The Miseducation of Penny Schwinn
🎓 Trump's latest appointee has TN roots · Last night at the council · La Résistance · Much more!
Good afternoon, everyone.
We've got an event coming up on Thursday, January 30th at Streetcar Taps & Garden with Oakland activist Seneca Scott. Scott successfully organized the ouster of both the Oakland mayor and the Alameda County Soros-backed district attorney last year.
It may seem extreme to compare Oakland, the birthplace of Black Lives Matter, and Nashville. But if present trends are anything to judge by, we may find ourselves in a similar situation to Oakland with the city being led by the most progressive city council in its history.
You should join us. RSVP here. There will be a free buffet for all attendees.
Onward.
Less than 48 hours into the new Trump administration, one of Tennessee politics’s most recent controversies has reached the national stage thanks to the nomination of former Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn as Deputy Secretary of Education. From the COVID era to her 2023 resignation, Schwinn racked up an avalanche of negative press from local conservative and liberal outlets while serving as a lightning rod for Tennessee’s grassroots conservative movement.
During the pandemic, Schwinn faced a lawsuit from Moms for Liberty after she granted a waiver for an English Language Arts curriculum called “Wit & Wisdom” that had failed a state review twice for backdooring CRT concepts into lesson plans for elementary school students. Her support for CRT led to numerous clashes with the state legislature, including its 2020 decision to remove the Commissioner of Education as a voting member of the Tennessee Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission.
Likewise, Schwinn’s COVID response also routinely came under fire. In August 2021, she instituted a plan to use $1 million of federal pandemic-related funding to provide school districts with a toolkit for home wellness checks after Gov. Bill Lee charged her to convene the COVID-19 Child Well Being Task Force. The short-lived plan put Schwinn on the radar of conservative resistance leaders like now-Congressman Andy Ogles, anti-DEI crusader Robby Starbuck, and Tennessee Stands founder Gary Humble. Schwinn also refused to take a stand on masking in schools, opting to leave that decision to local school boards.
Those on the left took more umbrage with an $8 million contract Schwinn signed for K-12 foundational reading skills training with TNTP Inc., where her husband, Paul Schwinn, worked as a leadership coach. This controversy, along with her lingering COVID failures, led Schwinn to resign in 2023 after Ogles, Humble, and Starbuck cemented their power in conservative politics, in part, by making her tenure a central issue.
Yesterday afternoon, anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo inexplicably took to X to defend Trump’s nomination of Schwinn. Within an hour, a host of prominent Tennesssee conservatives, including country artist John Rich and Starbuck, initiated a pile-on by reiterating her leadership failures.
Rich shared his own experiences meeting with Lee and Schwinn, pointing out how the anti-CRT and obscenity laws that she supported excise any punishment for the educators who violate them. Former Vanderbilt Professor Dr. Carol Swain endorsed Rich’s claims citing how Schwinn’s lack of enforcement had made the state’s education system a “train wreck.”
Starbuck took issue with Rufo’s minimizing of the wellness check plan as nothing more than “a line in a PDF” by telling his anti-DEI compatriot that his account of the controversy, “dismisses our very real experiences as parents with her tenure here.” He then shared a video of Schwinn stating, “My core values really center on equity and integrity for all–no matter what.”
While local parents turned grassroots activists have substantial evidence of Schwinn’s disastrous performance, one cannot ignore that it was emblematic of the Lee Administration’s wider failures during COVID, which led The Pamphleteer to label him as the pandemic’s biggest disappointment back in 2022 for his tacit endorsement of masks, wasteful spending on propaganda, and non-answers on vaccines amid empty odes to individual freedom–a stark contrast to Republican pandemic allstars like Ron DeSantis.
Schwinn may indeed not be the wolf in sheep’s clothing that her most vocal critics claim. But that she spent enough time in Tennessee to amass a resume competitive enough to garner Trump’s attention is just the latest evidence that our state’s reputation as a Ruby Red bastion of freedom is not what it seems. JEROD HOLLYFIELD
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🖋️ Edited by Megan Podsiedlik.
🏛️ Nothing Really Matters, Anyone Can See... Last night’s Metro Council meeting blurred the line between politics and performance art, as the council spent thirty minutes deliberating over a non-binding resolution regarding traffic stops.
Although critics of Nashville’s defund the police movement have been repeatedly dismissed, diminished policing has become a problem that the city can’t afford to ignore. Over the last five years, routine traffic stops have dropped nearly 90 percent. Meanwhile, the Nashville crime rate has increased alongside traffic fatalities. But, no matter what new statistics Mayor O’Connell and Chief Drake throw out there, Nashvillians simply don’t feel safe on the roads or in their neighborhoods. That still didn’t stop some from poo-pooing an attempt to encourage MNPD during last night’s meeting.
Councilmember Delishia Porterfield brought up statistics published in a 2016 “Driving While Black” study initiated by the controversial nonprofit, Gideon’s Army. “MNPD, from 2011 to 2015, conducted 7.7 times more traffic stops annually than the U.S. national average [and] made more stops of black people than there were black people 16 years old and older living in Davidson County,” she explained. “They consistently and unnecessarily stopped and searched black drivers in predominantly black, hispanic, and low-income communities at rates substantially higher than they did white drivers in predominantly middle-to-upper income communities.”
Later in the discussion, Councilmember Bob Nash followed up Porterfield’s data dump by reviewing the findings from a Stanford Computational Policy Lab Report:
“There are indeed notable racial disparities in traffic stops in Nashville….Disparity, however, is not necessarily evidence of discrimination,” read Nash. “Any number of neutral factors, including officer deployment patterns or differences in rates of offending, explain these and other disparities in the criminal justice system. MNPD explains these racial disparities in traffic stops on the ground, that officers go where the crime is, and in Nashville, high-crime neighborhoods tend to have larger minority populations.”
The council ultimately passed a compromised version of the resolution. However, it’s unclear whether the entire charade will have any meaningful impact—though the legislation’s suggestion for MNPD to staff up their traffic division signals a slight move away from the defund the police agenda.
🏚️ Affordable Housing Crisis Still On The Docket At-large Councilmember Burkley Allen deferred her legislation regarding Metro’s mixed-income PILOT Program until the beginning of March. The resolution is the latest in a slew of changes council members have been throwing out there to try and tackle Nashville’s “affordable housing crisis.”
At the end of March, the council is also set to receive the results of a “comprehensive analysis” on the effects of density and zoning changes in Davidson County. Last year, members passed a resolution allowing several Metro departments to look into the matter, and the council is expected to use their findings to help them as they revisit some of the county-wide zoning initiatives that were originally brought forward in the NEST initiative last spring.
🪧 La Résistance The same groups helping to coordinate the release of thousands of illegal aliens—some with dangerous criminal records—into Nashville back in 2022 plan to set up a bulwark against the new administration’s immigration policies. According to WKRN, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition has been coordinating with undocumented families.
“A lot of what we’re doing right now is making sure people understand their rights. Under the Constitution, everybody has rights regardless of their immigration status,” Cesar Bautista with TIRRC told the news outlet. “It’s very common for maybe the average person, but for somebody, if they’re undocumented, they may feel like ‘Oh, because of my status, I don’t have any rights in general,’ but we know that’s not correct, so it’s really educating people and walking them through these easy steps.”
DEVELOPMENT
- Southern Land Co. reveals Nolensville community details (NBJ)
- Century Farms developer pays $7.05M for Priest Lake-area property (Post)
- Indoor putting golf course will open in fall near Berry Hill (Post)
- Berry Hill property sells for $1.34M (Post)
THINGS TO DO
View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.
📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.
🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.
👨🏻🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide.
TONIGHT
🎸 Hiss Golden Messenger Solo Plays "Bad Debt" and other favorites @ The Blue Room, 7p, $51.77, Info
🎸 Matt Koziol @ The Basement, 7p, $12.85, Info
🎸 Lo Noom / James Eichman / Oscar Lindsey / Peter Dark (solo) @ The East Room, 8p, $13.36, Info
🪕 Bluegrass Night @ The American Legion Post 82, 7p, Free, Info
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