A Memphis high school Spanish teacher is running against TN Rep. Mark White. Here's why
In August, as temperatures eclipsed 100 degrees, the aging HVAC systems in Memphis-Shelby County Schools buildings struggled to cool classrooms. Some broke down, leaving students and teachers without air conditioning. Maintenance staffers worked swiftly to fix and replace the outworn systems, but it was an uphill battle.
And in the class of Spanish teacher Noah Nordstrom at Overton High School, the sweltering heat caused a student to pass out. Nordstrom snapped into action. He opened a window, trying to bring at least some cool air into the class. He called for help.
“I was just in reaction mode,” he said. “Like, how do I fix this? How do I stop this?”
The student ended up being alright, but Nordstrom’s concerns didn’t cease. Though he had been in the role for less than a month, it wasn’t the first time he had noticed infrastructure challenges. Less than a decade had passed since he had graduated from a private high school in Knoxville, and there was stark contrast between the pristine building he had learned in and the rundown building his students were learning in.
But this was also emblematic of larger problems within the district.
MSCS has $500 million in deferred maintenance and an average school building age of 64, 24 years past the national recommended life span of a school building. The district was developing a comprehensive infrastructure plan to address these issues; but to Nordstrom, the lion’s share of responsibility for its challenges lay with the State of Tennessee ― which he felt hadn’t provided enough funding.
As time passed, his frustrations mounted. He noticed mold and cockroaches. When he encouraged students to take their education seriously, they’d say, “Oh, at this broke school? How am I going to take it seriously?”
In the fall, he reached a breaking point when Gov. Bill Lee proposed dramatically expanding the number of vouchers offered in Tennessee through the Education Freedom Scholarship Act ― which would offer $7,075 in state funds to 20,000 students looking to attend a private or home school in the 2024-25 school year. Already, Tennessee had implemented Lee’s Education Savings Account program in 2022, which offers 2,400 students in Shelby, Davidson, and Hamilton counties $9,000 in state funds to cover tuition and other expenses at private schools.
Nordstrom was apoplectic. How could the state consider shelling out more money that would ultimately go to private schools, he thought, when public schools needed more funding?
Championing the proposal, he noticed, was State Rep. Mark White, a Memphis Republican who chaired the education administration committee in the Tennessee House of Representatives. Knowing White was up for re-election in 2024, Nordstrom started asking members of the Tennessee Democratic Caucus who would run against him. Though he didn’t have interest in being a candidate, he had experience running campaigns and wanted to lend a hand.
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But no one, it seemed, was going to challenge White. So, after receiving encouragement from prominent state democrats and members of the Tennessee Education Association ― which he was a representative for ― Nordstrom decided to take a big leap.
He decided to run against White himself.
“I cannot accept where we’re just throwing away our future,” Nordstrom said. “Education is the most important investment any society can make, period. It's supposed to be the great equalizer. But unfortunately, right now, it cements our inequalities, because of how it’s funded.”
'Two full-time jobs'
These days, Nordstrom is maintaining a bustling schedule. He’ll teach full, often exhausting, days at Overton High. Then, he’ll drink coffee, shift gears, and start campaigning door-to-door in White’s district ― District 83 ― which is comprised of Germantown and parts of East Memphis.
It’s a pace he’ll likely keep up until the general election in November; and it is, he explained, like “working two full-time jobs.” But he’s used to grueling schedules. He spent about two-and-a-half years teaching English in Mexico, at one point even instructing the head of Pfizer Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a student at Eastern Tennessee State University, he took 21 credit hours while managing a state senate campaign.
And he’s aware that winning the seat in the state house requires a herculean effort.
Nordstrom, after all, is a Democrat running against a Republican incumbent in a historically conservative district. White has held the seat since 2010 and warded off multiple challenges over the years. Defeating him isn’t easy.
But at the same time, Nordstrom doesn’t think it’s impossible. To the contrary, he believes he’ll win.
Can Nordstrom win?
District 83, he asserted, isn’t as much of a conservative stronghold as one might suspect. In 2020, democrat Jerri Green ran a close race against White, garnering about 46% of the vote. Nordstrom estimates that roughly 43% of the district’s residents are Democrats, and he considers the seat to be “super flippable ― one of the most flippable in the state.”
Still, to win, he’d likely have to earn the votes of most Democrats and at least some Republicans, which he believes he can do. While Nordstrom does have multiple political priorities, much of his campaign is centered around education, with voucher opposition and more public-school funding serving as flagship issues.
And he believes this gives him crossover appeal.
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“The message that we’re running on, which is centered around education, is super popular, and that’s what people want,” Nordstrom said. “I’m also not running just to represent Democrats.”
The Education Freedom Scholarship Act, the state voucher proposal, has drawn fiery condemnation from both urban and suburban school districts. MSCS leaders have roundly criticized it; and in late November, Ted Horrell, superintendent of the Lakeland School District, told The Commercial Appeal that “any plan that takes funds away from public schools has the potential to hurt public schools.”
Around that same time, Arlington Community Schools leaders issued a scathing statement, saying “the proposed voucher expansion, if passed, will continue to siphon money from public schools to private schools who are beholden to no one.”
And Germantown Municipal School District’s superintendent, Jason Manuel, blasted the proposal in a video, asserting that private schools don’t have to follow the same rigorous requirements as public schools.
“In my past 10 years as a superintendent, our legislature has passed hundreds of laws that are crushing the way that we run our schools,” he said. “None of these laws will apply to the schools accepting this taxpayer money… Will they be required to spend thousands of hours on state-mandated evaluation systems? … Will they be required to follow strict state standards and curriculum? The burdens are endless.”
Many of their grievances about vouchers are similar to Nordstrom’s.
“Public schools desperately need more money. So, if we're going to be investing more money into education, great. But that needs to go to our public schools that are crumbling,” he said. “You can't just like have this really poorly maintained system here and then say, ‘Oh, we're going to find new money to invest in another system.’ No, actually deal with the system you've got now.”
Multiple points of view
But will Nordstrom’s opposition to vouchers and advocacy for more public-school funding help propel him to the Tennessee General Assembly?
White doesn’t think so.
In many ways, the two seem strikingly different. Nordstrom is a 26-year-old, 6-foot-6 Democrat with long, blond hair. When he first started at Overton High, he was mistaken for a student and encouraged to join the school’s basketball team. White, on the other hand, is a 73-year-old Republican grandfather with short gray hair, who isn’t likely to be mistaken for a high school student or get recruited to play basketball.
The differences continue. White, for example, began his career teaching at Harding Academy, a local private school, and later became its principal. Nordstrom, early in his career, is teaching at a public school.
But while the two differ in many ways, they do share similarities, as both Nordstrom and White believe they have broad political appeal and can secure votes from Republicans and Democrats.
“I’ve got a lot of friends in the Democratic party,” White told The CA. “One of the best compliments I ever got was from a CEO of one of our major hospitals in town, who said, ‘Mark, the issue with you, is that we don’t know if you’re a Republican or a Democrat…’ That’s because I try to listen to all sides. I have conservative Republican values. But I listen to all sides because the way we make the best decisions is to listen to everybody.”
Funding and parental choice
Both Nordstrom and White also say they want to improve the lives of students in Memphis and Tennessee ― even if their approaches to doing so differ drastically.
White pushed back against claims that MSCS and other public school districts haven’t received adequate state funding. MSCS’ hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance, he asserted, is the result of mismanagement from the school district ― not a lack of support from the state. It’s an allegation in line with White’s recent frustration toward MSCS. In early February, he unveiled a plan that would add state-appointed members to the district’s school board.
“When they want to change things, they say, ‘Well, the answer is more money.’ The answer is not more money,” White said. “They're not maintaining their grounds with the money they have. It's easy to say money is the fix. But if you don't have a management plan in place to spend the money correctly, then it doesn't work.”
White also maintained that the state has significantly increased public education funding in recent years. As an example, he pointed to the state’s new funding formula for education, the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement, which generates an additional $1 billion for public schools.
And he echoed a point about the recent voucher proposal that has been made by the governor: the Education Freedom Scholarship Act wouldn’t receive money from the same funding source as public school districts, so it shouldn’t hurt them.
But it could, he explained, help students.
“It gives parents the choice to be able to have the option to take your kid to a school that may be a better fit for them,” White said. “Education is not about propping up the system. It’s about making sure that every child has opportunities to get the best education they can. It's giving the parent the options… What we want to do is build up our public schools, build up our charter schools, but give parental choice, to where they do need that choice.”
'The simple reality'
There’s no shortage of families who agree with him. Feedback from parents for the first year of the state’s current voucher offering, the ESA program, was overwhelmingly positive. Of the parents who completed the Tennessee Department of Education's parent satisfaction survey, 91% said that they were very satisfied with their student's academic growth.
And in December, Lee sat with several mothers at New Hope Academy, who gratefully spoke about how their children were receiving a better education at private schools thanks to vouchers.
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Nordstrom, however, doesn’t plan to back down from his stance. When speaking to The CA, he noted that studies don’t necessarily show students performing better after switching to private schools using vouchers. TCAP test scores from the first group of ESA students showed that many of them performed worse than their public-school peers on the state assessment in 2022.
And even if vouchers can improve a student's education, he explained, most will remain in public schools ― schools which he feels need improvement.
“Are all of my students going to be able to take those vouchers and go to St. Mary’s? St. Georges? St. Agnes? No,” he said. “That’s just the simple reality. No. Anyone who gets a good education, I’m happy about that… My issue is that every public school in Tennessee should be at that level. And that’s doable. People think that’s pie in the sky. It’s not.”
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis teacher Noah Nordstrom is running for TN Rep. Mark White's seat
