Nashville Announces Scholarship to Make College Completely Free
Nashville is launching a new scholarship to make higher education completely free for many students. It’s one of the first local government efforts in the nation to target non-tuition expenses, and it will help students at two colleges in Nashville beginning fall 2019.
Nashville GRAD — or Getting Results by Advancing Degrees — will work alongside the state’s two existing initiatives that waive community and technical college tuition: the Tennessee Promise for graduating high school seniors and Tennessee Reconnect for adults.
Some recent studies — one by the Tennessee nonprofit Complete Tennessee, another by the Nashville Public Education Foundation — found even though tuition is covered through these programs, many low-income students still struggle to complete their degrees.
That’s because they can’t afford expenses like textbooks, transportation and certifications, says Indira Dammu, education policy advisor for Mayor David Briley.
“We are a city that has a lot of economic opportunities. But not everyone in our city has access to them. And Nashville GRAD would really level the playing field,” she said.
For the pilot next year, Metro government will budget $1 million and serve about 400 students at Nashville State Community College. In the pilot program, the scholarship will only be available to full-time Tennessee Promise students or those that are eligible for the Pell Grant, a type of federal financial aid.
But at full implementation, the city will provide $2.5 million to help 3,000 students annually, between Nashville State and the Tennessee College of Applied Technology. The goal is to make the scholarship available to part-time and full-time low-income students, and participants in Tennessee Promise and Reconnect.
Dammu says the city chose these schools to consider low-income and diverse students.
“We are thinking about equity as the primary lens when we are distributing funds,” said Dammu.
Mayor David Briley says this type of scholarship is key to helping more students from low-income backgrounds complete their degrees and find work.
“We know that obtaining a degree or credential after high school can raise a person’s lifetime income by one-third, and by 2020, 60 percent of jobs will require some type of postsecondary degree. Giving Nashvillians the assistance they need to successfully reach this goal is vital to Nashville’s long-term prosperity,” said Briley in a press release.
The city hopes Nashville GRAD will increase the number of graduates from Nashville State to at least 50 percent over three years and raise TCAT industry certifications to 66 percent by 2023.
[Read more at Nashville Public Radio]
Read MoreThis Memphis teacher wanted to make learning physics more engaging, so he created a website. Now it’s used in 40 countries.
Three girls explode into laughter and cheers as they roll a small cart across the table, successfully getting a rubber band to launch the cart just fast enough to knock a washer off the back of the cart, but not quite fast enough to knock over two washers.
These high schoolers might look like they are just playing with toys inside their Memphis classroom, but they are actually in the middle of a physics lesson. That’s by design.
In his 12 years as a teacher in Memphis, Jack Replinger has worked on perfecting physics lessons that are easy to break down, accessible to students who may not be on grade level in reading and math, and, above all, fun for his students at The Soulsville Charter School in south Memphis. But he’s got another huge aspiration as well: to bring his increasingly popular physics website to as many students and teachers as he can, and to as many countries.
“I was trying to teach the way I had been taught,” Replinger said of his first years in the classroom. “It was boring and a bit of a disaster. Over winter break my second year of teaching, I blew up everything I had learned and said, ‘OK, I’m going to slow this down and move away from teaching long equations.’ That’s when I really started to enjoy teaching.”
Replinger came up with the idea three years ago to take his lessons, which were handed out in his classrooms as thick, paper packets, and turn them into an interactive website, for his students. It’s called Positive Physics. Software engineer Anthony Fizer, who played pick-up basketball with Replinger, helped him get the site running in 2015 and continues to work on the site.
Now, more than 6,000 students in 585 schools across 49 states and in 40 countries have used the free website to learn physics. Replinger grew the site’s reach through his postings in teacher-focused Facebook groups and on other social networks.
“I originally wanted to make this because I wanted a website where my students would work that had interesting problems and also didn’t punish them if they are behind in grade level,” Replinger said. “But I think it’s clear it’s hit on a need for teachers elsewhere.”
The website thus far has been mostly self-funded, though he has solicited small donations from friends, family, and via PayPal, and has received some help from the Soulsville Foundation. Replinger said he is now working to find outside investors to keep the website going into the future.
Replinger came to Memphis in 2007 from Seatle as a Teach For America educator, and he was recently named as the winner of the Barbara Rosser Hyde Alumni Leadership Award, a $5,000 award recognizing leadership among the program’s alumni in Memphis.
When Replinger started teaching at Kingsbury High School as part of the teacher training program, he said he struggled to engage his first classes of physics students. He said so much of his first years of teaching was writing problems and grading, that he had little time to design labs such as the rubber band cart experiment. Part of his goal for the website was to prevent other early career educators from going through the same slog.
“For me, this is a chance to say to other teachers, ‘Let me write the problems for you so you can focus on labs,’ he said. “It takes the burden off newer teachers so they can focus on the fun and creative stuff.”
Anna Krueger, a teacher at Hamilton High School, said that the site has taken a “huge load off of my shoulders,” while also guarding against cheating since each student gets different numbers to work with on the same type of problems.
“I feel like this prevents cheating really well and simultaneously encourages teamwork,” Krueger said.
For Replinger, he said the most rewarding part of the site goes back to how it impacts his students. The high schoolers can pace themselves and try homework problems as many times as they like without punishment.
He said one student story stands out as an example of how the site can boost confidence among his high schoolers.
“I had a student last year who saw herself completely not as a math person,” he said. “But she spent a lot of time practicing on the site, and she would even start on homework problems before I had assigned them. She started the class by getting a D on the first quiz. She ended it by getting As at the honors level.”
[Read more at Chalkbeat] Read MoreTennessee Releases New State Report Card
Education Commissioner Candice McQueen today released the new, redesigned state report card for 2017-18. This tool was developed over the past year with educators, parents, and community organizations and includes a number of new features based on that feedback, including school ratings, a Spanish translation of the site, and additional new data about the performance of different student groups.
The new report card is intended to help families better understand school performance and support student success. The updated design of the report card and information that is included in the tool, including the new rating system, is based on input the department received as it developed a plan to transition to the new federal K-12 education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, and has several components that are unique to Tennessee.
“We want families to have easy access to information about their school’s performance and how it is meeting the needs of all students, and we want them to have that context on a variety of metrics that encompass success,” Commissioner McQueen said. “The report card provides parents and community members with an additional snapshot of information to understand how their school is performing, see successes, and know where to ask questions and get engaged.”
While the department has published a state report card for a number of years, the redesigned version includes a number of updates. For the first time, the report card provides schools with ratings on up to six indicators designated in Tennessee Succeeds, the state’s ESSA plan. These indicators capture different aspects of school performance and include academic achievement, academic growth, chronic absenteeism, progress on English language proficiency, and graduation rate. The report card also includes a new measure called the Ready Graduate indicator that that looks for students’ readiness for college and career to let families know how students are being prepared for life after graduation.
The rating system provides a score of 0.0 to 4.0 on each indicator, similar to a GPA, with 4.0 being the highest. Parents can click through to see more information behind each rating, including how both the full student population and different student groups are performing. Ratings are based either on how well the school is doing overall or how much it improved over the last year; the school receives the higher of the two. The department has shared more information about the rating system and indicators, as well as context on how schools were rated in 2017-18, here.
Additional new features include a new full Spanish translation of the website, an opportunity for principals and superintendents to share messages about their schools, and a wealth of new metrics, including new details on the performance of different student groups and new data in areas like discipline and attendance. The department will continue to update and improve this tool in future years as it receives additional feedback, which families can share via the report card home page. To view the new report card, click here.
[Read more at the TN Department of Education]
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