I recently spent a week in Orlando, but I didn’t hobnob with cartoon animals or traverse any kingdoms, magical or otherwise. In fact, the only mouse ears I saw were in the airport gift shop. Instead, I spent five days with educators from across the country — including fellow Tennesseans — reviewing test items for…
Just a few years ago, Tennessee embarked on an ambitious plan to better prepare students for the future. Tennesseans took a hard look at student proficiency and concluded that continuing to accept mediocre academic performance was a disservice to our students. When SCORE was launched in 2009, we identified a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for unprecedented growth…
At 9:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, I find myself walking into a South Memphis classroom taught by a second-year middle school English teacher who is determined to “make a difference in the lives of children.” My initial thought was that within the fourth week of a new school year, I would hardly see any…
Tennessee set an ambitious goal in 2009 for our education system to be the fastest-improving among all states. The results are in: Tennessee students in fourth and eighth grade surpassed their peers across the country in overall gains on national math and reading tests, making Tennessee the fastest-improving state in the nation. Not only did…
November 7 was maybe the best day of my professional life, and I started not to write about it. I was going to play it cool, I wasn’t going to “geek out”, and I certainly wasn’t going to expend my own “personal social media capital” to talk about it. So much for that.