On June 23, when a crowd of several hundred gathered in an auditorium at Tennessee State University for a moderated forum with Metro school board candidates, three incumbent board members were noticeably absent — noticeably because two sides in an ongoing fight over the future of Metro schools wanted it that way.

The forum had been organized by Nashville Rise, ostensibly the “parent engagement” arm of Project Renaissance, the education-focused nonprofit started by former Mayor Karl Dean, one of several gigs to hold him over until a possible statewide run in 2018. Project Renaissance describes itself as an organization dedicated to increasing the number of Nashville students attending “high-quality public schools,” but the type of schools most evident in its DNA are charter schools — the publicly funded, privately run schools that have been at the center of Nashville’s bitter education politics for years. As mayor, Dean never hid his affinity for charter schools or his desire to increase their number in the city. Upon its creation, Project Renaissance was stacked with people of a similar persuasion. Its co-CEOs are Justin Testerman, the former chief operating officer of the Tennessee Charter School Center, and Wendy Tucker, Dean’s former senior adviser on education, who is also a member of the state Board of Education. Project Renaissance’s board of directors includes prominent local charter backers Bill DeLoache and Marcus Whitney.

The organization’s apparent ideological roots raised hackles from the beginning. In May 2015, as Project Renaissance’s makeup and mission were being rolled out, school board member Will Pinkston, an outspoken charter critic who rarely shies away from a public fight, told the Scene that people who had heard the Project Renaissance pitch described its aims as “New Orleans without the hurricane,” referring to that city’s complete embrace of charter schools after Hurricane Katrina. Project Renaissance, Pinkston said, appeared “to be nothing but a Trojan horse for continued unabated charter growth.” Tucker rejected those claims, saying the leadership of Project Renaissance doesn’t “care what type of management a school has as long as it’s producing a high-quality education that kids deserve.”

A little more than a year later, Pinkston was raising hell about the Nashville Rise forum, citing a lack of transparency about Project Renaissance’s funders and their pro-charter leanings, and copying reporters on emails to the organization outlining his concerns. Soon, Pinkston, Amy Frogge and Jill Speering — two other incumbent board members facing more charter-friendly challengers — announced they’d be boycotting the forum.

On the night of the event, the remaining eight candidates were joined onstage by empty chairs bearing the names of the incumbent candidates, absent in protest. (Another empty seat belonged to candidate Janette Carter, who was reportedly ill.)

The brief brouhaha offered a glimpse of the dynamic underpinning this year’s school board elections, one that is not new but is perhaps more evident now than ever before. Organizations like Project Renaissance and others with anodyne names like Stand for Children say they are pouring time and money into school board races out of a devotion to “quality schools.” But to incumbents like Pinkston and Frogge, all this “engagement” looks like a shadowy effort to remake the school board in the name of charter schools and target anyone who gets in the way.

Even in a city that hosts the state legislature every year, the politics of education in Nashville have been the most hard-fought game in town since at least 2012, when money poured into campaign coffers in six-digit sums, producing the costliest school board races in Metro history. The stakes then were high as ever, with charter school organizations looking to expand their footprint in Nashville and the hire of a new superintendent on the horizon.

Among the big-money players that year were DeLoache, the Project Renaissance board member, and Townes Duncan, the managing partner of Solidus Co. and chairman of SouthComm (the parent company of the Scene). The two formed a political action committee through which they contributed to Elissa Kim, an executive at Teach for America whose candidacy had energized local charter supporters, and Margaret Dolan, a candidate with the mayor’s public backing who would go on to become the most well-funded candidate ever in a Metro school board race. The two would each experience quite different election nights.

After raising a little more than $80,000, Kim defeated the board’s then-chair Gracie Porter in a four-way race in East Nashville’s District 5. But Dolan’s night would turn into the sort of election story told as a warning for years to come. Despite raising more than $100,000 — enough for television commercials, previously unseen in local school board races — and receiving public support from Dean, Dolan was trounced by a candidate with a fraction of the funding: Frogge.

That night also saw the election of Pinkston and Speering. In the four years since, the three have consistently voted together, and although each has focused on his or her own particular issues, they have combined to form a block that at least some interested parties — and their deep-pocketed backers — would like to see removed. Pinkston and Frogge in particular, with their shared affinity for social media as a soapbox to call out opponents and question their motives, have come under fire from detractors.

The targeting of multiple incumbents distinguishes the 2016 race from 2012, but the vehicles for those efforts are similar — organizations with varying degrees of transparency about their end goals and financial backing.

Ahead of the Nashville Rise forum in June, an ad campaign from the group sparked a NewsChannel 5 report on the then-mysterious backing for the group, confirming that it was indeed an arm of Project Renaissance. Tucker would not identify current funders, but gave the station tax filings that showed top contributions from 2015. Among them: $2.5 million from The Scarlett Family Foundation, led by Joe Scarlett, a board member for the conservative Beacon Center of Tennessee, which has advocated for charter schools and vouchers; and $250,000 from the Joe C. Davis Foundation, which supports charter schools and counts DeLoache among its trustees. Davis is the brother-in-law of Dean. Although Tucker has repeatedly referred to Nashville Rise in the press as an essentially independent group of interested parents, the connection between the group and its parent organization seems closer than advertised. Questions to Nashville Rise parents from the Scene have prompted responses from Project Renaissance spokespeople. Project Renaissance is not officially endorsing any candidates.

Stand for Children, a national education nonprofit, has been active as well, and less vague about which horses they’re backing. The group recently announced its endorsements, which included the three candidates challenging Pinkston, Frogge and Speering. They’re handing out money and sending out mail pieces. The group spent more than $80,000 on polling alone this quarter — including more than $30,000 to push-polling firm Strategies 360 — and has been active in Jeremy Durham’s race and other contested GOP primaries.

Support for those three incumbents came from the local teachers union, the Metro Nashville Education Association, which endorsed all three but is backing current board chair Sharon Gentry’s opponent, Janette Carter.

“I think it’s coming down to what it always comes down to,” says T.C. Weber, the parent of a student at Tusculum Elementary, when asked what he makes of this round of school board elections. “It’s never about charter schools until it’s actually about charter schools. And it’s always about charter schools.”

Weber is as close an observer of Nashville education as anyone who isn’t paid to follow it. He is active on Twitter, where he has been a forceful defender of Pinkston, Frogge and Speering, pushing back against what he sees as an effort by the charter school industrial complex to remake Nashville’s school board the way they have tried to elsewhere.

In District 7, Pinkston is facing Jackson Miller, a Metro schools parent and small businessman — he owns three local Plato’s Closet franchises — who recently moved from East Nashville, where there is an open school board seat, to South Nashville, although he denies being motivated by a desire to challenge Pinkston.

He does want to see Pinkston gone, though. In January, Miller told the Scene he thought Pinkston was “a big driver” of rancor on the school board. Pinkston’s tone and overall approach — one that supporters and opponents alike will agree is occasionally abrasive — are as much a motivation for Miller as any policy differences between the two.

“If we are to make only one change in the entire public education sector in Nashville to have the greatest outcomes for students, that’s the District 7 board seat, hands down,” Miller says. “I truly believe that.”

Weber doesn’t dispute that Pinkston can be prickly, but he says an obsession with that ignores the real work Pinkston has done on behalf of Metro schools, including leadership on the issues of English language learners, pre-K and central office accountability.

“[Pinkston] is a friend, but don’t think I don’t get irritated with him off and on myself,” Weber says. “He is what he is. What you get is Will Pinkston. He’s incredibly knowledgeable, he’s incredible passionate, he’s incredibly intelligent. But he can also be incredibly abrasive, and he can also be at times self-interested. But again, you’re not going to find anybody that fights harder for the school district over the last several years.”

He adds, “I don’t know when geniality became what we were looking for.”

Pinkston is sorry he’s not sorry.

“I don’t suffer fools lightly, so what?” he says. “I’ll try, up to a point, to deal with people, but when I come to the conclusion that you either can’t deal with the person or the person is not capable of having rational conversations, then I make a value judgment about my time, how I’m going to apportion it and whether I’m going to deal with this person, whoever it is, again.”

Months ago, after a few spats on Twitter, Pinkston blocked District 7 opponent Miller. The race has continued along those lines, even if by proxy. Pinkston’s supporters have been digging back through Miller’s social media record and former blogs, finding Miller’s LiveJournal posts from a decade ago and tweets from eight years ago, which don’t paint him in the best light. In one tweet from 2008, Miller calls John McCain a “pussy.” Another from 2013 refers to an East Nashville Kroger as “the ghetto Kroger.” In a blog post from 2005, Miller posts about his 10 years of sobriety, pointing to times when he sold and used drugs. (Miller is 38, was 28 when he made that post, and 18 when he became sober.)

“This is now 20 years ago that they’re criticizing,” Miller says. “I was open and transparent, and I’ve been very clear that I was a kid on the discipline track. I think if you look at the trajectory and the redemption aspect of that story, that it should be celebrated — to try and criticize me for it is disheartening and a troubling worldview from a school board perspective.”

Miller’s online behavior was likely enough to cost him the endorsement of the daily paper and one of Pinkston’s biggest critics, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. Despite the fact that Miller chaired the chamber’s report card committee, it declined to support him.

Recently, Pinkston told the Scene of a public records request Metro schools had received seeking all of his official emails going back to 2011 — a year before he joined the school board. Moreover, the person making the request claimed to be doing so on behalf of a Louisiana-based private investigation company called HUB Enterprises Inc. Miller says it’s not anyone he knows. This was the second round of opposition investigations in this election cycle, according to Pinkston.

“It’s unprecedented that these amounts of negative resources are being pumped into a local school board race,” Pinkston says. “But it illustrates how desperate the charter movement has become in trying to tear down a board member who has accurately and effectively articulated the threat of unabated charter growth.”

In any case, Miller and, apparently, an out-of-state private investigation firm aren’t the only ones out to get Pinkston. Stand for Children has made it clear it wants Pinkston, Frogge and Speering gone.

The organization’s Nashville director, Dan O’Donnell, pins the district’s low performance — and increase in the number of schools that have fallen into the state’s bottom 5 percent — on the board’s culture. Stand for Children endorsed Gentry, the current board chair, in District 1, but O’Donnell says that’s because she’s “done the best she can” with Pinkston on the board.

That it took the board more than a year to hire its new director and the lack of gains in achievement are a “direct result of poor leadership, divisiveness and this never-ending fight on charter schools,” he says. (The board nearly unanimously offered the director job to Williamson County school boss Mike Looney a year earlier. Looney remained in the suburbs after the Williamson County school board sweetened his deal.)

Whereas Pinkston, Frogge and Speering contend their opponents are “charter zealots,” O’Donnell argues there’s not a candidate running who’s for unabated charter growth. Though some might argue Speering is just as anti-charter as Pinkston, O’Donnell, who is supporting Speering’s opponent, Jane Grimes Meneely, in District 3, says, “I’m not going to say anything bad about Jill.

“What we do have is a faction of the board that’s aggressively anti-charter,” O’Donnell says. “And that’s mostly driven by Pinkston.”

In Nashville, O’Donnell argues, charters have provided a high-quality option for students who might not otherwise get one. The motivation for Stand for Children and others like Project Renaissance to defend charters, O’Donnell says, comes from the hostility toward current charter operators.

Here’s the interesting part: O’Donnell doesn’t exactly dislike Pinkston based on his policy choices. It’s less about his positions and more about the dysfunction he says Pinkston creates on the school board, O’Donnell says.

“I think it’s easier to wage an ideological war against charters than it is to solve the very real problems facing the other 90 percent of schools, and I think that’s why they do what they do,” O’Donnell says. “This isn’t just about policy differences; this is about how we interact with each other, how we as a community build relationships.”

When it comes to that “divisiveness” on the board, Frogge is often put in the same category as Pinkston, mostly because she too has made a headline or two with a sharply worded Facebook post or tweeted argument. Both have advocated for less testing and a moratorium on charters, but Weber says lumping Pinkston and Frogge together is a mistake.

“Amy has been painted in this corner because she continually says things that people don’t want to hear,” he says. “So they paint her as being shrill or being aggressive or being negative, when nothing is really further from the truth. Amy wants evidence-based policy out there.”

A look at the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, will reveal things Frogge has been talking about for years, Weber says, from standardized testing to recess to community schools.

Her opponent in West Nashville’s District 9, Thom Druffel, is one of Weber’s examples of a slate of candidates who have “no business” running against incumbents with track records like those of Pinkston and Frogge. Druffel’s background is in the corporate world working for hotel chains, and his political performance in the past has left something to be desired. Last year, he announced he was running for Metro Council and held an event to launch his campaign, but he forgot to turn in the 25 petition signatures required to qualify for the election. Druffel says the absolutism around charters and “dysfunction” on the current board drew him to the race.

“You lose the trust of being able to work together because you’ve created one issue,” Druffel says. “So maybe you go from 28 to 29 charters? Does that make a difference when you have a hundred-some schools? To me, it’s all about the student. You have a discussion about a charter each time one comes up.”

That race has already shown signs of getting ugly too, with push polls circulating that have targeted each candidate, including one that attempted to tie Frogge to clients defended by her husband Patrick Frogge, also a lawyer. Both Frogge and Druffel have denied any connection to the polls.

And then, of course, there’s the money. So far, Druffel has outraised Frogge by $10,000, bringing in almost $37,000 — $20,000 of which came from donors in District 8. Pinkston has secured a little under $70,000, along with endorsements from Mayor Megan Barry and former Gov. Phil Bredesen, for whom Pinkston was a top aide.

Miller has brought in around $90,000, with the largest contributions coming from charter school backers like DeLoache and Trump supporter and English-only backer Lee Beaman. Stand for Children’s O’Donnell says checks are on the way from his organization and mailers have already been sent out in support of its endorsed slate. Additionally, Beacon Center board members other than Beaman have donated the maximum amount in multiple races.

The bulk of Pinkston and Frogge’s campaign donations in this election come from the Metro teachers union and Service Employees International Union. The same goes for Speering. In 2012, Pinkston raised around $68,000, and he says if he had any more money, he’s not sure what he would have spent it on. But that race, he says, was largely positive.

“This one I expect to go hard negative, so maybe I’ll have to spend more money,” he says. “But the other candidate will draw first, and then I’ll have to respond accordingly.”

No one needs to tell Frogge that a monetary disadvantage can be overcome, but she says the bitter tactics in this year’s races could change the calculation.

“The last election there were no negative attacks on either side, and that’s already happening, so I don’t know how that’ll impact the outcome,” Frogge says.

Asked about her hostility toward charter school supporters, she says it’s a response to a disconnect between the stated goals of certain people and organizations, and their actions.

“The reason I distrust them is because they act one way and they talk about collaboration,” Frogge says, adding that they’ll then do things like put empty chairs on a stage at a forum. “It just doesn’t match up, and I guess I already know they want me gone.”

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