Bill Lee's Education Bully

When you say nothing at all

Sometimes it’s what you don’t say that matters most. Governor Bill Lee is learning this lesson in spades this week.

The investigative reporter Phil Williams, at Nashville’s CBS affiliate Channel 5, broke at least the ‘Story of the Month’ before the weekend. It happened in a private session at a conference involving Lee and a man named Larry Arnn, who is the president of Hillsdale College in Michigan.

It matters because Lee has placed Hillsdale in a high place this year. Not only is Arnn’s institution to develop 50 new charter schools in Tennessee, but Lee wants Hillsdale to develop a new standard for what Tennessee students should know about history.

In the private session, it seems President Arnn had a lot to say – too much, maybe – about his own low opinion of classroom teachers and how poorly he believes they are trained.

Here’s what the man said: "The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

I wonder what Vanderbilt University, with its celebrated Peabody College for Teachers, thinks of that statement. What does the University of Tennessee and MTSU (and their thousands of graduates) think of this? And the presidents and deans of Belmont and Lipscomb universities, too? This would be a good time for all to be heard from.

But the real shocker came next when, in non-response to this pompous bullying, Bill Lee sat there and said NOTHING AT ALL. Incredibly, the governor offered…

• No rebuttal.

• No defense of classroom teachers.

• No push-back at all on Arnn’s smearing of teacher-training colleges and how they work.

If you are the governor, why on Earth would you sit mute while a right-wing critic of public education maligns teachers in your state? Possibly you agree with him?

If not, wouldn’t it have been better, all around, to have at least said something like, “Larry, I don’t agree with everything you’re saying about the training of our classroom teachers.”

This is all the more remarkable because Governor Lee has been pumping Arnn and his institution for many months now. (Some in the Capitol Hill press corps are referring to Arnn as “Lee’s education adviser.”)

What Arnn now appears to be, most of all, is Lee’s public school bully. What is the strategy there?

Whether you’re a teacher, school board member, or just a public-school parent, you are entitled to be deeply offended by the bombast from Arnn - and by the dead silence from Lee who ought to know better than let such ridicule go unchallenged. I am offended. My Mom was a classroom teacher, trained at Peabody College, and both my grandmothers were teachers in their day.

Classroom teachers work long hours with little thanks. We can forgive them now if they feel gut-punched in light of this episode.

For Lee himself, this timid behavior doesn’t help a rookie governor polish his national profile as a public leader.

It does not make you look presidential. It makes you look foolish.

© 2022 Keel Hunt