(The Center Square) – Ranking third in the nation in return on investment, Tennessee is eighth overall in this month’s Education Freedom Report Card.
The state was 11th in transparency, 16th in teacher freedom and 19th in education choice according to the Heritage Foundation’s annual analysis.
According to the report, “Tennessee spends the 44th-most (meaning the seventh-least) per pupil, spending $13,027 in cost-of-living-adjusted terms annually. Tennessee ranks 28th in its combined fourth-grade and eighth-grade math and reading average NAEP score.
“The Volunteer State employs 2.87 teachers for every non-teacher in its public schools. Tennessee’s unfunded teacher pension liability represents 0.1% of its state GDP. Tennessee can improve its strong ROI ranking by improving academic outcomes on the NAEP and stopping growth in non-teacher staff.”
The higher academic transparency grade, the report says in part, is because “Tennessee lawmakers have adopted provisions that prohibit the teaching of certain concepts, including the ideas of critical race theory, in K–12 classrooms. These provisions, however, do not address the application of critical race theory to school activities, and may allow educators to apply racially prejudiced concepts to school activities and classroom content by renaming the material and not calling the information “critical race theory.”
Textbooks are publicly accessible.
