On the Persistence of Privatizers
How Tennessee policymakers are undermining public schools
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has long been a proponent of privatizing the state’s public schools.
Back in 2018, I noted:
Even though as early as 2016, Bill Lee was extolling the virtues of school voucher schemes and even though he’s a long-time supporter of Betsy DeVos’s pro-voucher Tennessee Federation for Children and even though he has appointed not one, but two voucher vultures to high-level posts in his Administration, it is somehow treated as “news” that Bill Lee plans to move forward with a voucher scheme agenda in 2019.
Now, Lee has appointed a Commissioner of Education who is eager to help Lee realize his privatization dreams:
Gov. Bill Lee’s new Education Commissioner, Lizette Gonzalez Reynolds, has been on the job since July 1st and says her priority will be implementing a raft of policies supported by Gov. Lee and passed by the General Assembly.
Chalkbeat has more:
Three weeks into her job as Tennessee’s education chief, Lizzette Gonzalez Reynolds says her charge from Gov. Bill Lee is to implement existing major policy changes — from how reading is taught to the continued rollout of private school vouchers — not to craft new initiatives.
Of course, privatization is also coming by way of extremist charter schools:
Why the aggressive push to privatize?
Money.
In the case of the Hillsdale charters, the full realization of the scheme Bill Lee laid out in his 2022 State of the State would mean around $350 million/year diverted from public school districts to the Hillsdale charter network.
Then, of course, there is campaign cash.
Privatizers like to spend heavily to elect sympathetic lawmakers.
Adam Friedman of The Tennessee Lookout has a fascinating story out about political spending in Tennessee.
The story includes notes on top donors, top lobbying spenders, and top spenders on campaigns by way of independent expenditures.
Turns out, support for privatizing public schools wins big when it comes to earning political money from Tennesseans for Student Success.
The pro-privatization outfit spent more than $500,000 in independent expenditures in 2022 campaigns, making it the top spender in this category that year.
Another big privatizer giving gifts? 50CAN (50 state Campaign for Achievement Now).
Friedman notes:
Pro-charter and voucher group 50can/TennesseeCan (formerly StudentsFirst) has given 93.5% of its $1.1 million in donations to Republicans since it started influencing Tennessee politics in 2011.
Privatization of public goods is a big money business with clear winners (the privatizers, GOP lawmakers, charter school networks) and clear losers (public schools, their students, and local property taxpayers).
Money is as always a top level reason for privatization efforts in every sector of society.
But setting that motive aside I have taken notice in your reporting of the active participation of Hillsdale College.
The presence of Hillsdale as an organization is significant to me due to the fact that it is a participating member of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Project 2025 is arguably the most significant existential threat to the upcoming Presidential Election of next year and by extension the future of a freedom loving liberal American democracy.
Hillsdale College is in all likelihood engaged in these privatization of educational systems in numerous places throughout the country. Their primary objective presumably is to separate the federal government from public education systems in order to supplant modern liberal education curriculums with some type of Christian nationalist curriculum that is intended to cultivate and propagate a deity centered, fixed epistemological worldview.
This would fit right into the right wing agenda of subjugating all of society to their theocratic ideology by which they intend to control, direct, and subvert as many people to the Authoritarianism that relies on nothing more than a belief in “God.”
Do you know what time it is?