Yesterday I posted a comment from Linda Whittington, a member of the state Legislature in Mississippi who was removed from her assignment on the House Education Committee because she opposes charters.
Today a reader in Tennessee posted a comment with these links from Memphis:
http://schoolingmemphis.blogspot.com/2013/01/tn-state-rep-fitzhugh-forced-off.html
http://schoolingmemphis.blogspot.com/2013/01/harwell-shenanigans-confirmed-in.html
You will learn here that Tennessee House Democratic leader, Craig Fitzhugh, was removed from his position on the education committee because he opposes vouchers.
Bottom line: The privatization steamroller is moving fast in those states. The privatizers don’t like local control.
Their goal is to hand public money over to nonpublic schools, out-of-state corporations, businesses, and religious schools, with minimal or no supervision. They don’t care if they destroy the public schools.
By the way, StudentsFirst, which is registered as a nonpolitical 501(c)4, poured about $900,000 into the legislative races in Tennessee to assure a Republican super-majority. But please don’t forget that it’s all “for the children” and of course, bipartisan. Oh, and if you read the article linked here, you will see that Rhee claims to be a resident of Tennessee, even though she is married to the mayor of Sacramento. Where does she live? Where is she registered to vote? It’s mysterious.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And hopefully complaints will be lodged against her “nonpolitical” 501 (c) 4. The 990 is a good read. Some things don’t gibe.
I suppose she was able to qualify for a second home mortgage with support from her “grassroots” supporters and maybe a separate living quarters on the compound for KJ.
She is much too fabulous for just one home in one state.
Hey, isn’t that just what the elitist deformers are about, makin jack and having second homes. Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot they were about the kids and the civil rights issue of our times (which is to resegregate the schools not only by race but preferably by class).
Vouchers aren’t the only reason they removed Rep. Fitzhugh. He is a strong advocate for public schools and for teachers. Today Commissioner Huffman made a presentation to destroy the teacher salary schedule to make way for merit pay based on our poorly designed teacher evaluation model. He told the legislature experience doesn’t matter and presented a slide that said, “The distribution of TVAAS scores does not differ substantially by years of experience.” The slide supposedly showed TVAAS evaluation scores by years of experience, and there was no appreciable difference in any of the categories from 20 years. In fact, there were more lowest “ones” in the >20 (20.2%) than <5 (16.5%). At the top of each category was the average salary: $37,244 $43,272 $51,015 $56,213 20 years. I wish I knew how to post the slide for you to see. Of course, no one got to dispute his testimony and no one is given access to how the data is calculated, making it difficult to dispute. Anyone have suggestions?