Governor calls session for Race to the Top funds
12/16/2009
| Chattanooga Times Free Press
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By Andy Sher asher@timesfreepress.com
NASHVILLE — Gov. Phil Bredesen said Tuesday he will call the General Assembly into a special legislative session next month to enact far-reaching changes in how K-12 teachers and principals are evaluated and granted tenure.
The governor said changes are necessary to help Tennessee qualify for federal Race to the Top funds. The one-week special session would begin Jan. 12, the day lawmakers reconvene for their regular session.
Gov. Bredesen also called for sweeping changes to higher education that better tie funding to student graduation rates and to boost community colleges’ role in educating Tennesseans.
When it comes to K-12 education, it is critical that the state’s laws be changed quickly because the application to the Obama administration for Race to the Top funds must be in by Jan. 19, Gov. Bredesen said.
“There’s a lot at stake here,” he said. “Our share of this could easily be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for education. And I would say, with these changes in the law, we are in a very strong position.”
Without the K-12 changes, “we are probably an also-ran in the competition,” he warned.
President Barack Obama has proposed dividing $4 billion in federal stimulus among states that have enacted innovative measures to improve education. Some officials in Tennessee have talked of seeing as much as $400 million if the state’s application beats other states in the same category.
Sharon Vandagriff, president of the Hamilton County Education Association, said the association wasn’t concerned about the move, because student performance couldn’t be the only way to measure teacher tenure.
Some teachers, such as those who teach related arts and physical education, have no test scores on which to be judged.
“Tenure is already tied to performance,” she said. “You can’t get tenure in Tennessee unless you show you’ve been through the evaluation process and you’ve received recommendation.
“I don’t know any teacher that would have a problem with (student performance) being one piece of the puzzle.”
Gov. Bredesen acknowledged that the Tennessee Education Association, which represents thousands of teachers across the state, has not yet agreed to the proposed changes.
“Part of the point I’ve made is that this is not some ideological thing that’s suddenly come to the fore,” he said. “This is a requirement put on the table by the most liberal national administration of my adult lifetime.”
The Tennessee Education Association’s top lobbyist, Jerry Winters, said the issue boils down to how much emphasis to place on student achievement as measured by testing.
“We would be opposed to using a single test score in evaluating teachers,” he said. “We think that student achievement could be part of an evaluation. We have not reached an agreement as to how much weight testing should play in evaluating teachers.”
Gov. Bredesen said he would “love” to let the state school board decide what percentage of evaluations would be based on student scores. However, he said, “it would “have to be 50 percent or north to really engage the issues.”
While he is pushing for the value-added testing to be used in granting tenure and in annual evaluations, Gov. Bredesen said he is not asking to have the test scores used to determine whether a teacher keeps tenure.
Rep. Gerald McCormick, RChattanooga, said that, based on what he is hearing, the governor’s plan “sounds great to me” and should “get a lot of cooperation” from House Republicans.
“It sounds like he’s moving in the right direction,” Rep. McCormick said. “I think personally it’s a brave thing for him to do, and President Obama deserves credit, too.”
Joining Democrat Bredesen in making the announcement was Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, R-Blountville, who is Senate speaker. Lt. Gov. Ramsey pledged to work to pass both the K-12 and higher education proposals in the one-week time frame.
Gov. Bredesen and Lt. Gov. Ramsey said the state has a leg up of sorts on many competitors for the federal dollars, given the value-added assessment program it initiated in the early 1990s that proponents say measures gains students make under individual teachers.
Lt. Gov. Ramsey said opponents have “watered down” the use of the value-added assessment system over the years to prevent it from being applied to teacher tenure and performance evaluations.
“We’ll be able to say we’ve passed this bill to have an objective evaluation when teachers are granted tenure here in the state of Tennessee,” Lt. Gov. Ramsey said. “That’s a good thing.”
SPECIAL SESSION TOPICS
• K-12
• Mandating annual teacher and principal evaluations.
• Basing evaluations and initial granting of teacher tenure in part on student achievement as gauged by test data.
• Creation of a statewide “recovery district” to handle failing schools or failing school systems.
• Higher education
• Change the state funding formula to emphasize graduation rates instead of enrollment.
• Require students needing remedial education to attend community colleges, not four-year institutions.
• Standardize basic community college courses to ensure students can transfer credits from two-year schools to four-year institutions.
• Allow dual enrollment in two- and four-year schools.