The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a hotly debated voucher bill by one vote after the deciding vote, Jason Zachary of Knoxville, was promised that his district would not get vouchers.
Isn’t it a curious commentary on the appeal of vouchers that the issue was decided by pledging that the decider would NOT get them? Vouchers in this bill would be limited to Nashville and Shelby County (Memphis). Just fine for black children, but not for Rep. Zachary’s District.
Thanks, Jason Zachary, for your profile in cowardice. If you thought it was a great idea, why not include Knoxville?
For cowardice, I place Rep. Jason Zachary on this blog’s Wall of Shame, along with the rest of his shameless and craven Republican colleagues who voted to undermine public schools in Nashville and Shelby County, endorsing a program known to harm children’s academic achievement.
Well, they tricked him, then. The moment the vouchers go in they’ll start the 24/7 lobbying campaign to expand them and he’ll vote for the expansion, too.
I don’t know if the voucher lobbyists tricked him or he’s tricking his constituents, but this “deal” he made is meaningless.
Did Tennessee get around to doing anything for PUBLIC schools this year, or is that too much to ask? Someone in his district should ask him.
Imagine being a public school family in one of these lawmaker’s districts. No one even pretends to be working on their behalf. In fact, all of the quotes from the ed reform choir go out of their way to bash public schools, so I guess the marketing campaign for the vouchers has already begun. They’ll spend 6 months promoting the vouchers now, which means public school students can’t expect any work from any of these public employees for the whole calendar year. Another successful year of ed reform, serving exclusively private school students.
With one exception, the Deformers will continue to hawk their depersonalized learning software to public school administrators scared to death that their students will not pass the stupid standardized tests, and to that extent, the deformers and their paid bobbleheads will attend to public schools. Gotta make available those public funds for purchasing software and computers to take tests on!
So true. We have a school district that tells the media that even a 1 percent annual raise for teachers will harm the district’s finances for the next 20 years, yet boosted the edtech/outside services budget by nearly 50 percent.
Eleanor and Bob.
We should all be asking if spending on technology is the result of our state dept. of ed. employees who are SETDA, which along side public employees from the other 50 states foster public private partnerships, promote digital learning and according to a former director, lobby government. SETDA is funded by Gates and is partnered with “gold, silver, event and strategic partners”.
SETDA is governed by the state’s education technology directors who work for a public paycheck. Why they offer seminars on how ed tech start-ups can scale up, and why they offer showcases and pitch fests for new ed tech products is an excellent question for the public and media to ask. The public employees names are listed by state at the SETDA site.
Are state employees acting as lobbyists or are they hiring them?
Is the lobbying for the funder, Gates, for the”partners” or, for the state employees? We can all contact our local media and ask them to examine the functioning of SETDA e.g. its parallel to ALEC.
The public schools in these lawmakers’ districts are safe. These lawkakers want to experiment with vouchers not in their districts. Their districts would kick their butts if they tried to introduce vouchers there.
Completely accidentally, the two districts where they want to introduce the vouchers are overwhelmingly democrats.
NIMBY at its worst. Another sellout to privatization and another coward playing with the future of other peoples’ kids.
I think public school families have to ask themselves how it came to be that the same people who don’t support their schools set policy for their schools.
If ed reform doesn’t want to support public school students then public school students shouldn’t be subject to their ever-shifting fads, gimmicks and schemes.
We really have the worst of both worlds- we get their policy in their schools yet none of them support our kids or our schools. We’re not even invited to weigh in. Would charter schools and private schools accept this? If I was working every day to defund and bash charter and private schools, would they accept my policy prescriptions? No, of course not. That wouldn’t be in the interest of their students. Perhaps we should start looking for public school policy ideas among people who actually support public schools. It will probably go better for our students, who have taken some real hits under ed reform leadership at the state and federal level. People who are ideologically opposed to the existence of public schools unsurprisingly do not BENEFIT public schools. We’ve seen this again and again, yet we continue to accept that they also RUN our schools.
Zachary- Republican poster child- shortsighted and looks out only for himself.
He can be reached at Rep.Jason.Zachary@capitol.tn.gov
Since Joe Biden is running now we should probably talk about how Joe Biden’s brother is an actual lobbyists for a charter management company:
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2012/01/27/vice-presidents-brother-sports-bars-school-vouchers-dwyane-wade/
He travels from state to state selling for-profit management of existing public schools. There are tens of videos of his sales pitch online. He partnered with people from Ohio’s notorious White Hat charter empire to sell schools in Florida, so literally the worst charter company in the nation. He’s also in Pennsylvania.
If you thought Obama was bad for public schools, and he was, wait until you meet the Bidens. It’s bad. It’ll be Obama on steroids.
Our Joe is clearly unsupportable.
I AGREE with you, Máté Wierdl.
4 words: NO BIDEN FOR ME.
Question: Do universities just give out HONORARY degrees nilly willy for political favors?
Yvonne, some do. Others give degrees to celebrities.
Thank you for this clarification, Diane. Your statement is a “record” and I appreciate it very much.
Absolutely. They don’t say “You get this honorary PhD, because nilly-willy,” but they dress it up with flowery words. These things are rarely initiated by faculty, they are initiated by Boards and Presidents.
Just look up the honorary univ awards Gates got from Harvard, Cambridge,
“Betsy DeVos visited earlier this month with Gov. Bill Lee in part to promote this legislation, which would provide education savings accounts to families.”
That was the visit where public school families and students were excluded.
If ed reformers are “agnostic” how come they never advocate for public schools and public school students? Why are our schools and students excluded from all their funding initiatives? Why do we get stuck with the gimmicky mandates and experiments and none of the lavish funding and praise?
Is that what “agnostic” means? Promote charter and private schools and exclude public schools and public school students from any effort or advocacy? Is this like how they redefined “public” to include “private”? I don’t think that’s what the word means.
“Donald J. Trump
The Great State of Tennessee is so close to passing School Choice. All of our Nation’s children, regardless of background, deserve a shot at achieving the American Dream! Time to get this done, so important!”
Except for public school students. Who are now not just ignored by the ed reform echo chamber, but actively excluded.
We should tell they’re unfashionable this political cycle. Tough luck, kiddos. Your schools are not “hot” this year in DC circles. Maybe they’ll come back into vogue at some point.
Why doesn’t Trump arrange to spend $50,000 per child, so poor kids can have the same opportunities to attend the same private school to which he sent his children?
Trump’s support of the vouchers clearly indicates to 70% of the population (who will not vote for him next year) that vouchers are bad.
Charles, you have said everything you can possibly say about how much you love school choice, while expressing your 1000% for public schools, which must cut their budgets to send children to religious schools where they learn creationism instead of science. Your comments supporting choice will no longer be posted because I have answered them hundreds of times. Stop wasting your time and mine. Post somewhere else.
Thank you, Diane. I can now start preparing my lunch on time instead of reacting to Charles’ echo-post about choice and endless missinterpretations of rules and regulations.
Blog readers can only take so much soullessness wrapped in illogic and hypocrisy. Thanks, Diane for sending Charles away to kibitz with the Bluegrass Institute “policy scholars” who share his deficits.
the latest news is that the bill which harmonizes the senate and house versions is coming up. Stay tuned
There may be a legal challenge to how the TN house vote went down.
https://chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2019/04/24/historic-voucher-vote-in-tennessee-house-could-be-open-to-legal-challenge-says-legislative-leader/