The possibility that state lawmakers in the House may thwart the state Senate bill to ban school boards from collective bargaining with members of the Tennessee Education Association – the teachers’ professional association – raises some hope that the Legislature may yet limit its gratuitously destructive assault on teachers’ rights to fair treatment. If Gov. Bill Haslam would step up and assert some leadership on this issue for a change, the glimmer of hope would be brighter.
The slender reed that raises some hope for fair treatment for teachers now hinges on House Speaker Beth Harwell. She said Tuesday that she favors some restrictions on the scope of teachers’ negotiations on contract matters, but not a complete ban. However, like Haslam, she immediately waffled, saying that she would support whatever proposal comes out of the education subcommittee to which she has assigned the matter.
She put the glimmer of hope that she raised for teachers in these terms: She said she would favor restricting teachers’ negotiations to the areas of wages and benefits, but that she would want to take off the table initiatives like merit pay and better compensation for teachers for hard-to-fill subjects (i.e., math and science). That would be a reasonable compromise, one that the TEA would likely, if grudgingly, allow.
For his part, Haslam has been weak-kneed on the effort by the state Senate and its House conspirators to bust the union by denying school boards the authority to negotiate with the TEA: the governor won’t say he’s for it or against it. The only thing the new governor has said is that he wants to tighten the terms for tenure for teachers by extending the probation time for tenure from three to five years, and by requiring superior ratings in performance evaluations as a further condition for tenure.
In reality, both the Senate committee’s vote to demolish teachers’ negotiating rights and the governor’s proposals for tightening tenure requirements are needless ploys. They are purely straw issues in debates over improving education. The former would slash teachers’ civil rights to reasonable collective bargaining; the latter would do nothing to cure the problems that are wrongly attributed to teachers as a group. The chief effects of both would be to demoralize teachers, to abuse their trust in a government that should be fair-minded, and to use them as scapegoats for a raft of social ills that the Legislature and the governor are all too happy to ignore if they can pretend that teachers are the problem with public education.