I believe Stick's only two comments on the McQueen announcement were that:

1) he had a that juncture been unable to find any peer-reviewed work of hers, in spite of the fact that she holds a PhD in education (although he conceded that he had not then had much time to conduct a very thorough search), and

2) he noted that Haslam's introduction of her to the public contained all the reform-y buzzwords we tend to associate with the movement.

This commendation of the Lipscomb teacher prep program by the National Council on Teacher Quality that you mention is news to me, but it's not particularly surprising news. Lipscomb's program is known to focus heavily on how teacher-candidates should use data to guide their instruction. The program is also known to work closely with SCORE.

Thanks for a few new details, but I'm inclined to agree with Stick that it's looking like the second verse will be same as the first...

The NCTQ info was cited in both The Tennessean and Lipscomb's own release on McQueen's announcement. That was specifically for Stick because he was upset about a column on NCTQ that I wrote in 2013 and what they had said about UTK's teacher education program. I hadn't been explicit enough at that time about where NCTQ stood.

I'd intended to write about something else this week but because of the holiday couldn't do the reporting I wanted to do regarding that issue, so I switched late in the day on Tuesday to McQueen, so as it turned out I didn't have time to do thorough research on the peer-reviewed work, which I also saw as an interesting question.

And I didn't have room to bring in the SCORE issue since I wanted to bring in the other too issues. Word counts can be troublesome, and often mean that a newspaper column is not definitive and is instead just a beginning look at something.

And, in case, you didn't read all the way to the end, my point was that McQueen is likely more of the same.

And, in case, you didn't read all the way to the end, my point was that McQueen is likely more of the same.

Oh, I read all the way to the end, or I wouldn't have presumed to post any comment :-)

I do appreciate your spelling out your point more specifically here, though.

When I read early in your column that "political leaders on both the left and the right were happy" with this announcement, I was curious as to just who these leaders on the left were (!) and also as to where you stood, personally.

So again, thanks for that clarification.

The privatetizers.

As for Haslam, he hasn't proposed or done anything on education that hasn't involved taking public money from the public and putting it private hands.

Charters and Tennessee Promise to name two.