Supporting Effective Teaching in Tennessee:
Listening and Gathering Feedback on Tennessee’s Teacher Evaluations
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Tennessee has emerged over the past three years as a national leader in
education reform. To ensure that more of its students graduate from
high school with the skills they need to be successful in life, Tennessee
has made a series of significant policy changes. In 2009, teachers began
teaching the higher academic standards of the Tennessee Diploma
Project in classrooms. In 2010, the General Assembly passed the First
to the Top Act, the most sweeping education reform legislation in the
state since 1992, which laid the groundwork for Tennessee’s first-round
Race to the Top win. Rapid implementation of the state’s First to the
Top plan is now underway, putting Tennessee in a unique position
to start realizing significant gains in student achievement.1 “There is
no state that has a greater opportunity…to be a national leader than
Tennessee,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told an audience
in Nashville last year. “There is a commitment, a sense of courage
here that we find absolutely remarkable…My challenge to you –
and my hope – is that Tennessee can be the fastest improving state in
the country.”2
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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