StickWithANose

If you’re like me, you’ve been dying to know how former Senator Bill Frist has been ticking off the minutes of his retirement. Yesterday, we got word that Billy is still hard at it doing the bidding of his corporate masters the good people of Tennessee. God love ‘em!

It looks like Billy has been hard at work with SCORE Tennessee, a local think tank spewing the same nonsense as its national cousins. Tennessean:

Tennessee students lag behind other states in the nation and the Southeast, a problem that stems from a lack of teacher training, the absence of talented top leaders and an ineffective use of student data.

Those findings are from an interim report released Thursday by the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, or SCORE, a bipartisan research group formed by former U.S. Senator Bill Frist. Recommendations for how to fix the problems are due out in a second report this fall…

As various state-by-state education rankings are released throughout the year, Tennessee consistently shows up in the bottom half. The SCORE report concluded that Tennessee must successfully roll out tougher curriculum, which debuts this fall, learn to better use its extensive collection of student data and improve teacher and principal quality.

Okay. So, let’s dispense with the BS, and then we’ll get to business. First, a look at Tennessee’s problems [teacher training, leadership, ineffective use of data] reveals the usual code words for loosening teacher credentialing requirements, open the principals and superintendents office to business leaders, and tough accountability systems linked to standardized assessments. That BS can be dispensed with here: [1] [2] [3]. Second, do you think the reason that Tennessee consistently ranks in the bottom half of education measures has anything to do with ranking in the bottom half of childhood and family poverty measures?

What is of real importance here is what’s going on beneath the surface. SCORE isn’t some grassroots organization of Tennesseans who are concerned about education policy. Looking at SCORE’s staff tells you quickly that the day-to-day operations are being run by former think tank trolls and congressional staffers, not educators. SCORE is a marketing machine designed to package policy, generate “news”, and influence policy at the astro-turf level, and it is funded by the usual suspects that will benefit tremendously from the policies they push.

The “research” SCORE released yesterday hardly merits the distinction by the standards of social science, but that isn’t the point. The modern political think tank is in the business of constructing common sense ideas about the nature of social reality so as to further a very specific political agenda. They do this through comprehensive media penetration, from the round-table discussions on cable news to newspapers and Op-Ed’s. The point of SCORE’s releasing the first installment of its “research” yesterday was to generate news stories, such as the Tennessean article above, and to lay the groundwork for the next piece of “research” to be released and the inevitable news stories to follow. I wonder what recommendations will be found therein? No matter. I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough. It is a safe bet that the overworked reporters at the slowly dying Tennessean will find in the next SCORE press release precious column inches. I’m giddy with anticipation…