Although the timing was apparently not planned, a broadside against the Hamilton County Schools by Hamilton County District 8 Commissioner Tim Boyd was published on The Tennessee Conservative Wednesday about the same time Boyd was telling his colleagues on the commission he would not be a candidate for re-election in 2022.
In the article, which is said to be compiled from an interview with Boyd conducted by the Hamilton County Chapter of Moms for Liberty and from a series of emails between Boyd and the political website, the three-term commissioner said the school district is not transparent with its data, is not spending its money wisely and is not given enough scrutiny by the Hamilton County Board of Education.
Boyd said the district is spending too much of its money on a "bunch of worthless administrators who have no interaction with parents or students while pushing their left-wing ideology," and that while the schools offer some good programs, the rest "pretty much suck."
The accusations come while the school board is in the midst of hiring a new superintendent. The first of the three finalists was interviewed Tuesday. The second was to be interviewed Thursday and the third next Tuesday. A final choice is expected to be made next Thursday.
In The Tennessee Conservative, Boyd - who has often been a commission fiscal hawk on budgetary matters - took two current board members to task. He said former chairman Joe Wingate admitted he did not make a line-item review of the district's fiscal 2019 budget but "trust[ed] the superintendent," and that current chairman Tucker McClendon is "young, has no children and not enough life experiences to make wise decisions for a public school system as large as HCDE."
He also said McClendon, the District 8 school board representative, "swallowed all the B-S [from former Superintendent Dr. Bryan Johnson] hook line and sinker."
Johnson, according to Boyd, set a "ridiculously low bar" by saying Hamilton County Schools could be the fastest improving school district in the state and then "worked the numbers with [Hamilton County Department of Education]'s PR department" to make the system look good.
"If you are at the very bottom of the state scores," he said, "it does not take a whole lot to show improvement."
Boyd also touched on three areas this page also has noted - the money provided by the state for teacher raises is used for all district employees rather than just teachers; extra per-pupil spending in lower achieving schools has failed to significantly raise achievement scores in those schools; and the district's magnet schools model should be applied at all schools.
While the state intended the money for raises to go to the district's approximately 2,900 teachers, he said, it is distributed among the district's approximately 6,000 employees, thus thwarting the amount state legislators actually wanted to compensate teachers.
As to achievement, just days ago, we noted that "three of the six schools with the worst reading scores (Brown Academy, Calvin Donaldson and Orchard Knob) had among the district's highest per-pupil expenditures in grades K-3, the grades where reading is foundational." And the three other schools with the worst reading scores were nowhere near the bottom in per-pupil spending.
Boyd said magnet schools are given more autonomy on how they teach students basic academics. "It is obvious that magnet schools work," he said. "The schools need a dedicated staff teaching curriculum basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. If they don't know the basic skills, they are never going to be able to move up."
The commissioner reserved additional criticism for Johnson, who left the district earlier this year to take a job in the private sector with U.S. Xpress.
In the preliminary fiscal 2019 budget, Boyd said, the former superintendent had $400,000 "of taxpayers' money in his lap drawer that he could spend any way that he wanted without any approval from the school board." Only when commissioners voted down a tax increase, he said, was that amount used to help balance the budget.
While in the job, Johnson - according to an email the commissioner retained - and the Tennessee Department of Education were "more interested in graduation numbers than what a graduate actually knows academically."
In general, Boyd said, the district "wants to ... add more programs [but] won't eliminate programs that don't work," "you can't take anything they say at face value" and they "will lie and cheat any way they can to get more and more money."
The commissioner may not be diplomatic with his words, and we think his fusillade doesn't credit the strides that were made under Johnson, but his constructive criticism makes clear there is much more reform work to be done in our schools. We hope the superintendent candidates are paying attention.