After last week, it’s hard not to wonder on whose side the leaders of our public schools sit.
Despite years of failures to turn around the five lowest-performing schools in our district, members of the Hamilton County Board of Education seem bent on perpetrating yet another failure – failure to understand their mission and responsibility.
Instead, many on the board seem poised to play obstructionist to a more-than-fair proposal from Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen to form a collaborative state and county alliance to improve the schools.
That collaborative partnership would mean forming a new board to oversee a five-school district, with 60 percent of the board members selected by the state and 40 percent selected by Hamilton County Schools. The board would have between seven and 10 members.
The alternative is that the state simply takes over our five lowest-performing schools.