Gov. Phil Bredesen's plan to call a special one-week session of the Legislature on Jan. 12 to push an education reform agenda has a worthwhile purpose. The governor wants to put Tennessee in the running a for big share -- perhaps as much as $400 million -- of a $4.5 billion federal incentive plan to boost a "Race to the top" competition on innovative education reforms. And given the timing, it now will take a special session of the Legislature to meet the deadline.
If Tennessee is to compete for the national prize money from the Obama administration's 2009 stimulus fund, it must have its application in the mail by January 19, and it must be supported by new school reform legislation that has been enacted into law. That raises the question: Why has the governor waited so long to push ahead with a bid?
The prize, and the goal, certainly are worthy. Improving school performance and student achievement is intrinsically worthwhile. And like every other state in the country, Tennessee's recession-depressed tax revenue is still imposing a squeeze on school budgets, along with every other state service. "Race to the Top" prize money would be a welcome find.
The issue concerning the competition for "race to the top" funds is whether the Legislature can develop and fairly enact an effective, worthy, bona fide education reform package in the short span of an early January week.
The Legislature's history provides few good signs that it can. Were that the case, one would imagine the urgency of raising the state's lackluster standing in education achievement would have compelled such an effort long ago.
Tennessee's educational deficiencies, after all, have been amply demonstrated for years. Like other several southern states, Tennessee has long ranked nationally in the bottom tier of states in a number of important education indices. These include student proficiency scores in key academic areas, high school graduation rates, college attendance, and per capita spending on education.
If the governor and the Legislature had great ideas about education reform that they were ready to undertake, we would have expected them to put those ideas forward some time ago. The Race to the Top competition, in any case, has been on the table since last Spring. It's reasonable to ask why it is just now compelling the governor's call for a special session. Earlier action would have allowed a legislative working group to develop a template for a proposal to the U.S. Department of Education long before now.
One reasonable assumption about the sudden and rushed special session is that the governor and the key legislative leaders he has corralled behind the idea -- a group that includes Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, a GOP gubernatorial candidate -- must think it will be easier to push through controversial reforms in a tight timetable.
Given the specific guidelines for the innovation prize, K-12 teachers may well feel threatened by the thrust of the state's plan. The governor's outline suggests a significant focus on ways stimulate achievement student achievement gains by mandating annual teacher evaluations, and by basing evaluations and initial grants of teacher tenure rights on student achievement, as gauged by student test data. He also plans to seek creation of a statewide "recovery" district to handle failing schools.
In the area of higher education, Gov. Bredesen wants to link state funding for higher education to college graduation rates, rather than enrollment figures. He reasonably would require students who need remedial courses to attend community colleges first, not four-year colleges. He also would standardize basic community college courses to ensure credit transfers from two-year to four-year institutions, and he would allow dual enrollment in two-year and four-year colleges.
Most of these ideas seem sensible. But it's understandable that K-12 teachers would be wary of tying tenure uniformly to student progress, particularly in schools with heavy concentrations of students from educationally deprived families that do not support or nurture learning in the home -- an indices long considered crucial to student achievement.
Colleges reasonably have comparable concerns about linking funding to graduation rates, which are heavily influenced by the necessity of so many students to work long hours to finance their college education.
Fixing hard-data standards to such subjective difficulties is not likely to be accomplished in a quick special-session week in the Legislature. Memphis' pilot standards for gauging teacher effectiveness, developed to help Memphis City Schools qualify for a $90 million grant from the Gates Foundation, might provide a path for evaluating K-12 teachers. But the governor will be hard pressed to move the Legislature so far along in January.
An earlier start on the Race to the Top proposal would have been beneficial. We can only ask why the Bredesen administration didn't enter the race sooner.
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