Tennessee education still sputters
Like a perfect storm, the headlines continue to chronicle the woes of education in Tennessee, with little news to brighten our hopes for a better tomorrow.
Nashville’s budgetary shortfalls are hammering its schools after several years of apparent progress. Now the projections show the loss of 240 teaching positions and never mind what percentage that is of the total teaching force. It would be 240 teachers in classrooms that will begin to get larger again after being reduced.
The Tennesseans’ research reveals school libraries across the region are filled with very old books and collections that are only marginally useful in preparing research papers in high school. Some serious students are using available public libraries but their collections aren’t impressive.
Tennessee’s public universities are not where they should be in providing current and diverse collections of knowledge for students. Serious under-funding has been the norm for decades, as well.
Then comes the news (it’s really only an affirmation, again, of what’s been known for years), that more than half of Tennessee adults have serious difficulty reading. Fifty-three percent of our adults can barely read a street map, a newspaper, or even figure out postage for mail, according to the Tennessee Comptroller’s Office of Research.
The reasons for this continuing tragedy are known but only a cock-eyed optimist would believe they will be addressed in a systematic way to help Tennessee become a competitive state. Meg Nuget, a curriculum development officer for nonprofit literacy program, points to our poverty and under-funding as primary causes.
There’s no doubt they are two of the major reasons. Tennessee spends much less money on adult literacy programs than other Southeastern states and has, again, historically. The endless cycles of poverty, including the ever-growing class of working poor, has never been broken, especially in the South. And it’s the racking hell of poverty that breeds crime, drugs, early deaths, and battered families. Take away hope and anything goes.
Part of the reason for under-funding is the failure of legislators to act beyond the passion of the moment and to overcome the endless fear of losing their seats to build a progressive tax system to fund education. It takes money to educate children and adults. And as if there isn’t enough politics in education already, burdened as it is with layers of bureaucracy both federal and state, there are the endless battles within each county.
Politicians have seldom taken the time and the required energy to educate Tennesseans on the under-funding crisis. Politicians have said they do not sense a political will within the people to fund an excellent, state-wide system of education, from kindergarten through graduate school. But, when, if ever, as there been any will to do anything unless it was mandated by the court system? The answer is never.
Consensus is built by making the case for this stark fact: Tennessee is a two-tiered state of have and have-nots, still struggling with racism that is in a serious state of decline.
Education is a labor-intensive art now embedded in ever-expanding technologies. It will take a massive infusion of new dollars to bring the entire educational system into a competitive stance. Once that is accomplished, the state’s economy will flourish, generating the kind of money it will take to sustain the system and job creation.
There are many, many successful students coming out of Tennessee schools, but it is too often in spite of the existing system, usually the result of dedicated teachers who want to teach, of schools which get great parental support and supplemental funding, and school boards able to rise above ego. They do exist in Tennessee. Just think of what it would be like if the system matched their love and passion for the student.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)