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August 27, 2018 News
Teachers learn about mental health to help their students
Deedra Finch watched several years ago as a close family friend battled mental health issues — depression, bipolar disorder and addiction. “That’s when I started to think about what mental health looked like among my students,” said Finch, a Metro Nashville Public Schools educator with 19 years of experience. School districts and educators are on the front line of meeting...Read MoreAugust 27, 2018 News
Extra duties limited school counselors’ face time with students. A new rule is changing that.
Middle school counselor Denise Owens previously closed her door to students during one of the most stressful periods of the academic year — exam days — when anxious students often need to talk to a trusted adult. Counselors across Tennessee, including Owens, are tapped to help coordinate statewide testing at schools and are unavailable to meet with children for weeks at a time. It is one of...Read MoreAugust 23, 2018 News
Metro Schools Lays Blueprint for Driving Literacy Achievement
National literacy data indicates that 37 percent of fourth-grade students and 36 percent of eighth-grade students are not scoring at- or above-proficiency (source: 2017 NAEP). In Nashville, two out of three third graders aren’t reading on grade level by 3rd grade – an indicator which can pre-determine a student’s future successes many years into the future. These sobering statistics are the...Read MoreAugust 22, 2018 News
It’s been six years since Tennessee took over its first low-performing schools. How are they doing?
Six years after the state took over six of Tennessee’s lowest-performing schools, all of those schools continue to struggle, new state test results show. The state’s ambitious goal with the Achievement School District was to transform the schools that tested in the bottom 5 percent into top-performers within five years. Though the district’s founder later acknowledged the goal was too lofty,...Read MoreAugust 20, 2018 News
Tennessee teachers lag in diversity as more minority students enter schools
While Tennessee’s population of students continues to grow more racially diverse, the state’s workforce of teachers is nowhere close to reflecting the same degree of diversity. A report released by the Tennessee Department of Education quantifies the gap: while 37 percent of the state’s students are students of color, 13 percent of teachers are teachers of color. In some...Read MoreAugust 16, 2018 News