Education remains our No. 1 priority

Summer in Tennessee means outdoor barbecues, lakeside picnics with family, and lazy evenings watching the sunset from the front porch swing. At the Capitol, summer also is the time when we take stock of our achievements from the just-concluded legislative session and begin setting new goals.

Determining the top achievement of the 2007 legislative session was simple. This year, I’m proud to say we once again made the education of Tennessee’s children our top priority.

We’ve spent the last four years working to improve Tennessee’s education system in a variety of ways. We have raised teacher salaries above the Southeastern average. We have expanded access to quality pre-K classrooms, which currently benefit 15,000 children. We have also established lottery scholarships to make higher education more accessible and affordable for Tennesseans from all walks of life.

This year, we took on an even more fundamental challenge ‘ restoring fairness to Tennessee’s education funding formula, known as the Basic Education Plan (BEP). The changes we instituted are an acknowledgement of the very real costs associated with running a complex educational system. They’re about making sure every child ‘ regardless of family income, situation or social standing ‘ has every opportunity to pursue his or her dreams.

With BEP 2.0, we’re making a historic investment in Tennessee’s children ‘ more than a half-billion-dollar investment, to be exact. I’m proud of our investment. While this additional money is important to our schools, however, it isn’t the fundamental answer to the challenges we face when it comes to education.

This BEP reform is part of a two-way contract. It goes hand-in-hand with accountability from our school boards, our administrators and our teachers for their performance. We’re saying, ‘We’ll step up to our responsibility to provide you with the resources you need. You need to step up to your responsibility for results.’

But before you can hold someone accountable, you have to be clear with them what is expected, and there are serious issues with Tennessee standards. Among the most serious is our lack of ‘truth in advertising.’ We are telling our kids and our schools that they are doing well in cases where they simply are not. I’m not the only one who feels this way; in their report on public education earlier this year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce gave Tennessee an ‘F’ in “Truth in Advertising.”

Here’s why: when our eighth-grade students take the Tennessee tests in math, we tell 87 percent of them and their parents that they are “proficient.” When our eighth-grade students take the national standards exam, the NAEP tests, 21 percent of those same eighth-graders are graded as “proficient.”

If our kids were just going to be competing with other Tennessee kids, we could get away with this. But that’s just not the world these kids are going to live in.

That’s why last month I began a tour of the state to talk with members of our business, educational and civic communities from Memphis to Mountain City about what they believe needs to be done from a state level so that our children have the tools they need for success in their next stage of life ‘ whether that’s college or career or a combination of both.

With the reforms implemented from these conversations and other research, we will raise the bar for education in Tennessee and set the stage for additional progress moving forward. Together, we will continue making education the No. 1 priority in Tennessee.

Phil Bredesen is governor of Tennessee. He can be reached at [email protected].