Charter Approval May Take Music City Miracle

Music City Academy founder and former Tennessee Titan Kevin Dyson (Photo by Music City Academy)

On January 8, 2000, Tennessee Titans wide receiver Kevin Dyson pulled off the seemingly impossible by returning a kickoff for the go-ahead touchdown against the Buffalo Bills with just 16 seconds left in the game. The so-called Music City Miracle sent the Titans to the team’s only Super Bowl, and the play is among the most famous in Tennessee sports history.

Dyson retired from the NFL after six years and went on to earn two master’s degrees and a Doctorate in Education, and now he’s hoping to found a public charter school named after his miracle play.

The proposed Music City Academy would provide high school students in Nashville with a team-centered, career-connected learning model that utilizes athletics and multiple career and technical education (CTE) paths.

“Taking that passion of sports and utilizing that and fueling kids with some postsecondary opportunities,” said Dyson, describing the school on a recent episode of WPLN’s This is Nashville. “There’s 22 players on the field at each point in football, but there literally (are) hundreds of people making that entertainment go, from a marketing standpoint, from a broadcasting standpoint, from a security standpoint, from a videographer standpoint, from a social media standpoint. There’s all these opportunities in the world of sports.”

Board Opposition to Charters

If recent history is any indication, Dyson may need something of a second miracle to get approval for his school from the Metro Nashville Public Schools Board of Education.

Board members haven’t greenlit a new public charter school since approving Aventura Community School on a 5-3 vote in 2021, and the district’s charter review team is recommending denial for all four applications up for vote tonight.

Of the four proposed charters, Music City Academy is the only one that review team members rated as meeting state standards in any category. Reviewers found Dyson’s proposed school only partially met standards in the other two categories, including its educational program, which the review team cited as lacking a “fully developed plan.”

Board members don’t have to follow the district review team’s recommendation, but recent votes have shown they tend to do so, and there have been multiple examples that charter school supporters consider to be biased.

Last year, District 2 Board Member Rachael Anne Elrod said publicly that she opposed the concept of charter schools before voting against all three applicants, and in 2023, District 4 Board Member Dr. Berthena Nabaa-McKinney provided misleading talking points for parents in her district to use in emails opposing a charter applicant.

The board has also made multiple decisions to deny renewal requests from existing charter schools that outperform most, if not all, comparable schools in their clusters.

Overturned by the State

Questions about a bias against charters have only grown louder as more of those decisions have been overturned by the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission.

Commissioners began hearing charter school appeals in 2021, and they’ve overturned at least one MNPS denial each year since, including three in 2022 and 2024.

Those overturned decisions prompted the Tennessee General Assembly to step in last year, approving legislation that would allow charter applicants the ability to circumvent district approval and apply directly to the commission in districts that have had three charter denials overturned.

MNPS narrowly avoided its “first strike” last year by rushing staff to schedule the charter vote nearly a month before the new law took effect.

Questions About District Bias

Existing charter schools have also faced a number of challenges in recent years that some attribute to an anti-charter bias that goes even beyond school board members.

In 2022, MNPS stopped inviting charter schools to its annual Celebration of Schools Parade.  Two years later, district leaders unveiled a new zoning plan that removed LEAD Cameron from its role as the zoned middle school in South Nashville, diverting its students instead to a lower-performing school in the Antioch community. Last year, the district abruptly canceled an agreement allowing students at one charter school to compete on a nearby district-run school’s football team.

Charter Overperformance

These decisions have all come as public charter schools have annually outperformed comparable district-run schools.

A recent study by researchers at Stanford University found that charter school students in Tennessee gained the equivalent of 34 additional days in reading and 39 additional days in math compared to their public-school counterparts.

In Nashville, multiple Tennessee Firefly investigations of state testing data have found that most charter schools outperform most district-run schools in their cluster. The disparity was especially noticeable in North Nashville last year, when Brich Church Middle School’s proficiency rates dropped by nearly 50 percent in the school’s first year operating under MNPS.

The middle school had operated as a charter school under LEAD Public Schools for a decade before the district took back control in 2024.

Tonight’s vote on applications from Music City Academy, The Gate School, Nashville School of Excellence, and Empowerment Academy – Middle Tennessee is scheduled for 5 PM.