Furthermore, there seems to be a PR game in education like none ever before. This is at both the National, state, district, and school level. I’ll tackle state and school at the moment. Kevin Huffman has had a stump speech saying the NAEP test results are proving his reforms are working (http://nashvillepublicradio.org/blog/2014/03/10/kevin-huffman-was-wrong-test-results-didnt-get-people-off-his-back/). However, when you account for socio-economic status, the achievement gap has actually widened (http://tnedreport.com/?p=604), illustrating a level of abject failure. At the school level, let’s take a look at Cornerstone Prep with the ASD. They often claim to be one of the top performers in the country on the Terra Nova test (http://cornerstoneprepmemphis.org/terranova). Terra Nova is something, I must admit, I know little about, but I do know TCAP. Looking at their 2013 TVAAS results on the state report card, their Literacy score was a 2, their numeracy was a 2, and their overall TVAAS was a 1. On the 1-5 scale, Cornerstone has literally regressed when compared to the predeceasing MCS control. The same can be said for Frayser Achievement and Brick Church in Nashville. Yet the song and dance continues. When I asked Ash Solar what the procedure was for failing schools in the ASD and who provides the oversight, he pointed to their own department of Portfolio and Accountability. Essentially, trust us.

So there’s your need: transparency and local accountability. The issue is that there is a lot of money in education, and too often people are literally banking on the lack of transparency and accountability. This is particularly true of the administrations around town.

1-2) The actions of politicians should be extremely personal, particularly when it comes to education. Some like-minded folks find the often-spouted quote that “education is the civil rights issue of our time” is reformist diatribe. I tend to agree with this quote, but come to a different conclusion. Educational civil rights is being co-opted those who wish to turn public education into a neo-liberal playground. Public schools are now being turned over to people that have no idea what they’re dong, where a script seen as a more important tool than a teacher with deep understanding of pedagogical theory and practice (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/education/at-charter-schools-short-careers-by-choice.html?pagewanted=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytnational&_r=1&amp ;). Where a test is being held as the sign-from-on-high of success in the classroom. As someone who is in an untested subject, I can tell you that it is most certainly not (TEA agrees: http://tnedreport.com/?p=753). It’s hard not to take something so personally when it affects something I love so dearly, and it should be taken personally. I get angry when I see what’s happening to the state that I’ve called home since I was 5. We should all be angry, but that’s not to say we should let that anger turn into hate and treat one another with disrespect. II will resist the urge to quote Yoda and instead turn to one of Audrey Lorde’s that was on the wall of my school during Black History Month, “Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.” So get angry, but don’t become hateful.

3) Our democracy was designed to be slow. It ensures that people work together, work carefully, and that the rights of the minority are protected. In education, we are seeing democracy erode. In Tennessee, we saw it first with collective bargaining being effectively outlawed, thus successfully busting the unions (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/01/us-unions-states-tennessee-idUSTRE75071I20110601). We are seeing it now with state run districts that does not answer to an elected school board, thus no democracy and little accountability (http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2013/jan/25/naacp-wants-law-to-make-charter-schools-more/?print=1). Now they’re pushing for a state-authorizer of charter schools appointed by the governor (http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2014302240023). We also saw sweeping changes to teacher compensation made by a governor-appointed panel whose decision was made on a conference call (http://www.t-g.com/story/1994849.html). Politicians who want reform show disdain for democracy, it’s too slow. They want unilateral change. The trade off is that it’s often messy, poorly structured, and often lacking empirical evidence for success.

4) I agree with this point, but I don’t think politicians are not doing the same. Often, valid, peer-reviewed research is being ignored. It then becomes incumbent on those critical of the reforms to provide it, which is a topsy-turvy approach to reform. Look at the push for merit pay across the state, yet the research critical of this method of compensation at our own Vanderbilt University is ignored (http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2010/09/teacher-performance-pay/).

I’ll end with one with my own point rather than a retort to one of your own. The efforts of reformers are nothing new. NCLB was made into law when I was sophomore in high school over a decade ago. RTTT, which heightened all of NCLB’s policies, is 5 years old. Lobbyists for reform groups now vastly outnumber those for traditional public schools in this state and probably nationally (http://www.mommabears.org/1/post/2014/02/silencing-our-voices.html). I think it’s now time to recognize them as the established power structure. The fact that their elite is made up of career politicians (Jeb Bush, Rick Snyder, Lamar Alexander), millionaires and billionaires (Bill Gates – recently renamed richest man in the world despite his vow to donate his fortune, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and the wall street insiders of the Democrats for Education Reform), and those with little to no background in the classroom (Arne Duncan, Kevin Huffman – and many other state commissioners, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, etc.). The people with the most influence in education often quite literally know the least about it and society has the audacity to call them reformers. That needs to change, they should be known as what they are: the status quo.

When the political landscape of education is understood, only then will it begin to be changed. The powered elite wants to hold that power, to consolidate it. They have no true intention of democratizing it. They’d rather pull from their own ranks with (to name a few) the Broad Superintendents Academy, TFA’s LEE, and the Gates funded Teach Plus. When you start following the money, you start to see the true way in which educational politics is enacted in both our state and our country. This underscores the need for political action of career educators.