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 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.
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.
As the story goes, FBI agents hired provocateurs to smash store windows and start a riot designed to embarrass King. A recent account includes civil rights photographer Ernest Withers in the plot, but there's no credible proof for the theories.
Bucking a nationwide movement, nine of 13 Southern states have no state law or court edict requiring police to video or audio record interrogations, according to recent studies.
A report memorializing procedural mistakes appears among hundreds of pages of records released Friday by the Memphis Police Department in answer to a public records request by the Institute for Public Service Reporting.
An investigation by the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis reveals MPD is a prominent outlier in a national movement among police departments to fully record the questioning of suspects during homicide investigations, making its detectives frequent targets for allegations of impropriety.
As Franklin Haney tells it, his trouble started when President Donald Trump passed him a business tip. It came on an otherwise delightful night last spring as they dined at adjacent tables in Florida’s exclusive Mar-a-Lago resort.
As the Memphis Police Department struggles to catch up with a nationwide movement to reform interrogations, its failure to record lets an accused murderer go free.
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