• Teachers are dumb.
• Educational diversity specialists are really dumb.
• Teachers “do things to” and “mess with” children.
• You don’t need to be an expert to teach. “Anybody can do it.”
• Modern education is like “enslavement” and “the plague.” It “destroys generations of people.”

Privately run charter schools are just part of the massive school funding legislation that Republican lawmakers in Nashville rammed through at the end of the 2022 legislative session. The official selling point is increased funding for public schools, although policy experts who’ve analyzed the legislation say it won’t shift Tennessee’s bottom-of-the-barrel per-pupil funding. In fact, schools that don’t serve disadvantaged communities might even see their funding fall.

But what’s most worrisome about this legislation is that it politicizes education, following a playbook being adopted by Republican-led states across the country:

1. 1. Give political appointees control over what can be taught in public-school classrooms and what books are available in public-school libraries (thus eroding teacher morale).
   2. Starve public schools of funding (thus eroding parents’ confidence in the schools).
   3. Shift public tax dollars away from public schools to charter schools established by Hillsdale College, a Christian nationalist institution with an overt political agenda to teach kids a propagandized version of American history—not a full and honest version.

Every child in Tennessee should have an excellent neighborhood school where they can get a full and fact-based education, free from political indoctrination.

Allison
[email protected]