Ed Talk: Kevin Huffman Says Adults (That Means Teachers) Have To Work Harder

Tennessee’s Education Commissioner gave a talk at TedxNashville earlier this year on the topic of teachers. Kevin Huffman’s 20-minute speech could be boiled down to this one controversial line: to improve education “kids have to work harder, and adults have to work harder too.”

“I think people somehow want us to build a better education system without having to do more work or without having to do things differently,” Huffman tells WPLN in a recent interview. “People expect there to be some magical, easy solution, maybe if you just have a better curriculum or a better book or something like that. Almost uniformly, what you see in the places that are doing better, there is more work going into academics.”

Huffman was tapped as commissioner of education by Gov. Bill Haslam in 2011. This was a departure from past commissioners who were often former school superintendents. Huffman was an executive with Teach for America, which recruits high-achieving college grads to spend two years in high-poverty classrooms.

“I think when you come in as a change agent, and you’re making changes to something as entrenched as a public education system, you’re going to quickly unearth some significant detractors,” Huffman says.

Since his hiring, it’s become harder for teachers to get the job security of tenure, they’re now under more scrutiny from their principals with more frequent and intense evaluations and collective bargaining has been outlawed.

Perhaps most notably, student growth data has become part of a teacher’s evaluation – something the Tennessee Education Association resisted for years. While the union supported the concept when it was used to get a $500 million federal grant, the TEA has soured on the idea and has even filed lawsuits over use of the data in pay decisions.

“I just don’t by the notion that by somehow saying we’re going to have a system that evaluates performance – and by the way 35 percent of what we’re going to look at is whether kids learned more material – that doesn’t strike me as soul crushing or unreasonable or unrealistic,” Huffman says. “It strikes me as a very reasonable way of looking at how a teacher has done in their day-to-day duties in the classroom.”

While Huffman says adults need to work harder, he also says “a very high percentage” of teachers are doing their best. He blames the TEA for giving him a reputation that he doesn’t value teachers.

“It comes from the union leadership pushing out this idea that there’s a boogey man out there that we can point to for things that you don’t like because frankly union membership goes up if you can create this construct that somehow there is something bad that we’re pushing against,” he says.

[box]LISTEN: Huffman says Tennessee Education Association leaders have “deprofessionalized” their relationship.

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Who Is Kevin Huffman?

• Taught in Houston for three years in a bi-lingual, high-needs school with Teach for America
• Went to law school at NYU
• Took senior management job at Teach for America in 2000
• Previously married to Michelle Rhee, head of StudentsFirst and former chancellor of Washington D.C. schools

[box]LISTEN: Huffman says teacher evaluations are more than test data but defends the use of student growth numbers, known as TVAAS in Tennessee.

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WPLN’s next Ed Talk will give the head of TEA – Gera Summerford – a chance to respond.