SCORE 2010 Annual Report | Page 28

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 28 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