Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio to discuss the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores revealing the education crisis in K-12 public schools.
Leahy: Crom, this morning we released the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores. These are done periodically of fourth-grade math and reading, eighth-grade math and reading from 2019, the last time it was studied nationally. Everything is down.
Math and reading scores are down significantly in fourth grade and in eighth grade. But wait, there’s more. As poorly as the nation is performing, the state of Tennessee is performing even worse.
According to the National Assessment, down eight points in one measure in math, down four points in another measure in reading at the fourth and eighth-grade level, but even worse in Tennessee than it is across the country. Your thoughts?
Carmichael: I know that in other states, and I assume that it’s true in Tennessee, that teachers are supposed to be evaluated each year. I was reading another article about the problems in Illinois that mirror the problems in Tennessee. For example, in Decatur, Illinois, 99 percent of black children were below grade level in math, and yet they were promoted anyway.
Leahy: National proficiency generally has gone down from about 35 percent to like 28 percent in math and reading, generally speaking. And it’s worse than Tennessee.
Carmichael: Yes, but it also indicated 97.3 percent of teachers were rated excellent or proficient.
Leahy: They are not doing a good job.
Carmichael: What they’re doing is they’re essentially saying, if you show up, then you’re going to be rated excellent because you got here. We have a national crisis in education.
And if any president can declare a national health emergency based on the data that existed for COVID, then clearly a president can, in my opinion, declare a national emergency on education because it’s the civil rights issue of our time and the competitiveness issue of our time, in terms of having a prosperous economy.
Leahy: So let’s take a look at the worst performance in the state of Tennessee, apparently – I don’t have the Nashville Metro-Davidson County scores but the Shelby County Memphis schools, their results were bad and have plummeted.
Let’s give an example, okay? In fourth-grade reading in 2019, the national average on this scale was 220. The Tennessee score was 219, and the Memphis score was about 206 in 2022.
Nationally, it dropped from 220 to 217, in fourth-grade reading. In Tennessee, it dropped from 220 to 214. And in Shelby County, it dropped from 206 to 197.
Carmichael: And that’s a low number, to begin with, the 220 is a low number.
Leahy: At 220 you only have 35 percent grade proficiency. That’s dropped down to like 28 percent.
Carmichael: It’s just terrible.
Leahy: It’s failing. And now the typical left-wing liberals, the ones who said we got to shut down the schools, remember those folks? They’re trying to blame this all on the school shutdown.
Well, the school shutdown had a lot to do with it, but I’ll tell you what else had to do with it: a poorly performing K-12 public school education system.
Carmichael: It was bad before the COVID shutdowns, it was worse after the COVID shutdowns, and let’s be clear, those teachers’ unions were more interested in having schools closed than having children educated.
Leahy: In fact, the teachers’ unions were big proponents of closing the schools.
Carmichael: And keeping them closed.
Leahy: Keeping them closed.
Carmichael: For as long as they could possibly keep them closed.
Leahy: Because what the teachers’ unions really care about is the power and pay going to the leaders of the teachers’ union, and forcing all teachers to be part of the teachers union. That’s what they really want. That’s what they want.
Carmichael: There are a lot of good teachers…
Leahy: A lot of good teachers.
Carmichael: Who are not allowed to teach properly, they’re not allowed to.
Leahy: I think a very, very hard job right now would be to be a teacher in a K-12 public school who’s actually trying to do the job.
But what they’re constrained by is not just the unions, but the educrats giving them all sorts of rules and restrictions, and then in an environment where they’re the ones in trouble all the time, not the poor-performing educrats.
Carmichael: Your 6:15 interview, Michael, was about higher education and the amount of bureaucracy that’s been added to higher education. I think your guest said that the bureaucracy has increased by over 400 percent in the same time period that the number of students increased by 78 percent.
Leahy: That’s correct, in higher education.
Carmichael: Same thing is true in K-12. And the reason that teachers aren’t paid more, if teachers are underpaid, the reason they’re not paid more, is that the number of people in our education system who do not teach is exploding.
Leahy: It’s exploding. And that’s basically the educrats pushing that.
Carmichael: And it’s the unions because every new body in the system means more dues collected by them.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Teacher and Students in a Classroom” by Max Fischer.
