Tennessee won $500 million last year in federal Race to the Top funds to improve education — one of the first two recipients in the national competition at the time — because educators, legislators and former Gov. Phil Bredesen worked together in a week-long special session of the Legislature to find common cause and deliver a break-through model for reform.
Now, just as the elements of that model are being rolled out in classrooms across the state, the new Legislature’s ruling Republicans, giddy with the power of a new GOP governor and heavy majorities in both chambers for the first time since Reconstruction, are seriously contemplating a war on the Tennessee Education Association, the professional organization that represents most teachers across the state.
A war on teachers
Key lawmakers want to destroy the rights of teachers’ local TEA chapters to bargain with local school boards over salaries, insurance benefits, seniority rights and professional development resources. Some legislators, in another bid to undermine the TEA, also want to pass legislation that would bar the teachers’ association from making contributions to political candidates.
A bill also has been introduced that proposes to kick the TEA’s representative off the state pension board, never mind that Tennessee’s teachers are among the largest groups of contributors to the state pension fund.
Yet another proposal would strike the TEA from the list of groups that are allowed simply to recommend appointees to the state’s financial literacy commission. That list, ironically, would keep the Cash Advance Association on it, which raises questions about the motive behind the bill as much as the snub to teachers? Maybe myopic legislators really do want more financially illiterate young people to keep the check-advance lobby’s campaign donations coming.
Haslam after tenure
Gov. Bill Haslam, meanwhile, is throwing fuel on the fire of his party’s pending crusade against teachers rights by embracing the mantra of new Republican governors around the country who favor abolition of teachers’ tenure rights. This is stunning. Teachers were granted tenure rights decades ago to prevent local politicians from firing professional educators in order to make patronage jobs available for their friends, family members and political supporters.
That’s wrong. The patronage problem remains a plausible threat. Some current and recent members of our County Commission used to use, and would today use, their power over the allocation of property tax revenue to the school system to promote the hiring of their friends, family members and supporters as principals and teachers if the superintendent and school board would bend to their demands.
To make matters worse, the legislation that would strip the TEA of bargaining and tenure rights is being supported by the Tennessee School Boards Association. The TSBA, it seems, doesn’t like having to bargain with teachers about their working conditions. Yet they are not now required to do so unless their TEA unit’s membership represents a majority of teachers in a local school district.
The thrust of all these measures is terribly misguided. It reveals legislators and the governor as enemies of teachers, rather than important collaborators. It seems to further presume that teachers are inordinately selfish and are more interested in their contracts than in their professional achievements and work in the classroom.
These are ludicrous assumptions, the notions of small minds and warped views that fail to recognize the huge gifts of time and effort that teaching demands, and teachers’ ceaseless struggle to teach students whose parents do little or nothing to nurture or require learning at home, attentiveness in class and the discipline of doing homework.
Yet most adults, if asked to name some of the people they most revere for constructively shaping their lives and goals, will usually list their memorable teachers.
Teachers as collaborators
The state’s teachers, in fact, agreed last year to allow a variety of factors suggested by Gov. Bredesen and education professionals to be used as measures of their professional competency and their right to tenure. Among these measures of accountability are their students’ value-added scores for their current classes and progress, as well as their professional evaluations.
If a more comprehensive method to assessing accountability is needed, then legislators should prove their case and secure the advice that is needed to make accountability more documentable. If the rules of tenure are truly onerous with regard to proving professional incompetence and firing teachers, then legislators should work with teachers to improve the grievance process for legitimately dismissing incompetent or underperforming teachers.
But the mean-spirited, small-minded, slash-and-burn approach of brash legislators to snapping a whip over teachers, debasing their professional integrity and effort and destroying their professional organization and their workers’ rights to organize and bargain, goes too far. It is breath-taking in its arrogance, cruel in its methods and counterproductive in its effect.
Tear down, or build up
This is not the way to promote morale, extra effort, hopeful cooperation and excellence in the classroom. It is a mind-set that is certain to produce disgruntled professionals, a demoralized atmosphere and a race to the bottom — not to the top — when it comes to keeping the sort of veteran teachers and bright young teachers that our economic future demands.
If academic excellence is to be the state’s goal, Tennessee’s teachers cannot be treated so disrespectfully and stripped of their professional standing and human and civil rights as employees. Teachers cannot be made to be automatons to a closed-minded, mean-spirited hierarchy of hare-brained legislators who bring nothing more than random barstool remedies to the complex social problems that haunt too many schools.
Collaboration with teachers and higher standards of achievement require a higher order of thinking, values and standards, especially from our legislators and governor. The Legislature should offer that.