Vendor Writing: Teach Our Children Well

Teach Our Children Well

BY JEN A., CONTRIBUTOR VENDOR

Republicans have long wanted to destroy our public schools. Each year, the Tennessee legislature does all it can to take the tax dollars necessary to fund our schools and gift those funds to enrich unregulated private businesses. That way the state can wash its hands of any responsibility for our state's low level of student achievement and at the same time add billions to their already overflowing bank accounts.

During the pandemic, the Tennessee State Board of Education did next-to-nothing to develop learning programs and procedures to help our early-learners keep up to speed in the areas of reading and math. While Republican legislators raged against mask mandates and vaccines, our children fell woefully behind. Where were their priorities? Certainly not with our children.

That isn't surprising considering our state board of education is a body with few members who actually have education credentials. There are two members who are involved with commercial real estate, a couple of lawyers: one who operates an investment firm and the other started and profits from a Tennessee charter school. There's even a lobbyist who used to work in the governor's office and another who came to the board after a 33 year banking career. Those aren't the people I would turn to for solutions to learning problems in our public schools.

Now years on, the TSBE and the legislature have finally come up with a plan to solve the student learning-loss problem. It's called the 3rd Grade Retention Law. It mandates that if a 3rd grade student does not pass, on the first try, the language arts portion of the TNReady assessment test given near the end of the 2022-2023 school year, that the student will be held back to repeat the 3rd grade or be remanded to an underfunded "summer camp." It also makes crystal clear that neither the teachers nor the administrators at the school will be held responsible for the student's failure.

The blame and punishment of the failure on this one-shot test will fall squarely on the small shoulders of the totally-innocent student. How in heaven's name can this be possible? Instead of developing a program that will help our early-learners become more proficient, or holding teachers and administrators to account for implementing that program efficiently, this law will allow the trauma of failure to follow this student for the rest of their academic experience.

The legislature has done everything it can to scare children away from books. After spending a good portion of the last legislative session depicting libraries as temples of smut and degradation, and librarians as little more than pornographers and pedophiles, is it any wonder that they have so little to offer our early-learners to help them to become able readers? Children have ears. They've been frightened by our legislature's baseless, outlandish rhetoric.

As always, low-income students will bear the brunt of our legislator's educational ineptitude. They may not have access to books or the Internet. Their parents might work two or three jobs just to keep up with constantly escalating rent. If a welloff family has a child who has fallen behind, they can afford tutors and private schools to help their children catch up. Low-income students don't have that kind of advantage. But I think all of us in Nashville can do something to help our precious early-learners.

Let's make this coming school year the year to "Teach a Child to Read." Let's make a commitment to make Nashville children the strongest readers in the state. Churches, unions, businesses, sororities and fraternities, musicians, lawyers, gas station attendants, fast-food workers, poets, publishers, everyone in town can do just a little to keep the earlylearners in our community reading and succeeding. We can do this!

I'm hoping that our local libraries and our neighborhood schools will develop programs we can use to help an early-reader to read. They can at least recommend age-appropriate books. This school year, everyone in Nashville should be reading to a child and then listening attentively as the child reads to you. As with everything else in life, the answer to how an early-learner becomes a proficient reader is: Practice, Practice, Practice. Let's do this!