Professional Educators of Tennessee Asks Where’s Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn as State Report Card Shows Problems

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 Professional Educators of Tennessee’s Founder and President, JC Bowman to the newsmaker line to discuss the recent report card for the state’s education revealing problems for Cannon, Williamson, and Davidson counties.

Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line right now by our very good friend, the president and founder of Professional Educators of Tennessee. They provide services to teachers but are not a teachers union. In fact, they’re the anti-teachers union. Good morning, JC. Bowman, how are you today?

Bowman: Good morning. And I sure enjoyed Bing Crosby singing.

Leahy: Oh, don’t you? Yeah, it’s great. It’s really great. Usually, JC you’re in studio. Today, you’ve got important stuff to do right away, so you can’t be in studio. So all of my great high-octane coffee is reserved for me, not you today. (Laughs)

Bowman: Oh, I’m just disappointed.

Leahy: So tell us, JC. Talking about education, there’s a report card that came out. I want to talk about that in a second. But by the way, I just have to ask you, there’s a rumor about the Commissioner of Education in Tennessee, Penny Schwinn. When was the last time anybody saw her in her office?

Bowman: Yes. It’s been like 30 days ago. We know she went to Europe at some point in time. Honestly, they still work remotely at the Department of Education. There’s been a sense of people are pretty upset about it because services are not getting rendered.

Yes, Every Kid

People are not getting returned phone calls when it comes to licensure, which is the bread and butter for teachers. They have to be licensed. They can’t get a returned phone call. We had a guy that went up there, a teacher from Metro Schools went there and waited all day. And finally, the security guard said, nobody’s there.

Leahy: (Chuckles) If you’ve seen Penny Schwinn, call us.

Bowman: Putting her on a milk cart may be a good thing.

Leahy: Yes, there you go. What’s the story of the performance? Our own TC Weber has a great story, analyzing the report card of Cannon County and Williamson County, and Davidson County. Do you have anything to say? Tell us about that.

Bowman: Well, number one, the report card is just like anything else. One of the things that did show that’s typical throughout the state, the schools that were in attendance and students were there and that had higher attendance rates tended to perform better. Something you’ve pointed out for the last two years.

You got to be in school to do better. So that’s one of the things. But you’ve seen stuff like that. You’ve seen that angle on that part of it. But particularly in Williamson is always going to be doing pretty well. So you’ve got a really good and of course, they spend a lot of money on education in Williamson County, so they tend to perform better.

And we know that those kids come to school prepared and ready to go to reading and everything else. The biggest takeaway for Metro schools was their attendance. They have a high percentage of kids who are not there. They scored 0.5. Below one on attendance.

Their scores are in the middle of the pack, but that in particular was very alarming. And so you’ve got that. Cannon County was an interesting county for me. I’m very good friends with their superintendent. I went to college with him we were history majors together, and so I’ve been a longtime friend of Freddie’s.

The one thing that people don’t realize is that Cannon County is one of the poorest counties in the state, but they have some very wealthy landowners which kind of skews their statistics. So they don’t get any poverty money. They’re above the poverty line but it’s really not accurate. And so they really have a hard time. They consolidated their schools.

They went down from five schools to three, I think is the number. They’re down to five. I don’t remember. They closed two schools. Kennedy County is a school district that’s got a lot of issues, and I do think that you’re going to see some more changes going on there.

Leahy: What’s the deal with the truancy rate in Metro Nashville public schools? It seems to be out of control.

Bowman: Like you and I had talked about in studio, it’s not just compulsory union, it’s truancy. And each system defines its own definition of truancy. They scored at 0.5 on chronically out of school, which means that they have missed 10 percent of the days on average.

It is one of the worst systems in the state for attendance. And of course, I’m not throwing stones, I’m just calling it as I see it. But what are we going to do for solving that issue in Metro schools? We’re going to create a panel to decide how to address attendance, which, by the way, we’re already in December of this year.

So by the time the committee meets and decides to have its thing, we’re already seven, eight months down the road. It just doesn’t seem like that’s why we pay people big money to sit in central offices to fix problems. And if they’ve got an attendance problem, they need to figure out what it is.

I think it’s somewhat of how they count kids that are absent. I think that’s part of their issue. But they’re the people who are paid to make those decisions to do it. We don’t need another rubber stamp committee to come together, which is basically going to echo what that person is going to say anyway. It’s kind of frustrating Michael.

Leahy: And to solve a problem, I always think it’s a wonderful idea, JC, to form a panel because they’re really going to get right on it.

Bowman: We’ve seen at the state level what you do. They trot out a solution, then they do the panel later to go around and validate what these people were already thinking. So I don’t know, it’s frustrating.

Leahy: Are we going to get more report cards out on more counties?

Bowman: Yes, they’re out across the state. I’ll give you one that you need to really pay attention to, though and this is Robertson County, which is north of us. But Robertson County had a horrendous year, and I got in trouble for saying that, but it’s true. They scored a one on attendance. They got a one on graduation.

A rate of one. They got one on achievement and one on gains. So they were really not doing well. Part of their problem, from my understanding, is that they opened a virtual school that took people from all over the state which they’ve since limited to just Robertson County students. So that may be part of the issue. But kids who didn’t want to go to school enrolled in this program up there or whatever, and that counts toward that school’s rate.

So that may be a problem and they may be able to adjust it. But the reporter did say to me when we talked about that one that they have since only limited to Robertson County kids that they are more responsible for, rather than being responsible for everybody across wherever they came from.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:

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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 “J. C. Bowman” by J. C. Bowman. Photo “Penny Schwinn” by Tennessee Board of Regents. Background Photo “Classroom” by Wokandapix.

 

 

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One Thought to “Professional Educators of Tennessee Asks Where’s Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn as State Report Card Shows Problems”

  1. Joe Blow

    How does MNPS survive financially? Isn’t their federal lunch funding based on attendance? Heck, you would think that the kids would go to school just to get a free breakfast and lunch because I am told that they are “food insecure”. What a crock!

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