Author: Marta W. Aldrich, Chalkbeat Tennessee

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Moms for Liberty Renews Fight Against School Lessons on Empathy, Compassion

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice speaks to an in-person and online audience on Jan. 8, 2025, at a small recording studio near Nashville, Tennessee, as part of the organization's new national training program for parents on monthly education topics. The first session was about social and emotional learning. (Marta W. Aldrich / Chalkbeat)

In a small recording studio near Nashville, Tennessee, conservative activist Kelly Schenkoske urged an online audience of parents to scour school district websites for contracts that mention social and emotional learning (SEL).

“Social-emotional learning is far more than just kindness,” Schenkoske said. “It is a bait and switch.”

The bait, according to Schenkoske and other panelists at the recent Moms for Liberty training event, is small shifts in the school day to introduce students to lessons about virtuous qualities like empathy and compassion.

The switch, they said, is to make children sympathetic to what they see as progressive ideas, ranging from open borders and acceptance of homosexuality to gun control, action against climate change, and redistribution of wealth.

“You send your child with your value system, your own beliefs, and now they’re getting the government’s value system installed into them,” warned Schenkoske, who hosts a podcast from her California home about education and parent rights.

The two-hour training session was the first installment in Moms for Liberty U, an online course meant to drive conservative parent activism in the group’s continuing effort to sway local and national education agendas.

That it focused on social and emotional learning illustrates the staying power of conservatives’ concerns about schools’ role in addressing student well-being. These concerns stretch back years, even as research on SEL shows wide-ranging benefits for students.

Now Moms for Liberty has an ally in the White House, with President Donald Trump painting schools as centers of radical indoctrination and signing executive orders that seek to stamp out teaching about systemic racism and policies supportive of transgender youth.

The group’s future trainings will cover critical race theory, restorative justice, sex education, library content, Marxism, and more — topics that are under scrutiny by the new administration and more prominent in public conversation.

Tiffany Justice, a Florida mom, activist, and former school board member who co-founded Moms for Liberty, sees SEL at the root of everything. She hopes the administration soon will call it out by name, too.

Parents who agree with the Trump administration can “take those executive orders, that messaging, and really make it come alive throughout the entire country,” Justice told Chalkbeat.

SEL use grew in schools after the pandemic

Social and emotional learning is an educational approach introduced in the 1960s to teach life skills designed to help children manage stress, treat others with respect and empathy, work cooperatively, and recognize and regulate their emotions.

The use of SEL tools has increased as educators seek to help students rebound academically and emotionally from disruptions to schooling and children’s daily lives after the Covid pandemic emerged in early 2020.

About 83 percent of principals reported last year that their schools use an SEL curriculum or program, compared with 73 percent in the 2021-22 school year and 46 percent in 2017-18, based on a nationally representative survey by RAND Corporation and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL.

Educators say the pandemic deeply affected students’ mental health, contributing to higher rates of depression and anxiety. And national studies highlight an urgent need to provide kids with tailor-made interventions. An infusion of federal aid for education during the pandemic helped to fuel the growth in SEL adoption.

The programs vary in quality. But a large analysis of studies on SEL published in 2023 found a wide range of positive effects, including better academic performance, homework completion, and attendance, a major area of concern nationwide since the pandemic.

Though teachers sometimes complain that SEL is one more thing piled on their very full plates and could distract from pure academics, the analysis also found that programs led by teachers had more positive effects than those led by counselors or outsiders.

“It’s frustrating to see the science and impacts in schools and then to see the noise around the banning of SEL,” said Christina Cipriano, an associate professor at Yale University and lead author of the meta-analysis, which synthesized more than 400 studies over 13 years that collectively included half a million children.

Cipriano recalled a trip to Washington, D.C., to talk with policymakers about using science to make decisions, including about social and emotional learning. One Republican congressional staffer told her that their constituents would love everything about her work — except the name.

“You have a Control-F problem,” the staffer said, referring to the computer keyboard command that lets someone easily find a term in documents such as school district contracts to purchase SEL products and services.

Polls back that up. Large numbers of parents support the idea that schools should teach interpersonal skills and self-regulation, but far fewer react positively to the term “social and emotional learning.”

Another SEL backlash brews

Justice, now a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with close ties to the Trump administration, described social and emotional learning as a “Trojan horse” that opens students to ways of thinking that run counter to what parents teach at home. For example, an emphasis on kindness might lead a student to feel pressure to use a transgender classmate’s preferred pronouns, she said, when that makes the first student uncomfortable and runs counter to their parents’ values.

That’s why Moms for Liberty U started its parent training series with a focus on social and emotional learning.

“We had to start here, because this is what opens the child up to the indoctrination,” Justice said. “It’s the programming mechanism that allows for gender ideology to come in, for critical race theory to come in.”

The training session, which was taped early this year, describes SEL as being tucked into dozens of programs and tools in common use in schools, from teacher-parent messaging platforms to programs designed to make recess a more positive experience. Panelists named surveys on youth well-being as another example of SEL.

Alex Neuman, a conservative author who appeared on the inaugural training panel, said the ultimate goal of SEL is “de-Christianizing education,” something he traces back to Horace Mann, the 19th century social reformer considered one of the fathers of public education.

Panelist Jennifer Kom, a psychology professor at Bethany Lutheran College in Minnesota, said SEL forces teachers to be therapists and leads children to disclose personal matters that can lead to bullying.

Their arguments were enough to convince Tennessee mom Genevieve Pahos to take her activism a step further.

Pahos was part of a small live audience at the taping. A Moms for Liberty chapter leader in Williamson County, south of Nashville, she already had heard many of the arguments against SEL, but she said the session inspired her to start filing more public records requests about SEL programs in her local districts.

“I learned a lot from some of the speakers,” she said, “about how to find out what’s really happening in our schools.”

Speaking to Chalkbeat after the training session, Justice said schools should stick to academics.

“Kids are sad sometimes; it’s okay to be sad sometimes,” she said. “But we need to help children be resilient and find their way through [sadness] by finding interest in life and success in school and giving them the confidence that they get from mastery of skills in the classroom.”

Put another way: “It ends up having kids marinating in their feelings all day. It’s very hard to focus on learning math if we’re all talking about, you know, Johnny’s dog that died.”

Researcher: Schools should include families in SEL programming

Even supporters of social and emotional learning are sometimes fuzzy on what SEL is and isn’t, Cipriano said, which can make it hard to have productive conversations across different viewpoints.

SEL is not therapy or a mental health intervention, she said. But done well, it might mean fewer children need mental health support down the road, just as teaching reading properly to all students might mean fewer students need special education services.

Building resilience — so that students can focus on academics even when bad things are happening around them — is one goal of SEL.

School leaders should think about what problems they want to solve and how they’ll support teachers, Cipriano said, not just adopt a social and emotional learning curriculum because it seems like the thing to do.

She’s working on a public database that she hopes will help school communities make better decisions about which curriculum or products to invest in. Users will be able to see what outcomes were generated by certain programs and the types of communities where these programs have been tried.

She sees lots of room for improvement — better teacher training, more rigorous reviews of existing curriculum, and better communication with parents.

“It seems to me that we have a real opportunity to engage families at the outset of implementation so they’re aware of what’s happening in the schools,” she said. “When you talk to parents and families about the strategies involved in social and emotional learning, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t want their child to be a good friend or have less test anxiety.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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TN GOP: Teachers Should Follow Trump’s “Gulf of America” Order

Sen. Bo Watson, a Republican from Hixson, chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee of the Tennessee General Assembly. (Larry McCormack for Chalkbeat)

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A state Republican leader has introduced a resolution encouraging Tennessee teachers, especially geography teachers, to use the names Gulf of America and Mount McKinley when speaking with their students about map locations recently rebranded by President Donald Trump.

As a proposed resolution and not a law, the measure would not place any mandates or requirements on teachers if it’s approved.

State Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, filed his resolution Thursday and had amassed 19 co-sponsors, including Lt. Governor Randy McNally, by the end of the day, ensuring its passage in the 33-member Senate.

Watson’s resolution follows Trump’s executive order renaming as the Gulf of America the body of water that for 400 years has been known internationally as the Gulf of Mexico. The order — titled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” — also reversed President Barack Obama’s 2015 executive order renaming Alaska’s Mount McKinley, the nation’s highest peak, as Denali, the site’s Native Alaskan name.

Republican lawmakers in Iowa already have advanced a bill that would require schools to change educational materials to map names that align with Trump’s “America First” worldview.

The Tennessee proposal reads: “We most heartily agree with President Trump that ‘the naming of our national treasures … should honor the contribution of visionary and patriotic Americans in our nation’s rich past.’”

On Friday, Senate Democrats called the resolution a “distraction” to important education matters aimed at preparing students for the jobs of tomorrow.

“Everybody has a right to file resolutions if they think it’s important, but it’s not going to be one that I’ll support,” said Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari, of Memphis.

Trump’s order has already sparked reflection, discussion, and debate among teachers, as well as mapmakers, journalists, and textbook publishers who seek to stay apolitical about map lines that are inherently political.

Mark Finchum, executive director of the Tennessee Council for the Social Studies, said his organization’s board has not taken a position so far or offered guidance to social studies teachers who are its members.

“Personally, I believe what teachers will do is what’s in the best interest of students,” said Finchum, a retired social studies teacher from Jefferson County.

“I don’t think they’re going to ignore the topic, but I also don’t think they’ll simply call it the Gulf of America and continue with the lesson,” he said. “In Tennessee, geography is primarily taught in middle and high school, so these students are old enough to have heard the words Gulf of Mexico. If you just call it the Gulf of America, some student is going to raise their hand.”

Tennessee, which overwhelmingly voted for Trump last fall and where Republicans have a firm grip on state government, has been an early adopter of laws stoking culture war battles around education in recent years.

In 2021, it became one of the first states to enact a law intended to restrict K-12 classroom discussions about race, gender, and bias. That law is being challenged in court by a group of teachers and the state’s largest teacher organization.

Under Republican Governor Bill Lee, the legislature also has passed several laws leading to the purging of hundreds of library books from public schools, with titles involving race, sex, and the Holocaust among the most frequent targets.

And earlier this month, Watson introduced a bill that could allow school districts and charter schools to bar undocumented students from enrolling, potentially challenging a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision entitling all children to a public education regardless of their immigration status.

His latest resolution says the body of water between Florida and Mexico warrants renaming because of the gulf’s pivotal role in shaping America’s future and the global economy.

Regarding the name of the nation’s highest peak in Alaska, the resolution cites President William McKinley’s leadership behind the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War and the nation’s rapid expansion, including the annexations of Puerto Rico, Guam, and Hawaii, during McKinley’s administration from 1897 until his assassination in 1901.

Informally, Alaskans have called the snow-covered mountain Denali, its Native name, for decades. President McKinley, who was from Ohio, never set foot in the state.

You can track the resolution on the General Assembly’s website.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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School Voucher Bill Poised for Passage as Special Session Set to Wrap

Chairman Bo Watson and Vice Chairman John Stevens lead the Tennessee Senate Finance Committee, which voted 8-3 to advance Gov. Bill Lee's universal school voucher bill during its meeting on Wednesday. (Larry McCormack for Chalkbeat)

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Gov. Bill Lee’s private school voucher bill on Wednesday cleared the committee level in a special legislative session, setting the stage for votes this week by the full House and Senate.

As expected, the bill sailed Tuesday through education panels stacked with lawmakers who support policies that provide taxpayer funding to families to pay toward private education services.

The bigger test came later in finance committees, where a similar voucher bill bogged down last spring over disagreements within the Republican supermajority. It passed easily there too, with only a few GOP members from rural areas in opposition.

Lee’s Education Freedom Act, his signature education proposal, is scheduled to be debated Thursday by both full chambers, where the votes are expected to be tighter.

If it passes, the initiative would mark a major change in K-12 education in Tennessee. It would create a new statewide schooling track, starting with 20,000 “scholarships” of $7,075 each.

To draw support from lawmakers worried about the impact to their public schools, the measure also would give one-time bonuses of $2,000 to the state’s public school teachers; establish a public school infrastructure fund using tax revenues from the sports betting industry that currently contribute to college scholarships; and reimburse public school systems for any state funding lost if a student dis-enrolls to accept the new voucher.

Only 15 of the state’s 144 districts are expected to receive such reimbursements, according to the legislature’s latest fiscal analysis of the bill.

An amendment added on Tuesday requires that, for public school teachers to receive the bonus, their school boards must adopt a resolution saying that they want to participate in the bonus plan. Sponsors said the change was intended to give local boards more autonomy over the funds.

The action on Lee’s proposal came as President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that frees up federal funding and prioritizes spending on school choice programs.

A day earlier, Trump applauded Tennessee’s Education Freedom Act.

“Congratulations to Tennessee Legislators who are working hard to pass School Choice this week, which I totally support,” the president said in his post.

A subsidy or a civil right: Senators debate the bill’s purpose

The governor, who has framed school choice as “the civil rights issue of our time,” called lawmakers into the special session to take up vouchers, disaster relief, and immigration.

Republican leaders who control the General Assembly have signaled that they intend to wrap up that business in one week and pass three different legislative packages, as well as about $1 billion to pay for them.

The statewide voucher bill is the session’s most contentious issue, prompting philosophical debates Wednesday among members of the Senate Finance Committee about whom the proposed program is intended to help.

According to the state’s own analysis, about 65 percent of the new voucher recipients are expected to be students who are already in private schools, with the rest coming from public schools.

That projection may be low. In Arkansas, which approved universal vouchers in 2023 under Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, more than 80 percent of last year’s enrollees had not attended public schools the previous year.

Tennessee’s bill would remove any family income restrictions for eligibility in the program’s second year. For the upcoming 2025-26 academic year, half of the vouchers would be available to students whose family income is no more than three times the federal threshold for receiving a reduced-price lunch, or about $175,000 annually for a family of four.

“It’s essentially giving a scholarship to people who can already afford to go to private school anyway,” said Sen. London Lamar (D-Memphis).

By contrast, the state’s smaller existing school voucher program, approved by the legislature in 2019, restricts eligibility to public school students living in Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga, and whose families have significantly lower incomes.

Defending the governor’s universal voucher plan, Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) challenged the suggestion that the measure amounts to a government-funded subsidy for affluent families.

“We’re not going to penalize people who’ve been successful,” said Johnson, the bill’s Senate sponsor. “We’re not going to penalize people who work hard and might do a little better than someone else. We want these to be universal, and that’s the ultimate goal.”

Johnson added that he “has a problem with deciding who’s rich and who’s not.” It depends, he said, on their family’s location and circumstances.

“This program is going to help families across Tennessee — 20,000 kids — get into a school that their parents think is a better option,” he said. “And it shouldn’t be based on income. It should be universal.”

Early research shows that small voucher programs limited to low-income students are more likely to have positive outcomes, while recent national studies indicate that vouchers have mostly negative or insignificant impacts on academic outcomes.

Long-term costs worry critics

Sen. Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville) sought to pin down the proposed program’s cost as it grows, especially since the 74,000 students who attend private schools in Tennessee would be eligible to apply for a state-funded scholarship.

State analysts expect all 20,000 vouchers will be awarded in the first year, allowing the state to expand the program by 5,000 participants each year, potentially doubling the program’s size by the 2029-30 school year. In the first five years, the program could cost taxpayers at least $1.1 billion, the state’s analysts say.

“This is a long-term program, and we should think about the long-term costs,” Yarbro said.

He called out the explosive growth of Arizona’s voucher program, which became available to all students in 2022. The initiative has contributed to a $400 million shortfall in the state’s current budget.

Johnson said Yarbro’s concerns amounted to “scare tactics.”

Any growth in the program is “subject to appropriation” by the legislature, he said. “We’ll be back next year, and we’ll have a conversation about it.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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School Board to Discuss Ouster of Superintendent Feagins

New Superintendent Marie Feagins engages with students during her visit to Northhaven Elementary School on April 23, 2024.. (Ariel J. Cobbert for Chalkbeat)

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools board has called a special meeting for Tuesday evening to discuss terminating the contract of Superintendent Marie Feagins, who officially started in the position just eight months ago, after a protracted search.

The board in February voted to hire Feagins away from a leadership position at the Detroit Public Schools Community District, making her the first outside leader to direct Tennessee’s largest school district since it was created through a merger a decade ago.

However, tensions emerged quickly between the board and Feagins over staffing issues and plans to close and consolidate schools as part of a sweeping facilities plan.

The special meeting — scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Tuesday — caught at least one board member off guard.

“I’m just as stunned as the public,” said Michelle McKissack, who represents District 1 and has been a strong supporter of Feagins. “I learned about this at about the same time as everyone else. There has been no discussion, at least with my presence there, to warrant this meeting.”

Other school board members could not be reached or declined to comment Monday night.

Another leadership shakeup could be a jarring setback for a district that took more than a year to choose and install Feagins and faces a series of significant academic and financial challenges.

It also could put the board at odds with community leaders, many of whom were glad to see Feagins taking steps to shake up a district they viewed as top-heavy and in need of significant reforms.

After Feagins started, tensions with the board developed quickly over her decision to eliminate around 1,100 positions over the summer, her allegations of overtime abuse by some district employees at a cost of $1 million, and her administration’s slowness to address air-conditioning and other school building needs before the start of this academic year.

There were also missteps over school safety in August, just after the school year began, as Feagins narrowly avoided a walkout by school resource officers and accepted the resignation of the district’s new security chief just days after he started.

The relationships didn’t seem to improve after school board elections that replaced four of the board’s nine members.

Tensions grew over the facilities plan Feagins’ administration was developing to close or consolidate schools — a blueprint that likely would affect nearly every board member’s district.

There was also anger after the Memphis City Council rejected the district’s planned site to build a new high school in Cordova to replace Germantown High School under a 2022 agreement with Germantown and state officials. Several board members said Feagins should have leaned more on board members to lobby council members for the new site.

Feagins came to Memphis well aware of the risks of a strained relationship with board members. Her 2020 doctoral dissertation, Chalkbeat reported in May, noted that a lack of trust can prompt superintendent departures.

At a tense school board meeting on October 21, after a brief discussion with members about building challenges, Feagins became emotional when board member Amber Garcia-Huett asked her what she was most proud of so far in her brief tenure.

Her voice breaking, Feagins said: “People — leaders who keep showing up every day, committed to something they can’t see.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Despite Controversial Law, Few Failing Students Held Back

Photo: CDC | Unsplash

Some 60 percent of Tennessee third-grade students scored below proficiency in English language arts on 2024 state tests. Fewer than than 1 percent of them were retained under the state’s reading and retention law, and about 2.5 percent are no longer enrolled in public schools, according to new data.

Among fourth graders who had been promoted by receiving tutoring during the 2023-24 academic year under the same law, just over 1 percent were held back this school year, while at least 4 percent have left their public school.

The findings, presented by Tennessee’s chief academic officer to the State Board of Education on Thursday, show some of the effects of Tennessee’s 2021 reading intervention and retention law aimed at accelerating learning after the pandemic.

The controversial statute was pushed by Gov. Bill Lee, who said he wanted to draw a hard line to “stop the cycle of passing without preparation.” The legislature has since approved several revisions to loosen the policies and provide more pathways to promotion for students who don’t test as proficient readers.

State leaders are ‘encouraged’ by tutoring and summer program data

The big question is whether students are becoming better readers with the state’s interventions.

That includes summer programming, which began in each school system in 2021 to mitigate the effects of disruptions to schooling during the pandemic. About 121,000 students went that first year, and participation has leveled off to about 90,000 in subsequent years.

Chief Academic Officer Kristy Brown, in her presentation to the board, said attendance rates improved for recent summer programs, indicating that parents are finding value in them.

As far as academics, she said: “What we’re really seeing is the effects of decreased summer slide, or the lack of it, for students who are participating, compared to those who are not.”

Summer slide, referring to when students’ academic proficiency regresses during summer break, is a common phenomenon, especially for historically disadvantaged populations.

As for required small group tutoring, which younger students receive weekly during the school year if they don’t meet expectations on state tests, Brown said students testing in the bottom level, called “below” proficiency, are moving in the right direction.

In addition, almost half of the 12,260 fourth graders who received required tutoring in 2023-24 showed improvement as the year progressed. Over 14 percent of them scored as proficient on their TCAPs last spring, and nearly 33 percent met the threshold for showing adequate growth based on a state formula.

The data is the first available for fourth-graders who started receiving additional support after scoring below proficiency in the third grade.

“To finally have the numbers — to see that the needle appears to have been moved in a positive way like that — I was glad to see,” said Ryan Holt, a member of the state board.

Several other board members also said they were “encouraged” by the data.

Brown, the state’s academic chief, cautioned that gains can’t be traced at this point to any single part of the state’s reading interventions.

“It’s a combination of the things that we’ve done,” she said, “with professional learning for teachers, and summer programming, and tutoring, and those things customized for those students to see the gains that I think we’ve seen in Tennessee.”

Many educators and parents have been less enthusiastic.

The high-stakes testing was well-intended, they say, but it’s taken an emotional toll on many of Tennessee’s youngest students, affecting their self-confidence and their feelings toward school.

The legislature’s most recent revisions to the law were intended to give parents and educators more input into retention decisions.

Many students facing retention used alternative pathways to promotion

After the 2023-24 school year, most of the nearly 44,000 third graders who were at risk of retention used other pathways to promotion.

Nearly 27 percent were exempted for various reasons, including having a disability or suspected disability that impacts their reading; being an English language learner with less than two years of ELA instruction; and having been previously retained.

Over 4 percent retook the test at the end of the academic year and scored as proficient.

Others were promoted through a combination of tutoring and summer program participation.

For the 12,260 fourth graders who participated in tutoring last school year, over 14 percent scored as proficient on the state’s assessment in the spring.

Over 32 percent met the state’s “adequate growth” measure that’s tailored to each student. It’s based on testing measurements that the state uses to predict the probability that a student can become proficient by the eighth grade, when they take their last TCAP tests.

And nearly 44 percent of at-risk fourth graders were promoted by a new “conference” pathway that lawmakers approved on the last day of the 2024 legislative session. It allows the student to be promoted if their parents, teacher, and principal decide collectively that it’s in the child’s best interest.

Any fourth grader promoted to the fifth grade via the conference pathway must receive tutoring in the fifth grade.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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List of Nearly 400 Purged Books Circulating Among TN School Districts

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One Tennessee school district’s list of nearly 400 books removed from library shelves, including titles by authors ranging from Dr. Seuss to Toni Morrison, is being used by other school systems as a possible template to follow.

Administrators for Wilson County Schools directed the district’s librarians to pull the books a month ago. This week, leaders with Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools sent its librarians the same list to consider when reviewing their collections.

A third large suburban district, Rutherford County Schools, instructed its librarians this week to remove around 150 titles — 51 of which overlap with the list in neighboring Wilson County.

The removal there came at the request of school board member Frances Rosales, who told Chalkbeat that she used the Wilson County list and reviews on the website Book Looks as the basis for her request.

The purges come under Gov. Bill Lee’s 2022 “age-appropriate” school library law, which lawmakers expanded this year to prohibit public school libraries from having books with “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual content, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse.”

Sponsors of the changes, enacted amid national “culture wars” fueled in part by pro-censorship websites, say their goal is to protect students from obscene content and give families more control over their children’s education.

But the changes have also created a climate of fear, confusion, and self-censorship for school leaders and librarians, prompting some to revise or ignore their own review processes and preemptively pull titles from their shelves.

Graphic novels and books containing LGBTQ+ topics for high schoolers are among the casualties, as are classics like Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, about a young African-American girl who longs for blue eyes, and popular children’s picture books like David Shannon’s No, David! and Seuss’ Wacky Wednesday.

“This law was designed to catalyze book banning,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program. “We should not be surprised now that we are seeing the mass removal of books in response to this censorial legislation.”

Tennessee law likely faces a constitutional challenge

Tennessee’s original 2022 law, championed by the governor, required districts to publish the list of materials in their library collections and periodically review them to make sure they are “appropriate for the age and maturity levels of the students who may access the materials.” Each community was to define what is considered age-appropriate based on local standards.

This spring’s revisions by the legislature added a definition of what’s “suitable” — including verbiage about sexual content, nudity, and violence that could be interpreted to prohibit literary classics like Romeo and Juliet, historical novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front, and encyclopedias containing photographs of nude statues.

The law is expected to be challenged in court over its vague wording, a lack of compliance guidance from the state, and the uneven way the law is being applied across Tennessee.

Among groups tracking its implementation are the ACLU of Tennessee and some publishing companies.

In Florida, several large publishers sued education officials there in August over a 2023 state law prohibiting sexual content in school libraries. They argued that the law had ignited a wave of book removals in violation of the First Amendment.

‘Creating an unofficial statewide book ban list’

A survey conducted this fall of members of the Tennessee Association of School Librarians found that more than 1,100 titles had been pulled statewide under the revised law during the first few months of the academic year.

“I’ve removed 300 books in the first month of school,” one librarian anonymously told the organization.

Since the survey, the number of titles pulled across Tennessee has ballooned “from a trickle to a tidal wave,” said Lindsey Kimery, a Nashville school library supervisor who is one of the group’s leaders.

“If Wilson County’s list is being shared around, and district leaders see it as a cheat sheet so that they don’t have to conduct their own reviews, it’s creating an unofficial statewide book ban list,” Kimery said.

A spokesman for the Clarksville-Montgomery district, which serves about 38,000 students near the Kentucky border, emphasized that Wilson County’s roster was being used “as a resource, not a mandate” for its own librarians.

“We are not directing you to immediately remove all of these titles from your library collection,” curriculum leaders told principals last week, according to talking points from the meetings that the district shared with Chalkbeat.

“However, we are providing this list as an example of books already vetted by Tennessee educators and strongly encouraging you and your library-media specialists to review the list and consider, if you have these titles in your collections, whether these materials violate state law.”

Books in violation must be removed, the principals were told.

In Rutherford County, where 150 books were removed this week, the school board voted Thursday night to give librarians time to review the titles and come back with a formal recommendation on whether they should be permanently removed or returned to the shelves.

“I don’t believe we intentionally have pornography in our schools, but I do believe that some books with questionable content have trickled in,” said Rosales, who told Chalkbeat that she “put a lot of thought and research” into her request to remove 150 titles.

She added, however, that “our librarians are experts, and we need to give them time to review these books and give us a report.”

Other school systems conducting library reviews reported that Wilson County’s list isn’t factoring into their work.

A spokesperson for Knox County Schools said the East Tennessee district is collaborating with its librarians and legal team to identify books for possible removal and will provide its schools with a list in the weeks ahead.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Gov. Lee Backs Trump Plan to Abolish U.S. Department of Education

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who has criticized the federal government for "excessive overreach," said Wednesday that the U.S. education department should be eliminated during Donald Trump's second term as president. (TN.gov)

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Gov. Bill Lee said Wednesday that he’d welcome closing the U.S. Department of Education under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, adding that states can do a better job of deciding how to spend federal dollars on students.

“I believe that Tennessee would be more capable than the federal government of designing a strategy for spending federal dollars in Tennessee,” Lee told reporters when asked about the prospect.

“We know Tennessee. We know our children. We know the needs here much better than a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. does,” Lee said.

The Republican governor’s comments come as Trump assembles his cabinet after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris last week to win a second term in office. As of Wednesday, he had not named his choice to be U.S. Secretary of Education.

During his campaign, Trump said one of his first acts as president would be to “close the Department of Education, move education back to the states.” The Republican Party’s platform also calls for shuttering the federal agency, as does the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Tennessee’s governor called it “a great idea” to dismantle the agency, which was created under a 1979 federal law during President Jimmy Carter’s administration.

“I think the federal bureaucracy that was built into the Department of Education starting in 1979 has created just that: a bureaucracy,” Lee said.

Tennessee has a template for spending federal funds

Trump has not provided a detailed plan for what would happen to federal funding or particular programs if the U.S. Department of Education were shuttered — a move that would require an act of Congress.

Lee suggested that education funding could be distributed to states similar to how Tennessee negotiated a Medicaid block grant waiver program with the first Trump administration, giving the state government more control over how it spent the money.

“We saved Tennesseans a billion dollars in taxpayer money over four years,” Lee said, “and we split the savings with the federal government.”

Federal funds typically make up about a tenth of a state’s K-12 budget. For Tennessee, that amounts to about $1.8 billion distributed to local districts for its public schools, most of which supports students with disabilities, from low-income families, or still learning English.

Lee said Tennessee would continue to spend that money to support its neediest students.

“I think that Tennessee is incredibly capable of determining how dollars should be spent to take care of kids with disabilities, to take care of kids that live in sparse populations, or with English as a second language,” he said.

Asked about the federal agency’s enforcement of civil rights protections — which some have suggested could pivot to the U.S. Department of Justice — Lee said the state would have a role in that work, too.

“The complaint process could and would still exist,” Lee said. “We would make sure that it happens in this state.”

Critics question the state’s commitment to special student groups

Tennessee doesn’t have a very good track record of educating and caring for its students who need significant additional support.

It was one of many states, for instance, that once had laws excluding children with disabilities from public schools. The premise was that those kids would not benefit from a public school education. Before the passage of a 1975 federal law establishing the right to a public education for kids with disabilities, only 1 in 5 of those children were educated in public schools.

Recently, the Tennessee Disability Coalition gave the state a “D” grade on its annual performance scorecard that includes education services.

Students with disabilities comprise a significant part of Tennessee’s public education system.

About a tenth of the state’s public school students use an individualized education plan, or IEP, that’s intended to ensure that the student receives specialized instruction and related services for their disability.

Federal laws protecting students with disabilities would remain on the books even if the education department went away, but it’s not clear how enforcement would work or what would happen to funding. The authors of Project 2025 suggested that funding be turned into something resembling a voucher and given to families.

Federal education funding has been hotly debated in Tennessee

Tennessee has gone further than any other state in recent history in rethinking its relationship with the federal government.

A year ago, after House Speaker Cameron Sexton suggested that Tennessee should look into the idea of rejecting federal funds, a legislative task force spent months studying the feasibility of such an idea.

Citing testing mandates, Sexton had complained of federal strings attached to those dollars. And the governor voiced support for the panel’s work and complained of “excessive overreach” by the federal government.

But some critics said the bigger issue was the U.S. education department’s role in enforcing constitutionally guaranteed civil rights protections for students.

Ultimately, the panel’s Senate and House members disagreed about their findings and issued separate recommendations. The Senate report highlighted the risks of taking the unprecedented step of rejecting federal funding, while the House report recommended taking incremental actions to further explore the idea. Nothing specific happened in the ensuing months.

Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat who served on the panel, said the Senate’s conclusions should give the governor pause.

“There are reasons why we have the U.S. Department of Education — to make sure that all kids have the opportunity to receive a public education and to have their civil rights protected,” Akbari said.

She noted that segregated schools existed less than 75 years ago across the nation.

“It’s unthinkable that we would move away from these very sacred and important protections, not just regarding race but gender, children with special needs, the handicapped community,” Akbari said.

Alexza Barajas Clark, who heads the EdTrust advocacy group in Tennessee, said the federal role in education is “to level the playing field for all students,” especially those from rural communities and low-income families or who have a disability.

“Let’s not lose focus about what is at stake,” Clark said. “At the center of every education policy decision is a student.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Teachers Scoff at Bonuses In Gov. Lee’s School Voucher Plan

Credit: Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who’s trying again to enact his statewide private school voucher plan, is hoping to win over critics and skeptics with a $2,000 bonus for public school teachers. But many educators who would be eligible for the extra cash are dismissing it as a diversion tactic.

Some are calling Lee’s bonus offer an attempted bribe, or “hush money,” as he seeks to expand policies that provide public funding for students to attend private schools. Others say it’s insulting to teaching professionals who have spent their careers advocating for their students, and for more funding to support them.

“It’s a one-time bonus that’s basically asking us to sell out our public schools,” said Liz Marable, a longtime Memphis educator who is currently president of the United Education Association of Shelby County. “But we are not for sale.”

Details of the latest universal voucher proposal, reached during months of negotiations between the governor’s office and legislative leaders, emerged last week after Election Day. House and Senate Republican sponsors filed identical bills in an effort to avoid disagreements between the two chambers that killed their first attempts this spring in committees, even though Republicans held a supermajority in the legislature.

Some concerns that critics raised about the earlier bills apply to the new package, too. Among them: The program could create long-term funding uncertainty for public schools and set uneven standards for accountability through testing. It wouldn’t guarantee accommodations and services for students with disabilities and would bar undocumented students from participating, in violation of federal law.

The one-time bonus for approximately 86,000 public school teachers is new to the mix. It would cost about $172 million, which could itself be a concern during a fiscal year when state economists project declining or stagnant revenues.

The bonuses, and other public school benefits in the legislation, aren’t intended specifically to win over teachers, of course; they won’t get to vote on it. Rather, they’re aimed at winning over Republican lawmakers, mostly in rural Tennessee, who are wary of vouchers’ impact on their public schools.

These lawmakers have to answer to constituents in areas where public schools are often the only educational option, the largest employer, and the hub of their communities. Lee and Republican legislative leaders are betting that the bonus will make a vote for vouchers more politically palatable.

Lee’s Education Freedom Act also proposes new money to help local districts pay for school maintenance and construction. And it includes “hold harmless” language that pledges the state will reimburse school systems for any lost funding tied to students who withdraw from public schools to accept vouchers and attend private schools.

Educators interviewed by Chalkbeat said that they believe the promised reimbursements would be short-lived, and that the funding would be eliminated from future state budgets, ultimately draining resources from their public schools.

“Teachers aren’t fooled by the promise of a small bonus in exchange for a bill that would lead to public schools closing across the state,” said Tanya T. Coats, a Knox County teacher who is president of the state’s largest teacher organization, the Tennessee Education Association.

The one-year bonus would barely address pay disparities between teachers in Tennessee and those in other states. The average teacher in Tennessee made below $58,000, compared with $69,597 nationally, during 2022-23, the latest year for which national data is available, according to an analysis by the National Education Association.

The governor is budgeting next year to increase the state’s minimum salary for teachers from $44,500 to $47,000, in accordance with his plan to get base pay to $50,000 by the time he leaves office in 2027.

But critics say those increases aren’t rewarding experienced teachers, keeping up with inflation, or attracting high-quality candidates to the teaching profession, which is suffering from sagging morale.

Kathryn Vaughn has been a full-time teacher in Tennessee for 20 years and works two other jobs to make ends meet. She’s unimpressed by the idea of a $2,000 bonus, which likely would be closer to $1,400 after taxes. The underlying goal of Lee’s voucher plan, she believes, is to defund public education.

“If you’re really serious about helping teachers, why not make some sort of systemic change to teacher pay to alleviate the starvation funding we’re operating under?” said Vaughn, an elementary school art teacher in Tipton County.

Linking benefits for teachers to school choice agenda

It’s not the first time the governor has sought to package benefits for teachers with more controversial education proposals.

In 2023, Lee pressed for a bill to guarantee gradual minimum pay boosts for teachers during his second term in office — and also to ban school districts from making payroll deductions for employees’ professional association dues. Teacher groups and many lawmakers objected to the tactic, but the bill eventually passed.

Similarly, Lee’s bonus proposal is tied to the creation of a statewide program to give $7,075 each in public funding toward the cost of a private education for up to 20,000 Tennessee students, beginning next fall.

Lee has pushed for more education choices for families, while also investing hundreds of millions of dollars in public schools, since taking office in 2019. He remains adamant that both policies can complement each other.

“This piece of legislation represents a commitment to education for all children in the state, and that includes public funding, teacher funding, parental choice,” said Lee, when asked by reporters last week why the voucher and teacher bonus measures aren’t decoupled so lawmakers can vote on them separately.

Other governors, especially in predominantly Republican states, have used a similar playbook when pressing for vouchers.

In Arkansas, for instance, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a 2023 law to increase beginning public school teacher salaries from $36,000 to $50,000, while also creating a statewide voucher program to cover the costs of private school tuition, homeschooling expenses, and other educational expenses.

Teachers fear that vouchers will hurt their students

Many Tennessee teachers are skeptical about the new proposal to give them a bonus, viewing it as a ploy to push a policy agenda that they say will ultimately hurt their profession, public schools, and students in general.

“Teachers I am hearing from are very insulted that the sponsor of this bill thought any devoted Tennessee teacher would be willing to erode the future of public education for a one-time, taxed bonus of $2,000,” tweeted National Teacher of the Year Missy Testerman, who works for Rogersville City Schools in northeast Tennessee.

Like Testerman, Siema Swartzel teaches students who live mostly below the poverty level. More investments in public education would help, she said.

“I don’t see how creating a voucher program and adding $2,000 to my bank account is going to make sure my kids have all the things they need to be good learners,” said Swartzel, who teaches music at an elementary school in Cleveland, near Chattanooga. “They are our future, and I’m very afraid that vouchers will interfere with that.”

In Clarksville, near the Kentucky border, Karel Lea Biggs doesn’t think vouchers, as they’re proposed, would end up benefiting any of her middle schoolers, many of whom are considered economically disadvantaged.

Under Lee’s proposal, half of the first year’s vouchers would be subject to limits based on family income, but those limits would still be high: three times the threshold to qualify for free and reduced price school meals, or about $173,000 for a family of four. The remaining 10,000 slots would have no income restrictions.

Lee’s administration acknowledges that many enrollees would be the children of parents who intended to send their children to private schools anyway, and already had the resources to do so.

Meanwhile, Biggs says her public school desperately needs more resources to support students experiencing post-pandemic anxiety and other mental health issues. “A teacher bonus and vouchers,” she said, “just aren’t going to help my kids.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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School Vouchers Are Back, With GOP Leaders On the Same Page

Gov. Bill Lee talks with students attending a summer learning program at Battle Academy, a public school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on June 18, 2024. His revised universal private school voucher proposal, which stalled in the state legislature in 2024, will go before lawmakers again in 2025. (Courtesy of the State of Tennessee)

Seven months after Gov. Bill Lee’s first universal school voucher bill died over disagreements within the legislature’s Republican supermajority, GOP leaders were unified as they introduced new legislation Wednesday.

House and Senate majority leaders William Lamberth and Jack Johnson filed identical bills to create Education Freedom Scholarships giving $7,075 each in public funding for a private education for up to 20,000 students, beginning next fall.

Recipients in grades 3-11 would be required to take a national or state standardized achievement test to track the program’s effectiveness.

In an effort to garner support among public school advocates, the proposal calls for giving every public school teacher in Tennessee a one-time $2,000 bonus. It also would direct 80 percent of tax revenues from Tennessee’s new sports betting industry toward local school building costs, especially for emergency needs and for 38 rural counties designated as distressed or at risk.

In a statement, the governor said he looks forward to delivering on his promise for more education choices for parents.

“For more than a year, I have worked in partnership with the General Assembly to introduce a unified school choice plan that empowers parents when it comes to their child’s education and further invests in Tennessee’s public schools and teachers,” Lee said.

Both Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton issued statements of support.

The bills were the first legislation introduced for the next General Assembly to consider when it convenes Jan. 14, signaling the governor’s intention to make the issue his top legislative priority for a second straight year.

The proposal arrived one day after pivotal elections in which vouchers were an issue in numerous legislative races across Tennessee, and on the ballot in other states. Republicans retained their grip on both of Tennessee’s legislative chambers, while voters in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska rejected measures that would have steered public dollars toward private schools.

Lee is expected to speak with reporters later Wednesday about his latest plan, including whether he intends to call a special session in January to focus on it exclusively.

The governor successfully pushed for a 2019 law to create a smaller voucher program in Nashville and Memphis, which has since expanded to Chattanooga. The state comptroller’s first report on that “pilot” program’s effectiveness is due Jan. 1, 2026.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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School Voucher Bills to Be First Filed Ahead of Next Legislative Session

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, flanked by Republican legislative leaders, speaks with reporters after the 2024 General Assembly adjourned on April 25 in Nashville. The defeat of Lee's universal voucher proposal was a major setback for his administration. (Courtesy of State of Tennessee)

A new universal school-voucher proposal will be the first bill filed for Tennessee’s upcoming legislative session, signaling that Gov. Bill Lee intends to make the plan his number-one education priority for a second straight year.

Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) said last week that he’ll file his chamber’s legislation on the morning of Nov. 6, the day after Election Day. He expects House Majority Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland) will do the same.

The big question is whether House and Senate Republican leaders will be able to agree on the details in 2025. The 114th Tennessee General Assembly convenes on Jan. 14 as Lee begins his last two years in office.

During the 2024 session, the governor’s Education Freedom Scholarship proposal stalled in finance committees over disagreements about testing and funding, despite a GOP supermajority, and even as universal voucher programs sprang up in several other states.

Sponsors in the Tennessee House, where voucher programs have had a harder time getting support from rural Republicans and urban Democrats, attempted to woo votes with an omnibus-style bill that included benefits for public schools, too. But Senate Republican leaders balked at the scope and cost of the House version.

On Monday, Johnson gave a voucher update to school board members in Williamson County, which he represents, on the development of new legislation.

Similar to last year’s proposal, the new bill would provide about $7,000 in taxpayer funds to each of up to 20,000 students to attend a private school beginning next fall, with half of the slots going to students who are considered economically disadvantaged. By 2026, all of Tennessee’s K-12 students, regardless of family income, would be eligible for vouchers, though the number of recipients would depend on how much money is budgeted for the program.

“The bill is not finalized, but we’re all working together with the governor’s office to come up with a bill we all can support,” Johnson told Chalkbeat after the presentation.

Testing accountability is among chief issues to settle.

Johnson said the Senate’s 2025 bill will again include some type of testing requirement for voucher recipients — either state assessments or state-approved national tests — to gauge whether the program is improving academic outcomes.

However, the Senate bill would eliminate a previous provision that might have allowed public school students to enroll in any district, even if they’re not zoned for it. That policy proposal had been included at the insistence of Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), who lost his reelection bid in the August primary.

Lamberth, the House leader, did not respond this week to multiple requests for comment about his chamber’s plan, which in 2024 had no testing requirement for voucher recipients. Instead, the House version sought to dramatically reduce testing and accountability for public school students, including replacing high school end-of-course assessments with ACT college entrance exams.

The House bill also included numerous financial incentives to try to garner support from public school advocates. One idea was to increase the state’s contribution to pay for public school teachers’ medical insurance by redirecting $125 million the governor had earmarked for teacher salary increases.

Johnson told school board members the governor is planning a “substantial” increase for public education funding in 2025 but didn’t specify how much or for what.

“I think we’re going to have some things in there that will be great for all public education,” he said when asked later about including costly incentives such as teacher medical insurance funding. “Whether it’s in that (voucher) bill or if it’s in a separate bill is a great question. We will see. I don’t know the answer.”

Williamson County school board rescinds earlier anti-voucher resolution

Johnson told board members in his home district that he expects “nominal” impact to Williamson County’s two suburban school systems south of Nashville, if the bill passes the legislature in 2025. Most enrollees, he said, would be in urban areas that have more low-performing schools and private school options.

Later Monday, Williamson County’s board, including four newly elected members whose campaigns were supported by a conservative out-of-state political action committee, voted 10-2 to rescind a resolution passed by the previous board opposing Lee’s Education Freedom Scholarship Act.

The governor is from Williamson County and graduated from a public high school there in 1977. So it was significant when his local board voted in March to join more than 50 other school boards across Tennessee on record against his signature education proposal.

But Dennis Diggers, a new board member, argued that it was appropriate to revisit the issue given the recent election, and proposed rescinding the resolution.

“Four of the six candidates who won their election ran publicly for more than six months on this issue, so it was out there,” Diggers said. “I am not going to deny the parents in Williamson County the chance to help their kids.”

Meanwhile, a Tennessee policy organization that supports vouchers released a new poll showing 58 percent of the state’s voters are more inclined to support a candidate who supports letting parents collect public funding to choose where their child is educated, including public, private, charter, or home schools. The Beacon Center poll did not use the word “vouchers” in its question to voters, which tends to poll worse than language about “school choice.”

Universal vouchers would mark a major expansion of vouchers in Tennessee, where lawmakers voted in 2019 to create education savings account options for students in Memphis and Nashville. That targeted program, which has since expanded to the Chattanooga area, has 3,550 enrollees in its third year, still below the 5,000-student cap, according to data provided by the state education department.

A spokeswoman for the governor said his administration continues to work with both legislative chambers on a “unified” universal voucher bill to kick off discussions for the 2025 session. She also noted that $144 million remains in this year’s state budget for the program, even though lawmakers didn’t approve the bill.

“We remain grateful for the General Assembly’s continued commitment to deliver Education Freedom Scholarships to Tennessee families by keeping funding for last year’s proposal in the budget,” said Elizabeth Johnson, the governor’s press secretary.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.