“She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world’s character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

Every Child Known (and Other Fairy Tales from MNPS)

About four years ago, Metro Nashville Public Schools adopted a new slogan — “Every Child Known.”

Central Office and Superintendent Dr. Adrienne Battle drop the phrase with the regularity of a prune-based diet. Say it enough and they may actually start to believe it.
But don’t you.

It’s the epitome of an empty slogan: catchy enough to print on a banner, but hollow enough to echo when you say it out loud. I can only imagine the brainstorming session that birthed it—whiteboard markers squeaking as someone suggested “Every Child Thrives” or “Every Future Bright,” until finally, with a flourish, someone landed on “Every Child Known.” Heads nodded. Mission accomplished.

And thus began the myth-making.

Merchandising the Myth

MNPS leadership didn’t stop at slogans. They’ve turned it into merchandise—t-shirts, hoodies, maybe even hats—available for purchase so you too can help spread the gospel of Every Child Known™. Though to be fair, I’ve never actually seen anyone wearing one outside the website.

When you build a PR campaign, the goal is usually to align policy and messaging. Not so here. If you look closely at MNPS policy implementation, you’ll find little evidence of any deep knowledge of “every child.”

Discipline, advanced academics, athletics, and now the district’s obsession with scripted instruction—they all operate from a one-size-fits-all mentality. They paint with such a broad brush that the individuality of students gets lost in the smear.

Relationships Can’t Be Scripted

Here’s the rub:
To know every child, you have to have a relationship with every child.

And authentic relationships can’t be scheduled on a Google Calendar. You can’t say, “Okay Johnny and Mary, every Tuesday from 10:00 to 10:30 we’ll build a relationship using the district-approved toolkit.” It doesn’t work that way.

Relationships are fluid, unpredictable, and human. They form on a student’s timetable, not the district’s.

I’m sure Dr. Battle would say she has great relationships with all the district’s principals—but does she?

A real relationship is built on trust and honesty, not power and position. How many of those principals would still publicly profess their love for Dr. Battle if she weren’t the Superintendent, and their paycheck didn’t depend on her favor?

The same dynamic plays out across the system—between teachers and principals, teachers and students, and schools and families. Despite every outsider’s attempt to streamline and quantify the process, education has always been about relationships. It always will be.

I see it in my own kids. My son is a multi-sport athlete. The coaches he’s built strong relationships with—he’ll run through walls for them. The others? Let’s just say the effort level drops considerably.

We’re all wired that way. Most of us perform better for bosses we respect and trust. Relationships drive effort and loyalty. But relationships can’t be graphed on a data dashboard or condensed into a performance metric, and that’s where the system breaks down.

Data Over Depth

The modern education machine loves data points—graduation rates, proficiency scores, chronic absenteeism percentages. What it doesn’t love are messy, unquantifiable things like trust, rapport, and empathy.

It also loves micromanagement, often as much as it loves its spreadsheets.

This year MNPS doubled down on its scripted lesson plans, demanding that every class at every grade level in every school be on the same page, every single day. Besides flying in the face of nearly every best practice ever written, it strips teachers of the flexibility—and time—needed to form authentic connections with their students.

The best teachers have always known the importance of relationships. They’ve built them instinctively, often despite the system rather than because of it.

That’s what makes it particularly ironic that MNPS loves to boast about its investment in Social Emotional Learning (SEL). You can’t claim to care about SEL while simultaneously robbing teachers of the capacity to form relationships that make SEL meaningful. Then district leaders act offended when parents call bullshit.

If Dr. Battle, the School Board, and district leadership were serious about making “Every Child Known” more than a catchphrase, they’d stop micromanaging and start trusting teachers. Give them time and space to actually know their students.

But the odds of that happening are roughly the same as Donald Trump headlining Nancy Pelosi’s retirement dinner.

Graduation Numbers: Record Statewide, Reeling in Nashville

This week, the Tennessee Department of Education released graduation rates for public schools. The statewide number was a record-breaking 92.3%, up from 92.1% the previous year. A total of 69,124 students graduated, nearly 1,900 more than the year before.

Those numbers sound great—unless you live in Nashville.

For schools under the MNPS banner, the results were, to put it mildly, atrocious. The district’s graduation rate came in at 83.6%—a full percentage point behind Memphis.

Now, I could go dig through whether that’s an improvement over last year, but when nearly two out of every ten students fail to graduate, does the decimal point even matter?

Neighboring counties are consistently posting rates above 97%. Yet MNPS leadership keeps touting that other districts are studying our data to replicate our “success.”

News flash: Nobody’s trying to emulate an 83% graduation rate.

MNPS points to its high number of English-learner and economically disadvantaged students as key factors—and yes, that’s part of the picture. But when you’re spending over a billion dollars a year on education, only getting 83% of students to the finish line shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone.

Some schools are performing even worse.

• Maplewood and Overton High hover just above 70%.
• Glencliff High sits closer to 60%.

I’m not trying to call anyone out, but clearly not every student is known.

Lowering the Bar, One Degree at a Time

Meanwhile, up on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Cameron Sexton has tossed another log onto the bonfire of bad ideas.

Sexton recently floated a proposal that would allow Tennesseans to start teaching with nothing more than an associate’s degree—the idea being to fill teacher vacancies. The pathway would then allow them to earn a bachelor’s and eventually a master’s to become administrators. Because of course, even in this setup, the goal seems to be getting more administrators, not more teachers.

At best, it’s a shortsighted Band-Aid. At worst, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Lower the bar to entry, and you lower the level of commitment. Teaching is hard work. Discipline issues, long hours, and endless bureaucratic nonsense already drive good teachers out of the field. Add under-prepared, under-committed teachers to that mix, and classroom management will collapse even further.

When the going gets tough, the less-invested will simply get going, making teaching an even more transient profession.

Of course, there is an upside—if your goal is control. Transient teachers are easier to manipulate. They’re slower to recognize bad policy and less likely to push back. Plus, you can probably trim benefit costs if you reduce the number of long-term professionals.

Funny thing—I never hear proposals to lower entry requirements for doctors or lawyers. But when it comes to shaping the next generation, apparently an associate’s degree and a smile will do.

Maybe we ought to apply the same logic to politics. After all, you can become a state legislator with barely a diploma. Perhaps we should form a committee, produce a survey, and schedule some focus groups on lowering the bar for politicians instead.

Strange Days in Tennessee Politics

Speaking of questionable leadership, word out of D.C. this week is that former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casadaand his chief aide Cade Cothren will receive presidential pardons from Donald Trump.

The pair were convicted on more than a dozen public corruption charges tied to a scheme where they, along with former Rep. Robin Smith (R-Hixson), defrauded taxpayers through a state-funded legislative mailer program. They were just weeks away from prison.

In September, U.S. District Judge Eli Richardson ordered Casada to self-report to the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Nov. 21 for a three-year term, and Cothren on Nov. 17 for 2.5 years.

Casada, you might recall, was instrumental in passing Governor Lee’s initial voucher program—the same one that still casts a shadow over public education today. Rumors have long circulated that the Department of Justice took an interest in how that sausage got made, but nothing’s ever materialized.

And in true Tennessee fashion, the plot twist continues: Robin Smith, who cooperated with prosecutors, did not receive a pardon. Her attorney, Ben Rose, posted on X that “Justice requires a pardon for the cooperator.”

Okay, but that’s a very different definition of justice than the one I typically use.

No word yet on whether Casada and Cothren will still have to pay their fines—Casada owes $30,000 plus $4,600 in restitution; Cothren owes $25,000 and $10,600 in restitution.

Strange days, indeed.

What “Every Child Known” Really Means

Let’s circle back to that slogan—Every Child Known—because it’s not just bad branding; it’s symptomatic of something deeper.

It reflects a district more concerned with optics than outcomes, with managing perception rather than nurturing people.

To know a child is to invest time, to listen, to build trust, to make mistakes, and try again. It’s human work. And humans are messy.

There’s no shortcut for that. No professional-development module, no spreadsheet, no algorithm that can substitute for a teacher who looks a student in the eye and says, “I see you.”

Yet we continue to chase the illusion of control—more scripts, more pacing guides, more rubrics, more slogans. Anything that makes the complex look simple.

But simplicity isn’t honesty.

You can’t know “every child” through quarterly benchmarks and pre-planned SEL check-ins. You can’t create belonging through slogans or merch drops.

If MNPS truly wants to make that phrase mean something, it will need to trust the people who actually do the knowing—teachers, counselors, and coaches—and give them time to build the relationships that make education real.

Until then, “Every Child Known” will remain what it’s always been: a hollow echo bouncing off the walls of Central Office.

Until Next Time

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Categories: Education