Section 1: Year In Review
Half of Tennessee’s $501 million in Race to the
Top funding will be used to support various
state projects including providing professional
development to teachers across the state,
expanding STEM education programs, and
pursuing aggressive strategies to turn around
persistently failing schools. The other half
of Tennessee’s Race to the Top funding was
allocated directly to the state’s 136 school
districts according to the federal Title I formula,
which is based on the number of economically
disadvantaged students in each district. Districts’
four-year awards ranged from $44,709 in Richard
City Special School District to $68,670,722 in
Memphis City Schools, with a median award of
$684,719. Each district was required to submit
a Scope of Work to the U.S. Department of
Education by June 28, 2010, outlining how it
would spend its share of Race to the Top funding.
Details of these Scopes of Work are included in
the tables to the right.
While winning Race to the Top was a clear
success, the difficult work came in the
implementation phase. At a SCORE Institute
event in May 2010, Sir Michael Barber, Founder
of the U.S. Education Delivery Institute
Race to the Top - Local Project
Activities and Fund Allocation
and head of McKinsey’s Global Education
Practice, said that “winning Race to the Top
is at best only 10 percent of transforming a
state’s education system, the remaining 90
percent is implementation, implementation,
implementation.”
The first year of Race to the Top implementation
focused on three areas: building project
management capacity, designing the state’s new
teacher and principal evaluation system, and
launching projects such as additional teacher
professional development and district grant
competitions.
As soon as Tennessee won Race to the Top, the
state began working to build the right team to
implement the grant. Specifically, the state
created a Race to the Top oversight team,
examined the Department of Education’s staffing
structure, recruited and reassigned staff, and
consulted with state and national experts to assist
with specific Race to the Top projects. SCORE
assisted with these efforts by funding outside
consultants to conduct a strategic planning
retreat for the Race to the Top oversight team
and to assist the Tennessee Department
Activity Allocation
100%
80%
60%
40%
43.4%
33.9%
20%
18.5%
Standards and
Assessments
Using Data
to Improve
instruction
3.5%
Great
Teachers and
Leaders
Turning Around
Low-Performing
Schools
Fund Allocation
100%
80%
60%
40%
35.3%
30.5%
20%
15.8%
In a matter of months, Race
to the Top had “engineered
the kind of wholesale reform
that ordinarily would take a
generation to pull off.”
20
The State of Education In Tennessee
Standards and
Assessments
Using Data
to Improve
instruction
32.1%
Personnel
32.0% 33.4%
Training and
professional
development
Other
Activities
15.9%
Great
Teachers and
Leaders
Turning Around
Low-Performing
Schools
SCORE’s analysis found that nearly
one-third (32.1 percent) of funds were
allocated to personnel, another third
(32 percent) to training and professional
development, and the final third (33.4
percent) to other miscellaneous activities.
The State of Education In Tennessee
21