“When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck” – James Whitcomb Riley.

Abraham Lincoln once said: “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” The powers that be in America right now are calling us to do just that—to create a future for our children, while the governor of this state and his cronies are trying to steal it from them. Some might think it rude that I refer to the governor of the great state of Tennessee as a thief and a racist, fascist, White supremacist, neanderthal but like James Whitcomb Riley said: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”

This duck, a.k.a., Gov. Bill Lee has invited ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, with its revisionist history curriculum designed as a rightwing corrective to the Pulitzer-Prize winning 2019 Project, to open 100 + Charter Schools in the state of Tennessee as part of the state’s ignorance-based assault on ‘Critical Race Theory,’ which neither Lee as governor and ‘chief duck’ or his ducklings can even accurately define. It’s all part of the ultra-right, fascist assault on public education and on our democracy. Lee calls his new formula for funding this charade (TISA) ‘Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement.’

Too bad TISA will do nothing to prepare our students for PISA, the ‘Program of International Student Assessment,’ that prepares students world-wide to function as global citizens. I doubt if the duck and the ducklings on Capitol Hill in Nashville can define that one either.