Tennessee’s university system has hogged the headlines the past year. At the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, then-president John Shumaker overindulged his fondness for the university’s private jet and credit card, then lied to auditors about his sordid financial affairs. Middle Tennessee State’s Sidney McPhee confronted charges of sexually harassing a university subordinate. Tennessee State’s James Hefner engaged in Enron-like accounting with his university’s scholarship dollars and accepted Super Bowl tickets from a campus vendor, then refused to accept professional help running his school before finally announcing his resignation.

These scandals have marred the reputation of higher education in Tennessee. They have been embarrassing setbacks. But to some critics of higher education—a group disparate in origin yet impressively credentialed and surprisingly consistent in message—there is a far more insidious threat to Tennessee’s overall welfare emanating from the college ranks than bad behavior by top administrators. Our teachers are not being trained to teach reading, and it shows.

The problem is decades-old, and remarkably, largely ignored. If medical schools turned out doctors incapable of prescribing the correct medicine or surgeons who did not know how to operate, the outcry would be immediate and transformative. Yet when it comes to Tennessee’s colleges of education, poor results elicit only a few shakes of the head, an occasional “tsk-tsk,” and nothing is done.

The consequences of failing to teach children to read are devastating, both socially and economically. Consider that several U.S. states—though Tennessee is not yet among them—now include elementary school reading scores in the formulas used to predict future prison capacity needs. If the correlation between reading scores and incarceration is legitimate, Tennessee will need lots of mortar and bars in coming years. More than 70% of fourth grade students in Tennessee read below grade level. Forty percent of public school students in Tennessee eventually drop out, a rate 10 percentage points higher than the national average. More than half of adult Tennesseans rank in the lower two quartiles of a five-tier literacy scale. In light of such sobering statistics, it would seem reasonable to expect that the top priority of Tennessee’s education schools would be to train their students to effectively teach reading. So, is it?

The answer, says former state school board chairman and Tennessee civic icon Nelson Andrews, is a resounding “no.” Andrews calls the need for education schools to more effectively prepare their students to teach reading “the single most important issue in the statewide arena of education in Tennessee today. It has been, it is and it will be until something happens.” According to Andrews, if schools of education could guarantee that their graduates enter the job market able to teach reading, that single revenue-neutral reform would dramatically improve the quality of education in the state.

Teachers for the Teachers

A newly hired, 21-year-old elementary school teacher, degree and license in hand, stands before a class of wide-eyed six-year-olds and through no fault of his own begins to flounder around with little idea how to teach those students to read. Seem unlikely? According to Metro Nashville Schools Director Pedro Garcia, “very few” of the hundreds of elementary school teachers he hires each year from Tennessee universities come to the job prepared to teach reading. Garcia describes their initial classroom attempts as exercises in “flying by the seat of their pants.”

Beyond the harm such improvising has on the academic development of students, the situation presents headaches for Garcia, who must provide the postgraduate professional development needed to ensure his district meets new federal standards mandating that students read on grade level. Of course, taxpayers share the pain. Nashville spent in excess of $3.5 million last year to employ reading specialists—teachers who have no contact with students but work exclusively to help teachers teach reading. “If we could get graduates from universities who really knew how to teach reading, not only would we have a better education system but we’d save a lot of money,” Garcia says.

Garcia and Andrews are not lone voices of concern among the top education minds in the state. In fact, it is difficult to find anyone in Tennessee’s higher education circles who won’t concede, at least to some degree, that education schools fail to produce teachers adequately prepared to teach reading. Even MTSU’s McPhee, president of the institution that produces the most teachers hired in the state each year, calls the observation “on target” and an inquiry about the problem “a fair question.”

“I won’t go so far as to describe it as a crisis, but it is clearly an area that needs greater attention,” he says. “Some of us in education have been slow to change.”

Ric Hodva, dean of the College of Education at the University of Memphis, the second largest producer of teachers in the state, says based on the evidence, namely reading test scores, the system needs to be fixed. “Clearly, what we’re doing and what other institutions are doing isn’t cutting it,” Hodva says—at least, he clarifies, not in the more “challenged” districts. Hodva argues a whole constellation of factors has contributed to the failure to get students reading, but he doesn’t downplay the role of education schools in that mix. “We shouldn’t be in the business of trying to avoid responsibility,” he says. “We’re not sticking our head in the sand. We know we’re part of the problem. We want to be part of the solution, and we’re working on it.”

One obvious way of “working on it” would involve simply adding to the number of courses students are required to take in the teaching of reading, a standard measure of emphasis in a curriculum. Unlike some other states where lawmakers or higher education governing boards have mandated specific course loads—even specific instructional techniques—education schools in Tennessee decide for themselves how many courses in reading instruction their students must take in order to graduate. The University of Memphis requires elementary school majors to complete four courses, or 12 hours, in the teaching of reading, up from previous years, but still less than 10% of the total credits needed to graduate. Many education schools in the state require less.

The Great Accountability Blind

Who’s to blame for such a low standard? Given a confusing command and control situation in Tennessee higher education, it’s difficult to pinpoint. Of the 40 education schools in Tennessee, nine are housed at public universities, guided by the U.T. Board of Trustees and the state Board of Regents. The Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC) exists partly to process the message of those two systems into one voice for policy makers to chew on. (Strange then, but telling, that the University of Tennessee employs its own lobbyist on Capitol Hill.) The state Department of Education licenses all teachers based on standards set by the state Board of Education, which doesn’t require a specific number of reading courses for education majors. Together, this five-headed management hydra amounts to a bureaucratic morass where no one group has firm control and singly accountable when it fails. Conveniently enough for the participants, this systematic lack of controls makes laying the failures of the system at the feet of any one group or person futile. It also means they share the blame for the parade of unqualified teachers that enter the public school systems each year.

Tangled lines of state bureaucratic accountability do not excuse the university presidents themselves. After all, where has been the call for reform among those heading the institutions so needing it? Perhaps some of the presidents consider the needed systemic changes too daunting to expend their precious political capital. University of Memphis President Shirley Raines shows no likelihood of taking on the challenge, deferring all questions regarding their failure to Hodva. That’s not to say the presidents are not addressing pieces of the problem. Under Raines’ leadership, Hodva recently hired the former reading czar of the Dallas public schools to “hone and sharpen course work” at the school, and McPhee points to the newly proposed creation of a literacy center at MTSU as evidence of progress. But a little work around the edges hardly addresses the core.

Hodva and fellow deans of education across the state do not escape the issue unscathed, either. During his years as chair of the state board, Andrews says he tried repeatedly to talk to the deans of the colleges of education about improving the quality of instruction—to no effect. “You would think they’d be the ones at the forefront of the issues we’re talking about,” Andrews says. “But the truth is, they are the hardest to change of almost everyone.”

George Yowell, head of Tennessee Tomorrow, an economic development group focused on the state’s education issues, blames such inertia on tenure, which he says makes education school deans and public school teachers alike too powerful. Resistance also stems from the close ties education schools have with the state teachers union, the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill and a group that seldom budges on proposed new mandates. Senate Education Committee Chairman Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) explains: “There’s a lot of resistance to any kind of change in higher education, and it’s significant resistance. Perhaps if we can provide more money to colleges of education at the same time we require improvements, we might get improvements.”

McNally’s implication that lawmakers essentially have to bribe education schools to do a better job shows that even lawmakers feel powerless to demand better results from education schools. Experience tells them that is the case. Back in 2000, lawmakers publicly berated education colleges for their failure to adequately prepare teachers and specifically for requiring as little as one course in the teaching of reading for graduation. A bill passed into law—though never funded—called on the state Department of Education, the state Board of Education and the entire higher education system to ensure teacher candidates were properly trained. The outcome? A follow-up comptroller’s audit in 2001 found “no general effort to promote more aggressive work in reading courses in teacher preparation programs.”

If lawmakers deserve some credit for making teacher preparation an issue four years ago, they now warrant equal blame for letting it slide. McNally, who does more than most lawmakers to make education reform an annual issue, says of the 2000 reform bill mandating better teacher training, “For the most part, it’s gone by the wayside.” Yowell largely agrees: “I think we’ve puttered with that, but we haven’t made the sweeping changes we have needed to make.”

THEC Executive Director Rich Rhoda suggests the real reason behind the sudden fading of the issue. Improving teacher preparation had legs as an issue in 2000 because it dovetailed nicely with the concurrent push by Democratic lawmakers, supported by the teachers union and higher education representatives, for a state income tax, which almost certainly would have resulted in bigger budgets for public and higher education. When tax reform left the table, Rhoda explains, the urgency for reform went with it.

Long years of study have convinced James Guthrie, director of the Vanderbilt University Peabody College Center for Education Policy, that conventional approaches to dealing with the dysfunction of education schools and their effect on public education do not suffice. Guthrie calls for school districts to stop hiring unprepared graduate teacher candidates from Tennessee universities. Guthrie goes a step further by calling for the abolition of education schools entirely. “There is no evidence that they add value,” he says. “This labyrinthine licensing system all results from the teachers union wanting to restrict the labor market. The teachers union and the education school deans are in cahoots. It’s not a technical problem; it’s a political problem.”

While the freeing up of market forces may seem an attractive option, it’s difficult to imagine Tennessee—a state that’s been loathe to embrace competition in education, even from charter schools—suddenly opting for such a broad stroke of reform. Moreover, the current teacher shortage makes it difficult for individual school districts to be very selective, as urban districts like Memphis and Nashville require hundreds of new teachers, regardless of actual skill level, to fill classroom vacancies each year. Competition is a worthwhile longer-term goal, but a more immediate solution is going to have to come from change within the system.

A Man for All Semesters?

So what’s a state to do when everyone acknowledges a problem, yet no one group has the unfettered authority or political will to tackle it? There’s really only one person with the stature, the reach and the authority to mount a serious effort at reform of the state’s teaching schools: Gov. Phil Bredesen. After all, education is by far the largest item on the state budget. Nonetheless, after eight years as Nashville’s mayor and two as governor, Bredesen hasn’t made a meaningful difference in the quality of children’s education, and there’s no indication that the issue is even on his administration’s radar.

One large obstacle to reform lies in Bredesen’s cozy relationship with the education establishment—hardly a recipe for reform. The teachers union and higher education forces represent a huge chunk of the Democratic voter base under whose tent Bredesen has been only too willing to appear. He has bolstered that relationship most overtly through the promotion of his role lifting teacher pay in the state above the Southeastern average in his first two budgets, a feat he was in fact mandated to do by the courts in the teacher pay equity settlement. Citing his recent steamrolling of other traditional Democratic Party stalwarts—trial lawyers and labor bosses—to bring about workers compensation reform in the state, some still insist Bredesen will not allow party allegiances to stand in the way of educational improvements. More likely, Bredesen’s ruffling of Democratic feathers on workers comp used up his store of forgiveness within the party over an issue closer to his heart—improving Tennessee’s business climate.

An even more basic incentive for Bredesen to let the education reform debate lie is that he can skip the fight without paying a public price. The veteran entrepreneur was hired by Tennesseans to use his health care expertise to fix TennCare (he has laid out his plan), to fix the state’s budget problem (his significant cuts to sacred cows like road building budgets got Tennessee through rough waters) and to improve the business climate of the state in such a way as to avoid an income tax in the future (his workers comp reform). Thus, Bredesen is setting the criteria by which he can be judged—a big reason he enjoys 70%-plus approval ratings even while problems like poor teacher preparedness keep Tennessee mired in the mid- to high-40s in so many national rankings.

All of which still leaves us with two incontrovertible facts: the training of those who teach Tennessee children to read is a vital responsibility, and the state is shirking that responsibility to such a degree that it is robbing children of hope in their future.

It’s not a simple issue. After all, successful reform demands that college presidents and deans work together to overcome the bureaucratic Gordian knot. But most dauntingly, teaching Johnny to read requires a politician willing to risk political capital on an issue where victory, though crucial to the future welfare of so many people, is not assured. Now with a clean legislative plate, will Phil Bredesen be the leader to do it?