Nashville Mayoral Candidate Threatens to Throw City’s Schools to Charter Wolves

GOP candidate for Mayor seeks to usurp authority of elected school board

Andy Spears
2 min readJun 23

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Photo by Guillaume Archambault on Unsplash

Nashville Mayoral candidate Alice Rolli says she’s ready to run the city’s public schools in addition to the rest of the city should she become Mayor.

The remarks came at a recent forum as reported by the Nashville Banner:

Alice Rolli said at a mayoral forum Tuesday night that as mayor she would consider seeking a takeover of the school system unless charter schools are renewed.

Candidates were asked whether or not they supported getting rid of the elected school board. The only person on stage seemingly open to the idea was Rolli, who said she would give the authority two years to get their act together before “holding them accountable.” She said the city’s school system should strive to be like Miami-Dade’s, and that without accountability, Nashville’s schools will become like Detroit’s.

As the Banner notes, former Nashville Mayor and charter school proponent Karl Dean sought the authority to take over the city’s schools, but then-Gov. Phil Bredesen rejected the ridiculous idea.

It’s telling that Rolli wants Nashville schools to look like Detroit or Miami.

I’m not sure Nashville wants their school system to look like The Hunger Games, which is how some describe the situation in Detroit:

It is encouraging, though, that no other candidate seemed all that interested in the idea.

In perhaps some more encouraging news:

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Andy Spears

Writer and policy advocate living in Nashville, TN —Public Policy Ph.D. — writes on education policy, consumer affairs, and more . . .