Newly elected Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, picked a privatizer from the Texas Education Agency to be State Commissioner of Education. Penny Schwinn, chief deputy commissioner for academics in Texas, is Lee’s choice. She is a supporter of school choice, including vouchers, which was never passed in Texas despite multiple efforts by the hard-right there. For some reason, she is described as a “reformer.” Apparently if you want to underfund public schools by diverting money to religious and private schools, that qualifies you to be called a “reformer.” The word “reformer” has become anathema.
In Texas, rural Republicans combined with urban Democrats to stymie vouchers in the legislature, year after year.
Tennessee also has rural Republicans who will question why public money should be diverted from their community schools to religious schools.
Schwinn has promised to fix Tennessee’s longstanding testing mess. Testing in Texas has been used to label and stigmatize schools and students. Remember the phony claims of a “Texas miracle” that brought NCLB to the nation? Legislators in the Lone Star State still has a zealous faith in standardized tests.
Worse, Schwinn was controversial in Texas.
Schwinn moves from Texas amid controversy there.
A September audit found Schwinn failed to report a conflict of interest between her and a subcontractor who got a $4.4 million contract to collect special education data. As a result, the Texas state commissioner canceled the contract, according to the Dallas Morning News.
The canceled contract cost the state more than $2 million, according to the Texas Tribune.
The Dallas Morning News also reported that Schwinn told auditors that while she had a professional relationship with the subcontractor, she didn’t try to influence the contract. In the wake of audit, Texas revamped its procurement process, the Texas Tribune reported.
Schwinn will need to help secure an assessment vendor to administer the TNReady test with the state’s contract with Questar Assessment set to expire.
This is not an auspicious start.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tennessee is Lamar Alexander country. I wonder how he would respond to an interview focussed on the choice of Penny Schwinn to lead education “reform” in his home state.
Lamar doesn’t care any more, that was obvious with his support for Betsy DeVos. I also believe that he is somehow involved with Chiefs for Change.
Lamar Alexander presided over the first attempt here to pay the good teachers more. When I was hired, his “Master Teacher” program was going strong. Every level three teacher who jumped through his education advisors hoops got a few thousand more dollars a year. Most of the people I knew who were level three were not exemplary as professionals, but we’re very good at manipulating any system. He groomed himself as the education politician, but he has never helped public schools. Of all the people in the Rupublican party who could have opposed their contribution to our reformist tragedy, his silence seems the worst offense.
Jeb Bush tweeted a congratulatory tweet. Schwinn is also a “member” of Chiefs for Change. Chiefs for Change and Kevin Huffman were involved in writing Tennessee’s ESSA plan. I really believe Chiefs for Change was involved in this decision. Completely frustrated in Tennessee.
Add Bill Lee and Penny Schwinn the the Koch brothers/Walton family Hydra list.
What may we learn learn from Hercules when it comes to getting rid of a Hydra like this one?
LLoyd I live in Williamson, this County is a big problem for the State. We need Glen Casada out. Teachers have to vote in his District. He has run damaging education legislation. Americans For Prosperity is headquartered in Franklin, TN. AFP dumped money into our school board election few years ago.
Tennessee isn’t the only state these vampires have dumped money in with the goal to destroy public education.
For instance, they have spent more than fifty million in California in an attempt twice to win the State’s Secretary of Education’s seat, but lost both times.
They have been successful in spending millions to grab the majority of seats for the Los Angeles Unified’s School District’s school board. The teachers there are on strike fighting to save the district from being torn apart and turned into another New Orleans. Thousands of parents and students in Los Angeles are supporting the teachers, but the oligarchs don’t care. They are ruthless extremist psychopaths.
The billioanre oligarchs behind this are relentless and have spend hundreds of millions of dollars across the country. Bill Gates by himself has dedicated billions of dollars to destroy public education, and the tentacles of this terminal cancer have spread across the country to every state.
As you know, Americans for Properity is actually an abbreviation.
The full name is Americans for Prosperity of the 1%.
TN WAS the country of Lamar Alexander. He & Corker were the last “moderates” of the TN Republican party. However, given their unflinching support of DeVos and all of the Trump agenda, moderate Republican has no meaning.
Worse yet, the TN General Assembly is a super majority of right wing, extremists.The new chair of the education subcommittee is David Byrd, an admitted child molester.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/10/tennessee-lawmaker-david-byrd-chair-education-subcommittee/2535383002/?fbclid=IwAR2fIQf96mld4mYRbG5tQ9d5_VgbQqJdu8pnqMSmEPSeI5arJUCbmcsYTBM
Until this appointment, the new gov, BIll Lee was a complete unknown. He ran on nothing except that he was a businessman and Christian who home schooled some of his children. He won his election by a landslide- even in places where he had zero name recognition. TN is in a very poor situation.
The good news-Gloria Johnson is one tiny glimmer of hope in the state general assembly. She was a special education teacher who the Republicans went after hard in her election to the TN house. She beat a pro-privatization Republican despite her opponent throwing millions of DeVos & Reed Hastings money to defeat her.
Tennesseans are in for a bumpy ride.
Absolutely 100 % correct. Williamson county is home to Americans For Prosperity. We are screwed. I tried to warn parents in Williamson, oh well . Ugh so disappointed
She is from Teach for America and attended the Broad Academy.
No surprise there!
A bonafide disrupter and destroyer of Public schools!
and thus knows ALL the right ‘words’ and ‘accusations…’
Yesterday, I watched a documentary about the Scopes “monkey trial”, conducted in Dayton Tenn in 1925. Your statement:
Q Tennessee also has rural Republicans who will question why public money should be diverted from their community schools to religious schools. END Q
I find this claim ironic. Given the history of Tennessee, and the conservative, fundamentalists who populate rural Tennessee, I see just the opposite occurring.
Conservative, rural Republicans, in the Volunteer state, will most likely support giving families support in sending their children to schools operated by religious institutions.
Voucher opponents often miss the fact, that financial support is provided to families, and then the families decide the institution where to redeem the voucher. Vouchers do not go to religious schools.
In Texas, Rural Republican legislators defeated vouchers, again and again and again.
The Scopes trial was almost 100 years ago.
Texas is not Tennessee. My (maternal) grandmother is from Putnam County, Tenn. Those people believe that creation occurred 6,000 years ago. A century is just a wink of an eye, to a creationist.
I used to live in Jackson Tenn. There are many fundamentalist Christians in Madison county, and across the state, who take the Bible literally.
You certainly think that people who live in Tennessee are ignorant.
I don’t.
I think they love their public schools and will fight for them.
Charles, are you claiming you have actually talked to every current registered voter in Tennessee?
Because your maternal grandmother was from Putnam County and you lived in Jackson, doesn’t make you the spokeperson for every citizen in the state.
Tennessee has a population of 6.716 million
4.88 million are white
318k are Hispanic
1.1 million are Black
105k are Asian
118k are mixed
Jackson has a population of 66,847
The population of Putnam County is 77,674.
https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Tennessee/Race-and-Ethnicity
Trump had 1,517.402 votes in Tennessee
Hillary Clinton had 867,100.
Maybe you can pretend to speak for the 61.1% of voters that voted for Trump, but you’d still be wrong about everyone in the state.
https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/tennessee/
In 2017, “Tennessee posts highest high school graduation rate on record for the state.
Tennessee posted its highest-ever graduation rate on record in the 2016-17 school year after years of steady improvement.
“The state saw 89.1 percent of all high school students graduate from its districts, Gov. Bill Haslam and Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen announced on Thursday.
“Overall, the graduation rate has increased 3.6 percentage points since the 2010-11 school year, according to a news release. This year, graduation rates increased in nearly 56 percent of districts with high schools.”
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2017/09/14/tennessee-posts-highest-high-school-graduation-rate-record-state/663283001/
And you have the gall to say everyone in the state thinks like you.
Charles: allow a bit of description of Tennessee voters. While they are conservative, especially in the rural parts of the state, they are also strong supporters of their public schools. A trip up the western side of the Tennessee River last evening caught four different high school ballgames being played on the radio between local city teams. They love their schools.
What rural voters will not protest is the privatizing of urban schools, but any attempt to mess with their small town schools will meet with opposition.
Charles, I like the Vanderbilt Agrarians of the 1920s, take some offense when other people from other places use the Scopes Trial to paint my state with a broad brush. Generalizations about people are always wrong. All tennesseans are not narrow minded. All New Yorkers are not abrasive. All immigrants are are not criminals.
We need to try to understand each other. Maybe if we did, we would not be electing people who hire incompetents to run public education.
Thank you, Roy.
My grandparents were from Tennessee, and I used to live in Jackson Tenn. You are using a broad brush, yourself. Comments like “they love their public schools”, is a generalization. I am certain that some Tennesseans are enamored of the public schools system, I am also certain that some are not.
The Scopes trial was in 1925, and I concede that it was a long time ago. But I went to a charismatic church service in Milan, Tenn in 1997, I saw people being “slain in the spirit”, and fainting and falling on the floor when they heard the name of Jesus. Some people up in the eastern Tenn mountains still practice snake handling.
I was in Jackson Tenn, in 1997. A local public high school needed repairs to the physical plant. The roof was leaking, the plumbing was rotten, mold in the walls, etc. The school system hired an engineering firm to do an appraisal, and determine a repair plan. The engineering firm estimated that the high school needed $18 million in repairs, to bring the building up to code.
The school board rejected the report as too expensive, and just let the repair plan drop. Some Tenn citizens may just adore the public schools, but when it comes to ponying up the cash, to repair the building even their adoration has financial limits.
Your final comment about electing people who hire incompetents, is well taken. When school boards are elected, and subject to the political process, all sorts of incompetents can get into positions of leadership.
This is one more argument in favor of school choice. Parents need to have the ability to withdraw their children from schools that are run by incompetent political hacks. Give families vouchers, so that the children can enroll in non-public schools.
If Tennessee is like Indiana, about 3.5% of kids will want vouchers.
This will enable them to attend little religious schools where evolution is never mentioned and the Bible is the source of science. Their teachers, in most cases, will not be certified. They may not even be high school graduates.
Meanwhile the cost to the public schools will be in the millions, like Indiana, where it is nearly $160 million, or in Florida, where the cost of vouchers for 5% of students is now $1 Billion per year. Which public schools lose. So the schools that most kids attend will lose teachers and electives and staff so that 3-5% of other kids can attend Bible school at public expense.
I dunno what you are talking about, Charles. TN has rejected vouchers many times, exactly because we are not idiots. It is exactly the rural parts of TN which kept saying “leave our public schools alone, and experiment with vouchers in blue cities like Memphis or Nashville.”
So unlike what you say, Charles, the real Tennesse battleground about vouchers and charterization is in these two cities, and arguably Memphis is the epicenter of the fight: we have the highest poverty rate of all US cities, and that’s a perfect excuse for Gates, ASD, TFA, Relay and other well-known criminals to try to take over and then down our public school system. They think people in poverty don’t care, they can’t resist.
These people obviously don’t know history, but they may learn some tomorrow when we’ll celebrate MLK’s 90th birthday here and elsewhere in the country.
“The canceled contract cost the state more than $2 million, according to the Texas Tribune.”
This $2 million is my total life earnings as a univ prof. How come she is not in jail? How come my state hires criminals?
Good question.