Chalkbeat Tennessee
Marta W. Aldrich is the senior statehouse correspondent at Chalkbeat Tennessee. A newswoman for The Associated Press for most of her career, Marta has covered state government, politics, business, education and other Tennessee news. She has served as news editor of United Methodist News Service and features editor of American Profile magazine. Marta is a graduate of Memphis City Schools and the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
There are 185 articles by Marta W. Aldrich :
Most of the 18 sources of lead were drinking fountains, but some were kitchen sinks and coolers, according to a report submitted by Shelby County Schools to the Tennessee Department of Health last week.
A plan that sets Tennessee’s agenda for the next five years will bring new attention to students’ social and emotional health in a state that has given more lip service than funding to that need in recent years.
Public school students finished with an overall average of 20 on a scale of 36, down from 20.2 last year and mirroring a national slump on ACT results.
Tennessee House Democrats want to ask about a pot of money tucked into the Department of Economic and Community Development’s budget.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is given every two years to provide a snapshot of U.S. student achievement for the Nation’s Report Card. With the showing, Tennessee defied national downward trends and edged closer to — but still fell short of — its ambitious goal of moving into the top half of states by 2019.
About 69% of those polled support continuing to use TNReady in Tennessee schools, a jump of 10 percentage points over this time last year.
For the time being, Tennessee will stick with a framework that emphasizes academic growth for all students, regardless of whether those students are deemed proficient on state tests.
The uptick for Shelby County Schools was small — from 79.2% to 79.3%. It was below the 80% benchmark set by Tennessee’s largest district to reach its goal of achieving a 90% graduation rate by 2025.
Debate over student growth versus proficiency has been ongoing for decades. Tennessee's William Sanders came up with the nation’s first system for evaluating teachers based on student growth, and the state was an early adopter of the model.
Rep. Antonio Parkinson of Memphis blasted the Education Department’s handling of the communication, which he worried could contribute to a climate of racial stereotyping, bullying, or low self-esteem for some students.
The Shelby County Schools district has not yet filed a report with the state on levels of lead in water sources at schools built prior to 1998. In Germantown Municipal School District, three schools found water sources that tested above the state’s safety threshold.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sexton has strong ties to public education. He attended schools in Knox County before graduating in 1989 from Oak Ridge High School in neighboring Anderson County. His mother was a kindergarten teacher for more than 30 years, and his grandfather was a principal.
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.