50 articles by Marta W. Aldrich :
Results from the latest Tennessee Educator Survey are both troubling and encouraging in a state that has fostered gains on national student tests but also is seeing a gradual decline in its number of teacher candidates.
TNReady tests are designed to assess every student’s true understanding of the material they’ve studied, not just memorized. The goal is to know how to help students advance their knowledge and skills, teachers raise their level of instruction, and districts improve their schools.
When a landmark study found that children in Tennessee’s pre-K program eventually fared worse than peers who didn’t participate, the surprising results unleashed a new wave of research to understand why.
It’s a reprieve for low-performing schools that are academically in the state’s bottom 5%, known as priority schools. Most are in Memphis and Nashville and were expected to receive some of the lowest letter grades.
The state-run district took over low-performing schools in Memphis and Nashville with a goal of vaulting them out of the state’s bottom 5% and into the top 25% academically. The schools – 28 in Memphis and two in Nashville – have performed no better or worse than comparable struggling schools outside of the district.
Gov. Bill Lee said the state, which began its new fiscal year on July 1, has enough money to start the education savings account program for the 2020-21 school year. His decision to work toward an early rollout caught even some staff members in his education department off guard.
Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn named Amity Schuyler voucher project manager. “She believes in education savings accounts. And to take the lead on this project, I need someone who believes in it,” Schwinn said.
The push is alarming voucher opponents, who worry that an accelerated rollout will be more prone to fraud in how the accounts, which will be loaded with an average of $7,300 a year, are used.
Read to be Ready camps first opened in 2016, and Tennessee has expanded the program annually with funding from the U.S. Department of Human Services. But state officials learned in January that the federal grant now has to be used for child care programs.
School districts will have to follow (or be aware of) many new laws that didn’t grab headlines. Here are 10 such measures that become effective with the new fiscal year.
British-based Pearson took over the student testing program July 1. The contract runs through June 30, 2021, and the state has the option to renew terms annually for up to three years through 2024. The five-year cost would be $93.1 million.
The State Collaborative on Reforming Education, which launched in 2009 to advocate for policies intended to boost student achievement, will combine forces with Complete Tennessee, which formed in 2016 to try to help more students finish college or other educational training after high school.
Tennessee used discretionary funds to ensure the Read to be Ready camps continue this summer, but there was no reprieve for a major component of the reading initiative: a statewide network of coaches created three years ago to help teachers improve their literacy instruction.
“I’m really struggling to see how equity is in the equation when 114 districts suffer” as Read to be Ready collapses. – Superintendent Joey Hassell of Haywood County Schools, a rural district near Memphis.
Student mental health is one of 12 priorities identified in the state education department’s proposed five-year strategic plan.
The world’s largest and oldest testing company, Pearson will become the third vendor in five years to administer TNReady in the state’s messy transition to computer-based testing.
The growth in Tennessee’s immigrant population — accounting for 12% of its public school students in 2016 — presents special challenges for rural schools trying to teach smaller numbers of English language learners across multiple grades without additional state funding.
The newest upticks are expected to affect about 3,500 teachers in 62 mostly small or rural school systems now meeting the state’s lowest salary threshold.
Asked on Tuesday if the House would have passed the voucher bill had Casada already been under the cloud of a scandal, Rep. Mark White of Memphis said “probably not.” White voted for the bill.
The state education department must administer the education savings accounts, establish a fraud-reporting system, and suspend or terminate schools that don’t comply with rules. It must produce an annual report on the number of students participating, the results of a parent survey, overall student performance and “graduation outcomes.”
Next school year, all of TNReady will be completed on paper to give the state’s next testing company time to ramp up for an online assessment for older students beginning in 2021. That change was ordered by the legislature this spring at the urging of Gov. Bill Lee.
For her chief of staff, Schwinn has picked Rebecca Shah, who worked at the Texas Education Agency where Schwinn served as deputy commissioner of academics before Gov. Bill Lee hired her as Tennessee education chief.
'We hope the governor reconsiders,' said Joris Ray, Shelby County Schools’ interim superintendent, about the education savings account proposal. 'I think the governor’s heart is in the right place. But on this particular issue, I think he needs to listen and have an open heart.'
The statement — released as the governor’s bill is slated for key legislative committee votes this week — marks the first time that the 3-year-old coalition has taken a stand against a major proposal.
Rep. Ryan Williams pulled his controversial bill from consideration by the House Education Committee on Wednesday, one week after the measure easily cleared a subcommittee over the objections of teachers and law enforcement leaders.
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