Archives for category: Tennessee
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ProPublica: 11 Black Children Were Arrested in Rutherford County, Tennessee, for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2021 //
33

ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio investigated a case that happened in 2016, when the police arrested 11young children for a crime that doesn’t exist. What they found was not simply an outrageous miscarriage of justice, but a county whose juvenile justice system is run by tyrannical officials who like to punish children to “straighten them out.”

The initial arrests occurred after a scuffle among three boys. The boys who threw punches were not arrested, but the children watching the fight were. One was only eight years old. Some were handcuffed.

A few weeks before, a video had appeared on YouTube. It showed two small boys, 5 and 6 years old, throwing feeble punches at a larger boy as he walked away, while other kids tagged along, some yelling. The scuffle took place off school grounds, after a game of pickup basketball. One kid insulted another kid’s mother, is what started it all.

The police were at Hobgood [Elementary School] because of that video. But they hadn’t come for the boys who threw punches. They were here for the children who looked on. The police in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, had secured juvenile petitions for 10 children in all who were accused of failing to stop the fight. Officers were now rounding up kids, even though the department couldn’t identify a single one in the video, which was posted with a filter that made faces fuzzy. What was clear were the voices, including that of one girl trying to break up the fight, saying: “Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay.” She was a fourth grader at Hobgood. Her initials were E.J…

In Rutherford County, a juvenile court judge had been directing police on what she called “our process” for arresting children, and she appointed the jailer, who employed a “filter system” to determine which children to hold.

The judge was proud of what she had helped build, despite some alarming numbers buried in state reports.

Among cases referred to juvenile court, the statewide average for how often children were locked up was 5%.

In Rutherford County, it was 48%…

What happened on that Friday and in the days after, when police rounded up even more kids, would expose an ugly and unsettling culture in Rutherford County, one spanning decades. In the wake of these mass arrests, lawyers would see inside a secretive legal system that’s supposed to protect kids, but in this county did the opposite. Officials flouted the law by wrongfully arresting and jailing children. One of their worst practices was stopped following the events at Hobgood, but the conditions that allowed the lawlessness remain. The adults in charge failed. Yet they’re still in charge. Tennessee’s systems for protecting children failed. Yet they haven’t been fixed…

Eleven children in all were arrested over the video, including the 8-year-old taken in by mistake. Media picked up the story. Parents and community leaders condemned the actions of police. “Unimaginable, unfathomable,” a Nashville pastor said. “Unconscionable,” “inexcusable,” “insane,” three state legislators said. But Rutherford County’s juvenile court judge focused instead on the state of youth, telling a local TV station: “We are in a crisis with our children in Rutherford County. … I’ve never seen it this bad.”

Rutherford County established the position of elected juvenile court judge in 2000, and ever since, Donna Scott Davenport has been the job’s only holder. She sometimes calls herself the “mother of the county.”

Davenport runs the juvenile justice system, appointing magistrates, setting rules and presiding over cases that include everything from children accused of breaking the law to parents accused of neglecting their children. While the county’s mayor, sheriff and commissioners have turned over, she has stayed on, becoming a looming figure for thousands of families. “She’s been the judge ever since I was a kid,” said one mother whose own kids have cycled through Davenport’s courtroom. One man, now in his late 20s, said that when he was a kid in trouble, he would pray for a magistrate instead of Davenport: “If she’s having a bad day, most definitely, you’re going to have a bad day.”

While juvenile court is mostly private, Davenport keeps a highly public profile. For the past 10 years she’s had a monthly radio segment on WGNS, a local station where she talks about her work.

She sees a breakdown in morals. Children lack respect: “It’s worse now than I’ve ever seen it,” she said in 2012. Parents don’t parent: “It’s just the worst I’ve ever seen,” she said in 2017. On WGNS, Davenport reminisces with the show’s host about a time when families ate dinner together and parents always knew where their children were and what friends they were with because kids called home from a landline, not some could-be-anywhere cellphone. Video games, the internet, social media — it’s all poison for children, the judge says.

Davenport describes her work as a calling. “I’m here on a mission. It’s not a job. It’s God’s mission,” she told a local newspaper. The children in her courtroom aren’t hers, but she calls them hers. “I’m seeing a lot of aggression in my 9- and 10-year-olds,” she says in one radio segment…

Scrutinizing the inner workings of Tennessee’s juvenile courts can be difficult. Court files are mostly off-limits; proceedings can be closed at a judge’s discretion. But on the radio, Davenport provides listeners a glimpse of the court’s work. “I’ve locked up one 7-year-old in 13 years, and that was a heartbreak,” she said in 2012. “But 8- and 9-year-olds, and older, are very common now.”

The article is long and heartbreaking, to anyone with a heart. In the past five years, the county has been forced to pay out more than $11 million to the children and families who were mistreated. But Judge Davenport plans to run for another eight year term..

This is a case that should be viewed through the lens of critical race theory.

Categories Cruelty, Discipline, Tennessee

Tennessee: Top Vaccination Official Fired for Urging Teens to Get Vaccinated

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2021 //
102

Dr. Michelle Fiscus, the top vaccination official in the Tennessee, was fired for encouraging teenagers to get vaccinated. She is a public health official who wants to save lives. Those who fired her thought she was alarmist, despite the deaths of 600,000 Americans who were infected with the coronavirus. Tennessee is a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation.

The now-former immunization director for the Tennessee Department of Health had been facing scrutiny from Republican state lawmakers over her department’s outreach efforts to promote COVID-19 vaccinations among teenagers.

“Now there is a fundamental lack of ability to discern credible information in the state of Tennessee amongst our leaders as well,” Fiscus told WKRN. “They don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between a Facebook meme and a peer-reviewed scientific journal publication.”

Dr. Fiscus told The Tennessean that she was fired Monday to appease lawmakers. She provided the newspaper with a copy of her termination letter, which does not explain the reasoning for her dismissal.

She also released a blistering statement accusing the “leaders” of the state of ignoring the dead and dying around them while turning their backs on doctors, scientists and other front line workers during the pandemic.

“I am ashamed of them,” she wrote. “I am afraid for my state. I am angry for the amazing people of the Tennessee Department of Health who have been mistreated by an uneducated public and leaders who have only their own interests in mind. And I am deeply saddened for the people of Tennessee, who will continue to become sick and die from this vaccine-preventable disease because they choose to listen to the nonsense spread by ignorant people.”

Dr. Fiscus told WKRN she was a scapegoat for a legislature bent on vaccine misinformation: “Our elected officials, many of them have really bought into this anti-vaccine propaganda that has been widely distributed, and they are not seeking the opinions of medical experts who understand these vaccines and understand this pandemic.”

August is National Immunization Awareness Month, but public health officials in Tennessee have been ordered not to acknowledge it.

Categories Health, Ignorance, Shame, Tennessee

Gary Rubenstein: Faking the ASD Story

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2021 //
23


Gary Rubenstein has been following the tale of the so-called Achievement School District in Tennessee for a decade. It was started with $100 million of the state’s $500 million from the Race to the Top (remember “Race to the Top”?). The ASD pledged to raise achievement dramatically in the state’s lowest performing schools, and it failed. Several other states were so impressed by the idea of the ASD that they created their own similar efforts. By the state’s own records, none of them was successful.

When Gary saw that veterans of the ASD were convening at a virtual conference to talk about the lessons learned, he decided to join the meeting. He couldn’t believe the claims that were made about the “success” of the failed program. When he finally decided to ask questions of the panelists, he was told that his questions were unacceptable and he was censored. He wondered why the Chalkbeat reporter wasn’t asking the same questions. All it takes is a review of the published stats.

“Reformers” continue to promote the same failed ideas, without concern for easily ascertainable facts.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Failure, Race to the Top, Tennessee

Tennessee: State Supreme Court Will Review Voucher Case

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2021 //
6

The Tennessee legislature passed a voucher law. It was declared unconstitutional by lower courts.

However the State Supreme Court will revisit the issue. Voucher advocates are hopeful.

Think of all the low-cost, low-quality religious schools that will drain public dollars away from the state’s public schools.

Vouchers will not only take money away from the public schools, they will lower the overall quality of education in the state. Not a good way to build a better future.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Tennessee, Vouchers

Tennessee: Why Do Failed Reforms Survive, Only to Fail Again?

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2020 //
19

In 2012, Tennessee created the “Achievement School District” (ASD) and promised that it would catapult the state’s lowest performing schools into high-performing schools. So confident were state leaders that they hired Chris Barbic, who ran a celebrated charter chain in Houston, and he was confident that the state’s weakest schools could be transformed within five years by handing them over to charter operators. Other states were excited by the idea and created their own state takeover districts.

The ASD failed, even though it was funded by $100 million in Race to the Top money. But Tennessee refuses to accept that taking over struggling schools and giving them to charter operators is a bad idea.

The North Carolina Policy Watch reported on Tennessee’s insistence on protecting failure. North Carolina created an “Innovative School District,” modeled on the ASD.

Greg Childress writes:

The state-run school district in Tennessee, the one on which this state’s Innovative School District (ISD) is modeled, has failed.

According to reports out of Tennessee, the Achievement School District (ASD), is working on a plan to return 30 ASD schools in Memphis and Nashville to their local districts by 2022.

State officials in Tennessee contend the district, which was established in 2012 to improve achievement in low-performing schools, “grew too quickly” and that “demand outpaced supply and capacity.”

Still, Tennessee officials aren’t giving up on the ASD. They’re billing the new proposal as a “reset” of the district, which has fallen short of its goals to move low-performing schools from the bottom 5 percent and into the top 25 percent.

Most ASD schools were handed over to charter school operators after being pulled from local districts.

“The Achievement School District remains a necessary intervention in Tennessee’s school framework when other local interventions have proven to be unsuccessful in improving outcomes for students,” officials said in a presentation obtained by Chalkbeat.

“The Commercial Appeal” in Memphis reports that most of the schools remain in the bottom 5 percent and that several have closed due to low enrollment. Teacher retention has also been a major challenge, the paper reports.

Tennessee school officials plan to stand by their Big Idea, even though its failure is clear even to them.

North Carolina’s “Innovative School District” has not fared any better. Although the state wanted the ISD to be a major reform effort, like the ASD, only one school entered the new district. NC had other low-performing schools, but whenever one was told to join the ISD, its leaders ran to their elected officials and got exempted.

To put it mildly, NC’s ISD has “struggled to get off the ground.”

Childress writes:

After only one year, state officials made wholesale leadership changes at ISD. The ISD got a new superintendent, the lone ISD school got a new principal and a new president was hired to lead the private firm that manages the school.

James Ellerbe, the ISD superintendent hired in July, reported this week that there are 69 schools on the state’s 2019 qualifying list, meaning the low-performing schools are at risk of being swept into the ISD.

The ISD will bring only one school into the state-run district next year. The school with the lowest performance score among Title I schools in the bottom 5 percent will be brought into the ISD.

The ISD was approved in 2016 by state lawmakers even though the ASD had showed little signs of success after being in business four years.

Not only is the NC ISD based on a failed model, its one school has both a principal and a superintendent!

All of which leaves unanswered question, why do failed reforms never die?


Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, North Carolina, Race to the Top, Tennessee

Mercedes Schneider: The Meteoric Rise, Fall, and Rise of a Reformer

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2020 //
14

In a post from 2019, Mercedes Schneider reviewed the spectacular career of a TFA “reformer” who became a star in Nevada, briefly disappeared, then resurfaced with a cushy job in the booming IDEA charter chain in Houston (Betsy DeVos’s favorite).

Alison Serafin flourished in Nevada when there was a Republican Governor. She was vice-president of the state board. She launched a start-up called Opportunity 180 to foster charter schools. She resigned from the state board in December 2015 since her Organization was seeking state funding. In April 2016 her Opportunity 180 won a $10 million grant to being high-performing charters to Nevada.

Opportunity 180 was supposed to create the Nevada Achievement School District, modeled on Tennessee’s failed program.

By 2017, Serafin resigned, and her name was scrubbed from the website of the organization she founded.

Not to worry. Now Serafin works for IDEA in Houston, which has big plans for expansion.

Reformers fail upwards.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Houston, Teach for America, Tennessee

Tennessee: Why the Courts Rejected Vouchers

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2020 //
4

This is an excellent and comprehensive explanation of why Governor Bill Lee’s voucher plan has been rejected by two levels of the state judiciary. Lee is closely tied to Betsy DeVos, and he really wants vouchers but they are stalled. The legislature decided to put them only in Memphis and Nashville, against the will of the local governments. It seems there are some constitutional principles that matter more than the Governor’s wishes.

“We hold that the ESA Act is local in effect and applicable to Davidson and Shelby counties in their governmental capacity,” the court wrote in its opinion.

As a result, the court found that the Legislature violated the Constitution by not allowing required referendums or votes of the county commissions when it approved the ESA program in 2019.

The court also found Metro Nashville and Shelby County had standing to file the lawsuit because county commissions are charged with funding local school systems.

The Legislature approved $25 million in this year’s budget for the program even though the governor decided to put it on hold after the Chancery Court found ESAs unconstitutional.

State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Memphis Democrat, said the Legislature needs to refund taxpayers for the voucher program and the Achievement School District, which has cost about $1 billion to run mostly charter schools in Memphis.

The state is likely to take the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court, but Parkinson said it is time to stop “wasting” money on the program.

The Attorney General’s Office said it is reviewing the ruling and consulting with the governor on its next steps.

“I think they should put this one to rest, go ahead and bury it and then bury the ASD right beside it and put up on the headstone: ‘We tried,’” Parkinson said.

The attorney for Nashville said the program not only violated home rule but would cost the district $111 million by year five.

Remember when Republicans supported local control?

Categories Tennessee, Vouchers

Tennessee Court of Appeals Rejects Voucher Plan!

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2020 //
5

The Tennessee Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision that Governor Bill Lee’s voucher plan is unconstitutional.

The voucher plan was supposed to be installed only in Memphis and Nashville, over the objections of their representatives. The deciding vote was cast by a legislator from Knoxville, after he was promised that the voucher program would not include his district.

A victory for friends of public schools and communities in Tennessee!

Categories Accountability, Failure, Privatization, Tennessee, Vouchers

Chris Barbic, Founder of Failed “Achievement School District,” Returns to Tennessee

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2020 //
26

Chris Barbic has returned to Tennessee to join its “charter school center.”

Barbic, you may recall, launched the much-lauded Achievement School District in Tennessee, drawing upon $100 million from the state’s $500 million Race to the Top grant. He promised to take over the state’s lowest performing schools, hand them over to charter operators, and propel them into the top 25% of schools in the state, in five years’ time.

After four years, he stepped down due to a heart attack. By the end of year five, none of the schools in the ASD had been vaulted into the top 25% of schools in the state. They all remained mired at the bottom of the state’s list of schools, as measured by test scores. Since Barbic’s departure, the leadership at ASD has changed hands a few times, but the evaluations have not improved. ASD was a flop.

However, the concept was adopted without waiting for results by a few other states, including North Carolina (one school was in its state-controlled version of ASD) and Nevada (no success). Georgia proposed to create a similar district, but it was turned down by voters.

State takeovers have typically failed. Michigan launched its “Education Achievement Authority” several years ago. It was a disaster, and it was closed down.

New Orleans is the original prototype, where all the district’s schools are now operated by charter managers. Despite lots of hype, it is hardly a model. The latest state scores for schools found that almost half the charters in NOLA were rated either D or F. Overall, the district’s test scores were below the state average. The highest performing schools are the most selective. NOLA is a low-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest performing states (on NAEP, the national testing program that compares states).

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, New Orleans, Privatization, Tennessee

T.C. Weber: Tennessee’s Education Commissioner Has Two Jobs: Is That a Problem?

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2020 //
7

Blogger T.C.Weber, aka “Dad Gone Wild,” thinks there is something amiss in Tennessee. The State Commissioner of education Penny Schwinn is holding down two full-time jobs. He thinks that is odd. Does anyone else? She founded a charter school in California, where she is still listed as executive director. Interesting. Superwoman?

He writes:

Capital Collegiate Academy was founded back in 2011 by one Penny Schwinn. In the past, I’ve talked about Schwinn’s tenure with the St. Hope Foundation, the charter network founded by Michelle Rhee’s husband and former Mayor of Sacramento Kevin Johnson. I think it’s a safe assumption that in opening her own school, Schwinn benefited from her relationship with Johnson. It worth noting that Penny’s husband Paul, also worked for the St. Hope Foundation. Stick around, you’ll notice a pattern here.

Returning to Sacramento and opening a charter school was a self-professed dream of Schwinn’s. Per an article in a journal produced by the California Charter School Association, “Her goal was to return to her home town and start a charter school in an under-served community. Her vision was to provide strong standards and high expectations for all students.” Schwinn would assume the role of principal of the school that first year, before 9 months later she would assume a seat on the local school board followed 14 months later by becoming Assistant Superintendent of Sacramento City Unified School District, overseeing the very school she founded.

You may remember back in the Spring when Schwinn tweeted out for principal day how much she loved being a principal. Well, who wouldn’t love to be a principal for a school that only housed 60 Kindergarten students? Per their website, “Capitol Collegiate follows a slow growth model, which means we add an additional grade level each year. Our founding scholars started Kindergarten in 2011 and will graduate from 8th grade in 2020. CCA currently serves students in Transitional Kindergarten (TK) through 8th Grade.” ​

If you look at state achievement scores, that initial class of 2011 seems to be doing quite well. Last year, as 7th graders, 58.2% performed at or above expectations in ELA and 47.06% did the same in Math. I’d say that qualifies for celebration.

The only caveat that I would add is to point out that a class that started out having 60 students held 22 students last year and is now down to 15. So a little math will tell you that out those 22 students, 13 are on grade level or above and 9 are underperforming. That’s not quite as much cause for celebration. With such a small class, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect higher achievement levels.

Right now, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking, “This all very interesting, but Penny lit out of there on a fast train nearly a decade ago. What’s all of this have to do with today?”

Ah, but the question is, did Ms. Schwinn truly depart Capital Collegiate Academy? You might be surprised to find out that the Commissioner is still an active board member of the charter school, a seat she has held since inception.

“How does she do it”, you might ask, “Surely there are expectations about attending board meetings.”

Rest assured that when Ms. Schwinn can’t make it in person, she participates via teleconference from 710 James Robertson Parkway, Nashville, Tennessee. In case you don’t recognize that address, it’s where her office, supplied by Tennessee taxpayers, is located.

Here’s where things get even more interesting. You see Penny wasn’t just a board member, she was also the Executive Director of the school from 2015 – 2019. Currently, the organization doesn’t appear to have an executive director. Though I hear Paul’s doing nothing…never mind, I’m sure they’ve already thought of that.

While serving as CCA’s executive director, Penny was serving as an associate superintendent in both Delaware and Texas, and in 2019 she became the Commissioner of Education for Tennessee. You wouldn’t be remiss in thinking, “There is no way she could have done both jobs simultaneously”. But she did, and was paid a pretty penny – pun intended – for it.

Lotta ching, huh?

So now you might be thinking that Ms. Schwinn cut some kind of deal, and arranged a ceremonial position due to her status as a “founder” in order to receive payment long after she split to explore greener pastures. A fair assumption, unfortunately not an assumption not backed up by documentation from the Capitol Collegiate Academy charter application where the duties of the Executive Director are extensive and clearly spelled out.

That seems like a lot of work to be doing from the East Coast while also serving as Delaware’s Chief accountability officer. I know the irony, right?

If this has you scratching your head in puzzlement, don’t consider yourself alone. In 2015, CCA was up for renewal and the SCUSD School Board had some questions themselves. They list a number of promises the school made that they’d failed to keep. Also noting that “the current Executive director fills her role as a part-time position. She is employed as an education official, in another capacity, on the East Coast of the United States. Clearly, they were as perplexed as we are.

Somebody should have pointed out to board members that the school’s IRS filings have Schwinn down as working a 40-hour week. Quite the go-getter this one is. And Mr. Schwinn, what was he up to in Delaware. He was hired as the Director of Leadership Development for the Delaware Leadership Project, which is funded by the Delaware DOE, Rodel, and Vision. Seeing the pattern yet?

There’s more.

Ms. Schwinn works for a pro-voucher chum of Betsy DeVos. Curiously Republican legislators wonder about her multiple jobs but Democratic legislators don’t. Read on to understand this puzzling situation.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Tennessee
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