“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it.”
― The Daughter of Time
It was another chilly night at the ball park. Our squad had just dispatched their crosstown opponents. A group of parents were loosely gathered, waiting for their student atheletes to wrap up post game rituals.
I was sitting on the bleachers, a couple rows up from four people enaged in a conversation about charter schools.
Being a perpetually curious person, or as my daughter prefers to describe – a nosy one, I found myself listening in. It was just a general overview of the current landscape in Tennessee, but it was clear one of the parties worked in education.
Minutes lateer we were all gathered near the backstop, when one of the participants in charter school conversation complimented me on my son’s pitching efforts the previous week. I thanked him and seeing an opening, asked, “Do you work in education?”
He did. He was an administrator in a local charter school organization. We talked for a few minutes. It was an extremly enjoyable conversation between two baseball parents with an interest in education policy.
As I got in the car afterwards, I reflected back to a decade ago and Nashville’s embroilment in the charter school debate. Those were stupid times, filled with lots of yelling and little listening. I’m not sure, such a conversation as the recently concluded could have taken place under those circumstances. Not because of anyone else’s role, but because of my narrow-mindedness and blindness.
I was a proud defender of public education, even though I wasn’t sure exactly what I was defending. There was little room for dissent, and too many people were too intent on scoring points at every opportunity, myself included. I’ve sinced mellowed, as have many of my former opponents.
Over the years, I have had several similar experiences to the aforementioned. Chances to engage with perceived political opponents that turned out far better then expected.
I know the expectation is to let go of regrets, but I do regret some of my behavior back in those days. When you are convinced that you have the pipeline to truth, you inadvertainly cut yourself off from an enriched truth.
You forget that your opponents aren’t caricatures, but rather people with more similarities then differences. The world isn’t populated by monsters, but rather by people with different perceptions trying to do the right thing as they see it. The trick is blending and massaging those different perspectives to arrive at the best solutions.
As I drove away from the ball park, I was grateful. Grateful for a reminder on the importance of loosening up the blinders.
Grateful for the opportunity to engage with a fellow parent and watch both our sons mature and grow.
His is a senior with a sweet swing and destined to park more then a few balls this season.
Mine a freshman, trying to navigate the first season of high school varsity ball and benefiting from some great role models.
Both playing on a team that thus far embodies the team mentality and is seeing results because of it.
It’s good stuff.
Strike that, it’s great stuff.
– – –
On Friday I told you about the abrupt regination of Virginia State Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Coons.
Coons had previously served as Tennessee’s Chief Academic Officer under the State Superintendent of Education Penny Schwinn.
Coon’s took the gig in Virginia nearly two years ago.
When I first broke the news of her resignation, The Richmond-Times Dispatch article was nestled behind a pay wall. I’ve since paid the $1 for 3-months subscription, and it’s worth every penny. Pun intended.
Apparently Coons was quite challenged by her duties at the VDOE. Per the Dispatch:
Coons’ resignation comes as the department has missed several deadlines for sending reports to the state legislature, has yet to publish teaching materialsfor the new history standards that the department promised to teachers last July, and as the department has hemorrhaged longtime staffers since Coons’ arrival two years ago.
That’s a lot of shortcomings for 24 months. In typical Coons fashion she delegated staff notification of her pending resignation:
The education department’s chief of staff, Jeremy Raley, sent an email to staff members on behalf of Coons on Friday afternoon to inform them of her departure.
“It has been my great honor to serve the students, families, and educators of Virginia in my time leading the Department of Education under Governor Youngkin,” Coons wrote in the message. “After careful consideration, I have decided to pursue new professional opportunities, and I wish Governor Youngkin and his administration the best.”
There’s a lot here that observers of the Tennessee Department of Education during Schwinn and Coon’s tenure will find familiar:
The Virginia Board of Education apparently directed the education department two years ago to produce robust, high-quality instructional guides — the framework of how educators teach — to accompany the history standards. But months before this fall’s scheduled implementation, the department has yet to produce nine of the 13 course guides.
in the early stages of Coons’ tenure, state Board of Education members approved a new partnership with iTeach, a for-profit company offering online teacher training. Board members were unaware at the time that education department staff had reviewed iTeach’s special education courses and found that they do not meet minimum state standards. Emails from Coons to other state education officials at the time showed that she was looking for a way to limit the dissemination of records to the Richmond Times-Dispatch regarding the story about iTeach.
ITeach is an a Texas based organization that began operation in Tennessee in 2019. Now that’s a coincidence.
“It all started when Dr. Diann Huber’s son came to her expressing his interest in becoming a teacher but without having to invest the time and money to get a master’s degree. As a Director of a university teacher preparation program, Dr. Huber understood her son’s perspective and thought there had to be an alternative path for smart, committed people like him to get into a classroom.”
Sometimes statements write their own commentary.
Similar to Schwinn and Coon’s time in Tennessee, the VDOE has seen a mass exodus of staff of late. Leading the education department’s former communications director, Chatles Pylem who retired in 2023 after 23 years at the agency to write:
“There has been such an exodus of institutional knowledge of effective educators and administrators, including experienced educators and education policy professionals who came to Virginia to help the governor achieve his goals in restoring academic standards,” Pyle said.
“We have a department now that has additional layers of senior leadership, while at the same time, weakened by the departure of a lot of really smart people who understood assessment, instruction, how you get things done in Virginia, and the role of the State Board of Education with its broad constitutional authority.”
All of this begs for further review of Penny Schwinn’s appointment as Deputy Secretary of Education for the USDOE.
To date most of the conversation has been around her puported accomplishments and personal life. Little discussion has been held over her leadership qualities. Which is interesting, because her boss, Linda McMahon, is by all accounts a competent leader. You may not agree with her politics but she can lead.
A good measurement of a leader are the accomplishments of former associates. The records of those who served under Schwinn do not add to her leadership resume.
We have already talked about Coons, who was Schwinn’s number two.
When Schwinn hired former Chief of Staff Rebecca Shah as Chief of Staff, she offered glowing praise for the former TEA employee.
“She ran performance management for me in Texas, so she really knows what I’m looking for in terms of data collection and holding us internally accountable,” Schwinn said of Shah.
Since leaving the TDOE Shah has partnered with former Chiefs for Change head Julia Rafal-Baer to found the consulting group ILO. It took less then a year for ILO to draw interest from the Rhode Island Attorney General.
In October of 2024, Attorney General Peter Neronha released findings that Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee directed a $5.2 million federally funded state contract to a company formed for that purpose, although there’s insufficient evidence to bring a charge in the case.
While Shah is still listed on the ILO mast head, she has founded a new consulting firm, to pair Rebecca Shah Consulting, called Mission Delivery Network.
Schwinn’s former TDOE Human Resource director David Donaldson formed his own company rooted in his experience and comnnections at the state department of education, National Center for Grow Your Own. Unfortunately those contacts and experiences have only led to marginal success. A perusal of the organizations website shows press articles from 2022.
Handpicked by Schwinn, Katie Houghtlin was chosen to lead the DOE’s prime initiative of “whole child education” – which encompassed student mental and physical well-being. She was accused of running her department by emulating the schoolyard bullies she was tasked with eradicating. Those accusations were verified by the state’s HR Department.
Houghtlin’s action led to a lawsuit by Katie Poulos. That lawsuit also charged that she was dismissed in retaliation for filing a complaint against the agency over Schwinn’s treatment of her following the medical emergency.
Poulos was chief schools officer when she was dismissed on Oct. 29, 2019, about seven weeks after returning from a six-week medical leave. She had been responsible for the state’s school improvement work, the school turnaround initiative known as the Achievement School District, and programs overseeing charter, private, and home schools across Tennessee.
As far as I can tell, that lawsuit is still pending.
Then there is Robert Lundin. Lundin had worked with Schwinn and Capitol Collegiate principal Kristin Fiorelli back in 2016 at St. Hope, the scandal-ridden charter school founded by Michelle Rhee’s husband Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johson. He joined Schwinn when she held her part-time work, full-time compensation job with charter school Capitol Collegiate. He’there and spent the better part of the last decade in Houston working for the public school district.
Commissioner Schwinn created cabinet-level positions for him and Katie Houghtlin – positions that paid in excess of $125k. Houghtlin led her department, which oversaw the department’s “Whole Child” initiatives, into some egregious territory and Lundin followed suit. The former TFA corp member was unceremoniously removed from his position amid rumors of mismanagement of Independent Education Accounts overseen by his department.
Since then he’s bounced around the country, taking various education related positions. Last June he settled in as Chief Academic Officer with the Des Moines School District.
Great atheletes like Wayne Gretsky and Patrick Mahomes are not only exalted merely for their individual progress, but because of their inate ability to elevate the play of everybody on the field. A quality recognized in all great leaders.
A quality I’m sure former Commissioner Schwinn possess.
– – –
The Tennessee Department of Education has quietly released the State’s School report cards.
The grades are largely derived from results on last TCAP tests.
Imagine if individual school released report cards based on data gathered last year just weeks before the next tests? But, certain allowences are granted to the TDOE that don’t apply to teachers, schools, and districts.
The interesting information com es from a new feature. a new featuree allows for the comparison of funding between districts. A comparison that reveals some discrepancies.
Marshall County invests $11,248 per student, with the state paying 60% and the locals 25%.
Lexington County invests $14,270 per student. Split between state/local is 61.6/24.6%
Cumberland has an investment of 11,935 per student. Their split is 56.6/20.6%
Williamson County makes things interesting. Their individual student investment is $12,737 with a state/local split of 32%/64.7%.
Maryville Schools invest $11,837 per student. Their split is 44.1/57.7%.
Both Maryville and Williamson County receive less then 6% of their budget from the Federal Government. Which probably explains some of the conversation emitting from Williamson County politicians.
For the record, Metro Nashville spends $22,004 per student and has a 26/54% split. They receive around 19% of their funding from the Feds.
I would think these numbers would fuel some deeper conversations.
But what do I know.
– – –
My favorite headline of the week comes from the Tennessee Firefly: Hamilton County School Board pushes to reduce the number of benchmark assessments despite their role improving student performance
Hamilton County School Board members are tackling the previously untouchable be moving towards reducing the number of benchmark tests students take during the school year. In doing so they’ve raised the ire of some strange bedfellows – at least till you follow the money.
The discussion comes as state lawmakers look to reduce student testing statewide. The House K-12 Subcommittee is looking at two seperate bills.
The Tennessee State Collaboration on Reforming Education (SCORE), along with several other state education reform groups, stand in staunch opposition to any reduction.
My theory, and you can choose to believe it or not, is that testing serves as a means to justify their existence. How can we possibly know how valuable their input is without constant validation?
Considering that SCORE picked up just shy of $4 million in grants from the Gates Foundation, I’d say that validation is pretty important.
Unfortunately for those opponents, theirs is not a view shared by teachers. As expressed by one teacher, “The pressure and stress of standardized testing can be detrimental to students’ well-being and motivation. Many students feel discouraged and lose interest in learning when they feel constantly judged by test scores”.
Another got even further, “The time spent preparing students for tests is time taken away from engaging in meaningful and enriching lessons. We need to allocate resources to activities that promote real learning, not just test preparation”.
Pretty clear, I would say.
– – –
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Categories: Education
Dad Gone Wild 
Regarding “The world isn’t populated by monsters, but rather by people with different perceptions trying to do the right thing as they see it.” I could not agree more.
NRA members believe more guns will reduce shooting deaths. Many others (like me) point to countries with infinitely fewer gun deaths, and the correlation of those observations with far fewer guns seems clear beyond what can be debated. Yet, we still debate.
So it goes with school privatization. In spite of nice conversations, the endless drone of “I think Charter School X is doing good things on city block Y”, in no city anywhere in the country have overall scores improved due to privatization of our schools. This was the promise of the experiment. The experiment has been concluded, yet the privatizers now point to simply “parent choice” in their quest to find sustaining arguments, when their little islands of first-gen immigrants scoring higher (which they always do) fails to sustain their arguments around ‘quality metrics’
I have always argued that if “parent choice” is so wonderful, we should just return to the 1970 zoning lines, before busing drove 50,000 white students to leave Nashville public schools over the course of the following year. The percent of parents who would have chosen busing was less than 15% in both African American and white communities, if my memory of the extensive literature is roughly right.
Then again, in our history, when America was greater perhaps, at least we seemed more thoughtful, we learned that separate was NOT equal. We learned that overall public school performance increased, and achievement gaps between groups decreased, when we committed to educating everyone, even poor kids, even poor kids of color, and backed that commitment with funding.
I admit my thinking here is as passe as the idea that we should have some responsibility expectations for gun owners (which also used to be a thing). After all, our public schools started the “Why don’t you also carry(enroll in) your own gun(schoo)” with the introduction of very appealing (to choosy parents) test-score segregated magnet schools. No wonder other choosy parents said “What about my kid?” and demanded charter schools, and now $7K vouchers to supplement their kids’ tuition at MBA when those weren’t segregated enough.
Great that you had a nice conversation with a charter school leader! I’ve had many myself. I’ve also had great conversations with NRA members and MAGA Republicans. Most of these folks want “good things” too.
indeed, I’m sadly confident that our myopic consensus shared values, as voters, are being well represented in the increasingly fragmented public school landscape across this country. I’m not remotely convinced that those consensus values are maximizing public education outcomes, reducing gun violence, or reducing our federal deficits.
And somewhere along the way, that higher goal of public education, that Republican kids could meet Democrats and understand them, that folks of different races and incomes could encounter each other in community, has definitely slipped away….. along with the average test scores, arts programs, college prep academics, and teaching as livelihood….