Sixty-Three Superintendents Who’ve Had Enough

I guess it’s a good thing 63 Tennessee superintendents are “pulling the reins in” on Tennessee education commissioner Kevin Huffman. I’m not exactly sure what that will mean in the end, or what direction they’re going to steer Huffman once they obtain those reins. They will have to giddy yap past Tennessee’s Gov. Haslam, who appears to see Huffman as his right hand man with education policy. For a few minutes when I heard about this I thought it was related to the petition floating around to remove Huffman from his position https://www.facebook.com/RemoveKevinHuffman, but I don’t think the Supers, no matter how courageous, will succeed at convincing the governor to go that far. I mean, Huffman was once married to Michelle Rhee and she is still lingering around out there and liable to pop out at you when you least expect. 

But it still sounded good yesterday to hear of, what looked like, a major pushback. Some commenter echoed, what many of us think about all this, when they said—finally! Another commenter noted that in the name of reform the state’s public schools have seen “scuttling”, “dismantling”, “slashing and burning”, and “defunding”.  This person did not blame Huffman for all this. Why? I don’t know. And why didn’t the school directors speak up sooner—before all the bad stuff happened? Apparently they were pushed over the edge by a recent conference call where they couldn’t hear the state board of education members approving Huffman’s draconian teacher licensing program. There was a dog howling in the background. Which leads me to wonder, what kind of conference calls do they make here in Tennessee? http://www.tennessean.com/article/20130912/NEWS04/309120063

In general, professional educators don’t like Huffman because he is not one of them…he’s from Teach for America, and a lawyer. Just don’t look for any signature from new Superintendent Dorsey Hopson in Memphis. Hopson is another lawyer and most likely has his job, in part, to Huffman’s ideology which involves the drive to privatize public schools. Stay tuned.