Sharon Gentry covered for Alan Coverstone?

An anonymous commenter writes of the last school board meeting in which action was taken on charter school applications:

Board member Mark North poured over the data of not only charter schools, but also local MNPS schools. What he found was that the charter schools proposed to set up shop to address students in schools that not only were not failing, they were in the top three in the county. He also studied in depth the charter applications and found glaring errors within the applications themselves.

North presented his findings to the board on May 29th only to have his board members question his findings and sweep them under the rug. Dr. Sharon Gentry did the first sweeping. Her words were an attempt to devalue what Mr. North had uncovered and make him look foolish. No one else on the board even questions Mr. Coverstone's committee to recommend a charter school where one is not needed.

Coverstone is being paid a six figure salary to dismantle MNPS with charter schools that do not work, and his board members are following his lead like lemmings.

That account is consistent with my experience with my school board representative, Sharon Gentry. She came across to me as dismissive toward concerned parents in a community meeting I attended. I never really heard from her when I copied her an email I sent to Gracie Porter about comments she made in the media celebrating Green Hills's Julia Green Elementary getting iPads while my kid's North Nashville classroom had desktops that seemed to limp along.

It is also worth noting that Gentry and her husband received large campaign donations from well-placed leaders in the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, the lobby about as invested in charter schools as any other special interest group. I suppose privately-governed, publicly-financed charter schools represent a big windfall for the business lobby's agenda. Is Sharon Gentry's opposition to Mark North prompted by campaign finance influence?

Update: Metro Public School's North Nashville Collaboration

I attended Alan Coverstone's North Nashville "Collaboration" this afternoon in the Pearl-Cohn auditorium. My unscientific estimate is that there were 75-100 people in attendance: a good number of MNPS staff, half-a-dozen council members, several ministers, Pearl-Cohn students and staff, and professional organization officials. It did not strike me as a community meeting. Instead, it was more of a networking klatch for North Nashville movers and shakers. Presentations were given by Coverstone, students, an official with the unbuilt Museum of African American Music, the President of the Interdenominational Ministers Fellowship, CEO of JUMP and an Urban League representative.

The stated purpose of the meeting was to make the Jefferson Street corridor a renowned destination and to ask North Nashville organizations to provide volunteer opportunities for Pearl-Cohn students. The terms "grassroots," "movement," "change," and "innovation" were used repeatedly. Pearl-Cohn itself received beaucoup praise some defensive because of perceived news media spin.

I would consider this an attempt to bring grassroots legitimacy through student voluntarism to the insular Metro Nashville Public School system. However, there were no parent-teacher (-student) organization leaders present as far as I could see. The only mention of a PTO was by one of the student speakers in passing. No neighborhood association reps stood to identify themselves. I cannot fathom how this "collaboration" can become a movement without the buy-in of PTOs and neighborhoods who were not there to collaborate. Maybe the IMF is so strong that they can leverage grassroots organizations, but I do not see it yet.

Interestingly, one community organizer who trains people in nonviolent direct action at JUMP mentioned the current "Occupy Wall Street" dissent (involving tens of thousands of protesters) as an example of the kind of things he instills at his clinics. I couldn't help but wonder how many of the education bureaucrats, council members, and business group leaders were squirming a little at the prospect of full-scale dissent in Nashville streets against untrammeled economic growth. Alan Coverstone's Office of Innovation is absolutely if not exclusively concerned with meeting the priorities of Nashville's Chamber of Commerce set. The last thing they would consider innovative is open dissent and nonviolent direct action against economic institutions in the streets of Nashville.

Some background and context might be helpful. Voluntarism arises from an American tradition Robert Fisher called "social welfare organizing". It was the legitimate form of neighborhood organizing for 100 years before the 1960s. This kind of charity movement compliments the Dean's administration's narrow focus on volunteer organizations for large segments of Metro service delivery. It is also the activism of elite society. A change in organizing culture in the 1960s gave rise to a "new populism" of community-based determination and mobilized social protest against institutions. This seems to be the tradition of Occupy Wall Street dissent (although the current protests also have strong echos of the classic radical organizing of the Great Depression era).

I simply do not see how the MNPS's Office of Innovation could be innovative enough to at once manage volunteers and tolerate a populism that skirts the radicalism of Occupy Wall Street. Wall Street is one of the drivers of education reform (otherwise known as, running education as a business).

In the end we will see if Alan Coverstone can mobilize enough community support on the strength of organizing volunteers alone to qualify this "collaboration" as an authentic North Nashville grassroots movement. It will no doubt help a few lucky students. However, I do not see MNPS brooking anything even slightly more participatory or comprehensive than that.

Is a "North Nashville Collaboration" collaborative when not all of North Nashville knows about it?

I received this Metro Nashville Public School announcement/invitation from the Salemtown elist today. It was actually forwarded as an attachment that Sylvan Park CM Jason Holleman sent to his constituents with the message:

I plan to attend this event on Thursday, and I thought you might be interested as well. I greatly admire organizer Alan Coverstone's forward-thinking approach towards making our schools -- and our community -- better, and I think that this event will be well worth your time.

Hope to see you there!

Thank you,

Jason Holleman
Metro Council, District 24
4210 Park Avenue
Nashville, Tennessee 37209
615-269-6365

For those who do not know, Mr. Coverstone is a private school product and a former private school Dean. He has been put in charge of Metro's charter school program, essentially privatizing our public education system. So, the collaboration-language of the invitation sounds odd if written by Mr. Coverstone. "Together we can make sure the Jefferson Street corridor is an essential destination" with a "meaningful discussion to identify new and exciting ways to support each other" sounds cryptic when coming from the charter schools division.

"Collaboration" assumes inclusiveness, but this invitation has not been sent to all of us in North Nashville. To disguise something limited in scope under jargon of inclusion bugs me. But collaboration also assumes listening to dissent. If this meeting is really about poaching resources and high-performing students out of existing schools for privatized charter schools, I intend to dissent. My guess is that what we will hear from this meeting is a shiny new initiative that we will have no choice but to accept.

Anyone heard anything about this "collaboration" that they care to share?


UPDATE: Yesterday I sent the following email to a couple of school board members, a Metro address I assume might be Alan Coverstone's, CM Jason Holleman, Metro Schools communications office, MNPS customer service, and CM Erica Gilmore:

Regarding the attached invitation: if this event was intended to be a "collaborative effort" between MNPS and North Nashville, why didn't some of us in North Nashville, especially those of us with kids in public schools, receive notice of this until this late date?

By the way, the author of the invitation omitted Jones Paideia and Hull-Jackson on the list of public schools mentioned on the invitation.

As a North Nashville public school parent I am supremely disappointed in the seeming lack of care in communication of this event. To find out second-hand in an email that CM Holleman originally directed to his constituents is really bothersome. If it was planned with community input, we were also left out of that stage.

Can anyone shed some light on what is behind this event in our zone and why no apparent effort was made on the Metro end to communicate with all of us?

The only person to respond so far is CM Gilmore, who writes that Alan Coverstone is the organizer and that he left a voice mail for her about it last week. They have not been able to speak with each other about it yet.

Why is Coverstone focusing on CMs and not on PTOs, neighborhood associations, or other community groups to communicate this event that he claims will "support the great work of ... neighbors"? This still smacks of elitism to me.


UPDATE: MNPS customer service responded to my email above. Their reply fails to clear up in my mind why this event was not communicated to all of North Nashville. On the contrary, they seem to insist that posting the announcement on their crowded, information-saturated website for North Nashvillians to stumble across and sending out a few emails to unidentified "contacts" is effective communication:

The idea for getting together is to better connect our students with their surroundings. We are asking everyone to spread the word, and we appreciate any help in doing so. The announcement of the North Nashville Collaboration is posted on the MNPS homepage has been sent and forwarded through e-mail by a scores of community contacts, and has been relayed directly through conversations with the intention of reaching any and all stakeholders.

We are starting a conversation and everyone is invited!

It is obviously going to be a battle of attrition to get to the bottom of real intentions behind limited communications and real agendas of this event. Given a Metro climate under Karl Dean that puts transparency in the back seat, I do not expect it to be easy.


UPDATE: We went back over our PTO notes from the last meeting. No mention of this collaboration. We also checked around at Jones Paideia Elementary without finding any indication that school officials know about this meeting.

Early this morning I finally got a response from Alan Coverstone:

I asked lots of people o help spread the word, and I know you are helping as well. It is a conversation starter, not an official business meeting. Everyone is welcome.

Hope to see you there.

I'm skeptical about this because in order to get MNPS to engage PTOs and community leaders we usually are restricted to speaking with our school's 2 representatives on the district's Parent Advisory Committee, who take concerns to MNPS. Otherwise, we are invisible. I cannot even get my own School Board rep, Sharon Gentry, to reply to any emails I send her way. At the one community meeting I've seen her speak she seemed aloof and dismissive of community concerns. We will see what happens at the "collaboration." My guess is that it will be an attempt to market the mirage of charter schools to desperate parents.