Section 1: Year In Review
Promising Practices:
DeKalb County High School Turnaround
of Education with the design of its Race to the
Top implementation workplan. SCORE also
hired eight consultants to work with the state
Department’s nine field service centers to
provide support to individual school districts as
they worked to draft their local scope of work
proposals outlining how each district would
spend its share of Race to the Top funding.
During Spring 2010, these consultants held 12
regional meetings, 55 in-person meetings, and
165 one-on-one phone calls with district leaders
as they designed their scopes of work.
To monitor long-term Race to the Top
implementation, Tennessee also established
the Education Delivery Unit (EDU) within the
Department of Education. EDU staff work closely
with the U.S. Education Delivery Institute, a
national non-profit, to develop systems for
monitoring performance data and with the
Commissioner of Education to intervene when
performance is off track. In addition to the EDU,
the state established an external oversight
mechanism, the First to the Top Advisory
Council, tasked with monitoring Race to the Top
implementation. The Advisory Council, which
meets regularly, is composed of 14 education
leaders from across the state including four
elected or appointed officials, six foundation or
business representatives, and four educators.
A second focus of Race to the Top
implementation in 2010 was the design و B