Reevaluating Salemtown's "Future Needs"

Eight years ago in the run-up to Metro Council elections I surveyed what were in my opinion Salemtown's "future needs" that deserved Metro government attention. I did not just pull these needs out of the air. I read planning documents that had been put together with the community feedback of residents of Salemtown. Then I picked ones that I thought were realistic and realizable in one or two council terms.

Now that we are in another council election year, I want to go back and reevaluate whether those needs have been addressed or not.

• 3rd Avenue greenway from Morgan Park to MetroCenter. In 2007, I wrote:
  

  [Metro] should address is conversion of the public property bordering the Treatment Plant to a landscaped greenway spur connecting to Morgan Park. That spur should include a decorative wall to hide the unsightly Plant from the view of the neighborhood. The strip of land running from Hume Street on the south to Coffee Street on the north is currently unlandscaped green space with a chain link fence and some trees and rose bushes.
  
  Currently, there is nothing about the green strip that attracts pedestrians strolling around the neighborhood. The rose bushes on the chain link fence seem almost like a token, half-hearted effort by Metro to beauty-up the strip. The space as it stands more designed to encourage people to hurry past in cars, because there is really nothing to see but a sewer plant.

  
  Nothing has changed along 3rd Avenue North, except the rose bushes are gone and there are more developments flying up on private property. The chain link fence still catches blowing trash. Metro has made no effort to overhaul and to reboot the public roadside strip into something people can use and enjoy. Metro has made no effort to block the blight and institutional ugliness of the water treatment facilities and their large grass-covered ash dumps blocking a clear view of the river. This area still has unrealized potential. The residents along 3rd deserve better.


• Renovation and buffering of the I-65 interface with Salemtown. In 2007, I wrote:

  we need a more vigorous and comprehensive effort by our next council member to pursue a wholesale renovation to the I-65 corridor through Salemtown that includes many of the community-sensitive compromises that TDOT made with West End-Hillsboro neighbors when they put I-440 in the 1980s.
  
  The Neighborhood Plan calls for noise walls and heavy landscaping along the perimeter of Salemtown. The plot of an interstate up against the walls and yards of urban neighborhoods without the addition of sound buffers is unconscionable. Our next council member needs to find ways to help us motivate TDOT to correct its obvious oversight.

  
  The state transportation department renovated the interchange between Rosa Parks Blvd. and I-65 in 2011, which improved the roads for auto traffic, but did little to benefit Salemtown. While TDOT did do away with concrete covered medians on Rosa Parks in favor of grass, they did not landscape them. Bushes and ornamental grasses could be useful obstacles for cars driving over the medians. TDOT cut down trees along the interstate, which served as partial buffers for road noise in Salemtown and then they refused to consider sound walls like those along I-440 in west Nashville. Instead, they threw the responsibility back on to Erica Gilmore, who did nothing to advance the cause of abating the roar of eighteen wheelers, despite the fact that in her 2007 campaign she acknowledged the problem. Salemtown still needs help with interstate buffering and better landscaping.


• Convert the Fehr school building back to a functioning public school. In 2007, I wrote:
  

  Salemtown is a neighborhood of families that will not stay that way very long unless some measures are taken to keep it from becoming a place super-saturated with amenities only for singles and young families with no children.
  
  One of the things that should happen to attract families with children to locate and to stay here is to replace a quality neighborhood public school here. However, there are no feeder schools proximate to the North End. Fehr School sits right in the middle of Salemtown. Decades ago it provided an education for neighborhood children, but it is used to provide other Metro Services now, having little to do with the neighborhood itself.

  
  Erica Gilmore and the Metro Historical Commission deserve credit for making progress on this future need. In 2011-2012 they picked up the cause that many of us had been working on for years: preserving the civil rights landmark from demolition. The Metro Action Commission, which was headquartered at the school, dug in its heels at times against historic overlay, but they finally gave in and Fehr is now protected. In 2011, MAC moved to a new headquarters downtown, which meant that folk seeking utility bill assistance from social services would no longer have to line up early on cold mornings in front of Fehr. Head Start currently occupies Fehr, which suits the educational purpose of the building. In the past few months, I have participated in constructive community discussions with Metro Public School officials, organized by current council candidate Freddie O'Connell, on converting Fehr back to a functioning neighborhood school. I am not sure that we are close to achieving that, yet. If it happens I would hate to see Fehr become a charter school. If anything it should be an unadulterated public school open to all children in Salemtown and its environs.


• A neighborhood-attuned council member. In 2007, I wrote:

  Salemtown, just like the rest of 19, is experiencing tremendous growth and redevelopment. The result is that we do have some greedy entrepreneurs who could care less about working with the neighborhood honestly for balanced growth in which everyone wins. Recently we found ourselves in the unenviable position of contending with both investors and Metro officials because growth is outstripping infrastructure in our neighborhood. The investors don't care because they only want to make money. Departmental officials only want to cover their butts. And many of our residents feel caught in the middle with no where to turn.
  
  It is not supposed to be like that. We are supposed to have an advocate on the Metro Council who not only listens to the contentions, but who is willing to get right down in the middle of the ruckus and help the sides reach a balanced and negotiated compromise. That council member should also be one to assist neighbors in consulting Metro Departments that are not always responsive or accountable. The Council Member should be leading the charge on updating our sometimes century-old infrastructure, while encouraging measured and responsible growth.

  
  Erica Gilmore has been considerably better than her predecessor on the Metro Council, Ludye Wallace. Where Ludye rarely showed an interest in Salemtown, CM Gilmore has attended our events and, especially early in her tenure, responded consistently. She went to bat for preserving the Fehr school building and many neighbors are grateful for her work on the conservation overlay. But I cannot give her much more than a solid "C" for advocacy for our neighborhood. She initially mishandled the conservation overlay process but then acquiesced to demands for community meetings. She was generally inconsistent with important community meetings. We were not always notified about meetings. And on the important question of a new minor league ballpark, she seemed prepared not to hold any meetings at all. When she did hold community meetings she ran them with a tight fist instead of encouraging open debate, negotiation and balance. The meetings were always framed as developers answering questions rather than getting feedback, and during one unpleasant confrontation with Salemtown Neighbors over rezoning, she seemed to question the association's legitimacy. We deserved better representation. I hope we get it in 2015.


• Extend the riverfront redevelopment transit loop into Salemtown. In 2007, I wrote:

  Salemtown proper is cut off from the Cumberland River by the Central Wastewater Treatment Plant. The Plant ... cuts our neighborhood off from direct contact with the river. So, the closest landing contacts our residents have with the river would be East Germantown and Downtown.
  
  So, it would make sense to extend the proposed transit loop past East Germantown to Salemtown and possibly MetroCenter. This could be done most easily by footpaths: extending the proposed greenway from East Germantown to the Cumberland River Levee Greenway in MetroCenter. But if a trolley run is planned for the Downtown to East Germantown leg, I hope that the future District 19 Council Member would look into the possibility of doing what he or she could to extend that trolley leg to a Salemtown transit stop (perhaps a greenway turnaround at the 3rd Avenue Treatment Center strip).

  
  So much water has passed under the bridge since I originally wrote this. I'm not even sure that the 2007 Riverfront Master Plan that included various landings applies. My point was that the trolley lines should stretch beyond downtown and East Nashville. More to today's context: with the opening of the new ballpark and the continuing densification of North Nashville, we are going to need more of the transit options that the east-west corridor currently enjoy. Trolleys running down 3rd between downtown and MetroCenter make sense more than ever. We got the extended greenway from Morgan Park to the Downtown Connector and Cumberland greenways. We have our walkable connection to the river that we did not in 2007, so if landings are still planned, we're in good shape. Mass transit still needs some work. We need pilot bus rapid transit projects for North Nashville. Light rail would surpass my wildest dreams (and is likely beyond what the next CM could accomplish). In Salemtown we need traffic and parking plans with street permits for residents, given the crush we will experience with the opening of First Tennessee Park. Metro seems to have failed us by not providing a comprehensive, smart northern transit plan (walking, biking and driving) with the building of the new ballpark.

Most of the changes that I argued we needed in 2007 still apply. Some have taken different forms over time. But most of upgrades Salemtown ought to have--many of which were expressed by previous community plans--are yet to be realized. I hope that the next council member from this district can help us realize them.

A short lesson in how business models do not apply in public education

Council member Jason Holleman pulled me in on Sunday when he quoted one of the finest expositors of the relationship between public education and democracy, John Dewey, in his Tennessean column. Dewey's may be a hard pill to swallow for the "collaborative culture" in Nashville, which eschews conflict usually by ignoring those who bring it to light. However, it is no less true in genteel Music City: conflict is the gadfly of the critical reflection necessary to growth. Both minimizing and denying conflict, instead of acknowledging it and working towards mutual understanding, instigate nothing. Instead, they lead to hubris, atrophy and neglect as they destroy authentic community.

But I could go on and on about kick-ass Dewey quotes to the point of diversion.

The really important statements by CM Holleman are:

Speaking out is an essential responsibility of democratic leaders. To describe such leadership as “freelancing,” reflects a misunderstanding of the role of elected officials. We work for the people who’ve elected us. If we limit that work to the minutes of official meetings, we abdicate a critical responsibility to protect the public interest.

The Chamber of Commerce’s recent Report Card critiqued such advocacy as being inconsistent with the policy governance model the Board adopted. Respectfully, the Chamber may need a reminder on the nature of democracy and the expectations of elected officials.

Expecting only public praise and private criticism in the name of “policy governance” undermines the essential protections of free speech in general and, more specifically, erodes the relationship between constituents and their elected officials.

CM Holleman is responding to the Chamber's education committee, which accused the Metro Nashville Public School Board of "freelancing" instead of acquiescing to an idea of "unity" contrived from the strictures of their own business models for fixing what they deem as "dysfunction." The fallacy is the unexamined assumption that everything is better if operating like a business ideal. Commentators of many stripes have pointed out that all kinds of societal projects would break apart under the weight of corporate logic.

Here is the specific critique in the Chamber's "report card" to which CM Holleman's op-ed is responding:

Over the past year, it is clear that the Metro school board has struggled to articulate a common vision for the school system. This may be due, in part, to significant turnover on the board. As of August 2014, five of the nine members had served fewer than two years. Even more disruptively, some board members routinely criticize their director of schools through social media and news media articles between official board meetings, creating a perception of dysfunction and lack of leadership. Given these dynamics, we believe the board would be wise to invest more time and resources toward becoming a more cohesive governing body. We recommend that the school board recommit its adherence to policy governance by engaging in ongoing professional development. Engaging an outside trainer on a regular basis to work with the board on updating its policy governance model would ensure all members, regardless of length of tenure, have a thorough understanding of the model. In addition, these ongoing sessions could be designed to help the board accomplish necessary tasks, such as coming to consensus on expectations for their next director of schools.

Before we consider the merits the report card's argument, keep this mind: the Chamber of Commerce is a powerful lobby group that exerts pressure on local government to address their special interests. Methods they have used to collect data used to exert influence in the past were overseen by public relations and marketing firms, not independent researchers. The report itself is funded by sponsors and corporate partners listed on page 2. Whatever detached objectivity the Chamber may claim for its data now has to be qualified by its subjective use of money and power supplying and potentially biasing report results.

Such funding mechanisms for lobbying remind me of how public-private partnerships produce economic impact studies that are generally more reliable for influencing opinions than for discerning the truth.

Now to the merits of the arguments. It is frankly hypocritical for a business group to criticize a government body for a high turnover rate when the former has been shaken by unstable economies. Nashville has been beset by layoffs in recent years at some of the region's largest employers. Many here have witnessed laid off employees asked to leave immediately and escorted out by security guards. What kind of hits are long-term institutional knowledge taking in the private sector right now? Are local corporations not now hiring temporary workers and contracting out projects so that they avoid paying benefits and payroll taxes on full-time employees? Are businesses setting examples of low turnover rates in the first place?

On on that point, the education committee's choice to lob darts with terms like "freelancing" and "disruptively" so pejoratively at dissenting school board members is interesting, given trendy "disruptive innovation" and the hard-core realities of the economic system. The "sharing economy" in vogue now emphasizes "freelance" or contingent workforce, which could be the norm in a few years. So, is freelancing bad or good? One of the co-chairs of he education committee, Jackson Miller (who himself takes to social media to debate privatization of public education), has a background in the tech sector, which has "an appetite for disruptive ideas." So, is "disruption" bad or good?

The Chamber of Commerce's harsher judgments are based on ideas that are not even enduringly real in its own limited world. To speak so unambiguously, so moralistically to public education leaders is disingenuous. And frankly, the Chamber engages annually in its own pet projects (witness charter schools and corporately sponsored "academies") that disrupt and freelance in public education. Pot meet kettle.

But more to CM Holleman's point, the report card reflects an unabashed bias to take the power away from parents, teachers, principals, and voters and leave it to the whims of special interest groups and hired consultants (who stand to economically benefit from the report card's recommendation). Business lobby groups should be one among many voices with influence over the school board. PTOs, neighborhood groups, and community-based organizations, even if they do not have a lock on wealth approaching that of the Chamber, should have equal influence.

However, inviting more stakeholders leads to more dissent and the actual messiness of democracy. As if we have any other legitimate choice. To insist a democratically obligated board should subscribe to some cleanly-projected, top-down, squabble-free, market-based ideal that rarely even exists in the marketplace is partial, unreasonable and plain foolish.

In the spirit of Dewey, public education is supposed to develop children into critically thinking participants in a robust democracy that encompasses dissent as well as obedience. We do Nashville's children a disservice if we pretend--even on their behalf--that democracy is uncomplicated by dissent. What may seem like a good business model (dependence, docility, submissiveness, etc) is not always a good education model.

Marshaled by mayoral candidate Megan Barry, the council refuses to discuss any downside to the Bridgestone dealio

In October CM Megan Barry characterized the problems that uneven growth causes in places like North Nashville as "growing pains" completely ignoring the historical prejudice and systemic flow of resources away from our neighborhoods. By minimizing the collateral shambles and planned blight caused by growth, she ignored how North Nashville has perennially been treated as a dumping ground for wealthy Nashville's refuse and as new territory for white settlement after real estate prices bottom out. Her answer to the "growing pains" is "transportation and affordable housing." Ironically, her last significant transportation vote as council member was to fund that $18 million sidewalk, exclusively serving downtown, while some Madison children walk to school in the street. Has she considered the limitations of calculating what gets called "affordable housing" in gentrifying neighborhoods?

Last night she also made clear that another option she would favor as mayor would be more of the same untamed corporate sweetheart deals that Karl Dean has become a rock star at ginning up while benignly ignoring North Nashville:

By turning this parking lot into a permanent [Bridgestone] fixture in the Nashville skyline, we are moving Nashville forward .... We are going to keep 1,100 Nashville jobs, but we are going to add 600 new jobs in Nashville with an average salary of $93,000 in which it increases our tax base for schools, for transportation and for public safety .... Let's be clear this is not a corporate giveaway.

Ms. Barry went on to soft-pedal one of the more alarming aspects of Dean's deal: Bridgestone can lay-off up to 20% of the 1,700 people it promises to deliver without losing its tax-free status with Metro. She said that "if Bridgestone fails to deliver" 1,700 jobs by the end of 2020, Metro can "claw back" a fraction of the taxes owed. But Bridgestone is still given leeway to shed 20% of this workforce and still be exempt from property taxes. The Bridgestone boosters are not being entirely honest about the risks of this deal. As one reporter put it, "Council members stayed away from discussing any possible downside to the Bridgestone deal."

The Orwellian dimensions of council supporters' comments about the Bridgestone deal are staggering. Bridgestone is not obligated to create any new permanent jobs. The company is praised for importing 600 out-of-state employees, but it can shed over half of the 600's filled positions and still keep its tax break. Supporters also tout Bridgestone's pledge to donate $150,000 to Metro schools. $150,000. That's it. They're getting a $56,300,000 hand-out from Nashville, and they're only pledging $150,000 to our schools, which I assume they can claim on their tax returns. Yet, in CM Barry's words, "this is not a corporate giveaway."

Another Orwellian moment was CM Barry's claim that the new Bridgestone building would be a permanent fixture in the Nashville skyline. Backing her up, CM Erica Gilmore said the HQ would "forever change" the skyline. The only real constant with regard to buildings in Nashville is that older ones are torn down to make room for newer ones, regardless of the history or need to preserve what is important to people here. Anyone who claims that there is permanence in Nashville's built environment is acting misleadingly and dishonestly. A new building downtown may be here for a long time, or it may give way to some future capital project subsidized by the mayor and ballyhooed by a blustery council.

Megan Barry is right about one thing. The new Bridgestone HQ is going to be a fixture, permanent or not, on the Nashville skyline that many will be able to see. Many in North Nashville who will never have the opportunity at any possible living wage jobs Bridgestone might catalyze will see it, too. And that is as close as they are going to get to the sense of entitlement downtown. The Bridgestone HQ sits on a far horizon for most of those who work their livings in this town. Average North Nashvillians will not be enjoying those $93,000 jobs even if the projected taxes on them eventually trickle down here and there like crumbs from the master's table.

And Megan Barry will continue to minimize the growth-induced plight of working people as "growing pains" that are somehow necessary when a city barters away its corporate tax base due to the Courthouse terror that companies might plead poverty and abandon it.

RePublic charter schools called me at work

I typically get no personal calls on my land line office phone, because I do not give that phone number out for personal reasons except in urgent and emergent situations. For instance, I give the number to my daughter's elementary school in case they need to call me and cannot reach me at my personal cell or land lines.

After several years with my current employer, I may have received a couple of phone calls from my wife on occasions were I forgot to power up my cell, but I have never received a solicitation phone call at work until the end of last month.

I received a call at work in September from a recruiter from the Nashville Academy of Computer Science part of a network of privatized charter schools called RePublic Schools co-founded by former Obama campaigner Ravi Gupta. The recruiter invited me to enroll my daughter in his academy. When I asked him how he got my work number he told me that his institution received parent contact information from Metro Nashville Public Schools.

Our daughter has not been a public school student in about a year and a half for reasons I have explained. When I gave MNPS my work contact information it was with the understanding that our primary number was our home land line, but that the work number was an "in case of emergency" number. Obviously, there was no longer any need for MNPS to even have my work number, given our previous understanding and the fact that she is now a private school student.

So, why is Metro Nashville Public Schools giving contact information, on which I have placed restrictions, to private institutions to sell me enrollment? Does this not undermine the goal of having sensitive, restricted phone numbers available when extreme situations demand contacting parents by any means necessary? When public school parents find out that MNPS casually hands out work phone numbers without their consent, are they not less likely to share that information with MNPS (thus making contact more difficult)? Should MNPS be in the position of using public resources to manage a marketing database with sensitive contact info for private corporations?

We left MNPS because of the creeping resource drain of privatization, which now seems to be in full flower. The phone call dripped with irony.

Acquisitive school reformers seem fond of using terms like "disrupt," which they insist challenges entrenched bureaucracy and regulations to do something different in education. They label what they do "innovation." Yet, it is clear to me that Nashville Academy of Computer Science is also willing to disrupt the lives individual parents to hawk their product. How innovative is that?

And their partner is MNPS, which seems fine with luring us back to a system where public education funding is given away to private corporations in exchange for getting a few kids to college and careers instead of educating everyone.

Fears of public school parents becoming realized

One year ago we pulled our daughter out of the Metro public school she was attending in North Nashville and enrolled her in a parochial school. Last August I explained elsewhere in greater detail than parents tend to do openly why we pulled away from MNPS. That statement is not entirely correct. Metro Nashville Public Schools pulled away from us.

The longer I was a public school parent in Nashville, the more I realized that the system is rigged to funnel money away from traditional schools and toward education reform gimmicks and band-aids like charter schools. We knew that the more the school district embraced privatization of public education, the more public money would flow away from public education.

A year later our fears seem confirmed by MNPS board member, Amy Frogge, who tweeted news of a disturbing trend:

We left MNPS because we were afraid that resources were going to be funneled away from public schools for reformers' experiments in privatized education. I wish we had been wrong on this one, because we miss public schools. But there is no way we were going to stay in a house that was falling down around us.

Priorities in this city are messed up.


UPDATE: Jump to more background of our decision to leave Metro Schools after 4 years of soldiering through fray.

When the testers don't perform

This week it is just plain "outage"

Boy, watching Tennessee's standardized testing regime's derailment this week has confirmed our decision last year to pull our daughter out of Metro public schools. The naked hypocrisy and outright shame of a high-stakes testing regime--which pushes kids into performance anxiety--sputtering and stalling under its own inept weight and low performance are proper payback for the toll the system took on us and many others.

Maybe someone should test the testers.

Forget it. That will never happen. They will just go on bumbling through the future, coercing kids to prove themselves over and over by standards that may or may not have anything to do with teaching kids to think critically or to become functioning citizens in a democracy.

This waiver is good for the Metro public school students who are going to have their grades reflect their actual academic performance in real classrooms for once. That beats being measured by an arbitrary stick imposed upon public education under duress by the special interests of business lobby groups and chambers of commerce and enforced by flawed federal policies.

It won't be long before Tennessee's education apparatus rights itself and this cycle of psychological violence and abuse starts all over again. Our public school children will be reduced again to survivors before long.

In the meantime, payback is a bitch, ain't it?

Civil rights not quite enough for Cooper?

Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 3, 1968)

Conservatives never seem to fail to express themselves awkwardly toward Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. We have seen it before among red-state Republicans, but it is no less true for Blue Dog Democrats. Nashville's Jim Cooper reportedly attended a local law firm's annual MLK fellowship breakfast today and asked one of Dr. King's comrades the following question:

What I hear driving questions like this is the Blue Dog assumption that market-based principles generally provide solutions for social problems better than government action does. The fiscal conservativism at the heart of the logic of Democrats like Rep. Cooper ideologically dresses down every other priority. Hence, "economic opportunity" is code for never binding an economic system that hums along on inequality, on inequities, on profound imbalances of power and influence, wealth and privilege, because the market fixes everything if allowed to.

Left wanting more?

To tell the truth there was rarely the bifurcation in the Civil Right Movement between economics and politics that Jim Cooper seems to be insinuating in his question. In fact, black history is filled with attempts to advance economic opportunity beyond the movement that showcased Dr. King's work, but that is a subject for another time.

The question of economic opportunity for people of color and poor people runs like a distinct thread through Dr. King's speeches and writings. All Rep. Cooper has to do is listen to or read them. Take the last speech MLK gave before his death on behalf of 1,300 striking sanitation workers in Memphis. The last half of that speech has two primary expressions. One is well known because it is recited over and over due to the tragedy of April 4, 1968: Dr. King tells his audience that despite threats, he does not fear anyone because he has been to the "mountaintop", looked over and "seen the Promised Land".

But the second aspect of the second half of that speech contains express appeals to the people's practicality and economic power to make the changes necessary to bring them greater freedom. Dr. King encourages them to stop buying Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread. He tell them to quit the banks of Downtown Memphis for ones that treat workers more equitably. He mentions black-owned insurance companies that would be more worthy of his movement's money than white ones.

His last speech prescribes economic opportunity. It expresses solidarity with underpaid, mistreated city workers. It constitutes a jeremiad against the city of Memphis and its mayor, who prohibited a union, refused to raise wages and allowed African-American workers to toil in unsafe conditions. The only way you could insinuate that this civil rights speech is not about economic opportunity is to ignore the speech (as well as every other speech that gives this one broader context).

I was not at this morning's breakfast, so I do not have knowledge of everything that Rep. Cooper said. Tweets are notoriously unreliable, even when posted by a pro journo, for judging comments in their entirety. However, I do understand the flawed Blue Dog logic. I have also been exposed to political hemming and hawing about Dr. King's beliefs, especially in January when it is politically expedient to seem pro-MLK with no strings attached.

However, when Metro Nashville Schools destroyed its custodians union by outsourcing service work, we did not hear a word from fiscally conservative Jim Cooper. Some might argue that collective bargaining is a civil right. Regardless of that question, others prey on my mind: does Rep. Cooper believe that cutting and outsourcing school custodians gives them greater economic opportunities? Does he believe that Dr. King was not striving toward economic opportunity for sanitation workers by standing by their strike? If we honestly strive to be like MLK, shouldn't we stand by unions in their hour of economic need?

The Civil Rights Movement did not need an economic opportunity movement to complete it. It was always about economic justice as much as it was committed to nonviolent dissent and political reform. It supported unions who fought for greater economic opportunities. For any Democrat to insinuate that it was incomplete without the Blue Dog brand of snake oil is in poor taste on this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

Arguably, the Blue Dog could have done worse. At least Mr. Cooper did not hijack the commemoration to pimp a new bus rapid transit plan.

Metro Schools pulled me into their Twitter fight against my will

For some reason, the social media persona responsible for MNPS tweets decided to pull me into the drama resulting from pro-charter school protesters at their Bransford Avenue doors. I've never myself joined in a public protest of MNPS, and I certainly wouldn't in support of charter schools. But the communications person at the district lost his composure and decided that it would be effective spin control and triangulation to compare me to their protesters. All I did was blog--in more detail than can be contained by a picket--about my honest experiences as a public school parent the past 4 years.

Here is the sequence of tweets MNPS used to issue their talking points:

To please everyone? Really?

Metro Schools made an obvious attempt in the thread to minimize and marginalize my experiences and my reasons for doing exactly what Jesse Register encourages us to do: choose between public, private, and public privatized schools.

Okay, be irritable with me if you must, but why drag me into this drama with charter school zealots? Like I am the only person who has concerns about the privatization and commodification of Nashville's public schools? Beyond the distinct probability that there are others out there who share my experience and views, the comparison of me--an individual blogging an opinion you choose to read or not--with a group of people organizing a conspicuous, disruptive demonstration is itself silly. And there are others who have other differences with MNPS based on other reasons not even counted. Trying to please everyone? Hardly.

And again, why am I lumped with noisy demonstrators unsettling the tranquility of Bransford Avenue when all I did was blog an opinion MNPS objects to?

I resist being cast by Metro Schools in some extreme juxtaposition to people who want any and all charters approved. I have argued without fail that public education should be community-based rather than corporately-based. As far as I am concerned both Metro Schools and charter school boosters reject popular determination of public education. Both are beholden to corporate dollars and to venture philanthropists. I advocate something else: money should not be allowed to buy out the democratic process. Both bureaucratic district and education reformers are bought and paid for. Both have organized money. I advocate organized people determining public education policy.

In conclusion, public school parents, the lesson here is that if you choose to express an opinion at odds with Metro Schools you might be singled out on their social media for it. You might be dragged into a war that you never intended to fight. Either take caution or throw it to the wind.


UPDATE: more background on the protesters at Pith in the Wind. They were enabled by a Washington, DC advocacy group. And one of the protesters' targets, school board member Amy Frogge responds to their criticism in the wake of yesterday's activities.

Speaking of Pith in the Wind, I found that one of their writers made specious Twitter comments on our decision to send our daughter to a parochial school (I seem to be the "he" she refers to):

Now I recall that the last time "Aunt B" was out-of-joint me was when I questioned--in the wake of a soft-pitch interview with former DC schools Chancellor, current lightning-rod, anti-teacher lobbyist Michelle Rhee--her claim that one of her fellow reporters had actually exhibited "the fix" for journalism that Phillips predicted she would. Rhee is an acknowledged public figure who plies the high-visibility media circuit making her case for education reform. All my comments about Rhee have been made in that context. Not in the context of personal decisions of what is best for her children.

If you look at my blog post, I did not disparage Michelle Rhee for being a private school parent. I criticized the reporter for allowing Rhee to frame the debate so that she is branded as a public school parent without acknowledging that she also is a private school parent. There was branding going on by a public figure and the reporter failed to critically analyze the branding. So, asking for full disclosure is disparaging now? I tried to fully disclose in my blog post our reasons for leaving MNPS, and I'm not even a public figure. Journos are supposed to reveal the information that the rest of us may not access.

As to "all the private school parents" I have allegedly disparaged: well, I don't know what she means. While I am disposed to a well-adjusting and functioning public school system, I do not bear ill-will toward private school parents. For several years I have corresponded with other parents who have faced the tough decision to move their children out of MNPS. I do not recall expressing anything beyond simpatico with their difficulties and hard decisions. If I disparaged parents in the past, I apologize.

But again, what is the big deal with our decision? I acknowledged that there are ironies, but we are acquiescing to a degree to the system of "choice" that has been handed to us by the school district. And there is nothing ironic about the fact that for four years we chose to send our kid to an urban public school near our home in a transitional neighborhood. Has "Aunt B" ever made that choice? Eventually, it was high stakes testing married to a corporate culture (maybe even the threat of austerity) that drove us out of MNPS; it was not the inner city or our predominantly African American school.

Personal attacks on private individuals (relative to public figures like Michelle Rhee) by alt-weekly writers strike me as mean, bad faith in a system of "choice" they do not themselves question.

Let's just admit that the buck for a budget crisis stops in one place

Tennessean columnist Bruce Dobie launched a provocative salvo at Metro Nashville Public Schools today. In the middle of his barrage, the charter school booster made an irresponsible judgment about our public schools:

We are on an unsustainable spending path at MNPS. Soon, the schools budget will comprise more than half of Metro’s budget.

What makes his comment irresponsible is that Dobie basically passes the buck for MNPS spending by leaving Mayor Karl Dean's accountability for unsustainbility out of the equation. I am always amazed at how the Mayor's supporters shift the blame for our budget problems, as if our charter was not set up to make the county executive the determinant force when push comes to shove on the Metro budget.

But put the charter aside. Look at the way Karl Dean has actually governed.

For 6 years, Mayor Karl Dean has made 3 priorities the defining loci of his terms in office: education, cops, and economic development. He hammered away at it his at his first community meeting with neighborhoods at the Nashville Public Library and his lackeys and shills continue to pitch those priorities right up to today whenever someone questions the budget. Regardless of the sirens of budget crisis and our fluid, ever-changing conditions, the Mayor has strapped himself to any 1 of those 3 masts like some kind of dogged mariner.

The problem is that we have run out of time. Karl Dean has not run out of time. He is term-limited, which only means he is moving up to a challenge for his next political office, maybe Governor, maybe U.S. Senator. His minions in the echo chamber will realign with him. But the rest of us are stuck with the budget mess that is starting to spill out around us.

Symbolic of Dean: a neighborhood of children
and a closed, padlocked community center

Perhaps the school budget has grown large and unwieldy because Karl Dean strapped himself to funding it at the expense of other programs. Karl Dean's budgets are shell games where money is taken from programs (like parks and libraries) to prop up the big 3 priorities. Community centers are closed and locked on summer weekends. Major drag is caused by the economic development pole in the Mayor's holy trinity. Mayor Dean hands out corporate welfare and perqs like tax-increment financing indiscriminately to relocating companies (even ill-fated, costly failures). While he collects revenue from us all and has even raised taxes, he gives tax breaks to big companies and rationalizes it by saying they will hire people, which in theory is supposed to make up for the revenue lost in attracting the companies.

Consequently, the school budget is naturally bound to outpace other Metro services with the Mayor's agenda in place. How easy it is to blame public education and ignore the Mayor's other pets. How easy it is to ignore his costly economic policies in particular.

Double standards and special favors for businesses (code-named "economic development"), shunt revenues out of the Metro budget, while the Mayor has to keep up the appearance of "fully funding" the other 2 immovable legs of his administrative stool: police and Metro schools. That is the formula that has won the Mayor enough votes to win two elections while compromising Metro services for citizens. Far be it from the columnist to ever take an unflinching look at Deanastic economics.

Despite Bruce Dobie's claim, MNPS funding is not the primary offender in unsustainable spending on Metro's spreadsheets. To lay all the blame on Metro Schools is dishonest. I read Bruce Dobie and I wonder whether he is running interference for the Mayor's Office so that they will not have to take the fall for the budget mess and so that Hizzoner can continue the transfer of public wealth to private companies, inside and outside education.

Even though it may seem like we are leaving them, we believe that Metro Nashville Public Schools left us

Over at another project I curate, I offer an apology with no apologies for the decision to relinquish my public school parenthood in 2013:
http://mikebyrd.net/2013/08/14/why-i-stopped-being-a-public-school-parent/

FYYFF

I speak for many (reporters, politicians, parents and citizens) when i say that there is nothing scary about your drunk rage.

-- Nashville charter school founder Ravi Gupta reportedly
to school board member Will Pinkston

An aside to this unpleasantness: in 2011 I received an email from a prospective charter school founder who expressed incredulity that Mr. Gupta could come to Nashville, straight from law school with no educational management experience, and gain approval for Nashville Prep so easily with so many "inconsistencies" and "biases" in the selection process. Perhaps assisting powerful Democrats David Axelrod and Susan Rice helped the process along.

I have made clear on this blog that I am no fan of Mr. Pinkston, but Ravi Gupta showed beaucoup gall in this debate, which makes me wonder whether the ease of his ascendance in Nashville has gone to his head.

Modeling "the best" at Stand for Children?

Stand for Children is widely acknowledged as an organization that consistently takes stands at odds with the the public school teachers who serve our children. They are a major player in the school reform movement, and the Tennessee branch sat silently by last September when the state education commissioner Kevin Huffman punitively defunded Metro Schools. But they have never missed a beat hammering away at teacher performance as the cause of poor student outcomes while ignoring the socio-economic conditions at home that crush opportunities for children.

Stand for Children Tennessee blogged a post today hailing Commissioner Huffman's plan to lash licensure to perceived performance. For the time being I'll set aside the questions of judging teacher performance without reference to causal factors outside the classroom and of forcing educational missions into business-oriented frameworks for which reformers like Huffman have a knack.

What caught my eye in the SFC policy analyst's blog post were several grammatical errors that did not themselves embody excellence.

[sic]

I try not to pick on people about grammar. Goodness knows, I make my own mistakes on that score. But when education reformers with reputations for attacking teachers in general and teachers unions in particular mar their own writing with grammatical mistakes (even as they presume to prompt teachers on how to be "shining examples" and "the best and brightest"), I am bound to point out the hypocrisy. If you demand modeling "the best" for our kids, then you better set an example yourself in your written demand.

There were other problems beyond an errant misspelling in the blog post. How about a glaring sentence fragment in the original?

The Department has recommended that several changes be made to the teacher licensure structure to not only streamline the system, but raise the standards in the teaching profession. These changes hope to ensure that obtaining a teacher license

[sic] Currently, the system for licensing teachers has a few flaws.

Again, I do not usually play the grammar monitor. I tend to prefer to be charitable about such errors because I understand blogging is sometimes a difficult activity. And frankly, debating ideas is more interesting to me that grousing over grammar.

My criticism is ultimately not about correct grammar, it is about the holes in Stand for Children's agenda: I cannot let slip the poor paradoxes of purist organizations that claim to demand excellence from people, many of whom are dedicated to serving our children even under impossible conditions.

Here's one I missed in 2011

Now that Google Reader is shutting down, I've been going back through the stacks of stuff I have not yet read, and I found this 2011 piece by education blogger Jim Horn on the start of "KIPPster" Karl Dean's budget commitments to the charter school corporation:

No leaky roofs in the Mayor's office.

After the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, Southern governors and mayors spent large sums of cash to fix up ramshackle black schools in an attempt to placate African-American communities and, thus, seek to avoid the white nightmare of court-ordered desegregation.  Now a half century later, Mayor Karl Dean of Nashville is doing something similar, but this time the effort not only serves segregationists but also the corporations in need of a compliant and positivized work force that is to include a few black and brown faces that can be counted upon to keep their mouths shut.

Mayor Dean has committed almost 10 percent of Nashville Metro’s 4-year school building budget for a new segregated KIPP, Inc. corporate charter school, which lays claim to the exemplary urban penal pedagogy model that has the backing of all the oligarchs of the Billionaire Boys’ Club, regardless of whether they keep Republican or Democratic politicians in their stables.

Meanwhile, Nashville's public schools that serve the poor and the brown use garbage cans to collect water from leaky roofs and cram their kids into overcrowded and damaged classrooms.  At Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet, a high-performing integrated public school, kids eat lunch in the hallways and do not have a functioning gym.

Never mind that KIPP has unlimited funds at its disposal and more on the way, thanks to bottom feeders like hedge funder, Whitney Tilson, who beats the Wall Street bushes daily for new philanthro-capitalists looking for big tax breaks and a sure-fire way to behaviorally neuter and culturally sterilize minority schoolchildren.  Meanwhile, KIPP, Inc. spares no expense to shuttle children around to Ivy League schools under the pretense that a significant percentage of these kids will someday actually attend college at Ivy League schools.

Now that we are about halfway through Hizzoner's commitment, how does Jim's criticism hold up? Is KIPP doing anything more than resegregating public education and raking in the bling via Mayor Dean's regressive education policies? And is Metro Nashville Public Schools really doing anything better than it was before Dean's infatuation with privatizing education began?


UPDATE:  I neglected to mention in this context that Karl Dean recently lent vigorous support to a state charter school authorizer that would effectively remove power to approve charter schools from Nashville and Memphis school boards (what's the legality of that narrow focus?). Hizzoner believes so fervently in privatization that he is willing to invite the state to wrest political control from the hands of local voters, putting it in the hands of a conservative, bureaucratic state board that does not have to be directly accountable to Nashvillians or Memphians.


UPDATE: To reiterate, Williamson Co schools emphasize infrastructure over charter choices. Yet, Hizzoner believes that charter choices make Davidson more competitive.

CM Carter Todd, TFA donor, expresses his support for Karl Dean on education

There are many avenues of education reform, but I want to address one in particular: high-quality public charter schools .... we have to create and recruit more great charter schools. And I will stand in support of any reasonable measure that helps make that happen.

-- Mayor Karl Dean in last Sunday's Tennessean

It is noteworthy that CM Todd agrees with Hizzoner's conservative embrace of charter schools and has donated a large sum of money to Teach for America. TFA is a "teacher's pet" of corporate venture philanthropy that strives to remake public education on market-based models and business strategies irrespective of the views of veteran education professionals.

It is also noteworthy that TFA has its own problems. Witness just a snippet of the comments from a TFA alum to NPR last year:

the biggest thing is that politicians hear these inflated successes, and then they buy into the current myth that we've got these old, lazy teachers that need to be replaced with these young go-getters. And that's also not the way it works.

But the huge issue - and the thing that got me, about a year ago, writing on this almost weekly - is the TFA alumni who, after two or three years, leave the classroom and go into a leadership pipeline. Now, there are some great Teach for America alumni that became leaders. They taught for a lot of years, and they became principals and things like that.

But I'm talking about a certain, small class of them. They taught for maybe two or three years, and then they were given the reigns to take over a district - and they have not done a very good job. A prime example is Washington, D.C., where Teach for America alumni are sort of at all levels, including the very top, and they haven't succeeded there. They have a policy of shutting down schools, firing teachers, given bonuses based on what I consider to be inaccurate metrics. And they've sort of bought into the whole corporate reform movement.

Gary Rubenstein points out elsewhere that the corporate push behind TFA and education reform consistently renders those of us who are its opponents (many of whom, like me, do not make enough to offset CM Todd's big donation of $5,000) as "defenders of the status quo". Hardly. Both Mayor Dean and CM Todd are established, powerful politicians who rely on corporate donations in a Republican red state, by definition conservative. Calling themselves reformers in the sense of agents of change, is far from expressing truth in advertising.

The status quo in Tennessee is that poor students and students of color generally end up with poor education while students from wealthy, mostly white families are handed better opportunities. In fact, that is the status quo in America. Neither charter schools nor TFA do anything to change that status quo. On the contrary, charter schools "cream" the best performers from public schools and can move poor performers out. Moreover, education reformers defend the status quo themselves by drawing the discussion away from economic inequalities that keep some students down in the dust while lifting a few others to obscene heights. I certainly understand why: conservative corporate donors do not want to support anything that rocks the boat that brings them their wealth in the first place.

And consistent with the corporate status quo, it is not students who are the primary beneficiaries of school reform, but the few wealthy white guys bankrolling it with their investments; the kind of guys on whom Karl Dean and Carter Todd rely on to keep their powerful positions in Nashville. The Mayor and the Council Member may cheerlead the flipping of education away from public, but at the end of the day let's hope that they are honest enough to admit that it really will not amount to any real positive change for the vast majority of Nashville's students.

Follow the bouncing logic

Karl Dean, Jesse Register, and just about every charter school leader I listen to draw the conclusion that Nashville needs charter schools and more charter schools. Their premise is that "choice" will give Metro Public Schools parents incentive to stay rather than to move to affluent public school districts like Williamson County or to private schools.

Williamson County Superintendent Mike Looney told reporters yesterday that he does not want charter schools in his school district because they dilute the resources that the public schools have. So, the focus in Williamson is not on "choice", but on "infrastructure," since money would shunt from the latter to fund charter schools. So, how can Williamson possibly be one of the most envied district if they do not even wave choice at their parents?

I have argued for some time that, as a public school parent, I am more likely to abandon Nashville schools over the charter issue. I base my view exactly on Mr. Looney's premise: charter schools sap what little money bona fide public schools have. Charter schools weaken already reeling Metro public schools. Hizzoner et al. give parents a false sense of choice because the mediocrity is spread around while wealthy education corporations (and some charter administrators) enrich themselves on the pedagogic blight. Choice is like an opiate that lulls parents into believing they have power in a school district that does not share power with those who do not first have the influence (like that of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce).

I guess sometimes, when the red flags of peon parents in poorer districts are ignored, it takes an affluent (and predominantly white?) school district leader to smack down the bouncing, flawed logic of our own educational overlords. Since few people listen to me, I hope others notice the hot mess of Mr. Looney's logic (and take note that infrastructure seems to take precedence over choice in one of the most Republican-leaning counties in the country). It makes more sense than the bunk we are spoon-fed here.

The Nashville City Paper missed the memo

I have already posed questions about the quality of Andrea Zelinski's recent interview with StudentsFirst zealot Michelle Rhee. But for the sake of fact-checking the City Paper reporter let's compare and contrast her observations about Rhee being relocated to Tennessee to those of Anthony Cody, a public education advocate who lives on the West Coast.

First, Zelinki:

A Tennessee transplant, she is turning her attention to schools in her new state.

The polarizing former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor heads up StudentsFirst, an education reform organization she founded just as she began setting roots in the Volunteer State. The group has already handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to state-level political campaigns and a handful of local elections here, positioning itself as a force to be reckoned with.

Next, Cody:

Michelle Rhee has made her home in Sacramento, ever since she married the city's mayor, former basketball player Kevin Johnson. Since landing here, she has been working to expand the influence of her lobbying group, StudentsFirst. Last fall, a school board member resigned in nearby West Sacramento, too late to be replaced in the fall election. School board members appointed a replacement, but an ally of Kevin Johnson, West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon, mounted a campaign to force a special election, which will cost of $100,000. And guess who is running to fill the seat? Francisco Castillo, an employee of none other than StudentsFirst.

Local school board races used to be small town affairs. But recently, as money has flowed into education reform across the country, we have seen local races take on national significance. And StudentsFirst clearly cares about the outcome of this local election, right in Michelle Rhee's back yard.

Zelinski might have been able to clear up the confusion had she been willing to ask Rhee to clarify whether she is a Californian or a Tennessean or both rather than running with the "Tennessee transplant" lede headlong into her interview. As things stand, I'm not convinced that she is transplanted here at all.

Thanks, SouthComm, for inducing more disarray into local perceptions in education reform.

A local reporter interviews Michelle Rhee and fails to clear a bar set for her by a colleague

Last October local SouthComm blogger Betsy Phillips introduced new SouthComm reporter Andrea Zelinski in an interesting way. Yes, full disclosure counsels that Phillips' wrote some "homer" PR fluff on behalf of the news corp she blogs for. So, take the cheers with a grain of salt and then verify for yourselves. And yes, it is remarkable that Phillips dropped a double-edged sword of praise for Zelinski qua woman (saying males "don't really know a lot about the reality of women's lives" even as she also argued that women's issues are not different than issues, like jobs, that concern males). Yes, it can be argued that Phillips takes away with one hand what she gave with the other.

Those questions are not nearly as interesting in the wake of Zelinski's recent interview with lightning-rod education reformer Michelle Rhee. Move to Phillips' conclusion, where she sets a soaring bar for Zelinski's work to be judged by: she insists that Zelinski may help "fix" the problem of reporters who "play into the way politicians frame their arguments".

Given the track record of collusion of reporters and the communications machinery of politics (evinced by the lateral professional pipeline between news and PR), such an achievement would be a dizzying prospect for Zelinski or any other journo.

Having granted that, I'm not sure she came close to the bar in her Rhee interview. Rhee, a politician in her own right, was permitted, nearly invited, to frame the arguments on her own terms.

Start with national public education advocate Diane Ravitch, who read Zelinski's interview and blogged on it. Ravitch's analysis suggests to me that Rhee effectively framed her argument without follow-up or challenge from Zelinski:

The story describes her thus: “A Tennessee transplant, she is turning her attention to schools in her new state.” It also refers to the “roots” she is “setting” in Nashville. Apparently, she never told the reporter that she lives in Sacramento, not Nashville. She describes herself as a “public school parent” because one of her daughters attends public school in Nashville. But she did not acknowledge that her older daughter goes to an excellent private school, Harpeth Hall School (“Nashville, TN’s only independent, college-preparatory school for girls, grades 5-12”).

One can hardly blame her for choosing Harpeth Hall. It has an 8:1 student/teacher ratio, with a median class size of 13. Class sizes in public schools in Nashville and other cities are much, much larger.

I bet that Harpeth Hall does not give standardized tests and does not evaluate teachers based on their students’ test scores.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Michelle Rhee became an advocate for small class size, and for the same goals and purposes for all children that she wants for her own child?

So, Zelinski did not do much to challenge Rhee's framing her brand as a Tennessee public school parent. In fact, Zelinski's primary follow-up on the question of Rhee's children was framed as "public or charter", not "public, charter or Harpeth Hall". If we apply Betsy Phillips' own standard about challenging dominant framing of issues and values, Zelinski lobbed no critical questions that would have basically challenged Rhee's frame job.

Where Rhee actually lives and her status as a private and a public school parent are both critical points that deserve follow-up questions by any reporter, man or woman. Either the reporter did not know that information or she chose (or was editorially prompted) not to disclose that information and follow-up accordingly.

In the end, to what "different perspective" (Phillips' term) does Zelinski's interview allude?

Zelinski describes Rhee in nearly favorable terms that the latter would probably not disagree with: "an icon of the education reform movement .... [who] pushed to hold teachers more accountable for students’ performance, busted open the doors of school choice and shaken up the education establishment." The framing here is ridiculously uncritical and by no means distinctive.

Loaded, but unpacked reform vernacular like "teacher accountability", "student performance", "school choice", and "education establishment" is hardly neutral. In fact--without acknowledging exaltation of standardized testing, without analyzing the actual choices framed by privatization and without observing that the education establishment is bankrolled by corporate philanthropy and massive government funding influenced by campaign finance--this interview is biased toward education reformers like Rhee.

Zelinski's interview comes on the heels of a PBS Frontline documentary that shows Rhee, having invited cameras into an exit interview with a principal, unprofessionally firing that principal as the video rolls. Zelinski could have raised questions about the impropriety, if not the viciousness of that, but instead, the reporter herself frames Rhee's mean behavior more favorably in a general sense: "she's thrown a few elbows". Educators losing their jobs in humiliatingly publicized fashion is hardly analogous to getting whacked on the basketball court. I still struggle to see the "different perspective" Betsy Phillips tells us Zelinski will be bringing to SouthComm reporting.

In fairness to Zelinski, Rhee is a tough cookie, a veteran of news interviews who knows how to dodge land mines. When Frontline sent Rhee some follow-up questions based on a principal who claimed to have witnessed school employees erasing and changing test answers after students turned them in, Rhee simply did not reply to PBS reporters. So, if Zelinski had asked more critical questions that actually challenged Rhee's dominant framing of her reputation, Rhee might have refused the interview.

But that still leaves the problem of the lofty bar set for Zelinski in the first place. If Rhee would not allow Zelinski to ask probing questions that might actually challenge her framing of education reform, then Zelinski cannot help but ask the questions she did, and those questions (to use Betsy Phillips own word) "played" uncritically to Rhee's advantage.

The bar had simply been set too high.


UPDATE: At her personal blog, Betsy Phillips responds to this post. I have two three replies:

• Phillips never lifts a finger to answer the primary question of my post: what "different perspective" did reporter Andrea Zelinski bring to the Michelle Rhee interview that helped her refuse to "play" into Rhee's framing of the education reform issue? For Phillips to maintain that she was merely supporting another woman is disingenuous. She made a specific claim: that Zelinski would conduct herself differently as a woman when faced with the framing behavior of powerful people. The question still stands: where is the difference in the Rhee interview?
• Phillips speculates that I see conspiracies in women "writing positively" about other women. First, I do not. What I am responding to on a material level is branding of the SouthComm product; what I am responding to on a less tangible level is the predisposed tone of SouthComm writing. I previously posted on that predisposed tone regarding the writing of one of Phillips' other colleagues (who is male) on the subject of education reform. Likewise, when Phillips blogs under the Pith in the Wind masthead, particularly when she showcases the work of other SouthComm writers (as has been the established practice at Pith for years) the writing has a marketing life of its own. Why else does Pith exist, but to promote the brand? Second, why is it acceptable that, when a critic observes continuity between the writing and the brand, s/he is opened to charges of conspiracy? (And outsiders are not total dolts. We know that writers, editors and reporters inside news companies interact with one another agree on their own frames of interpretation). By the way, at least one local journo (who is male) has responded to similar criticism with the same hyperbole that they are not told what to write. As I explained two years ago, the brand is not a bunch of disjointed pieces wrenching themselves away from each other. There is organizational and interpretive cohesion. Hence, it is legitimate to judge the SouthComm news brand as a whole. That does not mean I see black helicopters.
• Phillips seems to resort to passive-aggressive criticism over my use of the term "tough cookie" in describing an all grown up Michelle Rhee who influences policy at a national level. It was a nice try on Phillips' part, but she failed to add that the context in which I used the term "tough cookie" is an all grown up one: Rhee is a veteran who dodges land mines. There is nothing symbolically childlike or diminutive about that metaphor. On the contrary, in that context, "tough cookie" means hard-nosed, strategic, battle-wise. Phillips, who concedes she has her own agenda, seems to be reading a gender agenda that I do not have into my observations of Rhee.

How do we know the Chamber of Commerce poll on charter schools is legit?

The Nashville Chamber of Commerce has made a habit of introducing its yearly "report cards" on Metro public schools with terms like "bold" to the point that it means very little: when every report card is bold, then no report cards are bold. Nonetheless, the special interest group whose main purpose seems to be to lobby and leverage policy favorable to it from Metro agencies trotted out another report card with rather interesting "poll" numbers:

Armed with a poll taken in May, chamber officials insist Nashvillians want “school choice” in the form of charters. A survey of Nashvillians, featured in the report, found that 43 percent of respondents believe the city should have as many charter schools as possible, and 39 percent say it should operate a limited number. Eleven percent believe charters are not necessary here.

Any marketer know that you can call just about anything a poll, because there are no rules governing the Chamber when it gathers its "findings". Too bad the journos at the Tennessean do not seem to heed it enough to probe into methodology.

We can assume that the "poll" was paid for by the Chamber, which makes it suspect to begin with. Money changes everything, including claims to objectivity, which brings me to my next point. I searched high and low for information on a polling agency that the Chamber could have contracted to conduct the study, but I could not find that information. Assuming that they hired a pro polling agency (I give them the benefit of the doubt that they did not just phone bank a bunch of their own volunteers asking leading, push-polling questions), I would like to know if that agency acted independently to cull these numbers in the same way an independent auditor would turn over objective balance sheets and neutral assessments. I would also like to see sample questions to test their objectivity. It is only fair. The Nashville Chamber of Commerce has not been bashful about questioning the methodology of more objective media polls at odds with their priorities.

Otherwise, I have serious doubts that nearly half of Nashville would like as many charter schools as possible. If the numbers are accurate and based on operationalized data gathering, then I can only feel sorry for a city that seems bent on going from foundering public education to mediocre privatized education that hands over tax dollars to entrepreneurs who have little or no obligation to taxpayers.


UPDATE:  Local reporter J.R. Lind tracked down the info that I could not find initially on the MNPS website. Appendix A has the questions asked and the results, but J.R. underscored the following paragraph in response to this post:

The following graphs represent results from a telephone survey commissioned by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. The survey was designed, written and analyzed by McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations in Nashville. The Parker Consulting Group of Birmingham, Ala., randomly surveyed 545 Davidson County registered voters May 8-9 and 13-14, 2012. The survey has a margin of error of approximately plus or minus 4.2 percent for the total sample.

Essentially, a special interest lobby group commissioned a survey designed, written and analyzed by a public relations firm (which itself has ties to local election and policy campaigns, most notably those of our pro-charter Mayor) and conducted by a marketing consulting business. The matter of whether the framing of the questions as well as of the answers offered to subjects is a legitimate one that I do not want to pass over lightly (for instance, it can be leading to frame the "unlimited charters" question by mentioning state legislative action), but more important for me is the fact that at no point along the process is the research conducted by neutral, independent firms that would be more exhaustive about objectivity and fact gathering.

The Birmingham consulting firm markets their phone surveys to get "accurate information" from their client's "target audience" and to "manage to specific quotas" in the target audience. What the appendix does not say is how the target audience was selected. It also does not delineate controls in place to keep callers from phrasing questions in leading ways or straying from a strict protocol of asking the same question in the same way to each subject in the target audience.

In my opinion a more neutral and objective survey of attitudes about charter schools should be formulated and conducted by a research (not marketing) firm without skin the game or financial connections to a local special interest group that has invested years and money clips on getting answers it expects. If the results are legitimate and objectively gained, I would like to see more qualitative data on what the 43% who support unlimited charters schools believe they are supporting and why they support such a market model for public education when running government like a business has not consistently worked.

The better part of valor is discretion

We have met the enemy and he is definitely not us.

Local blogger Jamie Hollin doses political realism to Metro Nashville Public Schools should they have second thoughts about taking on Tennessee's state education commissioner for attempting to punish their denial of Great Hearts' charter application:

...if the money [$3.4 million withdrawn by the State of Tennessee] is deemed by MNPS to be immaterial and the vote is against litigation, then they will have one heckuva time explaining to the citizens of Nashville why our property taxes went up to fund schools. Their next trip to the Metro Council for funding might meet the proverbial buzz saw in their next budget request—to the tune of at least $3.4 Million.

Public officials should choose their battles. Future fights over Metro funding, complete with public hearings and letter-writing campaigns, look like slow, uphill slogs of attrition compared to the blitz they might launch in court to defend their legal rights.

Hizzoner casts his lot with the state: not exactly a profile in courage

Apparently, Mayor Karl Dean could not put aside his own personal fondness for the Great Hearts charter school company in order to lead a Metro agency out of a mess the State of Tennessee engendered. A Tennessean reporter tweeted Hizzoner's response to state action in September:

Mayor Dean said in interview that loss of state funds [due to declining one application for one charter school] is [Metro school's] problem. "They created it, and they need to figure it out."

Gadzooks. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the school board made a mistake. If you were the elected head of Metro government, the person who makes all of the budget decisions for all departments and agencies, is it the wisest course of action to cut loose an entire department or agency for a misstep? The alternative expression--"Regardless of what happens, we will find a way through this together. Let's pick up the pieces"--seems the proper course for those looking for a high road even when one has the opportunity to say, "I told you so."

Consider the fact that those adversely affected by the actions of the State of Tennessee are not powerful business interests who should be able to weather the lack of state funds, but the most vulnerable segment of the population: Nashville's public school children. Was it prudent for Hizzoner to take an adversarial posture with the state against a Metro agency when the latter had not violated anyone's civil rights and had not conducted themselves in an unethical manner? Was it wise to endorse the idea that the state should be spending less money on all Nashville children because a few middle class parents, who already have charter options, did not get the plum charter school they wanted close to their predominantly white neighborhoods?

How many times has this Mayor attempted to be our local Oprah with efforts like encouraging us to lose weight or to join his book club? He can weigh in touchy-feely over our personal lives, but he cannot have some compassion over the real risk to kids of red-state action?

And let's not forget one more thing: Karl Dean's campaign claims to fight tirelessly for full funding of Nashville's schools is fundamentally compromised by his stubborn willingness to side with the state and punish Nashville's school kids over a charter school application.

But let's end the dumb assumptions and let's get one thing straight: the school board made no mistake. For once, they did something right with a charter school application. And how much worse does Hizzoner's callous indifference appear in that light?