Crafty TN GOP Causes Delay in School Funding Lawsuit
Funding fight in New York, Vouchers in Missouri, and more
Tennessee Republicans are so resistant to funding public schools that they are now coming after the judiciary branch in order to delay a school funding lawsuit many observers suggest the state will lose.
Chalkbeat reports that a Nashville judge set to hear a case about the adequacy of the state’s funding formula has now recused herself following the filing of legislation that would remove her from the bench.
Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle did not offer a reason for her recusal in a two-page order issued on Monday in Davidson County Chancery Court. But the order came several days after Rep. Tim Rudd, a Republican from Murfreesboro, filed a resolution seeking to remove Lyle from the bench over her ruling last year to expand absentee voting during the coronavirus pandemic. Rudd, who chairs the House subcommittee on elections and campaign finance, said the ruling amounted to judicial overreach.
As Chalkbeat notes, the funding case was schedule to be heard this November. Now, that timeline is in doubt as a new judge will need to be assigned and will have to be brought up to speed on the case.
A bipartisan commission in Tennessee has suggested the state underfunds public schools by $1.7 billion. Meanwhile, the state’s GOP continues to crow about a funding record that has consistently earned the state a grade of “F” in both overall funding level and funding effort relative to ability.
The state has at least a $3.1 billion surplus this year, and yet GOP leaders in the legislature have joined with Gov. Bill Lee to maintain the paltry status quo of school funding.
The school funding fight isn’t limited to Tennessee, of course. The Education Law Center reports on Gov. Cuomo’s New York budget and his consistent push for cuts to public school funding.
Education Law Center released a research brief analyzing state school aid cuts in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s FY22 State Budget. For a second straight year, the Governor wants to impose significant cuts on school districts. For the 2021-22 school year, the proposed cuts would total $2 billion statewide.
If enacted by the Legislature, the Governor’s state aid cuts would amount to over half of the $3.85 billion in federal emergency relief funds allocated by Congress to New York public schools in the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act. Congress intended these federal funds to be used by districts over multiple years to respond to the immediate and ongoing impacts of COVID-19, not to plug holes in state education budgets.
The $2 billion in proposed cuts includes a $1.35 billion “local district funding adjustment” (LDFA) along with a $683 million “Services Aid Reduction” (SAR). Governor Cuomo has proposed that these cuts be permanent and recur in future year budgets, when emergency federal funds may no longer be available to fill the hole.
Meanwhile, in the incessant push for vouchers
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports on privatization efforts there:
If ever there was a Trojan Horse bill sneaking its way through the state Legislature in hopes that Missouri taxpayers wouldn’t take notice, it is House Bill 349. That’s the bill approved by the House Thursday that purports to expand school-choice opportunities for low-income students. Everything about the bill is worded to make it look innocuous and well-intentioned, but it opens the door for the defunding of public education and for taxpayer money to begin funding private schools — possibly to include religious schools.
This bill deserves swift defeat in the Senate. But given the way hardline conservatives in the GOP-dominated Legislature operate, the goal is always to see what lawmakers can sneak past the public when no one’s looking.
There is, though, some good news out of Tennessee as the state’s Supreme Court rejected an effort by privatizers to push forward with implementation of Gov. Lee’s voucher scheme:
On February 22, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied a motion by pro-voucher groups to lift a lower court’s permanent injunction barring implementation of Tennessee’s 2019 “education savings account” voucher law. In May 2020, the Davidson County Chancery Court ruled the voucher law is unconstitutional because it violates the Home Rule provision of the Tennessee Constitution. In August 2020, the Tennessee Court of Appeals affirmed the Chancery Court’s decision. The case is now before the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Talking Testing
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review opines that testing during a pandemic seems like a really bad idea:
And in the very best of years, the tests are unpopular. They are stressful for many educators and kids alike. They put a year’s worth of pressure on a week of questions.
They set up the false equivalency of progress or regression, since this year’s third-grade numbers have nothing to do with last year’s numbers that measured a completely different class of students with different strengths, weaknesses and challenges. By the same token, measuring last year’s third-graders against their progress in fourth grade says nothing, as they are learning entirely different material from different teachers — assuming they are, in fact, the same students and no one moved or was otherwise shuffled.
Kids are stressed. Some families are facing eviction or housing issues. Many more are facing an epic hunger crisis that is stretching food banks to their limits. Even in families that have managed to weather the pandemic fairly well, learning has been disrupted in ways large and small, and in degrees hard to measure.
This does not seem like the formula for accurately measuring what a kid does or doesn’t know.
Nashville’s Amy Frogge agrees:
This is a huge disappointment. Standardized testing in general is pretty useless. It does not improve outcomes for students or help drive instruction for teachers. To require testing during a pandemic is a crime. I can tell you the results right now: Children will fail- if they even show up at all.
Connecting the Dots
Nashville education blogger TC Weber connects the dots and explains all the money being made by those pushing a privatization and “reform” agenda:
These groups usually have innocuous names that give the impression that they are fighting for parents and kids – Stand For Children, Teach For America, The New Teacher Project, Education Trust, Tennessee Campaign For Achievement, State Cooperative for Reforming Education. If you didn’t know better, you’d have positive feelings about their efforts. That’s not by accident.
Behind these feel-good names lurks a lot of cash. Cash that comes via a select number of billionaires – Gates Foundation, Hyde Foundation, Walton Foundation. To most of you, this is not new information, but I wonder if even the most informed are aware of the salaries commanded by the “public interest” groups and the volume of money they spread around. The most recently available tax forms are from a year or two ago, but I doubt anybody has taken a pay cut since then:
John King, Education Trust, made $531,027 in 2018. Many of you know that Acting-US Secretary of Education Ian Rosenblum previously worked for EduTrust but did you know that in 2018 he cleared a salary of $216,788?
Elisa Villanueva Beard, Teach For America, in 2017 drew an annual salary of $493,836
Daniel Weisberg, TNTP, in 2018 received $348,779 in compensation.
David Mansouri, SCORE CEO, and Sharon Roberts, Chief Impact Officer, pulled in $313,295 and 272,808 respectively.
Brent Easly, TNCAN, the year before he went to work for Governor Lee cleared roughly $170K.
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