Pastors for Tennessee Children is dedicated to protecting and respecting public education as a moral and common good. We care for our neighborhood schools, support our educators, and advocate for fair and equitable school funding.

1. A Pro-Student Budget: Tennessee schools are underfunded and cannot accomplish their mission to serve all children effectively without proper funds. We support adequate and equitable funding for public education.

2. More Learning Time in Classrooms and Meaningful Assessment: Massive amounts of standardized testing (which is often flawed and ineffective) have crippled our classrooms, impeded student learning, and narrowed the curriculum (by eliminating the arts, recess time, PE, and important subjects). We promote limits on standardized testing and believe that any tests administered should help inform teachers and drive instruction.

3. A Healthy Start for Tennessee Children: All children should enter kindergarten prepared to learn. We support fully-funded, high quality pre-kindergarten programs.

4. Public Money for Public Schools: We oppose school privatization. We must fully fund our schools and say NO to any voucher schemes.

5. Democracy and Transparency: We support full public transparency and accountability for charter operators. We believe we must reign in out-of-control charter operators, and we oppose charter corruption and fraud, as well as the draining of pubic school funding through charter school proliferation. Charter schools must be publicly regulated. Schools should answer to Tennesseans, through democratically-elected school boards. We support local control of schools.