Taking Note
Superintendent Selection in Tennessee: A Brief History
February 2011
teachers reported engaging in a mentoring experience with another
teacher in the past year and that less than half of Tennessee teachers
found the majority of their professional development experiences to be
high quality.xiv
Third, Tennessee’s education system has historically failed to reward highly
effective teachers. In the 1950s, Tennessee established two systems –
tenure and the single salary schedule – to insulate teachers from politics
and discrimination.xv Tenure provided extra job security for teachers by
requiring that teachers have access to due process before being fired,
and the single salary schedule ensured teachers would receive pay
increases for each year of experience and graduate degree (e.g., Master’s
degree, doctoral degree) they obtained.xvi At the time, these tenure and
compensation systems were necessary as many superintendents were
elected, making patronage extremely common in local school systems, and
minority and female teachers were often discriminated against.xvii
Both the tenure system and single salary schedule are systems
that now prevent the most effective teachers from being rewarded.
Although tenure has the potential to serve as a significant reward to
teachers (imagine a system in which only the best 15% of eligible
teachers receive tenure each year), districts have done a very poor job
of making tenure decisions meaningful. For example, a recent study
found that over 90% of eligible teachers receive tenure.xviii With the
vast majority of teachers receiving tenure, it is clearly not viewed as a
mechanism for singling out and rewarding the most effective teachers.
Similarly, today almost all teachers are compensated according to a
single salary schedule, which results in all teachers in a district with
the same years of experience and graduate degrees earning earning
the exact same salary, regardless of the quality of their teaching.xix
Research has shown that a teacher’s years of experience and graduate
degrees have, at best, weak correlations with student achievement.xx
Distribution of Teachers Ratings on
Tennessee’s Current Evaluation System
1%
Satisfactory
Rating
Unsatisfactory
Rating
Page 2
Therefore, a single salary schedule that relies solely on these factors is
inadequately rewarding the most effective teachers.
Finally, Tennessee’s education system has historically failed to remove
ineffective teachers. It is estimated that only 50 tenured teachers a
year are removed from their jobs.xxi When teachers are removed, it is
almost always for misconduct, such as an inappropriate relationship
with a student or insubordination, rather than poor performance in the
classroom.xxii Moreover, even when teachers are removed from their
job, they are often not fired from the school district, instead becoming
a teacher at another school or receiving a job in the district’s central
office.xxiii This typically occurs because districts know that firing a
tenured teacher can be a long and expensive process that, to some
districts, is not worth the time and resources it requires.xxiv
Recent Progress
Despite the above analysis, Tennessee has taken significant steps over
the past few years to improve teacher effectiveness, especially in regards
to differentiating teachers and rewarding highly effective teachers.
In January 2010, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the First
to the Top Act, which established a committee to develop a new
teacher and principal evaluation system that is based 50% on student
achievement data, including 35% based on TVAAS data for teachers
for whom it is available. Although many challenges remain in ensuring
this evaluation system is reliable and valid, it should provide Tennessee
schools with the ability to differentiate teachers based on the effect each
teacher is having on student achievement.
The First to the Top Act also allows districts to develop new, alternative
salary schedules so that districts can reward teachers based on their
Distribution of Teacher Ratings on Tennessee
Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS)
50%
43.5%
40%
30%
28.4%
28.1%
20%
99%
10%
0%
Above
Expectations
At
Expectations
Below
Expectations
1207 18th Avenue South, Suite 326, Nashville, TN 37212 — tel 615.727.1545 — fax 615.727.1569 — www.tnscore.org