By John Branston
“Education” is a vague platitude. And the federal Department of Education is “Most Likely to Be Abolished” in the Trump Musk purge.
“School” is a land mine. School choice. School busing. School shooting. School principal. School closing. School superintendent. Charter school. Optional school. Private school. School board.
In Memphis, city taxes don’t fund schools. The Memphis Shelby County Schools are funded by county taxes. Since the hostile surrender of the Memphis City Schools charter and suburban secession in 2014-15, there are not two public school systems but seven. They get funds from state government and federal grants and, if they are lucky, from private benefactors.
Gambling is a big funder of schools. The Tennessee Lottery, sometimes called “a tax on stupidity,” pays part of its gross receipts to college scholarships.
The federal Department of Education is on the chopping block, already cut in half. No one is more closely identified with “Education” than Tennessean Lamar Alexander. He went to public school in East Tennessee. His father was a school principal. Lamar Alexander went to Vanderbilt, joined Sigma Chi fraternity and was known as a “milk drinker” by his mates. He was an excellent student, musician, runner, and leader. He ran for governor but lost in 1974 and ran and won in 1979 (walking across the state in a checkered flannel shirt) and served two terms. He was pro-Education, came up with “No Child Left Behind,” and was head of the federal Department of Education from 1991-1993.
He later supported abolishing it. Not so fast, critics! Like most of us who have children, he was full of contradictions about education and schools. He often touted and visited Grahamwood Elementary School in Memphis – an “optional” school so desirable that (most of them White) parents camped out overnight at the board of education office or got on a phone tree to secure a spot for their children. If you won the life lottery and chose your parents well, optional was the way to go. If not, well, tough luck, you were on the “regular” or “traditional” track.
(In the olden days of print media, the education beat was a dead end. School board meetings were a drag, and readers only cared if they were parents of public school children. In the AI Era, education coverage seems to be farmed out to freelancers. Think pieces, I bet, get few clicks unless they include Whataburger or guns.)
I found it hard to not like Alexander. He was as media savvy as Bill Clinton, but just as real too in his own way. I remember covering him as a reporter in 1982. He was escorting the homecoming queen on the sideline at a high school football game. It was raining buckets and bone-chilling cold. The master of ceremonies droned on and on. But the governor ignored his PR aides and stood by that girl the whole time. Wow, I thought. When his second term was over he grew a beard and moved with his family to Australia for a while. He wrote a book. Pretty cool.
No offense to him (he is 84), he was sort of like Miss Americas saying “world peace” to the interview question. Education is as desirable as world peace. But schools, well, not so fast.
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John Branston covered Memphis as a reporter and columnist for 35 years.
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The battle over how to run and fund our schools — primary, secondary and higher — is far more important that most of realize. Of course, well-schooled people are often more interesting than less-schooled. And schooling is supposed to make us better citizens. But the big advantage of schooling appeared with the GI Bill after WWII. We found that schooling increased productivity and inventiveness. A society full of engineers may be boring, but it will be very productive. Getting rid of the US Department of Education — whatever its internal inefficiencies — is just sign that we no longer value the economic value of education. Big mistake — while the rest of world attempts to build an education system that mirrors the work of the US over the past 75 years — the US decides to erase its own legacy. Well, enough ranting. Like you I really admired Governor Alexander — but as a Senator he wasn’t so great.