8 recent articles by David Waters:
Randall Mullins and Sharon Pavelda founded a project to identify and memorialize lynching sites in Shelby County, and helped create a community of supporters, from the National Park Service to the local NAACP, preachers and politicians, activists and academics.
PART 2: High-stakes testing has shifted the focus of kindergarten from what's developmentally appropriate to get kids ready for school, to what's academically required to prepare students for their first standardized achievement tests in third grade.
Special Report: Memphis' Reading Test PART 1: Meeting goals for third-grade reading proficiency in Tennessee is a daunting task unless dramatic improvements occur in Shelby County, where the hurdles are high and the challenges complex. And in Memphis, a city where nearly four in five children in public schools aren't reading on grade level, the undertaking is monumental.
PART 3: Billions of government and philanthropic dollars have funded new curricula and standardized tests, teacher evaluation systems, charter schools and takeover schools. But it hasn't made much of a dent in the third-grade reading gap or any other measures of student performance.
Since Steve Montgomery arrived here from Atlanta in 2000, he has played a role as pastor to the entire community. No one has done more to extend "radical hospitality," as theologian Henri Nouwen called it.
Coming Monday: A three-part series from The Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis explores the challenges and possible solutions to improving third-grade reading proficiency locally.
Phoebe Roaf didn't see a woman wearing a clergy collar until she was in her 20s, and didn't wear one herself until she was 41. On Saturday, she became the first female and African-American to serve as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee.
John will be lamented and loved as a survivor and casualty of addiction, a saint and sinner, a gentle and tormented soul whose life and death, head and heart, darkness and light were a parable, a revelation, a psalm.
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