When people ask me where I’m from, I say Memphis. Being a Memphian has always been my primary identity, before being a Tennessean or a resident of Shelby County. Growing up in Memphis, we’re acutely aware of just how different we are from the rest of the state. We’re the largest city, we prefer blues…
How have you seen schools rising to the challenge, in your own community or across the state? To complement the data-driven SCORE Prize, SCORE would like to celebrate teachers, school administrators, parents, and education-reform activists across Tennessee by collecting and sharing personal stories of how schools are boosting student performance. For example, one school sets very high…
Tennessee’s 39th ranking is its best ever, in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2011 KIDS COUNT Data Book. It shows how good public policies and quality public-private and state-local partnerships make a difference in improving outcomes for Tennessee children. The state’s ranking of 9th for the lowest percentage of teens not in school and not…
Backwards planning is one method teachers and educators use to teach students. The central idea is to look at the standards and outcomes and implement various strategies to reach them. If we are to achieve our economic development goals, governmental leaders need to engage in some backwards planning of our own. In Tennessee, it is…
For data to be useful in increasing teacher effectiveness, teachers need to have access to it. That may seem obvious, but providing teachers with useful data for improving instruction in the classroom is rarer than we might think. In the past, data have only flowed upwards: from classrooms, to districts, to states, and to the…