The Rise of Charter Schools Is Meant to Take the Power Away From the Voters
“The significance of the charter school/school choice issue is NOT related strictly to educational choice. It is related to acceptance of a communist system of governance where decisions are made by appointed, not elected officials. Appointed officials cannot be removed from office by voters/taxpayers,” said Charlotte Iserbyt, writer and critic of the American government educational system.
Iserbyt said it best when she issued that warning. How does this impact Tennessee?
In 2019, The Tennessee legislature created the public charter school commission, which now has the authority to bypass local school board decisions regarding the approval of charter schools. To put it simply, if a local school board votes against a particular charter school opening within its district, the charter can apply directly to the commission, which can then approve its application.
In 2024, the legislature passed SB2820 establishing “opportunity boarding charters,” a.k.a. “at-risk boarding charters.” You read that right—these are set up to be residential, meaning children will eventually be residing in these institutions.
The Rock Academy will be the first at-risk charter in Tennessee, focusing primarily on chronically absent children, foster children, and children within the juvenile justice system.
The New School Venture Fund has invested $23 million dollars in ventures including The Rock Academy. The New School Venture Fund is funded in part by Bill and Melinda Gates, The Walton Family Foundation, and the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, Mackenzie Scott. Mackenzie Scott donated a whopping $35 million to the New School Venture Fund.
Founder of The Rock Academy, Dr. Ahmed White, explains:
“From a financial standpoint, the model we are developing is inherently more expensive. We’re not just opening another school—we are attempting to transform the trajectory of education for youth who have been historically marginalized. This means offering more flexible scheduling, trauma-informed supports, culturally responsive curriculum, and wraparound services that foster belonging, relevance, and healing. The existing public school funding structures are not built for this level of personalization or intensity.”
What he is describing is not a school. It is an institution that will capitalize monetarily on a sector of children who will be ripe for the picking.
Dr. White’s LinkedIn page lists him as serving as the Principal of Smithson Craighead Academy from 2017–23. According to the Tennessee Department of Education’s 2022–2023 Public Charter Schools Annual Report, 76% of students at Smithson Craighead Academy were not proficient in math, 80% were not proficient in ELA, and 85% were not proficient in science. In addition, Smithson Craighead Academy earned a low composite Tennessee Value-Added Assessment Score of 2.
“The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) provides measures of school effectiveness by estimating the impact teachers and schools have on their students’ academic progress. TVAAS measures growth in student achievement from one year to the next,” according to the state of Tennessee. “Schools earn composite TVAAS levels each year ranging from Level 1 to Level 5. Level 1 schools are described as ‘Least Effective,’ while Level 5 schools are ‘Most Effective’.”
It will be interesting to see the fiscal impact these opportunity/at-risk boarding charters will have on taxpayers; more concerning will be the potential negative impact these charters will have on children in the state of Tennessee.
Advancing the charter scam even further, in 2025, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill that would allow charter schools to bypass local school boards in order to expand charter networks.
Multiple bills have been passed in Tennessee in an attempt to pave the way for charter expansions. As we have been tracking that legislation, it underscored the importance that citizens need to understand that charter schools are not only taxation without representation but they are an expansion of communism. Any politician promoting charter schools is not conservative. Often they will attempt to defend their position by claiming that charter schools outperform traditional schools. But do they? How are these charter schools performing? Let’s take a look.
American Classical Academy Rutherford: 71.6 % of students are not proficient in ELA and 79.3% of students are not proficient in math. Touting a classical curriculum, many parents had high hopes that ACE would be the answer for their family. However, throughout the year I was personally inundated with allegations from parents about lack of transparency, bullying, safety concerns, lack of accountability to taxpayers, and more.
Rutherford Collegiate Prep: 74.6% of students are not proficient in ELA and 75% of students are not proficient in math. Rutherford Collegiate Prep has a primary focus on social emotional learning, which, according to these statistics, does not seem to be resulting in improved academic performance. https://boropulse.com/2023/11/rutherford-countys-social-experiment-first-charter-school-set-to-open-in-county/
Springs Empower Academy: With a focus on social justice, SEA churned out scores revealing that 74.1% of students are not proficient in ELA and 71.9% of students are not proficient in math. According to its application form, this school is devoted to equity. “Springs believes that public education is the most important social justice institution.” Professional development includes topics such as culturally responsive strategies, instruction restorative practices, and developing culturally responsive classrooms.
Follow the money. Charter schools are multimillion-dollar businesses.
“In 2022 The Charter Facilities Fund in Tennessee was increased to $38 million dollars, $22 million of which is recurring. Tennessee also received a federal grant worth $24 million. In 2024, a $15 million non recurring investment was made to the Charter Facilities Fund,” according to the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education.
Now that taxpayers across the nation are being fleeced and forced to fund multiple avenues of education from traditional public schools to charter schools to private education, via school choice and scholarships, they also need to understand that their constitutional republic is being systematically dismantled. I warned about how these unelected, soviet-style councils were already making decisions for us in Tennessee back in 2024.
Now that people in Tennessee and across the nation have, as Charlotte warned, been conditioned to accept non-elected, appointed boards, we will continue to be led to slaughter. The question is, when will citizens have enough?
If you don’t want to heed my warning, I hope you will listen to Charlotte.
“Widespread acceptance of this aspect of communist governance—as it relates to education (U.S.A. has 17,817 operational school districts that could well come under this non-elective system)—will make it easier to usher in the unelected system across the board at the local level to the county, to the state, to the Congress, to the White House level. That will spell the end of elected representation and our freedoms established under the Constitution of the United States of America. We will be a totalitarian state.”
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Photo, top, courtesy of Edmond Dantes / Pexels