In the past two years, Memphis-Shelby County Schools hasn’t just struggled with low test scores and missed targets. It has lurched from one political crisis to another — a superintendent firing, election-law battles, and now an anti-takeover plan — all with one constant: a school board fighting harder for its own survival than for our children’s success.

Look closely at the sequence. Every time there was a chance to reset the system in favor of students, the board chose self-preservation instead. This isn’t an accident. It’s a pattern.

The Superintendent Firing: Chaos Over Children

On January 21, 2025, after a tense, chaotic meeting, the MSCS board voted 6–3 to fire Superintendent Marie Feagins, less than a year into her tenure. She had been hired as a “transformational leader.” She left calling the board’s decision “exactly the opposite” of what an educational institution should stand for, accusing members of choosing “chaos over children” and vowing to see them in court.

Board members cited a 200-plus-page investigative report and allegations of contract violations and misleading statements. Whatever legitimate concerns they may have had, one thing was conspicuously missing from that night and the days that followed: a clear, kid-centered turnaround plan rolled out alongside the termination.

There was no emergency roadmap for lifting third-grade reading. No detailed strategy for stabilizing classrooms or accelerating learning after yet another leadership upheaval. No publicly articulated plan that said, “Here is how we will protect students from the fallout of our own decision.”

Instead, Memphis families watched — again — as adults fought adults. Lawyers were hired. Statements were crafted. Lawsuits were threatened. The board devoted enormous energy to justifying its move and managing its own narrative. The students, as usual, were left out of the frame.

A moment that could have been an inflection point — a chance to demand measurable gains for kids in exchange for yet another superintendent shuffle — became just another chapter in governance drama.

The Election Fight: Dodging Accountability at the Ballot Box

While the Feagins saga played out, state lawmakers were sharpening another tool: the ballot box.

Frustrated by years of low performance and leadership instability, legislators pushed to reshape MSCS board elections and even add state-appointed members. One proposal would allow the governor to appoint up to six additional board members to sit alongside the nine elected ones, citing the need for more “highly qualified” voices at the table.

At the same time, a “mega-election” was looming that could put all nine MSCS board seats on the May 2026 ballot at once — an unprecedented opportunity for voters to send a message about chronic failure and demand new leadership.

The board’s reaction was telling. Rather than seizing this moment to go directly to families with a bold student-rescue plan — saying, “Judge us on whether we can finally get your children reading, and hold us accountable if we don’t” — MSCS sued to stop the mega-election and rallied against changes that would alter the composition or power of the board.

Again, the focus wasn’t: “How do we fix 75 percent non-proficiency in reading?” It was: “How do we keep control of the seats?”

To be clear, state intervention proposals raise real concerns. Appointed managers and added seats can dilute local voice and open the door for agendas that have little to do with kids. But MSCS leadership didn’t counter those efforts with a transparent, time-bound academic rescue plan the public could rally around. Instead, they framed the fight almost entirely around their own authority.

When politicians feel threatened, they campaign. When public servants feel responsible, they confess failure, tell the truth, and present a plan with deadlines.

Memphis got the campaign. It still hasn’t gotten the plan.

The Anti-Takeover Plan: A Shield, Not a Lifeline

Enter the latest chapter: the “Local Accountability and Transformation Plan: An Alternative to State Governance in Memphis-Shelby County Schools.” Six pages long. Heavy on structure. Light on student guarantees.

The context matters. After the Feagins firing, state lawmakers advanced a bill to create a state-appointed “board of managers” for MSCS, potentially sidelining the elected board for four to six years and relegating them to advisory status. Another proposal would add state-appointed members directly to the board. Both were explicit responses to what lawmakers called “too much dysfunction” and unacceptable academic results.

Only then — with the possibility of losing real power — did the MSCS board move quickly to craft a counteroffer.

The document’s title says the quiet part out loud: this is an alternative to state governance. It was not born out of a fresh moral reckoning with children’s suffering. It was born out of political necessity.

Who Gets a Seat at the Council Table?

One page of the plan lays out the membership of the new Intergovernmental Transformation Council. Read the list of guaranteed seats, and you can see exactly whose interests are protected:

• 2 Board of Education members
• 2 Shelby County Commissioners
• 2 Memphis City Council members
• 2 members of the Shelby County Legislative Delegation
• City and County Mayors (or their designees)

Only after that come the so-called “strategic stakeholders”: teachers, parents, students, the Superintendent, a Chamber of Commerce representative, and a representative from the Tennessee Department of Education. The Council is then empowered to appoint “additional community and business leaders” with expertise in finance, facilities management, and infrastructure — more adults, more titles, more authority.

Count the guaranteed power slots: far more are reserved for politicians and insiders than for the people whose children are most harmed by MSCS’s failures.

Notice what’s missing: there is no guaranteed seat for a literacy specialist from a high-poverty school, no requirement that a principal from a chronically low-performing campus be at the table, no mandate that the Council include experts whose sole focus is early reading or math intervention.

The structure is perfectly designed to protect the people and institutions already in charge. It is not designed to give direct power to the families and educators desperate to see children finally learn to read.

More Adults in Meetings, Still No Guarantee for Kids

The highlighted clause that the Council may appoint “additional community and business leaders” with finance and facilities expertise might sound harmless — even helpful. But when you put it next to the district’s reading crisis, it sends a brutal message about priorities.

In a system where:

• Three out of four students are not reading on grade level.
• National test scores have fallen to historic lows.
• Graduates are leaving with diplomas that don’t match their skills.

MSCS’s flagship response to a possible state takeover is to promise more seats at a governance table for adults who understand budgets, buildings, and political levers — with not one sentence guaranteeing a reading specialist in every priority school or a non-negotiable daily literacy block in every K–3 classroom.

It’s not that facilities and finance don’t matter. Of course they do. But the order of operations here tells the truth: the thing the board is most urgently trying to save is its governance model, not the children drowning in a system that has failed to teach them basic skills.

The Pattern: Power First, Kids Later

When you line up the last few years, the narrative becomes impossible to ignore:

• When the superintendent became a political liability, the board moved swiftly to fire her — without pairing that decision with a credible, public turnaround plan for students.
• When election changes threatened their seats, board members and local officials mobilized to fight the proposals — instead of using the moment to invite voters to judge them on a clear set of academic targets.
• When a state takeover loomed, the board produced a six-page governance-heavy plan built around a new council stacked with politicians and insiders — not a classroom-heavy plan built around urgent literacy, math, and graduation guarantees.

At every critical moment — firing a superintendent, facing new elections, and now facing a takeover — the board’s first instinct has not been, “What will it take to get 15,000 more kids reading?”

It has been: “How do we keep control of the system?”

That is the through-line. That is the story Memphis has to decide whether it will keep accepting.

What If We Flipped the Script?

Imagine, for a moment, what a children-first response would have looked like at each of these crossroads.

When Feagins was fired, the board could have walked out of that meeting with a signed, public commitment to specific third-grade reading and math targets, backed by an emergency plan with dates, budgets, and consequences attached. Instead of just “We’ll see them in court,” Memphis could have heard, “We’ll see you at 50 percent reading proficiency by 2028 — or we’ll step aside.”

When election changes were proposed, the board could have embraced the mega-election, put its record on the line, and said to voters: “Keep us if you believe we have a real path to rescue your children academically. Replace us if we don’t.”

When the takeover bill surfaced, the board could have answered with a devastatingly specific plan: targets by school, year-by-year literacy milestones, public dashboards updated monthly, and automatic triggers if progress wasn’t made.

Instead, at each turn, the main project has been saving the board — not saving the kids.

So Who Is This System Really Serving?

It would be easy to treat all of this as just more political drama, one more Memphis story of power brokers clashing while regular people tune out. But there is a cost to this pattern, and it isn’t measured in headlines or legal fees. It’s measured in children’s lives.

Every year MSCS spends prioritizing adult control over student outcomes is another year thousands of kids fall further behind. Another year of third-graders promoted without truly being able to read. Another year of high school seniors graduating into a world they are academically unprepared to navigate.

That damage will outlast every single person currently sitting on the board. Long after their names are forgotten, the children they failed will still be paying the price.

In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the lost decade and dissected the so-called transformation plan. In this third part, we’ve traced the power trail that reveals what the board really prioritizes.

Next, we’re going to turn the camera on the people who keep telling Memphis to “trust the process” — and on the kids who can’t afford to wait.

In Part 4 of our JustMyMemphis investigation, we’ll leave the boardroom and follow MSCS graduates into colleges, workplaces, and the military to expose what this system’s failures really mean: diplomas that don’t open doors, futures shrunk before they begin, and a city that cannot afford another decade of leadership that puts power first and children last.