Defender of Tennessee Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds fails to make his case

Re: "Lizzette Reynolds, Tennessee education commissioner, suffers for disrupting the status quo," by Joseph R. Murray II, April 10.

Attorney Joseph R. Murray’s recent guest opinion column, defending the besmirched honor of Tennessee Education Commission Lizzette Reynolds was as shameless as it was risible.

I do not wish to engage with his argument, stated repeatedly but backed up only by one piece of data — which shows student standardized test scores rising in recent years, and which Gov. Bill Lee himself trumpeted — that public education in Tennessee is “a complete failure, a laughingstock.”

If that were the case, Tennesseans would be clamoring in support of Governor Lee’s voucher program, instead of doing what they have been doing throughout the current legislative session: imploring their representatives to vote against it.

Tuition waiver controversy disqualifies education commissioner

Mr. Murray is, of course, a proponent of that same voucher program. He is hardly a dispassionate observer. The poverty of his argument is underscored by the fact that Ms. Reynolds could find no one else to deliver a defense of her conduct and qualifications.

I would think that an award-winning attorney would conclude, as even some Republicans have admitted, that Ms. Reynolds is unqualified to hold the position to which she has been appointed.

The law is clear on that the commissioner be a person who is “qualified to teach in the school of the highest standing over which the commissioner has authority.”

I would also think that an award-winning attorney would know perjury when they see it, and Ms. Reynolds appears to have perjured herself when she lied on her application for a tuition waiver for her teaching certificate at University of Tennessee-Martin, which her office called an "administrative error." The shamelessness of this lie is par for the course for the entire crooked enterprise, fueled by out-of-state money, which seeks to impose vouchers on a state that does not want them.

David Rivera, Brentwood 37027

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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tennessee education: Defense of Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds lacking