Education 101 - An Overview of Recent Education Reforms in Tennessee | Page 3

Taking Note

Superintendent Selection in Tennessee: A Brief History
January 2011

Page 3

or college (2) building data systems to measure student growth and
success over time (3) recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining
effective teachers and principals and (4) turning around the lowestperforming schools.

to the Top funds. To help districts develop these plans, SCORE hired
eight consultants to work with the Tennessee Department of Education’s
regional offices to provide support to individual school districts as they
wrote their plans.

Tennessee was immediately viewed as a frontrunner in the competition
because of the Tennessee Diploma Project and the passage of the First
to the Top Act. In addition, the state was viewed as a strong contended
because of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS),
the state’s database for tracking student growth. Established in 1992,
TVAAS is widely viewed as the best data system in the country for
identifying the state’s most effective districts, schools, and teachers by
measuring how much students in each district, school, and classroom
learn in a given year.

Federal and Philanthropic Grants

In January 2010, 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted
applications in the first round of the Race to the Top competition. On
March 29, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that
Delaware an d Tennessee were the only round one winners. As a result,
Tennessee will receive over $501 million in federal funding over the
next four years. Half of this funding will be distributed directly to local
school districts to support initiatives aligned with Race to the Top’s four
reform areas while the other half will be used to support various state
projects aligned with these same four priorities. In September 2010, an
additional ten states were awarded funding in the second round of the
Race to the Top competition.

Tennessee SCORE
In 2009, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist created the
Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE) to
bring together all the key education stakeholders in the state to create
a bold plan for improving education in Tennessee. Led by a Steering
Committee of 25 business, education, and political leaders from across
the state, SCORE held eight statewide meetings and 82 town hall
meetings in 2009 to learn about best practices in education reform.
Based on this research, in 2009 SCORE released a report entitled “A
Roadmap to Success: A Plan to Make Tennessee Schools #1 in the
Southeast Within Five Years.” This report was closely aligned with
Tennessee’s Race to the Top application and critical in building broad
stakeholder buy-in for many of Tennessee’s recent reforms.
In 2010, SCORE worked to build public support for these reforms
as well as partnered with the state to provide additional resources to
implement key reforms. For example, in Fall 2010 SCORE coordinated
the “Expect More, Achieve More” campaign to build support for the
state’s higher academic standards (for more information visit www.
expectmoretn.org). To lead this campaign, SCORE partnered with more
than 30 statewide business and education organizations. In addition
to this campaign, SCORE has partnered with the state to provide
additional resources to implement key reforms. For example, after
Tennessee won Race to the Top, local school districts had 90 days
to develop plans for how they would spend over $250 million in Race

Because of its strong commitment to reform, Tennessee has attracted
over $710 million in competitive federal and philanthropic grants over
the past two years. These grants are summarized in the figure below.
Many of these grants will go directly to local school districts to help
implement innovative local education reforms.
In November 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced
that Memphis City Schools had been selected as one of only four
sites in the country to be part of the foundation’s Teacher Effectiveness
Initiative. Over the next seven years, Memphis City Schools will work
with the Gates Foundation and other partners to fundamentally redesign
the teaching profession in Memphis City Schools by implementing a
new evaluation system and then using that evaluation system to recruit
and reward high-performing teachers, provide additional support and
growth opportunities to all teachers, and remove the lowest performing
teachers.
In August 2010, the U.S. Department of Education announced that
the Niswonger Foundation in Greeneville, Tennessee, was one of only
49 winners of the Department’s Investing in Innovation competition
(from a total of 1,698 applicants). As a result, 15 districts in Northeast
Tennessee will receive $21 million over the next five years to implement
rigorous coursework through a combination of distance learning, online
learning, Advanced Placement, and dual enrollment courses. The grant
should provide a model for how rural districts in the state can provide all
students with access to rigorous courses.

Federal and Philanthropic Grants
GRANT

LOCATION

AMOUNT

Race to the Top

Statewide

$501 million

Gates Foundation
Teacher Effectiveness
Initiative

Memphis

$110 million

Teacher Incentive
Fund

Statewide, Knoxville,
Memphis

$72 million

Investing in
Innovation Fund

Northeast Tennessee

$21 million

SCORE

Statewide

$6 million

TOTAL

Statewide

$710 million

1207 18th Avenue South, Suite 326, Nashville, TN 37212 — tel [phone] — fax [phone] — www.tnscore.org