A week ago today, state lawmakers opened Gov. Phil Bredesen's special legislative session to push an education reform package through the Legislature to allow Tennessee to apply for a grant of up to $485 million under the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" reform competition. Having passed the bill late Friday evening in near record time, the governor will be able to meet today's deadline for submitting Tennessee's application. The question now is not just whether the state's application will be considered bold and innovative enough to win a grant, but also how quickly the state will execute the new reform law it has just enacted.
If Tennessee doesn't win any of the money it seeks, it almost certainly will slow the reform plan that has now become law. That would be an ironic result. The reform act merits support, whether or not it is judged a winner in Washington to share the $4 billion in federal seed money for urgent school reform.
It's clear that education reform in Tennessee is critical. As state Sen. Andy Berke points out, of every 100 students who enter the ninth grade in Tennessee, just 19 end up graduating from a two-year or four-year college. That's one of the lowest rates in the nation. It's an abysmal indicator for Tennessee's future in a broadening global economy which awards living-wage jobs mainly to the well-educated.
The strongest measure in the bill, the result of a welcome compromise between the governor and Tennessee's largest teacher union, provides for significantly stronger teacher accountability and tenure rights through a mandate for annual evaluations for teachers and school principals -- a standard far above the current criteria of two evaluations in a 10-year period.
Fifty percent of teachers' evaluation criteria and tenure rights will be based on objective student achievement data. Thirty-five percent of that data would be drawn from the state's Value Added Assessment System data, which measures a student's year-over-year progress under every teacher. Another 15 percent would be taken from a menu of other teacher assessment data.
Gov. Bredesen had sought to condition 51 percent of a teacher's evaluation and tenure on student's statistical achievement data. That critical one-point difference would have made the statistical data alone the single dominant factor in teacher retention. That would have been unfair in the extreme.
We applaud the compromise between the governor and the Tennessee Education Association that made this landmark reform possible. Teacher evaluations, as many legislators acknowledged, also must consider student and parent responsibility. Indeed, the reform law made room for initiatives to examine and improve student and parent responsibility.
Among other measures, the reform act would create a state-wide school district as an umbrella category for so-called "failing" schools in each of Tennessee's 139 school districts. However, it does not specify a funding mechanism for an estimated $65 million a year for staff time and resources for continuing education for teachers, which will be needed to help students meet achievement criteria apart from the state's hope for "Race to the Top" funding.
The Legislature and governor also ran short of time to address the higher education component of education reform, which would have made the grant application stronger.
Discussions on tentative college-level reforms included basing college funding on graduation rates as opposed to student-body population; and adopting uniform curriculum criteria and credits for junior college courses to be accepted at four-year institutions. Having failed to get high education criteria rolled into the reform act, the Legislature and governor plan to make that part of the legislative agenda in the regular session.
The governor bemoaned the lack of time to adopt a more comprehensive bill for Race to the Top funding, but that's hard to understand. The initiative has been known about for months. With better planning, the governor and legislative leaders could have created a legislative work force, held hearings and crafted a model bill last fall, and started a special session a week earlier.
The strategy for waiting until the last week to craft and cram a critical reform bill through the Legislature in just four days was the governor's choice. That it achieved as much as it did is laudable. But if it fails to win a substantial sum of money from Washington, it will be rightly criticized, however worthy the result is.
The TEA's "compromise" to 50% of teachers' evaluation scores coming from test data was because Gov. Bredesen had enough support to do anything he wanted, and was ready to push through even harsher requirements. The TEA was simply trying to keep a seat at the table.
While I agree that teacher evaluations should include data from test scores, what must also be taken into account is the wide range of student achievement in each classroom. Teachers are faced with wide ranges of student abilities in each of their classes. Students have been promoted socially for so long that, especially in the poorer schools, many students are unable to read or write - making it very difficult to teach the other students.
This mess we find ourselves in will work itself out very slowly with the guidelines put forth in this bill. In the mean time, we will be penalizing teachers in upper grades due to the failings of teachers at lower grades. Even the much-derided NCLB was rolled out gradually, allowing teachers AND students to adapt to new standards. But, especially in this case, money talks, and Tennessee's schools are in dire need.
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