TN Supt. Penny Schwinn Bypasses Legislature with No-Bid Voucher Contract | deutsch29

TN Supt. Penny Schwinn Bypasses Legislature with No-Bid Voucher Contract | deutsch29

TN Supt. Penny Schwinn Bypasses Legislature with No-Bid Voucher Contract

Teach for America (TFA) alum Penny Schwinn is Tennessee’s education commissioner, a post that she has held for a year as of this writing.

Within ten months of Schwinn’s arrival as Tennessee ed commissioner, the Tennessee Department of Education experienced 250 resignations, including “people with decades of institutional knowledge,” which the November 15, 2019, Tennessee Chalkbeat characterized as “not typical.”

It might not be typical for an education commissioner who does not hail from TFA, but Schwinn’s purgative effect on Tennessee’s ed department is a familiar story to those of us in Louisiana, where another TFA alum, John White, had the same effect on the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE). (For an inside peek of LDOE chaos under White, see this 2014 post by former LDOE employee, Jason France.)

I first wrote about Schwinn in her previous role as Texas Education Agency (TEA) deputy commissioner of academics in connection to the wrongful termination of Texas special education director, Laurie Kash, who blew the whistle on TEA’s no-bid contract with special education data company, SPEDx. One of Kash’s concerns was an alleged personal relationship between Schwinn and a SPEDx leader.

On February 12, 2020, Schwinn was again in the news related to a no-bid contract controversy, this time in connection with Tennessee’s school voucher program CONTINUE READING: TN Supt. Penny Schwinn Bypasses Legislature with No-Bid Voucher Contract | deutsch29