In his Aug. 6 guest column in this newspaper, Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey wrote that the Tennessee Education Association had unfairly attacked the education "reforms" that he and his fellow Republican legislators enacted during the last legislative session.
He claims that the TEA has "opposed every innovation in education reform since Lamar Alexander was governor." Perhaps Ramsey has so soon forgotten that it was only with the willing support of the TEA that the state was able to succeed a year ago in being named one of only two states to finish first in the competition for federal funds through the Race to the Top initiative.
As a result of the support from TEA's membership and organizational staff, Tennessee was able to win $501 million in academic grant dollars. Tim Webb, who was then Tennessee's education commissioner, called it "the single greatest day in the history of public education in Tennessee."
Along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds awarded to Memphis City Schools, the city and Shelby County schools will receive tens of millions of dollars to improve the quality of classroom education.
Teachers, through the TEA, had reservations about some aspects of the Race to the Top implementation -- particularly major changes in teacher evaluations, which they might have preferred to be done differently. But it is highly unlikely that Tennessee would have won the nationwide competition without the organization's efforts.
The claim by Ramsey, who also serves as speaker of the state Senate, that the TEA has had a "monopoly" over the state's education system seems an overstatement at the least. No public or private school teacher is required to join the TEA. Failure to join has no professional or economic consequence. The TEA plays no direct role in any teacher's evaluation, the granting of tenure to a teacher or the setting of pay for any individual teacher. The teachers at each public school system in the state have the option to decide whether they want to engage in collective bargaining with the local school board and whether they want to do this as a TEA affiliate.
As for Ramsey's assertions that the Tennessee media erroneously portrayed legislative Republicans as "anti-teacher" and that he knows of no Tennessee Republican who has ever attacked a teacher in the debate over ending union contracts, I would remind him of an old saying: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
I challenge Ramsey to peruse newspapers in the state for negative statements of himself and some of his legislative colleagues about teachers and the TEA, and then deny that they were attacking teachers. If you call the Tennessee Farm Bureau a communist organization, then you are calling its farmer members communists. If you claim the Tennessee Medical Association promotes quack medicine, then you are asserting that its doctor members are incompetent. You cannot separate an organization from its membership. They are the ones who determine the goals and objectives of that organization, not vice versa.
Ramsey says that what he particularly cannot tolerate are those who promote the "big lie" that members of his party are "anti-teacher," and that "no one values education more than conservatives." But he offers no evidence that truth is on his side.
We are indeed making great strides in education reform in Tennessee, but that has little or nothing to do with the policies promoted by the Republican-controlled state legislature. The teachers know it and most of us in Tennessee's adult population know it.
Extending the granting of teacher tenure from three years to five years will have nothing to do with making any teacher a better one. What will make a difference is the new state-mandated teacher evaluation system, which will require all teachers, tenured and nontenured, to perform to a minimum level to retain their teaching position.
Taking away from a teacher organization the right to be politically involved in state elections and limiting the opportunity for teachers to financially support organizations that promote the candidates they favor will not make them better teachers. To assert to TEA leaders, as Republican state Rep. Glen Casada admitted to doing, that the organization should financially support Republican legislative candidates to the same degree as Democratic candidates, will not make for better classroom teachers.
To claim that the TEA seeks to have a "monopoly" control over state education policy and at the same time attack political opponents for promoting a "big lie" about the Republican Party is hypocrisy. And when such assertions come from the speaker of our state Senate, they are scary.
Richard Chesteen is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
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