In my piece for this week's print issue, I note how the mayoral runoff began with varying degrees of passive aggression from Megan Barry and David Fox.
Well, almost as soon as that story went to press, the candidates dispensed with the passive part.
After Barry released her open letter to Bill Freeman supporters vowing to take up the cause of Community Schools — the first in a series of letters to the supporters of former rivals — Pith asked the Fox campaign where they stood on the issue.
Wednesday morning, they released this statement aimed right at Barry:
After eight years on the Metro Council, Megan Barry seems to have suddenly discovered that our public schools are vitally important to the future of our city. Yet, she seems to be all over the map with made-up, last minute proposals.For instance, she wants to triple the number of Community Schools and expand the delivery of social services, but she doesn’t say how she expects the city and the taxpayers would pay for it.
So after adding more than $1 billion to Metro's debt and leaving the taxpayers holding the bag over her last eight years on the Metro Council...now she is coming up with even more ways to spend our money that have little to do with actual learning in the classroom.
In contrast, as the former Metro Nashville school board chairman, David's priorities are clear in helping make Nashville the Best-Educated City in the South.
David strongly supports:
1) Targeted Pre-K to ensure all economically at-risk children in Nashville have access to voluntary, high quality pre-K;
2) Recruiting, growing and supporting excellence in teaching and leadership in all of Nashville's schools and classrooms;
3) Creating better neighborhood schools and many more-attractive public school options so every Nashville student can attend a great school regardless of their zip code;
4) Launching a new Nashville Promise to take full advantage of the state's Tennessee Promise scholarship program, which can transform our city’s workforce and economy, one high school and college graduate at a time.
There will be many issues of importance in this campaign, but David knows few are more important to the future of our city than the success of our schools and our students.
The two also went at it over education in
separate interviews with The Tennessean, with Barry saying Fox wants to "charterize" the school system and Fox saying Barry doesn't understand why schools aren't successful.
They didn't get an explicit mention in his released statement, but Fox has talked about a wide expansion of charter schools in Nashville and has also not kept secret his disillusionment with the elected school board model.
When the Scene profiled Fox in January, he spoke about both issues.
Fox served as chairman of the Metro school board from 2006 to 2010, a term that was marked with controversy. In 2008, Fox called for the dissolution of the elected board, urging then-Gov. Phil Bredesen to empower Dean to take over the schools and support legislation allowing the mayor to appoint all members of the school board.The next year, Fox was named in a federal lawsuit stemming from Metro's 2008 rezoning plan. The suit alleged that the plan was an attempt to re-segregate Nashville's schools. A federal judge would later rule that, although the plan "caused a segregative effect," there was no evidence it was racially motivated. The case was dismissed in 2012, and Fox called it a "ridiculous lawsuit" and "an unfortunate waste of money."
Fox also presided over the outsourcing of custodial and janitorial services in Metro schools. It was a move predicated on saving money — and one he recalls now as the kind of tough decision Metro's leaders have to be willing to make to avoid bigger financial problems later.
At the time, he called for an end to school board elections, reasoning that while candidates are typically well-meaning and nobly motivated, they often lack the experience and background a mayor would seek in appointed education officials. He still thinks doing away with the elected school board would "give us a far better chance to be successful," though he doesn't expect that will happen.
"We've had it for 30 years, and until the last few years we've had continually diminishing results and poor function," he says. "I don't think that's coincidental." He returns to a point he likes to make about who's failing the system and whom the system is failing.
"We have not been dealt a bad hand of kids," he reiterates. "We have perfectly good kids. We've had adults in leadership positions who have failed the kids, who haven't been worthy of the kids that they're trying to serve."
The solution, from Fox's perspective, involves a lot more charter schools, the publicly funded, privately run model that has expanded in Nashville in recent years and embroiled the city in near-constant debate along the way. Fox references New Orleans, which recently created an all-charter school system, and hails it as a turnaround story. He's not alone in his view of the move as a bold embrace of innovative solutions to a system that's long failed many children.
But it's also far from the consensus. Many in both Nashville and in New Orleans see charters as an offensively market-driven approach to public education, turned over to outside actors who are unaccountable to voters and have dual motives at best.
"I'm not saying that's what we have to do, but anybody who's going to engage in the conversation about how can we make our schools better needs to do it with as much urgency as you do for your own kids and with an awareness of what has been working," Fox says.
"I would like to participate in a conversation that various board members have called for about how do we financially accommodate more charter schools."
Despite hailing the New Orleans model, Fox rejected Barry's charge that he wants to "charterize" the system to The Tennessean. Barry has argued for something more like the status quo when it comes to the balance between charters and traditional public schools in Nashville's system.
"I don't have any vision for how many charter schools we need," he told the daily. " I don't have a vision that we need to charterize everything. It doesn't matter to me who runs the school. They just have to be successful."
When it comes to a mayoral takeover of the school system, it's clear Fox wishes it had happened years ago. He's been somewhat less-than-clear on how he'd approach the question as mayor, saying only that he doesn't expect the city will be abandoning the elected school board.
