Tennessee education chief Penny Schwinn, one of the nation’s most high-profile state superintendents, who worked to expand tutoring and revamp literacy during the toughest days of the pandemic, will announce today that she is stepping down, effective June 1.  

In addition to launching the to curb learning loss, Schwinn shepherded through the legislature and positioned Tennessee as the first state with a federally registered . At the same time, she told The 74 in an exclusive interview last week, she weathered distracting culture war battles over the way race and gender is taught in the state’s classrooms.

“I see it as extraneous politics and my job is to educate kids,” she said. “I knew that my charge, first and foremost, was to move our state forward.”

A Republican, Schwinn faced criticism from Democrats and GOP leaders alike for issues ranging from the teaching of American history to her support for charter schools.

Last fall, she told Republican Gov. Bill Lee that she didn’t plan to stay through his second term. Lee will appoint Lizzette Gonzalez Reynolds, a school choice advocate with experience in state and federal policy, to be her successor. 

Currently vice president of policy with nonprofit ExcelinEd — which has been instrumental in the rapid expansion of education savings accounts in Republican-led states — Reynolds said she plans to pick up where Schwinn left off. 

“It’s an absolute joy to be tapped for this role and to continue this work,” she said.

A former Teach for America leader from California, Schwinn held high-level positions in the Delaware and Texas education agencies before Lee appointed her commissioner in 2019. She had a rocky start in Tennessee, initially facing criticism from lawmakers for being an outsider. Even though she’s a Republican, her policies were by more conservative members of her own party. But under her leadership, the state won praise from for requiring districts to use a , training teachers in those methods and providing free curriculum resources.

“Dr. Schwinn has successfully executed a culture and curriculum shift to the science of reading that no other Tennessee state commissioner could do,” said Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville Propel, a parent advocacy organization. “Under her leadership, we have become a national leader in literacy reform.”

Julia Rafal-Baer, founder of ILO Group, a consulting firm focused on leadership opportunities for women in education, added that Schwinn has had a “seismic impact” as commissioner, inspiring other women in the profession. On Friday, Schwinn addressed members of of women superintendents, where she spoke in part about the importance of navigating politics in the top job.

“I said to keep kids as your north star because that’s common ground,” she said. “Ignore the distractions and get a thick skin because everything in education is personal, but you can’t take it personally.”

Tennessee has been in the spotlight not just for post-pandemic recovery efforts, but also for a legislative proposal to phase out federal funding, as well as controversies over and the state’s ban on receiving . 

In 2021, a state Moms for Liberty chapter their complaint about the Williamson County district’s use of an elementary reading curriculum, which includes the children’s book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story.” The autobiography recounts Bridges’s experience as the first Black student to desegregate an all-white school in New Orleans. But some to the book’s use of words such as “injustice” and “unequal” and references to “a large crowd of angry white people.”

The complaint focused on lessons during the 2020-21 school year. Schwinn largely sidestepped the issue, responding that the law requiring the state to investigate possible violations didn’t kick in until the following year.

From Democrats, she’s faced criticism for her ties to charter schools (she founded one in Sacramento) and questions about possible conflicts of interest involving her husband, Paul Schwinn, a leadership coach for TNTP. The nonprofit, which works in districts to improve teacher quality, with the state as part of its reading initiative, but Schwinn received approval from the state and promised to distance herself from the agreement.

“Whichever side you’re on or whichever kind of philosophy you have, there’s always another push that is frankly very distracting,” Schwinn said. “It can come from the left or the right, and I think it has really decimated our leadership nationally.” 

Of the 38 states where superintendents are appointed and not elected, Tennessee will be the 17th to have since January 2022 — a mark of the widespread leadership turnover in the profession since the pandemic.

But John Bailey, a consultant and visiting fellow for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, noted that Schwinn had a longer run than some state chiefs. , appointed Virginia education chief by Gov. Glen Youngkin in January 2022, recently stepped down after just a year. She previously spent eight years leading Wyoming’s education department.

Schwinn’s “superpower,” Bailey said, has been her ability to “bridge differences that are sometimes political and sometimes just normal policy tensions.”

‘Foundation of success’

Schwinn noted, for example, last year to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to highlight the state’s grow-your-own teacher preparation program.

“I have a great relationship with that administration as I serve very loyally my own,” she said, calling Lee “unwaveringly supportive” during her tenure. “He said, ‘Penny, go do your job, and your job is to make sure our kids are accelerating faster than ever before.’ ” 

Schwinn and Lee worked together to gather public input on how the state funds schools. On top of a base amount for each student, the new system provides additional funding for students with greater needs as well as ongoing funding for tutoring, early literacy and career and technical education.

In a statement Monday, Lee said, “Penny has played a key role in our administration’s work to ensure educational opportunity for Tennessee students and secure the next generation of teachers, while navigating historic learning challenges.”

Last year, Schwinn showing Tennessee students had largely recovered from pandemic-related declines, which leaders attributed partly to recovery efforts like tutoring and summer school. But those wins quickly were overshadowed by sharp declines in math and reading performance on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, especially in the . The mismatch is not unusual. State tests more closely cover state standards than the national test. Students also took NAEP before tutoring efforts were widely implemented.

Meanwhile, the state’s effort to turn around performance in many Memphis schools has been a disappointment, Schwinn said.

Since the Achievement School District began a decade ago, the schools involved , academic gains. The state is now , reducing the number of charter school operators running schools. But Schwinn added, “I regret that we didn’t move faster on that. The kids deserved us to move faster.”

She also regrets not spending more time on students’ mental health. She called on the issue — which lists suicide as the third leading cause of death among 14- to 18-year olds — “frightening” and said the state still needs “a really clear, tight and well-articulated plan” to respond to students in crisis. 

Early in the pandemic, she took heat from GOP state lawmakers for a plan to use $1 million in federal COVID relief funds for districts to conduct “well-being checks,” particularly for students who didn’t participate in remote learning while schools were closed.

House Education Administration Committee Chair Mark White, for example, he received calls from parents concerned about government intrusion. And Rep. Scott Cepicky suggested Schwinn was more concerned with her own agenda and didn’t consult with those “elected by the people of Tennessee.”

“I think there’s still a huge lack of communication to the General Assembly and to [local] superintendents and school boards,” Cepicky said Monday. “I think that was one of the pitfalls of Commissioner Schwinn and her regime.”

Schwinn declined to say what she’ll be doing next, but said she has “quite a few good opportunities” and expects to make a decision in about a month.

Reynolds, her successor, said her first priority will be ensuring eligible families can take advantage of the state’s targeted ESA program. It’s currently open to students in Shelby and Davidson counties, which include Memphis and Nashville, respectively. This year, , which encompasses Chattanooga.

“ESAs are the most flexible form of school choice,” Reynolds said. “I’m excited to take the work we’ve done nationally [at ExcelinEd] and implement our ESA program in Tennessee.”

She’ll also oversee the next phase of academic recovery efforts and lead the state through  the financial challenges expected as federal relief funds run out in 2024. 

“The good news is that she gets to build on this foundation of success,” Bailey said. “She has a lot of momentum.”

Some hope to significantly broaden the concept of ESAs, which allow families to tap state education funding to pay for private school tuition, tutoring and other education-related expenses.

In a “Condition of the State” earlier this month, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said the state should spend the same amount on students, whether they attend public schools or not. 

“We have to set aside this us-versus-them mentality,” she said. “If you want to pretend that this is a war between two different school systems, then you’re not focused on our children.”

Reynolds is one of more than half a dozen GOP governors who seek to join the that currently have ESAs. They say parents across the political spectrum want more control over their children’s education, and blame districts and teachers unions for extended school closures. But critics say the programs undermine funding for the traditional schools attended by the vast majority of students. 

“There is a push among some Republican governors to make this a priority,” said Jessica Levin, director of Public Funds for Public Schools, a campaign of the left-leaning New Jersey-based Education Law Center. “But when they are proposed, there is a broad spectrum of groups that come out against them — pastors, rural legislators, parents.”

Governors proposing the programs draw inspiration from the recent “empowerment scholarship” and Florida’s long history of taxpayer-funded . 

Arizona’s program — which provides about $7,000 per student — is like the “holy grail of school choice” because it’s not restricted to certain groups of families, said Tom Greene, vice president of advocacy for ExcelinEd, an education reform think tank. But in a sign of the opposition such programs face, new Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has pledged the expansion, saying the program lacks accountability and could cost the state $1.5 billion over a 10-year period.

Under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has multiple scholarship programs and raised eligibility to $111,000 for a family of four. And this year, Republicans have introduced a plan to the program to more families, potentially leaping over Arizona to become the state with the largest ESA enrollment. 

“I think both states have really helped create momentum and energy,” Greene said. “Parents want an all-of-the-above approach when it comes to how their kids are educated. Legislators across the country are responding to that desire.”

‘On the ground’

While Republican legislators are leading the charge for ESAs, a shows there is less of a partisan divide among voters — likely because many parents in lost patience with remote learning. Conducted by Yes. Every Kid, a school choice advocacy group, and YouGov, a research company, the poll found that 60% of parents favor ESAs, while 15% oppose them. Democrats were actually slightly more supportive than Republicans — 58% to 55%.

That doesn’t surprise Craig Hulse, executive director of Yes. Every Kid.

“People think about Republicans versus Democrats in Congress, and it’s just not what people on the ground are hearing,” he said. “Everybody recognizes the status quo is inequitable.”

Acknowledging the pandemic created a “perfect storm” for ESA supporters, Levin nonetheless pointed to data showing parents remain with their local schools. In the 2022 PDK Poll, Americans’ support for schools in their communities reached a . She also pointed to the failure of ESA efforts in and

“An even better poll is the vote,” Levin said.

Legal hurdles have derailed other programs. In Kentucky last month, the the state’s “education opportunity accounts” unconstitutional, ruling that state law clearly intended for public funds to be spent only on public schools. And last summer, the Nevada Supreme Court to get an ESA measure on the ballot, calling it an unfunded mandate.

‘Robust debate’ 

Greene still expects a “robust debate” this year over ESAs in Republican-led states like , where Gov. Spencer Cox’s support depends on , and Oklahoma, where made school choice a focus of his re-election campaign. 

The impact of ESAs in rural areas was a key issue in Stitt’s race against former state Superintendent Joy Hofmeister. She argued private school choice would wipe out small town school districts. Some rural Republicans, , have opposed ESAs because there are fewer private schools for kids to go to.

At the same time, a focusing on a Florida program showed that families in rural areas use ESAs, but are more likely to spend funds on curriculum and tutoring than private school tuition. 

Most reports on ESAs focus on parent satisfaction. A from EdChoice, an advocacy group, showed that almost 60% of ESA users were somewhat or completely satisfied with the program when it was more targeted.

Even so, Levin said ESAs are tough to push through state legislatures. 

“Lots of voucher bills are proposed every year and the majority of them fail,” she said. “A governor has to put in a ton of political capital if he or she wants one of these to pass.”

In Virginia, experts suggest Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in 2021 was partially due to parents who felt and weary with school board drama. But the might face resistance .

A bill could make it out of the House, where Republicans have the majority. But Democrats control the Senate, where Kristen Amundson, a Democrat and former member of the state assembly, expects strong opposition from the state’s Legislative Black Caucus.

“There is zero way that they are going to approve that,” she said.

Seeking accountability

Shifting some of the education budget to the private sector also raises questions of academic and fiscal accountability. 

In South Carolina last year, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, a Republican, blocked an ESA bill in the final hours of the session because lawmakers removed a requirement that participating students take the same state tests as those in traditional schools. 

The state school boards association agrees with him. 

“If there is going to be legislation, then we certainly are going to support accountability measures that are similar or the same as those in public schools,” said Debbie Elmore, government relations director for the association. 

But Sen. Larry Grooms, also a Republican, thinks it’s “punitive” to require students using ESAs to take state tests because they were likely already behind when their parents withdrew them from district schools. He has reintroduced a similar version of the bill that failed. 

His bill would cap the program at 15,000 students, and Grooms tells his “teacher friends” that the difference between Arizona’s program and his plan is “like night and day” because it would be targeted to low-income students.

In Arizona, participation is nearing 46,000 students. That’s why observers in Texas, where lawmakers have filed , are paying close attention. 

Colleen Dippel, CEO of Families Empowered, a Texas nonprofit that helps parents navigate school options, has no doubt that such a program would be popular because of “pent-up demand” from parents for more educational options. 

“It seems insane to me to try to preserve this system that is not getting optimum results and is really outdated,” she said about traditional schools. “It’s like saying, ‘We’re going to keep those rotary phones on the wall and spend more money on those phones.’ ”

Compared to winter results, the end-of-year data on the widely used Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, shows that fewer students were at risk of not learning to read — a decline to 38 percent from 47 percent in kindergarten and a drop to 32 percent from 43 percent at first grade. But the scores at third grade, a critical year for developing more advanced reading skills, haven’t bounced back in the same way.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The results provide some hope that a full in-person return to school this fall could see young children quickly regain the early literacy skills they missed while learning from home. But students entering fourth grade might need more targeted support to get back on track not only in English language arts but across other content areas as well. In keeping with anecdotal evidence and other assessment results, the Amplify data confirms that the severe disruption in learning caused by the pandemic has disproportionately impacted Black and Hispanic students, but the setback for white students has been minor.

“It is really encouraging to see that when we get back to instruction, the kids in the early grades are really responsive,” said Susan Lambert, Amplify’s chief academic officer for elementary humanities. But the pandemic, she added, has magnified existing gaps in reading for Black and Hispanic students. And many in the upper elementary grades will need extra intervention from tutors, reading specialists and others specifically trained in literacy.

The racial disparities were also noted this week in of pandemic-related learning loss from McKinsey and Company, which found that while students ended the year about five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, students in majority Black schools had six months of “unfinished learning” in math and those in high-poverty schools were seven months off track.

In the Amplify report, the DIBELS data represents about 400,000 students from 1,400 schools in 41 states from both the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. The sample also mostly reflects students in large, urban metro areas, which serve a higher proportion of Hispanic students than the nation as a whole.

Just prior to schools shutting down in early 2020, 32 percent of Black, 30 percent of Hispanic and 20 percent of white first-graders were severely off track. When the 2020-21 school year ended, 44 percent of Black and 38 percent of Hispanic first graders were significantly behind, but the proportion of white students in that range had increased by only 1 percentage point. At third grade, white students were even less likely to be well off track in reading at the end of the 2020-21 school year than they were before the pandemic.

Kymyona Burk, the policy director for early education at ExcelinEd, a think tank focusing on state education initiatives, said the results match the trends in students returning to school in person. Black and Hispanic students were more likely to finish out the year in remote learning, while white students returned at higher rates.

When students are learning to read in the classroom, teachers are better able to “check for understanding,” Burk said. But at home, a lot of students lacked a reliable internet connection, chronic absenteeism was high and even when students were attending remote classes, many turned off their cameras or didn’t want to speak on screen.

She added that for students who were already struggling readers, remote learning “was an easy way to check out of the process,” while more motivated readers probably weren’t deterred by the virtual format.

As districts decide how to plan recovery efforts this fall, Amplify suggested that it’s essential to collect data on students’ literacy skills and then to organize daily schedules and educators’ time to allow for extra reading instruction.

At last week’s Reagan Institute Summit on Education, Amplify CEO Larry Berger urged educators to take an informal inventory of students’ reading skills when school starts and focus on reestablishing relationships.

High-stakes assessments at the beginning of the year “could do more harm than good,” he said, but added it’s important to gather “enough data to understand where resources need to be deployed.”

This year, lawmakers in several states, including Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, North Carolina and Tennessee, have joined Alabama and Mississippi in passing legislation focusing on comprehensive literacy instruction, Burk said, adding that some are providing guidance on which materials to adopt and ensuring teachers are receiving training using those resources.

These laws, she said, improve equity for Black, Hispanic and low-income students since schools predominantly serving white and upper-income students were already offering high-quality reading instruction.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s review of district plans for using federal relief funds shows that several have prioritized literacy efforts. These include $25 million to hire and train 850 literacy tutors in grades K-5 in Chicago, a reading intervention coordinator in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, and elementary and secondary literacy specialists in Columbus, Ohio schools.

Both Lambert and Burk added that upper elementary teachers will need some support in how to teach foundational reading skills.