Bredesen Takes on the BEP

Governor Phil Bredesen says the way the state funds public education is flawed and he laid out a plan to fix it before a special joint session of the legislature this morning.

The changes to the 1992 Basic Education Program will raise teacher salaries, fully fund the cost of at-risk students and remove a controversial funding mechanism that inflates salary dollars for teachers living in high-cost areas.

Bredesen says that mechanism, called the cost differential factor, or C-D-F, allows some counties like Williamson to get more money from the state.

“Conversely, Hamilton County, Chattanooga, is an urban system with the second largest number of failing schools in the state. Hamilton County gets nothing. Zero.”

While the House chamber during this morning’s speech was largely quiet, legislators responded favorably to Bredesen’s comments that the state should assume a stronger role in fixing failing schools.

“We can make them charter schools or run by one of our universities, we can even remove school board members…I commit to you to take a stronger hand in fixing these schools by aggressively using the laws we already have.”

The bi-partisan plan, developed with Republican Senate Education Chair, Jamie Woodson and several others, will add 476-million dollars to education.

The governor doesn’t plan on funding the changes all at once. He’s developed two scenarios that legislators will discuss. The first costs 283-million dollars. That plan would fully fund the cost of education at-risk and English-language learners, and will fund the other changes like raising teachers’ salaries at 50%. Under that scenario, Davidson County will get 13.7-million extra dollars next year.

The second plan would fund the cost of at-risk children at 60% and everything else would increase to be funded at the 60% of the total cost. Because Nashville has a high number of at-risk children, it would only get 11-million new dollars under that plan.

Fully funding the BEP changes will net Davidson County 21.7-million dollars. Over the next few weeks, the legislature will decide how much of the plan it will fund.

WEB EXTRA

 

Click here to watch the Governor’s speech.

Talking to reporters immediately after his “B-E-P 2.0” speech, Governor Phil Bredesen underlined his main points and promised more detail. He talked about 20 schools being on the “failed” list, including a high school in Nashville.

“What I’m saying is, Maplewood is the school in Nashville that is the failing school. And I think we should look at that. Again I want to work in cooperation with the superintendent if they want to work with us. But I don’t know how long you wait. Once you’re over six years and you’re in this failed mode. They’ve obviously been trying it for six or seven or eight years to get it fixed. It hasn’t worked so far. I think it’s time for the governor to ask some hard questions about this.”

Bredesen said he was open to wider ways to address those problem schools.

“There’s a lot of different ways of running schools. You could have charter schools. You could ask one of your universities, you could ask one of your colleges of education, to run some of these schools. You could look to business groups to try and do something. You know there’s an awful lot of people who certainly believe they have something to contribute to the operation of schools. I’m ready to try some of those things to get these schools fixed.”

Bredesen said he would follow up on his diagnosis that colleges of education aren’t teaching their students the contents for their subjects. UT and the Board of Regents can expect a visit, he says.

“Obviously with regard to those colleges, which is the majority of them, which are part of either University of Tennessee or TBR, I’m the chairman of the board of both of those institutions, and frankly I intend to go to those boards and explain in considerably more detail than this presentation this morning where the problems are and what problems we’re seeing, and ask those boards to undertake the process to get change to happen. I don’t have any illusions about how difficult it is to get higher education to change any more …probably disengaging from Iraq is probably an easier problem than fixing schools of education, colleges of education.

But I think it’s time to do it.”

The governor said he is flexible on the timing of the funding of B-E-P 2.0, even given the extra revenues he forecast.

“I mean I certainly understand that there’s going to be a lot of things pulling in a lot of different directions for that money, including cutting taxes. As long as we put the long-term funding of this thing in place, underlying it, I don’t have a problem phasing it in, in some fashion. The plans at the moment are to do about 50 or 60 percent of the total this first year. I actually think that’s about what these school systems can absorb well. You don’t want to just send them more money than they can use smartly. Doing things over a little period of time makes an awful lot of sense.”

Bredesen stressed the bipartisan nature of the plan so far.

“You know, I think what we put together, with Democrats and Republicans, really is a good, understandable, transparent, accountable program. And I think it’s an improvement over what I put together, and I’ll be very, very honest about that.”