New Test to Solve Tennessee's "true ethical and moral dilemma"?
Candice McQueen has replaced Tennessee's toxic former Commissioner of Education, Kevin (Rhee) Huffman. In doing so, McQueen has inherited one of the most aggressive corporate education agendas in the nation.
At the same time, she has taken the reins of a state system that has been underfunded for at least the past 35 years, as governors and legislators have jumped from reform one bandwagon to another to collect any free federal cash being handed out, even as the percentage of the state's budget committed to education has continued to dry up (see Part II of The Mismeasure of Education).
If these challenges were not enough, Dr. McQueen faces a literacy meltdown as measured by state test scores, even with the infusion of $501,000,000 from Race to the Top federal funds--most of which never reached the classrooms or the severely underfunded school library programs that remain on life support.
At the same time, poverty continues to grow across the state, with more than one in four children now living in poverty, and one in three black or brown children. The state ranks 43rd in the nation in child poverty and 48th in Hunger and Food Insecurity. As poverty and hunger spread, literacy scores continue to tank, especially since math prep has been the major focus of year-round test prep.
For Dr. McQueen, however, it is not the hunger, poverty, and oppression that represent the "true ethical and moral dilemma; it is, rather, the low reading test scores.
As these developments unfold, the billionaire governor, Bill Haslam, continues to hand out to his cronies as much of the public resources as he can, including the shuttering of public schools in favor of the corporate welfare charter reform schools. And the chief federal architect of the racist new states rights education policy based on the proliferation of charter schools, Lamar Schools Matter: New Test to Solve Tennessee's "true ethical and moral dilemma"?: