Why the Tennessee Legislature Has My Blood Boiling

A number of state Senators and Representatives in Tennessee have identified a serious problem – Tennessean children aren’t doing that well in school. And they’re right. Tennessee earned a C+ this year on Education Week’s State Report Card and Tennessee’s average ACT score ranks 48th out of 51.

Unfortunately, their solution is simply absurd. There is a bill [PDF] that has cleared committee in both the Tennessee House and Senate that would “fix” the perennial underperformance of students by linking a student’s academic performance to his/her family’s government supports. Specifically it would cut a family’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits by 30 percent if their children “are not making satisfactory progress in school.”

WHAT?! (Let’s keep in mind that in TN, TANF benefits max out at $185/month, we aren’t talking about anyone living large off of a government program.)

I couldn’t neatly package all of my rage into nicely organized paragraphs, so here are the top three reasons why this idea makes me think my head is going to explode…

1. The bill claims the cut to benefits wouldn’t apply if the student has a learning disability. Newsflash – not every child that has a learning disability has been properly screened and diagnosed. When I was a teacher in a low-income school, I taught students that had “highly likely to be dyslexic” results on their preliminary screenings. But in order to be officially classified as dyslexic they had to take a specific exam administered by a diagnostician.  Those exams cost thousands of dollars so none of my students could be properly diagnosed, therefore they couldn’t receive any special services, and they didn’t make adequate progress over the year. The families of those kiddos, if they lived in TN under this law, would have lost vital TANF dollars that helped them barely scrape by.
2. Students must comply with attendance requirements – if they don’t their families receive a benefit cut. Since, access to a reliable car and money for gas at the same time is a luxury for many low-income families, it’s reasonable to conclude that there will be days, weeks even, where parents cannot physically get their children to school. And what about the districts (like this one in… you guessed it… Tennessee) that have discontinued bus service to school thanks to budget cuts – how are struggling parents working multiple jobs (many of which start before school does and end well after school ends) supposed to get their kids to school?
3. The bill says that parents who “take steps” to improve their child’s school performance would be exempted from the benefit cut. What are those steps, you’re wondering? Suggestions out there are “attending a parenting class”. Who is providing these parenting classes? Cash-strapped school districts certainly don’t have the money or expertise to start hosting parenting classes. Would parents have to pay for the class?  If these classes did exist, when would they be held? Low-wage workers are very likely to work odd hours, overnight shifts, and lots of unpredictable overtime, not to mention multiple jobs. Some of these parents might be teen moms, working hard to finish school and make ends meet.  Now the Tennessee state legislature would like them to fit in a parenting class?
4. Yes, I know I said three reasons, but there’s a 4th I can’t skip. This bill is blatantly discriminatory. What about higher income parents whose children aren’t making adequate progress? It seems like the Tennessee legislature thinks that these parents must be doing all they can to help their kids succeed, which is probably not always the case. There isn’t any attempt to make them pay up for their child’s lack of progress. They aren’t being mandated to attend “parenting classes”. It just seems wholly unfair. On top of that, 86% of TANF recipients are women, many of whom are single mothers – so this bill ends up disproportionately harming women.

I can’t imagine telling any child that they better work hard because if they don’t their TANF (yes, kids definitely know what TANF means) will be cut and their family might not have enough money for food, or heat, or clothes, or medicine, or gas. Add to that the fact that the lives of low-income children tend to be very stressful to begin with. I would think that anyone using common sense would realize that this policy is much more likely to lead to worse school performance, not better.