Section 2: SCORE Card
2011 Priorities
2010 was a year of unprecedented education
reform in Tennessee. In 2009, SCORE’s “Roadmap
to Success” report included more than 60 detailed
policy recommendations that fell into four
categories: embracing high standards, cultivating
strong leaders, ensuring excellent teachers, and
utilizing data to enhance student learning. To date,
more than one-third of those recommendations
have been completely implemented. This includes
a large number of high-priority recommendations
related to embracing high standards, allowing
TVAAS data to legally be used in various human
capital decisions, and surveying teachers on
their working conditions. Additionally, significant
progress has been made on 10 of SCORE’s other
recommendations, including the creation of new
statewide principal and teacher evaluation systems
and the launching of new professional development
for teachers on how to use TVAAS data to improve
student achievement. As “Roadmap to Success”
emphasized, “Tennessee has a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to improve our schools.” As the above
progress makes clear, Tennesseans have proven
they are up to this challenge.
However, while significant progress has been made,
half of the recommendations issued in “Roadmap
to Success” have been barely, if at all, implemented.
These recommendations, which overwhelmingly fall
under the categories of cultivating strong leaders
and ensuring excellent teachers, will require
significant work in the coming year. Some of these
recommendations include strengthening the way
teachers are trained, enhancing professional
development opportunities for district and
school leaders, and helping teachers find ways to
collaborate together to improve their instructional
strategies. Based on the state’s progress to date,
SCORE has four priorities for 2011.
Sustained Policy Leadership
As outlined earlier in this report, the link between
a quality education and a high-paying job has
never been clearer. In order for Tennessee to be
economically vibrant, education reform must
remain a top priority for state leaders, including
legislators, educators, and business and community
leaders. These leaders must continue to support
the specific reforms that have been implemented
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The State of Education In Tennessee
in the past few years, especially the Tennessee
Diploma Project and the First to the Top Act. No
one will be more important in sustaining support
for these reforms than Governor Bill Haslam and
Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman.
In addition, state leaders must continue to push
forward with other reforms recommended in
SCORE’s 2009 report, especially reforms related
to more directly connecting the state’s new
educator evaluation systems to hiring, tenure, and
compensation decisions. For example, the various
districts in the state that received funding through
the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher
Incentive Fund or Race to the Top’s Innovation
Acceleration Fund should work with teachers to
design plans for recognizing and rewarding highly
effective teachers and providing teachers with
targeted professional development opportunities
based on the results of an individual teacher’s
evaluation. Additionally, tenure decisions should
be directly linked to the new teacher effectiveness
measure at the local level. To support these
practices, the Tennessee Department of Education
and professional associations should annually
recognize the top-performing principals and
teachers in the state based – at least in large part
– on educators’ performance on the state’s new
evaluation systems.
A Comprehensive Strategy for
Improving the Pipeline of District
and School Leaders
One of the key recommendations in “Roadmap
to Success” was to create a statewide initiative
focused on strengthening the pipeline of district
and school leaders. There should be significant
optimism on this front as Governor Haslam made
developing a pipeline of strong school leaders a
top priority during his campaign, SCORE laid out
detailed ways to create such an initiative in its
“Roadmap to Success” report, and Race to the
Top set aside more than $10 million for funding
of school leadership efforts. However, to date no
statewide leadership effort has been launched.
With a new Commissioner of Education in place, it’s
time to design and implement such an initiative.
As SCORE recommended in “Roadmap to Success,”
this leadership initiative should focus on creating a
network of regional high-quality school leadership
programs that recruit, train, and support highly
effective school leaders. These programs should
work to identify best practices in implementing
the State Board of Education’s Learning Centered
Leadership Policy by creating a pool of shared
resources (such as a common curriculum and
online professional development tools) and
providing opportunities for school leadership
programs from across the state to share best
practices with one another. These programs should
be held accountable by creating a report card
similar to the one the State Board of Education
has for teacher preparation programs. In addition,
the initiative should ensure that the Tenness