Policy Update: Tennessee: In for a Tuneup

Vital Statistics
138	Public school districts
1,512	Public schools
906,000	K-12 enrollment
26%	Minority students
23%	Children in poverty
14%	Students with disabilities
$3.9 billion	Annual K-12 expenditures (all revenue sources)

Most of the tinkering focused on the state's testing system, one of the most extensive in the nation.

The 1992 school reform law required high school students to take end-of-course tests in every subject. But adhering to that proviso would have meant writing dozens of different tests at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. To avoid a bureaucratic and budgetary nightmare, the state school board in July chose a more manageable list of 11 subjects for testing.

At the urging of Gov. Don Sundquist, the board and state lawmakers voted to require them to go one step further and pass tests in three of the subjects on the list--algebra, biology, and 10th grade English--in order to graduate.

That new provision is scheduled to begin with students entering 9th grade in 2000. But some educators say it could yet prove controversial.

"We all know some highly intelligent and successful people who couldn't pass an Algebra 1 competency test," says Robert Greene, the superintendent of the Meigs County schools, a rural, 1,750-student district northeast of Chattanooga. "Just to hold someone back because they didn't perform well on a standardized test is, for me, hard to justify."

For a state where nearly one-fourth of children are poor and where one out of seven people ages 18 to 24 lacks a high school diploma, raising the academic bar is indeed a challenge.

On the latest round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 42 percent of the state's 4th graders and 47 percent of 8th graders scored below "basic" on math tests.

State assessment results released in the fall, however, show that students are improving in mathematics, reading, language arts, and science.

The same reform law that gave birth to the state's testing system seven years ago also gave the state education commissioner the authority to take over troubled schools and districts--those with a history of flat or dropping test scores or high dropout rates. But, as education leaders found out with the end-of-course tests, moving from paper provisions to practice proved to be more of a challenge than anyone had anticipated.

or district had yet been taken over, and only one district had been placed on the state's warning list.

For now, the state has decided not to identify and intervene in failing schools, instead leaving it up to districts to do so.

What the state needed, Commissioner Jane Walters told lawmakers early last year, was even more authority and the chance to intervene earlier in troubled districts. Her cause was helped at the time by bad news coming out of Hancock County in East Tennessee--the single district on probation. A state audit cited a long list of problems in the rural district: below-average test scores, schools badly in need of renovation, and out-of-date textbooks.

What's more, the superintendent and his wife stood trial on charges of embezzling $58,000 in district funds. Their case was declared a mistrial in February of last year after the jurors deadlocked on a verdict.

In the end, lawmakers agreed with Walters and gave the commissioner the power to replace local officials during a district's two-year probationary period.

The legislature also authorized the state building commission to force county officials to pay for the building of badly needed schools or renovations.

It was the first test of the state's new accountability system, and many believed that Tennessee had passed.

"In our state this year we have not let the accountability issue get watered down," says Sarah Thompson, the vice president of education for the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.

At the same time, though, long-standing complaints about the fairness of Tennessee's school finance system continued to dog the state.

Spurred by a lawsuit brought by more than 70 small, rural districts, Tennessee in 1992 raised its sales tax half a cent and used the money to even out spending differences among districts.

But by midsummer of last year, most of the districts involved in the original suit were headed to court again. While the changes in the finance laws helped close gaps in per-pupil spending, rural districts still lagged far behind in teacher pay, the plaintiffs claimed.

Average salaries across the state, for example, range from $29,041 in rural Monroe County to $44,153 in Oak Ridge, a suburban district outside of Knoxville.

The blame for the continuing inequities, the districts believe, lies with local-option sales taxes. The taxes, which are earmarked for local schools, unfairly favor more heavily populated areas where stores and shopping malls are plentiful.

"Most people in rural areas trade in these towns, and they get all the sales tax back and we get nothing," says Thomas Dykes, the superintendent of the 7,000-student Hawkins County schools. The district, roughly an hour's drive from bigger cities such as Knoxville and Kingsport, is one of those involved in the lawsuit.

Dykes and the other plaintiffs in the case would like to see the local sales tax turned over to the state and redistributed to reduce disparities in teacher salaries.

A legislative task force began studying the issue in August. But it's hard to tell how successful the districts will be this time around if they continue to press their case. State officials note that Tennessee already spends $12 million of its $2.9 billion state education budget to equalize spending among districts.

Moreover, in 1997, the level of state funding for schools for the first time reached the full levels called for under a 7-year-old formula. Last year, schools received a $100 million boost in state aid in addition to what the formula called for.

As part of that budget, lawmakers also set aside $10 million in new money for school safety and another $3 million to help districts set up preschool programs for at-risk children.

Aside from those changes and funding increases, no major new education initiatives took hold in the Volunteer State last year. Prodded by the state's powerful teachers' union, the legislature, in fact, easily fended off a charter school proposal from the Republican governor.

The Tennessee Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association, complained that the bill would have allowed noncertified teachers in charter schools.

Sundquist, who won his bid for re-election to a second term last year, chose to withdraw his bill rather than argue the point. He vowed to take it up again this year.

But education issues were not a focus of the governor's re-election campaign. And that, some observers contend, may be too bad for schools.

As James W. Guthrie, a professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody college of education in Nashville, puts it: "I can't see anything really going on here that is going to make Tennessee a first-rate system."