NASHVILLE – Gov. Bill Haslam signed his teacher tenure bill into law today, predicting the effect of his first major piece of legislation “will be felt for many, many years.”
A short while earlier, the House Education Committee approved Haslam’s other major education bill, which would expand charter schools in Tennessee.
Surrounded solely by GOP legislative leaders, Haslam, also a Republican, said the teacher tenure law continues the efforts of education reform initiated last year by his predecessor, Democrat Phil Bredesen, and the General Assembly.
“One of the reasons this is so important because so much is at stake,” Haslam said, later noting that “three years is too short a time to grant something that’s such a great privilege like tenure. I think the bar had been set too low in term of as having objective criteria … [on] who got tenure and this bill addresses that.”
The bill increases from three years to five years the time it takes for a teacher to qualify for tenure. It also requires new teachers to be granted tenure only if they fall within the top two ranks of a five-tiered evaluation system built in large part on student test scores.