee's henchmen want to mislead the public with manufactured scores for 3rd graders is explained here by Amy Frogge:

. . . here’s the biggest concern about the “learning loss” bill: It will require districts to hold back third graders who are not deemed “proficient” in standardized testing. (Proficiency rates can be manipulated by the state through cut scores.) If you google the term “Mississippi miracle,” you will find that Mississippi used this very same trick to create the appearance of a sudden increase on NAEP test scores. Holding back low-performing third graders creates the illusion of huge one-time testing gains, and implementation of the bill would take place just in time for the 2023 NAEP tests. This is not about best serving the children of Tennessee; it’s about gaming the system. Furthermore, the costs for holding back large numbers of third graders, as mandated by this bill, would be astronomical.

It's not as if we don't know the harmful effects of grade retention on children.  We do.  Even so, Lee up for, um, a presidential bid? in 2024, and he has consciously decided to sacrifice the welfare of Tennessee's poorest children, who inevitably will comprise the vast majority of 3rd grade failures, for the PR boost that he hopes voters will attribute to his miraculous education interventions, just passed.

Karl Dean Sits on Left Aisle of Corporate Party Jet

Former Nashville mayor, Karl Dean, is running to be TN's next governor.  He is running as a Democrat, but he is no less a Wall Street corporatist than Michael Bloomberg, Rahm Emanuel, or the Clintons.  As mayor, Dean's most visible accomplishments, aside from killing a mass transit effort that was opposed by the auto lobby and Gov. "Pilot Oil" Bill Haslam, were 1) providing incentives and other tax breaks for big business to locate or expand in Nashville and, 2) leading a muscular advocacy for school privatization via corporate charter school expansion.

Take Hospital Corporation of America, for instance.  Even though HCA was already headquartered in Nashville, Dean was able to wrangle a deal that gives HCA a $3 million annual tax abatement for 20 years, plus moving expenses to relocate into a new headquarters in West Nashville.  The year that Dean provided his corporate welfare deal to HCA, the company brought in over $30 billion and had a net profit of $2.45 billion.

And then there is the Omni Hotel deal, which provided Omni $103 million in tax breaks over 20 years, plus another $25 million to acquire the building site near downtown.  And, of course, there are other sweet deals of less impressive proportions.

Dean's generosity with public funds for corporate welfare projects was just as striking when it came the white elites' final solution for schooling the children of the disenfranchised.  In 2011, as public school buildings were crumbling and teachers were running around with garbage cans to catch the rain from leaky roofs, Dean ponied up 10 percent of Nashville's four-year school building budget, $10 million, for one KIPP, Inc. school in Nashville. 

When Dean left his mayoral post, he joined the board of a national charter school privatization venture bent on spreading the paternalistic gospel of "no excuses" charter schools as replacements for urban public schools. He still serves in that post.

In spite of the fact that the appetite for charters in Tennessee has waned as Tennessee taxpayers now realize that the only people getting fat from this deal are the charter operators and corporate foundations, Dean has doubled down on his charter zealotry:

Dean is unapologetic about his pro-charter position, which he said is in line with other big city mayors and with President Barack Obama.

“The important message for me is that charter schools are public schools,” he said. “It’s a different way of management, it’s a way that gives parents more choices and has produced very positive results in Nashville.”

“I don’t regret my support for charter schools and I think it’s consistent with being a good Democrat, and in line with some very, very good Democrats,” he said.

Will a real Democrat emerge in the gubernatorial race to support public schools?  Only time will tell. 

One thing is for sure: there is no appetite among progressives for the Republican Lite candidates that the DNC has supported in the past.  On education issues, the difference between Dean and the Republicans is that the Republicans love vouchers with their charters for school privatization, whereas Dean is strictly a charter man.

The Corporate Education Reform Poster State

Since Lamar Alexander served as Governor in the 1980s, Tennessee has been at the forefront of corporate education reform.  Tennessee was in the first wave of states to initiate mandatory student competency on standardized tests in order to get a diploma, and it was one of the first to ram down a career ladder program that ended up disproportionately rewarding teachers who worked in the whitest and leafiest suburbs.

Alexander's focus on shiny new things in education earned him the title of Education Governor, while allowing the state to shrink the proportion of funding going to education.  More state money was available, then, to build an economy based on the hospital and prison industries, along with foreign investment in bringing auto manufacturing to Tennessee. 

Alexander's gubernatorial replacement, Ned Ray McWherter, wanted to take on the mantle, too, of Education Governor, if he could find a cheap way to do it. Enter the tobacco-chewing agriculture statistician from UT Knoxville named Bill Sanders, who had been trying for years to sell a statistical formulae for measuring the effects of various treatments on the subsequent growth of ag products, from soybeans to cattle. It was called value-added modeling (VAM), and Sanders promised that he could accurately and cheaply measure growth in academic achievement, while sorting out the bad farmers teachers whose crops of students remained stunted.

Sanders offered the perfect education solution by not requiring major investments in teacher pay, facilities, resources, curriculum, or teacher preparation.  The state could continue to squeeze the education budget as it continued to avoid any talk of a state income tax, even as it expanded the prison industry, the hospital industry, and foreign industries looking for sweet deals to lure companies to Tennessee.

VAM became law in 1992, with Sanders' proprietary algorithm written into state statute.

The details to this sordid case of ed reform run amok can be found in The Mismeasure of Education.  The story line in Part II details the contours and dimensions of the education funding shortfalls, and it details the State's commitment to low and entirely regressive taxes.  It also traces the State's desperate attraction to and dependence on federal grants, or any grants, to fill that great education funding chasm.

The State's efforts to find outside sources to fund public education reached a zenith in 2010, when TN was one of the first two states to win a Race to the Top grant, worth $501,000,000.  Another $90 million came to Memphis from the Gates Foundation, money that was used to blow up the Memphis Public Schools and to build a hothouse for growing corporate welfare charter schools.

With the RTTT grants that have since dried up, the State set about to create a charter school incubator (Achievement School District (ASD), now funded by the State, that will hatch a steady supply of cuckoo corporate charters that taxpayers will have to feed for as long as these interlopers continue to feed from and foul the public education nest.  

The ASD began 6 years ago with the big lie that, by pure force of will and hard fists, the charter zealots would, in a five period, “ catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state.”  


Now that the pipe dream has been exposed for what it is, the ASD has shifted its sights to a goal that no one can accurately assess, since no one knows what it means: "By 2025, we will close the opportunity gaps long persistent in Tennessee’s public education."  Do they plan for every poor kid to be in a zero tolerance unregulated "no excuses" corporate charter school with uncertified teachers?


And what of the grand scheme that began in 1992 to make Tennessee schools world class with the help of a magic statistical formula?  Well, the formula is still part of a state statute, and its owner, Bill Sanders, has retired to a handsome farm estate a few miles south of Nashville.  SAS in Cary, NC is now in charge of selling the magic formula to other cities and states.  Business is off.

As for Lamar Alexander, Tennessee's education pioneer and political profiteer.  He's doing fine.  In fact, as co-chair of the Senate education committee, Lamar is set to smooth the way for the confirmation of a billionaire who hates public education to become the next, and likely last, Secretary of Education.   I can't get a call through to his office, for some reason.

What about the schools in Tennessee, you ask.  This headline and chart are from Ed Week, which offers the latest Quality Counts report:

Tennessee Earns a C-Minus on State Report Card, Ranks 36th in Nation

TNReady NOTReady, Again

From the Dickson Herald, via the Tennessean:

Dickson County Schools have delayed administering the paper version of the state’s new TN Ready standardized tests until March 7 after a delay in receiving the testing materials, the schools director said.

Schools Director Dr. Danny Weeks alerted parents to the issue in a SchoolReach phone message and he also discussed the matter with the county School Board on Thursday night.

Educators and parents had prepared for administering the paper tests on Monday. However, Weeks said the school system had not yet received confirmation the print testing materials had yet shipped Thursday.

The TN Ready tests were first delayed when the online exam version experienced a technology failure Feb. 8 – the first day that online testing platform was used.

About the paper testing materials, Weeks said “because shipping could take two or three days, the school system had no confidence that the test materials would arrive in time for (Monday) testing.”

“Additionally, tests must be unboxed, labeled, and organized once they arrive at schools,” he added. “Lacking any specific information regarding test delivery, school and district leaders decided to move back the testing window to March 7-11.”

Weeks went on to say that each change in date and testing method “further complicates the already difficult transition from traditional testing to TNReady tests.”

“With online testing, students expected to have a calculator built into the test program on the computer, so the school district made no investments in calculators and trained students to use technology-based tools,” Weeks said in a statement. “Now that the test has been moved to a paper version, Dickson County Schools has had to purchase $12,000 in new calculators to make sure that every student had the necessary tools to be successful.”

Weeks said that students with learning difficulties will not have “appropriate accommodations that would have been available had schools known about paper testing earlier in the year.”

TN's Cheap Choice School Model for the Needy

Last spring Tennessee passed a limited school voucher bill that offers just over $6,000 per year to disabled students who, otherwise, would attend public schools.  Ostensibly, the purpose of the legislation was to give parents more educational choices for their special needs children.

When we consider, however, that the best private schools for special needs students like the Curry Ingram Academy in Brentwood costs $38,000 per year, what kind of educational services can parents hope to find with their $6,000 voucher? Something marginal at best.

Since private schools are not bound by federal requirements, these bargain basement vouchers are only available to students whose parents are willing to give up most of their educational rights secured by IDEA. Governor Haslam was quick to sign the bill into law.

This year Haslam and his privatizing Tea Party allies in the General Assembly have the same morally-bankrupt voucher deal ready for the children of Tennessee's poorest parents.  It offers a $6,500+ voucher to parents whose children attend the highest-poverty schools to go shopping for a marginal private school education, minus any oversight or regulations to guarantee teaching and learning quality.  And the average tuition cost for private schools in Tennessee is about $1,500 more than the voucher provides.

Hot breakfast and lunch provided in these marginal private schools?  Forget it.

To borrow from Jonathan Kozol, the day that Tennessee conservatives are willing to give every poor child in Tennessee a $30,000 voucher to attend Ensworth School or Montgomery Bell Academy, that's the day I will become a Republican.

Until such time, we should all call publicly out the hypocrites in the state legislature who mouth words about helping poor children, as they continue to refuse to provide full funding of the Basic Education Program for Tennessee's public school children.  Tennessee's abysmal record for funding public schools (ranks 47th in 2015) goes hand-in-hand with the legislative determination to further limit better educational options in the name of a phony cheap choice.

New Test to Solve Tennessee's "true ethical and moral dilemma"?

Candice McQueen has replaced Tennessee's toxic former Commissioner of Education, Kevin (Rhee) Huffman.  In doing so, McQueen has inherited one of the most aggressive corporate education agendas in the nation. 

At the same time, she has taken the reins of a state system that has been underfunded for at least the past 35 years, as governors and legislators have jumped from reform one bandwagon to another to collect any free federal cash being handed out, even as the percentage of the state's budget committed to education has continued to dry up (see Part II of The Mismeasure of Education).

If these challenges were not enough, Dr. McQueen faces a literacy meltdown as measured by state test scores, even with the infusion of $501,000,000 from Race to the Top federal funds--most of which never reached the classrooms or the severely underfunded school library programs that remain on life support. 

At the same time, poverty continues to grow across the state, with more than one in four children now living in poverty, and one in three black or brown children.  The state ranks 43rd in the nation in child poverty and 48th in Hunger and Food Insecurity.  As poverty and hunger spread, literacy scores continue to tank, especially since math prep has been the major focus of year-round test prep.

For Dr. McQueen, however, it is not the hunger, poverty, and oppression that represent the "true ethical and moral dilemma; it is, rather, the low reading test scores.

As these developments unfold, the billionaire governor, Bill Haslam, continues to hand out to his cronies as much of the public resources as he can, including the shuttering of public schools in favor of the corporate welfare charter reform schools.  And the chief federal architect of the racist new states rights education policy based on the proliferation of charter schools, Lamar Alexander, is at Haslam's side, ready to berate any school board that has the audacity to support its public schools as its first priority.  See story here.

The corporate foundation solution that has been prepared for Dr. McQueen's "true ethical and moral dilemma," however, is as old as the corporate efficiency movement that began over a hundred years ago: it is another standardized testing scheme that promises to produce even more failures, more inequality, more racist and classist results, and more inequity than the TCAP that is now headed for the dustbin of failed fixes.

The "new" antiquarian reform is called TNReady, and it is another test based on the infamous Common Core standards.  Like the old test, the new test will be used to label, sort, and further segregate the poorest and neediest children of the state in test prep hell schools, where they will be dehumanized and roboticized and made ready for a Walmart or Amazon future, or one without any job at all. 

Tennessee ranks 41st among states in the number of 18 to 24 year olds unemployed or not enrolled in higher education.

McQueen and Haslam's morally-bankrupt dehumanization school plan has the support of the corporate union affiliate in the state, the TEA, even though the majority of teachers in the state must surely know that this effort will end as poorly as the last one.  TEA President, Barbara Gray, is bullish on TNReady, ready or not:

The new test will also be given online, which officials believe will further help prepare students for life in the real world [irony alert].

However, Barbara Gray, president of the Tennessee Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union, told The Associated Press in an email later Thursday that teachers are concerned about a "lack of appropriate technology for students to complete the assessment online."

"Many school districts across the state, especially in our rural areas, have poor Internet connections and too few computers to efficiently administer the assessment," she said.

Aside from that, Gray said the new assessment overall should be beneficial.

TN Drops to 46th in ACT Scores

In 2014, Arne Duncan's favorite corporate education experimental state soared from 46th to 43rd among states on composite ACT scores.

This year Tennessee has returned to its previous cellar level at 46th.  The average composite score, which is 19.8, is 0.1 of a point above where it was in 2012, and it is far below the 21 needed to apply for a Hope Scholarship or to attend the University of Tennessee--which requires and ACT of 24.

State Changes Test Score Numbers for Students to Mollify Parents

If you have a highly unpopular Common Core testing system, such as the one in Tennessee, that is guaranteed to produce widespread failure among students and their teachers, what do you do when the scores come out just before the end of school?

Simple. You let the test vendor produce a phony "quick" score that looks like students are proficient, and you send those scores to schools and homes so that they can be used to figure into final student grades.  In doing so, state officials and testing companies hope that parents will put away their pitchforks and torches, and go on vacation.  

Teachers can then be told that these "quick" scores aren't the real scores, you know, the ones that will be used to decide teacher individual and collective employment fates.  The real scores, which are much, much lower than the phony ones just used to mark grades and placate parents, will be used for teacher evaluation.

If it had not been for the widespread celebrations at schools across Tennessee for the miracle improvements everyone was seeing, the corporate Department of Education that Huffman built would, no doubt, still be mum on the subject.  But with fireworks going off and confetti raining down statewide, the duplicitous fools in Nashville had to come up with a totally obfuscating explanation of their scheme.

Who will be the first to sue? 

Story here from Chalkbeat.

TN's Deal with the Devil, Part 2

Updated April 17.

See Part 1 here.

In 2010 Tennessee got a check from Race to the Top for $501 million.  TN quickly moved to do everything their successful grant application had promised: adopt Common Core, build even bigger data systems on top of the VAM system that had been in place since 1992, uncap charter school expansion, and create a teacher evaluation system based on VAM student test scores.

By November 2011, Tennessee's new system for using test scores to evaluate teachers had made big news in the New York Times.  Michael Winerip wrote:

The new rules, enacted at the start of the school year [2011-2012], require Mr. Shelton to do as many observations for his strongest teachers — four a year — as for his weakest. “It’s an insult to my best teachers,” he said, “but it’s also a terrible waste of time.”

Because there are no student test scores with which to evaluate over half of Tennessee’s teachers — kindergarten to third-grade teachers; art, music and vocational teachers — the state has created a bewildering set of assessment rules. Math specialists can be evaluated by their school’s English scores, music teachers by the school’s writing scores.

It didn't take long for Commissioner of Education for TN, Kevin Huffman, to begin making modifications that might save the new system from drowning in own weight of paper, as all teachers were required to be evaluated 4 times each year. Observations would count as half the evaluation score, as testing in one form or another would make the other 50 percent of a teacher's score.

At the end of the 2011-2012 school year, the state's corporate ed reform office, the Gates Foundation and SCORE (State Collaborative On Reforming Education) reported that there were wide discrepancies between some principal observation scores and teachers' student test scores.  

The solution provided by Huffman: re-educate principals to bring their observation scores in line with the lower ratings derived from test scores.  None of the Kevin Huffman's former TFA advisors suggested that the tests might be off, even though researchers had already established that TN's VAM system could be depended upon to produce incorrect scores for 25 percent of TN's teachers each year (at least those teachers with test scores to report):

One of the most egregious shortcomings of VAM for educational purposes is that 1 in 4 teachers is mislabeled when using three years of data.  It would take ten years of data, in fact, to get the error rate down to 12 percent (Schochet & Chang, 2010). 

By the end of 2014, teachers had documented how the VAM system in Tennessee is unfair, unreliable, and invalid.  They filed a federal lawsuit in early 2015 against the state, Governor Haslam, and Kevin Huffman.

Since 2011, SCORE has been headed up by lawyer, Junior Leaguer, and former state legislator, Jamie Woodson, who likes to take her mind off the challenge of spinning bad news into good by working around the stables of her horse farm in East Tennessee: "I just enjoy the sight, the smells and the sounds of horses and the labor that it takes to tend to them properly."  Umm.

As a legislator, Woodson was a sponsor for the bill that created charter schools in Tennessee, and she remains a loyal supporter of whatever it takes to replace public schools with charter schools across the state. Not surprisingly, Woodson acknowledges that SCORE's educational mission is the same as that to that of the Gates Foundation: "SCORE's mission is to ensure that every child graduates high school prepared for college or a career through its programs and activities. . ."

Earlier in 2015 SCORE released it annual report on the state's effort to be "First to the Top."  (See Part 1 as it relates to that fantasy.)  The report noted that the state had made progress in reducing the number of teachers whose evaluations are based on another teacher's scores.  Details will be shared in Part 3.

Tennessee's Deal with the Devil

Part 1:  NAEP and ACT
 
When Tennessee accepted the millions of dollars and grant-writing help from the corporate foundations to get their state application in shape to win the $501 million grant from Race to the Top in 2010, Tennessee accepted the role as poster state for corporate education reform, along with all the visibility that comes with it. In doing so, a deal was made that cost the state that tiny part of its educational soul and integrity that had not already sucked away by 25 years of value-added testing.

Arne Duncan has visited Tennessee a number of times (with and without his boss) since 2010, and even now Duncan and Obama continue to tout the "Tennessee miracle" as a model for the nation. On MSNBC last week, Duncan told Chis Hayes that Tennessee took the tough steps in 2009 to do what was needed (adopt tougher tests) and that, as a result, on 2013 NAEP tests, the state showed the greatest growth of any state in the nation.

What Duncan did not say, of course, is that the ranking he attributes to TN is based on big doses of dissembling, spin, and outright lying.  See this Brookings analysis for details, but here is the gist of why Haslam and Duncan are not be believed:

Governor Haslam’s chart is based on a very crude statistic.  Tennessee’s gains on all four NAEP tests add up to 21.80 points—and DC’s to 22.22—but the tests have different scales.  A one-point gain on NAEP’s 4th grade math test is not the same as a one-point gain on the 8th grade reading test.  The NAEP website warns users, “Since these scales are calculated independently from each other, we cannot compare scale scores across subjects and grades.”  The same goes for adding scale score gains from the different tests.  If you search the NAEP website for a statistic like the one on Governor Haslam’s chart—combining gains on all four tests—you won’t find one. 

And:

To conclude the discussion of TN’s gains, here is a summary of its statistically significant gains relative to the other 49 states and the District of Columbia:

• 4th Grade Math: Greater than 42 states. Not significantly greater than 8 states.
• 8th Grade Math: Greater than 15 states. Not significantly greater than 35 states.
• 4th Grade Reading: Greater than 22 states. Not significantly greater than 28 states.
• 8th Grade Reading: Greater than 34 states. Not significantly greater than 16 states.

Pop! goes the balloon.

But these are not the only facts that weigh heavily on Duncan and Haslam's gas bags that are quickly descending.  When we look at Tennessee's NAEP performance just two years earlier from 2011, we see plenty of room for Tennessee to improve in 2013, since 2011 represented a free fall in the rankings and a further opening of the achievement gaps, two facts that neither Duncan or Haslam will never mention:

Tennessee’s results also show that economically disadvantaged students in neighboring states such as Kentucky, Georgia, Missouri, Arkansas and North Carolina now score higher in every tested area than do poor students in Tennessee. “We have an educational emergency. These results underline the urgency of pressing forward with the necessary reforms,” Ralph Schulz of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce said. “If we’re going to ensure the future economic prosperity of our state, we can’t go back — we have to step up.”

The state dropped from 45 to 46 in the nation in fourth-grade math; 39 to 41 in fourth-grade reading; 43 to 45 in eighth-grade math; and 34 to 41 in eighth-grade reading. Twenty-six percent of fourth-grade students are proficient in reading, and 30 percent are proficient in math. Twenty-seven percent of eighth-grade students are proficient in reading, and 24 percent are proficient in math.

Tennessee also participates in an ongoing NAEP pilot assessment, which tested 12th graders in Math and Reading in 2009 and 2013.  Below is a chart from NAEP that represents where Tennessee's 12th grade proficiency levels stand in comparison to the other states that participate. 

ACT Embarrassment

The Tennessee mirage is confirmed, too, by TN's ranking among states on the ACT, which remains near the bottom of the nation.  In 2013, Tennessee ranked 47th in college readiness as measured by the ACT.  In 2014, Tennessee ranked 45th.  Congratulations, Governor Haslam!

The chart below shows the bottom bracket of states, arranged by average composite scores in the second column (the first column represents the percentage of high school students tested).  Go here to the ACT site for more details.

The following chart shows percentages of Tennessee seniors who met benchmarks.  Note that only 19 percent of seniors met all four.

Part 2 will discuss Tennessee's Rube Goldberg teacher evaluation scheme.

Urge Your School Board to Support the End of Unethical Funding for Schools

I sent the following letter this morning to members of the Nashville Metro School Board.  Feel free to post excerpt from TMoE where you feel the need.

Dear Honorable School Board Members:

If you have not already decided, I am sure that you and your Board are considering whether or not to join Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Shelby County in calling for a full and immediate funding of the BEP. 

The BEP was approved by the State Board of Education in November 1988 as a result of pressure exerted by a lawsuit filed by small school systems of Tennessee (Tennessee Small School Systems v McWherter).  It did not become law until 1992, and even after that, it has never been properly funded.  As you are likely familiar with the recent history and continuing criticisms of the BEP, you may be missing some of the basic  legislative and court history.  I am sending along, then, an excerpt (pp. 87-92) from The Mismeasure of Education (Horn & Wilburn, 2013).

I urge you to support the call for full funding of the BEP, which is the first step to a fair and equitable system of public schools in Tennessee.  I also urge you press the Governor and the General Assembly to demand a moratorium on all punitive actions stemming from school accountability measures  until the BEP is fully funded.  At present, any punitive actions against underfunded students, teachers, schools, and school systems only compound the unfairness and unethical nature of high stakes education reform.

Thank you very much.  I look forward to becoming a part of the public school discussion in Nashville Metro, as I am in the process of moving from Germantown to Nashville.

Sincerely,
Jim Horn, PhD

From pp. 87-92, The Mismeasure of Education:

….While educational funding in Tennessee had been under study for a number of years, the 1989 ruling by the Kentucky Supreme Court in Rose v. The Council for Better Education, Inc. (790 S.W. 2d 186) created an urgency to head off the same kind of expensive legal rendering in Tennessee.  In ruling the entire state school system unconstitutional in a 3-2 decision on June 8, 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court had determined that

. . . Kentucky’s system of common schools is underfunded and inadequate; is fraught with inequalities and inequities throughout the 168 local school districts; is ranked nationally in the lower 20-25% in virtually every category that is used to evaluate educational performance; and is not uniform among the districts in educational opportunities (p. 9).          

At the request of the Tennessee General Assembly following the Kentucky decision, Dr. Brent Poulton, Executive Director of the Tennessee State Board of Education, reviewed the Kentucky case for the Education Oversight Committee.  In his review, he compared the Kentucky case to the Tennessee Small School Systems v. McWherter (851 S.W. 2d 139) case, which had been filed on July 7, 1988.  What Poulton highlighted for Tennessee legislators was that the Kentucky Supreme Court was now the education authority in the state of Kentucky, developing both the program and funding formula for all public schools.  In response to a question from Committee members about why state mandates for personnel had not been adequately funded in the past, Poulton replied that both the State Board of Education and the General Assembly had increased the need for personnel without regard for local systems’ capacity to fund those positions, thus amounting “to tinkering with an overwhelmingly archaic system.”  Poulton added, “if we’re really serious about having good schools in the State then we ought to go to the heart of the problem and change the system” (Legislative minutes, Tennessee House Education Oversight Committee, 7/12/89, Brent Poulton).

            Poulton then explained the data collected in past funding reports completed by the State Board of Education and sent to the governor and the General Assembly had “identified funding problems as the single greatest impediment to achieving the goal of having schools among the best in the nation” (Weeks, 1988, p. 1).  One report (Weeks, 1988) included an examination of the Tennessee Foundation Program (TFP), which was set forth in 1924 “as a means for insuring adequate funding in Tennessee’s public schools” (Weeks, 1988, p. 1).  Citing Tennessee as 51st in per pupil spending for public schools in both 1984 and 1988, the report identified three problems with the TFP:

            • There is no link between the changes in appropriations and changes in the costs of delivering programs and services at the local level.

            • The amount of funding provided is too little to ensure adequate funding of a basic educational program in all systems.

            • It does not ensure the children in Tennessee equal access to quality educational resources (pp. 3–4).           

The study recommended a basic education program that would adequately address needs for professional and support personnel, transportation and textbooks, staffing ratios, and expenditure levels.  While calling for a new formula to fund these essential elements equitably, the report was notably silent on learning programs.

            Having failed since 1909 in repeated efforts to equalize state funding for education, the State Board of Education used the Weeks (1988) recommendations to develop a new funding formula for the Basic Education Plan (BEP), which was approved by the State Board of Education in November 1988.  The new plan, which would not become law for another four years, sought to narrow the funding disparities across counties in the state by establishing the basic elements for school operation, by shifting more of the funding burden to the state, and by assigning the local funding share according to the local board’s ability to raise revenue (Snodgrass, 1990, p. 69).

            In spite of the State Board’s new funding formula, the State took a defensive position in response to the plaintiffs in the Tennessee Small Schools Systems case.  Aiming to minimize the State’s financial obligations, State Attorney General, Charles W. Burson, expressed the State’s position in a legal brief:

There are no constitutional rights to any specific allocation of funds for public education. All that is constitutionally required is some legislative scheme for funding public education that has a rational basis.  These requirements have clearly been met.  Even if students do not have computers or new textbooks as the complainant alleges, there is no indication that they are denied access to the fundamentals of education (“No guarantees for poor areas,” 11/27/88).

Cavit Cheshier, Executive Director of the Tennessee Education Association (TEA), responded that the defense’s brief

…reflects a narrow view of what is required for a basic level of education in today’s society.  Computers, up-to-date textbooks, modern vocational training equipment and reasonably sized classrooms are essentials for educating children and preparing them to live in an increasingly complex, technological society (“No guarantees for poor areas,” 11/27/88).

            Almost two years later, Tennessee Small School Systems v. McWherter (851 S.W. 2d 139) finally came to trial in Chancery Court on October 29, 1990, and after six weeks of argument, Chancellor C. A. High sided with the plaintiffs. Noting that “the statutory funding scheme has produced a great disparity in the revenues available in the different school districts” (Keese & Huffman, 1998, p. 165), the Court ruled that “under a uniform system [as guaranteed under the Tennessee Constitution of 1835], a child living in a poor district should have the same opportunity to receive substantially the same education as a child living in a rich district” (p. 165).  The State appealed the decision, which resulted in a 2-1 reversal by the State Court of Appeals in April 1992. The following year, however, all five justices of the Tennessee Supreme Court “endorsed the conclusions of the trial court and remanded the case for the trial judge to draft an order to correct the funding inequity problem” (p. 165). When Chancery Court held its hearing to begin drafting an order in July 1993, the State offered the 1992 passage of the EIA with a specific revised funding formula of the Basic Education Program (BEP) as new evidence that the State was making good on its responsibility to phase in an equitable funding formula.  Chancellor High was impressed and ruled that he would allow for the BEP to take effect before any further orders would be rendered (p. 165).

The BEP formula was comprised of forty-three separate funding components that included almost every aspect and category of school operations except the most expensive one: teachers. Another major exclusion of the new funding plan was a provision for “annual review of the actual costs of each component and for reviewing the formula each year to make adjustments for improving the system (Tennessee Small School Systems, et al. v. Ned Ray McWherter, et al. No. M2001-01957-SC-R3-CV, October 8, 2002, p. 5). Arguing that an equitable state system could not be achieved without an effort to equalize teacher salaries, the plaintiffs returned to court in what was known as Small Schools II.  In February of 1995, the Tennessee Supreme Court handed down a decision (Green, Smith, & Hydorn, 1995) in favor of equalizing teachers’ salaries across the state:  “The Court ruled that omitting teachers’ salaries from the BEP was a significant defect and had the potential to impair achieving the objectives of the BEP” (p. 9).

            The State’s solution was to pass new legislation that provided state funding to equalize teacher salaries in school systems where the average salary was below the state average of $28,094.  Because the plan did not provide for annual reviews or determine the state’s ongoing obligation in the same way that other funding components were reviewed and adjusted, the plaintiffs returned to court once again in Small Schools III.  The trial judge ruled in favor of the State that it had met its obligations to equalize teacher salaries, but on appeal, the State Supreme Court ruled once again in favor of the plaintiffs on May 1, 2002: . . . the salary equity plan in Tennessee Code Annotated § 49-3-366 fails to comport with the State’s constitutional obligation to formulate and maintain a system of public education that affords substantially equal educational opportunity to all students (Tennessee Small School Systems, et al. v. Ned Ray McWherter, et al. No. M2001-01957-SC-R3-CV, October 8, 2002, p. 7).  In rendering their judgment, the High Court clearly noted the State’s long-term resistance to establishing structures required for an equitable school finance system:

. . . the record supports the plaintiffs' argument that for the most part, the same disparities in teachers' salaries that existed when Small Schools II was decided still exist today. For example, in 1995, the City of Alcoa paid teachers an average of $40,672, while Jackson County paid teachers an average of $23,934, a difference of $16,738.  In 1997, Oak Ridge paid its teachers an average of $42,268, while in Monroe County the figure was $28,025, a disparity of $14,243. In 1998-1999, the disparity between Oak Ridge and Monroe County grew to $14,554. Thus, wide disparities still exist, and it takes little imagination to see how such disparities can lead to experienced and more educated teachers leaving the poorer school districts to teach in wealthier ones where they receive higher salaries.  In the end, the rural districts continue to suffer the same type of constitutional inequities that were present fourteen years ago when this litigation began (p. 13).

The BEP formula of the EIA offered a façade of deep-rooted education finance reform within the state funding structure for education when, in fact, the BEP proved ineffective in altering the long-standing inequities among the state school systems.  Peevely and Ray (2001) found that even when the phased in Basic Education Plan (BEP) reached full funding five years after passage in 1997, those underfunded systems named as litigants in the 1988 lawsuit against the State had improved funding, on average, only five percent “in comparison to both non-litigant and state average expenditure during the five year phase in of full funding (pp. 467-468). In 1999, plaintiff districts’ per pupil average funding stood at $4,577, while non-litigant average funding was $5,157 (88%), and state average funding was $5,077 (90%).  In 2000, the funding gap began to open up once more, and by 2003, almost all the progress made in narrowing the spending gap after 1992 had been lost once again (Center for Business and Economic Research, 2007, p. 41). Tennessee’s BEP formula did not adequately address the inequity in education funding between rich and poor districts.

            While it is clear that both poor and rich school districts suffer from underfunding when compared to the national average or to most states in the Southeast, citizens of poorer districts pay an unfair proportion of the taxes to support their schools.  Tennessee’s schools are funded by property taxes and local sales tax options, creating an inherent inequity (Edmiston & Murray, 1998) in both the distribution of the tax burden across income levels and between businesses and individuals, with the greatest burden falling on the poor who can least afford it: “if one compares the tax burdens of households earning $25,000 per year and $100,000 per year across all states, Tennessee has the most regressive tax system in the nation” (p. 193).  Based on 2012 calculations by the Tax Foundation (2012), Tennessee still has the most regressive tax system in the U. S.

            With a string of continuing reform “firsts,” from value-added assessment implementation to being one of the first two states to win a Race to the Top grant to singular recognition from the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, for “making unprecedented progress in producing statewide reform and boosting student achievement” (U. S. Department of Education, 2012) a 2012 report by the Education Law Center (Baker, Sciarra, & Farrie, 2012) showed that Tennessee compared poorly on four dimensions of education funding: funding level, funding distribution, state effort, and coverage.  Tennessee ranks 51st in the nation for funding level, which is described in the report as the “overall level of state and local revenue provided to school districts” in comparison to other states’ average per-pupil revenue (p. 6, 12).  When comparing the distribution of funding across local districts within a state to student poverty rates in those districts, Tennessee received a grade of C in comparison to other states (p. 7, 14).  Tennessee’s funding effort, or “the ratio of state spending to state per capita gross domestic product (GDP)” rated an F (p. 7, 22), while “coverage” or the funding for the proportion of school-age children that attend public school versus parochial or private school ranked 46th in the nation (p. 7, 24).

            Even when faced with State Supreme Court rulings, low national educational rankings, and continuing inequities between rich and poor systems, the executive and legislative branches of Tennessee government continued inadequate funding of education in the EIA, despite the rhetorical commitment to exceed the national achievement levels in Commissioner Charles Smith’s 21st Century Challenge.  Instead of the promised “comprehensive approach to funding schools” that would enable “accountability standards for quality and productivity” (Goal 10), the state offered poor school districts the high goals and accountability demands of the EIA without the needed funding to achieve goals or satisfy demands. At the same time, the state adopted new value-added accountability measures that served to mask the continuing disparities between rich and poor systems, while justifying the regressive tax increases that proved inadequate and as inequitable as the system they sought to remedy.  Meanwhile, Tennessee’s continuing rhetorical commitment allowed resources to be shifted without fanfare toward purposes other than education and the state’s most vulnerable citizens.

Baker, B., Sciarra, D., & Farrie, D.  (2012).  Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card (2nd edition).  Retrieved from http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/National_Report_Card_2012.pdf

Center for Business and Economic Research.  (2007).  Education crossroads:  Opportunities for you, me, and Tennessee.  Knoxville, TN:  University of Tennessee.  Retrieved from http://cber.utk.edu/tsa/tsa03/ch16.pdf

Edmiston, K. D., & Murray, M. N.  (1998).  Finances of Tennessee state government.  In J. R. Vile & M. Byrnes (Eds.), Tennessee government and politics: Democracy in the Volunteer State (pp. 197-198). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. 

Green, H., C. Smith, & S. Hydorn.  (1995, June).  Funding Tennessee schools:  From reform to restructuring.  Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations Report.  Nashville, TN:  TACIR.

Keese, N. & Huffman, J. (1998). Education in the Volunteer State. In J. R. Vile & M. Byrnes (Eds.), Tennessee government and politics: Democracy in the Volunteer State (pp. 151-166). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. 

Peevely, G. & Ray, J.  (2001).  Does equalization litigation effect a narrowing of the gap of value added achievement outcomes among school districts?  Journal of Education Finance, 26(4), 463-476.

Snodgrass, W.  (1990, February).  Performance audit.  Nashville, TN: Comptroller of the Treasury, Office of Education Accountability Report.

Tax Foundation. (2012). State and local sales tax rates as of January 1, 2012.  Retrieved from http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/state%26local_sales%26use_rates_jan2012-20120216.pdf

U. S. Department of Education. (2012, July 16). Statement from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on "Teacher Evaluation in Tennessee: A Report on Year 1 Implementation" (Press release).  Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/statement-us-secretary-education-arne-duncan-teacher-evaluation-tennessee-report

Weeks, K. (1988). A study of the Tennessee Foundation Program.  Nashville, TN:  Tennessee State Board of Education.