I have a new roommate this fall—a first-year teacher eager to make a positive impact on her students and the Nashville community. Watching her grapple with the complexity of student issues, school requirements and a steep learning curve, I find myself in a time machine transported back to my own first weeks of teaching. When…
It has been a while since I have had to pass a test. But last week I dutifully (and somewhat anxiously) worked through the assessment for evaluators to become certified for the Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model (TEAM), the state’s new performance evaluation system for teachers. I know that as a Superintendent, I am unlikely to…
Former Sen. Bill Frist and Country Music Star Josh Turner to Highlight Educational Success at Prize Event (Nashville) – The State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE) today announced the 12 finalists for the first annual SCORE Prize Award. The Prize will be awarded to the elementary, middle, and high school, along with one school district…
Last week I attended the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) Conference in Washington, D.C. The Tennessee Department of Education (TDE) was awarded a TIF grant last year, which allowed districts to participate in creating alternative compensation plans for educators. At that conference, I had the opportunity to meet with district administrators from around the country who for the…
In the battle to close the achievement gap, college is the endgame. Right? When we talk about transformational change, we’re talking about the sort of things that puts students on track for lifelong success, and in our world, a college education is instrumental in preparing someone for such success. But what prepares someone for college?…
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…
Across the state, teachers are welcoming students into their classrooms and into their hearts for another school year. Classrooms have been arranged with the addition of signs and banners to help all students feel welcome, lists of school supplies have been made available so students will have the tools they need, and lesson plans meant…
I would like to thank SCORE for giving me the opportunity to blog on this forum. I have often said that the most important thing we deal with in the General Assembly is education. I have served on the Senate Education Committee since 2004 and have been honored to be a part of a tremendous…
This week as I returned to my college campus, full of students already busy swapping stories of their summer adventures and revelations, I’ve found that despite my own personal excitement my summer accounts haven’t exactly wooed the crowd. This summer I interned at SCORE, a nonprofit working to bring stakeholders and policy makers together to…
My experience at Teach For America’s training institute before my first year of teaching and the ongoing support and professional development I received throughout my first year as a Middle School Social Studies teacher at New Vision Academy in Nashville were instrumental in ensuring I was able to help my 5th and 6th graders succeed. 94% of…
Yesterday was an exciting day in the education reform world as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited Nashville to highlight and celebrate our state’s dramatic work in improving public education. Teacher recruitment, No Child Left Behind, charter schools, the achievement gap, and parental involvement were all topics of discussion during a panel with the…
The State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE) today released a report outlining specific recommendations to improve public education in rural communities in the South. The recommendations in Transforming the Rural South: A Roadmap to Improving Rural Education are based on research, best practices, and voices from rural communities across Tennessee and throughout the Southeast. The report, released…
A Message from Jamie Woodson Friends, In the past month we have seen evidence of the tremendous progress that Tennessee is making in improving student achievement, as well as data that shows just how much work we have left to do to ensure every child graduates high school prepared for college and the workforce. The…
Great news for students in Tennessee (and across the U.S.). From 2003-2009, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test SCOREs grew by 29.4% for Tennessee students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. That places Tennessee 8th in the nation for this measure. Below is a graph that Matthew Ladner (from the Foundation for…
Most private employers will tell you that one of their foremost concerns is employee morale. In service companies in particular, a customer’s experience with a particular employee determines whether that business survives or dies. In government, however, too many public officials disregard employee morale. Teachers are an acute example. More and more, I hear from…
After completing my first year teaching Algebra 1 as a Teach For America corps member, I was exhausted. For ten months, my ninth graders and I had worked tirelessly to meet our goal of at least 45% of students passing the End of Course exam (up from the 18% of students who passed this…