March 2011 marked the one-year anniversary of Tennessee’s Race to the Top win and of the state’s sweeping school reforms, collectively known as First to the Top. Tennessee was one of just two states selected on March 29, 2010 to receive millions for education reform in the first round of the federal Race to the Top competition. Since then, the state has made substantial progress toward its goal of developing the strongest and most responsive education system in America.
Erin O’Hara, educational policy advisor for the governor’s office, says changing the way Tennessee educates its students is a huge job.
“It’s a massive undertaking to reform the way you provide services from the state level to the district level, and from the district level to the school level, and from the principals and teachers to the students. We’re making fundamental changes to the way we achieve outcomes for our students, and that’s a long-term process.”
Tennessee has, however, already made big strides toward becoming a leader in four key areas of reform: adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace; building data systems that measure student growth and success, and specifying how to improve instruction; recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and turning around the lowest-performing schools.
Here’s a look at the year-one achievements of Tennessee’s First to the Top program:
Education policy: The Tennessee Department of Edu-cation has made plans to overhaul its accountability system, and proposed changes to the tenure connected to the new evaluation system. Also, Gov. Haslam has proposed significant changes to charter school laws.
Professional development: The DOE has trained 30 regional value-added specialists, 450 district value-added specialists, 150 higher education faculty, and 4,000 classroom teachers in the use of value-added data to improve instruction. Value-added analysis is a statistical method used to measure the impact schools and districts have on the rate of student progress from year to year.
In addition, more than 120 districts and 1,300 leaders and district level teams received training in the use of formative assessment practices to improve instruction. Formative assessments are ongoing assessments, observations, summaries, and reviews that inform teacher instruction and provide student feedback. Teachers use formative assessment to improve instructional methods and student feedback throughout the teaching and learning process.
Finally, educators have taken more than 120,000 online courses in value-added and formative assessment, totaling more than 90,000 hours of training.
TELL Tennessee survey: Over 57,000 educators, representing 77 percent of the state’s educators, completed the first Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning Tennessee survey.
Of the state’s 1,745 schools, 1,605 now have their own data to use for school improvement planning purposes. The data will be used to institute professional development and provide resources needed to support parental involvement, leadership development, and school-wide climate change. TELL Tennessee is an online, anonymous survey of all licensed public school educators in Tennessee’s public schools designed to identify how Tennessee’s public educators perceive their school environments.
STEM Innovation Net-work: The Doe formed the STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and math) Inno-vation Network to build and connect STEM resources across the state. In addition, the Stratford Academy of Science and Engineering opened in Nashville with 150 ninth and tenth grade students, and will expand to 200 in the fall of 2011. Knox County will also open a STEM school in the fall of this year.
Finally, STEM teachers across the state will be trained beginning this summer and during the 2011-2012 school year through partnerships with the Tennessee Higher Education Commission and Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
School district achievement: The DOE plans to reform 13 of the state’s lowest performing schools beginning in the 2011-2012 school year.
UTEACH: The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Middle Tennessee State University, and the University of Memphis replicated the UTEACH program to recruit high-performing math and science students to take courses in education and earn teaching certificates. Over 160 students are enrolled in the program.
Teacher and principal evaluation: Tennessee is in the final stages of selecting the state-supported rubic for the observation portion of the new teacher evaluation process. The state is also planning online and in-person training and support for the process.
Charter school growth: Tennessee has earmarked $40 million to grow and support charter schools in a broad public-private partnership. This will provide funds for the launch of 40 new start-up charter schools.
These purpose of these programs and initiatives is to provide Tennessee with a better-educated work force and the ability to attract economic development to the state in an ongoing manner, O’Hara says.
“A well-educated work force is the basis for continuing to see improvements in Tennes-see’s economy in the years to come.”