It’s rare that a governor calls a special session of the Legislature the week before lawmakers officially resume their new year’s duties. But with the possibility of pulling down several hundred million dollars from the Obama administration’s $4 billion Race to the Top fund to propel national education reform, the governor is on a mission.
Mr. Bredesen wants to make Tennessee a leading model — and grant recipient — for the kind of K-12 reform that the president is seeking to vault American education back into a leadership position in the global community. And the governor intends to do so by revising the state’s teacher tenure laws to make tenure contingent on student performance, as measured by increased achievement levels year over year.
That seems to fit the kind of bold, innovative thinking that the Obama administration is seeking to shake up the lax status quo that has left American students trailing European and Asian public schools year after year the last few decades in math, science and language skills.
Yet teachers’ 51,000-strong Tennessee Education Association is understandably wary about making student achievement gains the sine qua non, the indispensable element, of reform. A fierce but necessarily quick battle is already underway on that issue, and has been in the run-up to the special session — which begins today — since the governor unveiled his proposal for a special session just a few weeks ago. The Jan. 19 deadline for applying for Race to the Top grants unfairly drives the debate schedule, and the governor is also responsible for putting this debate in the vise of that short time-frame.
Teachers have reasonable fears of being ramrodded in the session to make an extravagant concession before the final votes of the special session on Thursday and Friday. They also want to avoid being made targets for a burden and a cause that often are chiefly due to family and social issues, as opposed to a problem of ineffective teaching skills or unsatisfactory teacher effort.