Amy Qualliotine, Outreach Associate

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.