Chalkbeat

Should Tennessee fully fund special education pre-K programs?

2026-08-25T19:48:10+00:00

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A top committee of Tennessee educators wants lawmakers to include special education prekindergarten students in the state’s public school funding formula.

The recommendation follows pleas from school boards and superintendents who say they’ve been saddled with the price tag of an unfunded mandate because federal and state laws require local school districts to serve students with disabilities as young as 3.

“The problem is, they’ve legally compelled us to serve kids for whom they’re not proportionally funding us,” said Bob Nardo, the executive director at the Libertas School, a Memphis charter school, during a TISA Review Committee meeting this month.

Lawmakers established the committee last year. Made up of top education officials and public school leaders from around the state, the committee is tasked with recommending revisions to the state’s overarching K-12 funding formula and will issue its first report later this fall.

A survey completed this summer showed the majority of committee members ranked special education pre-K funding as a top priority, in addition to revising how the state identifies economically disadvantaged students.

“Early childhood education is widely recognized as an important factor in long-term academic success,” committee member Ron McPherson said in the summer survey. McPherson serves as the finance director at Knox County Schools.

Reworking TISA, the state’s funding formula, would require legislative action. The formula currently only funds Tennessee K-12 students.

“Change the rules about who we’re required to serve, or fund us for the kids we’re required to serve,” Nardo said, noting that his school has an “acute population” of special education students with “severe” needs.

It’s not clear how much weight the TISA Review Committee’s recommendations will carry with state lawmakers.

A previous legislative effort to fold these pre-K students into public school funding stalled in 2025, likely over funding concerns. The legislature estimated that fully funding the programs could cost the state more than $159 million annually.

On Thursday, state Board of Education Chairman Bob Eby sent a formal list of TISA recommendations to Gov. Bill Lee.

The pre-K funding recommendation wasn’t included in the official list, but Eby noted it at the end of the letter.

“This topic, being outside the K-12 formula, was omitted from the list, as it is not necessarily authorized by the statute creating this Committee; however, we wanted you to know of this high level of interest from the committee members,” Eby wrote.

West Tennessee school leaders said last year that they’ve encountered “fundamental” misunderstandings of how special education pre-K programs work and are funded, even among state officials responsible for education oversight.

Tennessee has an $18 million grant fund for special education pre-K costs. But district leaders say the grant program is less stable than recurring funding streams, and it’s still not enough to cover the costs of their special education pre-K classrooms.

“Yes, the grant program exists, and I’m very grateful for it,” Nardo said. “But it’s not actually proportional to the need.”

Special education costs for pre-K classes can balloon quickly, school leaders say.

Lakeland School System in Shelby County currently has 29 special education students to whom it is federally required to offer pre-K services, including specialized teachers and therapies.

But these students must also be educated alongside general education peers to meet federal and state class size and inclusivity regulations. Lakeland is serving an additional 30 general education students in those pre-K classrooms as peer models for its 29 special education students.

Lakeland’s 59 students are spread across four classrooms, each with a special education teacher and two special education assistants.

The cost to run those classrooms? More than $621,000, according to data provided by the district. The district is receiving $15,058 in federal funding and another $124,660 from the Tennessee special education preschool grant, which together cover about 22% of Lakeland’s total costs.

That means Lakeland must dip into its TISA funding — calculated and intended for K-12 students — to pay the remaining $481,282.

Other district officials said the existing funding models do not factor in the costs of peer students and the enrollment increases they bring.

“That’s where we’re getting in a bind,” said TISA Review Committee member Eddie Pruett, the director of schools at Gibson County Special School District. “We have to provide this, and don’t have the funding we need to do it with.”

Melissa Brown is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact Melissa at mbrown@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee should fully fund special education pre-K, districts say

2025-10-14T11:00:00+00:00

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Tennessee school districts have been footing the bill for special education pre-kindergarten classes, and now they want lawmakers to allocate money for it in the state’s school funding model.

Some districts are pulling hundreds of thousands of dollars from their K-12 budgets to provide classrooms for students as young as 3 with disabilities while receiving limited federal funding and no recurring state dollars. More than 9,900 pre-K students in Tennessee require special education services per a February 2025 state analysis.

Federal disabilities law requires schools provide services to these students, who often need expensive therapies and extra teachers. But the state’s Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act formula adopted in 2022 doesn’t factor them in and only provides per-student funding once they enter kindergarten.

The Germantown Municipal School District is spending over $800,000 yearly to run special education preschool. It only receives around $23,000 in state grant funding.

“Each preschool classroom requires a highly specialized team: a dually certified teacher, two paraprofessionals, therapists, and sometimes a nurse,” said Germantown Superintendent Jason Manuel. “The total cost per classroom can range from $143,000 to more than $200,000 annually, depending on the student needs and staffing.”

Last month, the Lakeland School System’s board of education unanimously approved a resolution urging lawmakers to amend the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act formula to include special education pre-K students.

The resolution renews a statewide Tennessee School Boards Association lobbying push to address the funding gap after a bill to amend the TISA formula stalled in the General Assembly in early 2025.

“If the federal government and state government is going to require this, then I think it’s essential that we address this,” said Rep. Mark White, a Shelby County Republican who sponsored the 2025 legislation.

Next year, White plans to push again for pre-K funding, though he acknowledges the estimated costs of fully funding the program have stalled progress on the issue.

Financial analysts at the legislature estimated the previous bill would cost the state more than $159 million annually.

But local educators think the estimate was skewed and overestimated how many children would be included in the program.

“We are asking whatever the figure is, give us 20% of it, give us 40% of it. It needs to be recurring dollars, or it doesn’t make sense,” White said, noting districts need to be able to rely on recurring funds rather than less stable grant funding.

Last year the Germantown district served 56 pre-school students with disabilities ranging from development delays to hearing impairments who required services such as physical and speech therapy.

And because of certain federal and state laws mandating class size and educating special education students alongside more general education peers, Germantown enrolled 65 other students in the program and spread students across eight classrooms.

Lakeland schools this year staffed four classrooms for 34 special education pre-K students aged 3-5 and served 25 general education students in the same classrooms.

Costs run more than $617,000 annually, which Lakeland schools must pull from other programs funded through TISA.

“Over the past several years, Germantown and Lakeland have worked together to raise awareness of this funding gap,” Manuel said. “Our school boards and leadership teams have met with legislators and even the governor’s finance team to advocate for a fix. Everyone agrees it’s needed, but it hasn’t yet been included in the governor’s budget.”

District leaders in west Tennessee say they’ve encountered “fundamental” misunderstandings of how special education pre-K programs work and are funded, even by state officials responsible for education oversight.

“Another reason this issue has been overlooked is confusion at the state level between voluntary pre-K programs and special education preschool programs,” Manuel said. “Voluntary pre-K serves at-risk students based on income, while special education preschool serves students ages 3-5 with developmental delays or disabilities — it’s not optional; it’s required by law.”

Voluntary pre-K receives some $85 million in state allocated funding, but Lakeland and Germantown are among the few districts in Tennessee that do not have voluntary pre-K programs. Still, even districts receiving voluntary pre-K funding aren’t being funded for separate special education students and classrooms.

Lakeland leaders last month expressed frustration at trying to bring attention to the issue at the state level, where it first stalled in 2024 over misunderstandings about what funding was available. Lakeland board member and legislative liaison Michelle Childs also criticized the focus on private school choice at last year’s special session over fully funding special education pre-K classes.

“We’ve explained it pretty well,” Childs said. “They just made the choice that they wanted to fund private school vouchers over special needs kids.”

Melissa Brown is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact Melissa at mbrown@chalkbeat.org.

Porter-Leath won the Memphis Head Start funding. It has a week to fill 3,000 seats.

2025-07-28T12:00:00+00:00

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With only a week until school starts, local early childhood education nonprofit Porter-Leath needs to fill 250 staff positions and nearly 3,000 student seats as Memphis’ new sole Head Start provider.

Porter-Leath announced last Monday that it’s taking over the five-year contract and the nearly $30 million annual federal grant from Memphis-Shelby County Schools. The district lost the contract after repeated safety violations.

The changeup leaves Porter-Leath with only a week to transition before the school year starts on Aug. 4. And families who previously signed up with MSCS for the upcoming school year need to apply again, said Vice President of Development Robert Hughes. The district didn’t explain how it plans to communicate that to parents.

“Time is a huge challenge,” Hughes said.

Over 700 families applied for acceptance last week, he said, and the organization is hosting enrollment support workshops and job fairs throughout the month of August.

Hughes also said Porter-Leath is expanding partnerships with other community organizations like First 8 Memphis to open new Head Start sites “for space reasons.” The nonprofit currently operates five centers of its own.

During the first enrollment event Friday, Family Services Manager Tracy Jackson said over 100 families showed up to Porter-Leath’s American Way center for support before 11 a.m.

For the past four years, MSCS has run the free federal pre-K program for low-income families. But funding from the federal Administration for Children and Families went up for grabs this spring because MSCS repeatedly violated Head Start safety standards, according to The Daily Memphian. The district received 3 deficiency notices in 2023-24 for “concerning discipline patterns,” including teachers who “hit, pulled and grabbed children by the neck.”

In an email to Chalkbeat, MSCS confirmed that it will not receive any Head Start funding this school year.

But the district will still provide “high-quality early learning opportunities” to 3,340 students, the email said, primarily four-year-olds, through funding from the state education department’s Voluntary Pre-K program.

MSCS did not say whether it would need to lay off any staff. In an earlier press release, district officials said the transition will affect 23 childcare providers.

“While the loss of Head Start funding has required adjustments to our staffing model, we are working diligently to retain as many team members as possible through reassignment and redeployment into roles supported by [the] Early Childhood Department,” the recent email said.

Last year, Porter-Leath served around 1,500 children in its Early Head Start program for children up to 3 years old and other pre-K models. And until a fallout in August 2021, the district paid the nonprofit around two-thirds of its grant award to serve as a partner in offering Head Start services.

Porter-Leath was one of 13 providers nationwide to be designated a “Program of Excellence” by the National Head Start Association in 2023. Hughes credits most of the organization’s success to its early education staff, and the focus on professional development.

“We’re not just like, ‘Hey, you’re hired. Go for it,’” he said. “We’re not asking somebody to rely on what they learned in school 25 years ago with no additional support. And that pays off in the classroom.”

Hughes said Porter-Leath also puts additional adults in its classrooms and centers through outside partnerships with AmeriCorps, including its “foster grandparents” program.

“Having extra adults in the classroom and in the centers makes a huge difference obviously, for our teachers, knowing that there’s a third set of eyes,” he said.

Starting Friday, Porter-Leath will begin hosting job fairs specifically for former MSCS Head Start employees, which will run every Wednesday and Friday through August.

Tennessee reading law’s retention policies should start as early as kindergarten, state board says

2024-03-04T23:54:55+00:00

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Tennessee’s top education policy board is urging Gov. Bill Lee and state lawmakers to refocus efforts to identify and help struggling readers on students in lower grades — as early as kindergarten — rather than waiting until third or fourth grade to intervene.

In a rare action, the state Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution Monday asking elected officials to revisit the state’s 2021 literacy law, which targeted third and fourth graders and strengthened retention rules for students who score poorly on state tests.

Over the past three years, the board has been working through the details and challenges of implementing the controversial law, which passed during a special legislative session called by the governor to address pandemic-related learning disruptions.

The law created popular summer learning camps and tutoring programs. It also included less popular provisions increasing the likelihood that third and fourth graders could be held back a grade eventually if they don’t perform well enough in English language arts under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP.

Third grade, when Tennessee begins to give its students TCAP tests, is a critical year for reading proficiency, because literacy is considered key to all later learning.

The board’s request for the state to reconsider the law’s retention provision is based in part on new tools that Tennessee teachers are using to identify reading problems before the third grade.

“Retaining students in grades K-3 rather than grades 3-4 will ensure that students who are in the most need of additional reading support will have access to foundational literacy skills instruction at a critical point in their foundational literacy development should they be retained,” the resolution reads.

While years of research shows the overall costs and benefits of retaining students are unclear, the general consensus among researchers and educators is that the earlier a struggling student is retained, the better the outcomes for that student.

“Third grade is too late,” Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds told the board last month when members asked whether Tennessee’s reading law is targeting the right age group.

Additionally, Tennessee students in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade now take three tests annually to screen them for potential reading challenges. Data from those tests wasn’t available when the 2021 law passed, but it could be used now to trigger key supports, interventions, and retention decisions earlier in a student’s academic career, the resolution says.

Ryan Holt, who represents Nashville on the board and wrote the resolution, said the law had a good intent but needs a “course correction.”

Executive Director Sara Morrison agreed. “It pushes us in the right direction as a state to look at those earlier grades and use data responsibly to make decisions earlier than third grade, but allows for that backstop to remain in third grade where we have that consistent TCAP measure,” she said.

Thousands of third graders were at risk of being held back last year because of their TCAP scores, but ultimately only about 900 third graders, or 1.2% were retained — not significantly more than in an average school year — thanks to intervention options and an appeals process that many families took advantage of.

The law also requires this year’s fourth graders to be held back if they don’t score as proficient, or show “adequate growth,” on their TCAPs.

Officials are projecting that the fourth grade retention number will be significantly higher than the third-grade rate, because the law allows for fewer exemptions for those students.

Just weeks ago, the state board approved a complex formula for what constitutes enough improvement for fourth graders — but not before several members questioned whether the law is targeting the right age group.

“I just want to encourage us to keep moving in the direction of working with teachers who would say the earlier, the better. Let’s not wait,” said Larry Jensen, a board member from West Tennessee.

Board Chairman Robert Eby, from Oak Ridge, said the body’s decision Monday to send a message to elected officials falls in line with its duty to develop and maintain a master plan for K-12 public education.

“We don’t pass many resolutions,” Eby said. “I think it shows the importance we’re putting on this issue.”

Asked about the board’s resolution, a spokeswoman for the governor reiterated the law’s intent, supports, and impacts.

“Beginning in kindergarten, students have access to high-dosage tutoring and summer school programs that reinforce proven phonics-based instruction,” said Elizabeth Lane Johnson, Lee’s press secretary. “Parents and teachers can track their students’ progress through regular reading screening tests, so they can determine the right path forward based on the unique needs of each student.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Ayden can’t speak. Lead poisoning is probably to blame

2024-02-27T19:54:35+00:00

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Dre Jones remembers watching his wife cry in the passenger seat of his GMC Envoy as they drove their 4-year-old son the 70 miles from their Dyersburg home to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital.

He can still see the inside of the emergency department and smell the alcohol swab the nurse used to prepare his son’s hand for an IV.

“I had to hold him to keep him still while they were doing it because he was fighting and crying,” Jones said.

Jones’ son, Ayden, was diagnosed with severe lead poisoning in August 2019. The current federal standard for concern is 3.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of a child’s blood. Ayden’s blood level measured 72 micrograms per deciliter.

Now 8, Ayden doesn’t talk. At school, he flips desks when frustrated and doesn’t play with other kids. Lead seems to have swung his brain’s development far off the typical course.

Hundreds of Memphis-area kids are diagnosed with lead poisoning each year, according to state data. While almost all suffer much milder effects than Ayden, their brains aren’t unscathed. Kids exposed to lead perform worse in school and are somewhat more likely to encounter learning disabilities and major mental health issues.

While Ayden’s case is far from the norm, it is a clear picture of the ways lead threatens West Tennessee’s children.

‘Like turning off a light switch’

On Jones’ phone is a video of a 2-year-old Ayden, captured more than two years before his lead diagnosis.

In the video, Ayden shows off his ability to wave and say “hey.” A few moments later, he tells the camera goodbye. He’s giggling throughout.

As far as his parents could tell, Ayden’s brain was developing normally until the fall of 2016 — about nine months into living in a new rental home.

That fall, his parents started to observe little regressions. His mother noticed he would no longer grab the dustpan for her when she was cleaning. His father noticed he’d started running around the kitchen when hungry instead of saying “eat eat” like he had been.

Always bouncing around the house, he seemed less and less able to control himself. He stopped talking in short sentences and asking questions. He stopped saying “momma” or “dada” or anything at all.

“It’s almost like turning off a light switch,” Dre Jones said. “That’s kind of what happened with him.”

The first time his mother, Bianca, asked Ayden’s pediatrician about the regressions, she was told he would “come around.” When he didn’t, the pediatrician referred him to a child psychiatrist in Memphis, but it took a year to get an appointment. When the appointment finally arrived, the psychiatrist diagnosed Ayden with ADHD and autism. Neither the pediatrician nor the psychiatrist suggested testing him for lead poisoning, Dre Jones said.

In recent years, pediatricians have become less alert to lead’s threat, meaning they test far fewer children than they should, according to Michelle Miller, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes.

While it’s possible Ayden’s brain would have developed atypically even without lead exposure, there’s little doubt that lead played a role given his extreme levels, according to Aaron Reuben, a clinical psychology researcher at Duke University.

In kids whose brains would have developed normally otherwise, lead can cause abnormalities. And in kids who already would have encountered neurological disorders, lead can exacerbate the problems, Reuben said.

Whichever boat Ayden was in, he would have been better off if his pediatrician had tested him. His parents could have moved from their rental house, which they would later learn had dangerous lead levels in the paint and dirt.

The State of Tennessee recommends — but does not mandate — that all children have their blood lead level tested when they’re 1 and 2. This is especially important for children living in a house built before 1978, the year lead paint was banned, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the 10 states that mandate testing, about 30% of children under 6 are tested each year, according to a 2017 report. In Dyer County and Tennessee as a whole, only about 17% of kids were tested last year.

Two brutal days

In August 2019, two and a half years after Ayden’s parents noticed him developing atypically, his mom watched her son put his mouth on a doorknob with peeling paint. When she looked at his tongue, she saw a paint chip dissolving on top of it. She tried to grab it but couldn’t.

She started Googling to see if she should worry. The online descriptions of lead paint’s effects seemed to match her son’s symptoms exactly — hyperactivity and speech delays.

“The (listed) side effects of the lead was basically (describing) him,” she said.

She called his pediatrician’s office, asked if he could be tested for lead and was told to bring him by the next day.

The night before he was tested, Dre and Bianca Jones sat on their couch, continuing to search the internet about lead poisoning and crying. Before, it seemed likely their son’s challenges were caused by genetics or something else out of their control. That night, Bianca remembers starting to blame herself. She realized the rental home she and Dre had chosen could have poisoned their child.

The following day, the test found shockingly high levels of lead in Ayden’s blood. The doctor told the couple he’d schedule an appointment at Le Bonheur for later that week, but the Joneses decided to drive the 70 miles that night and wait in the emergency room.

Once at Le Bonheur, doctors started giving Ayden chelation therapy, a measure that’s reserved for extreme cases of blood poisoning.

For a week, the Joneses lived at Le Bonheur. And even when they were discharged, they couldn’t go home. A state health official monitoring Ayden’s case told Jones he couldn’t, under any circumstances, move his son back into the house that had likely poisoned him. They moved in with Bianca’s mother for two weeks before finding another place they could afford.

Chelation dropped Ayden’s blood lead level from 72 into the 50s. Jones and his wife had to rely on time and nutrition to further lower it, adding broccoli and other vegetables into their son’s diet. Studies show that children eating less fat and fewer calories tend to have lower blood lead levels than those living in similarly high-lead environments. Iron, calcium, vitamin D and vitamin C may also help.

Of course, the lead has already done most of its damage. The toxin is most damaging to the brains of kids under 6 — with the danger increasing the younger the child is. But in the more than three years since chelation, Ayden’s blood lead level has fallen to about 15 — a much safer level.

Moving forward

As Ayden’s lead levels have dropped, his behavior has improved. Now, he loves to twirl his mother’s clothes, interact with adults and play with his two younger siblings, born in the years after his lead-poisoning diagnosis. He has a skinny frame and a wide smile. At home, he’s a “sweet” and relaxed child, Bianca Jones said.

When away from his parents, though, Ayden’s behavior has continued to be disruptive and unpredictable, especially if he’s missed a dose of his medicine.

At school, he will still sometimes run circles around his special education classroom, Dre Jones said. He’s bitten his teachers and flipped desks. His teachers have struggled to teach him much.

Studies have shown that students with even moderately elevated blood lead levels are more likely to perform poorly in school or fail to graduate. One study found that 20% of kids with blood lead levels over 25 micrograms per deciliter require special education.

Dre Jones worries about his son’s future. For now, he and Bianca Jones are able to protect their son and provide him with a happy home. But if something were to happen to them, he doubts Ayden would be taken care of adequately.

To better set Ayden up for his future — and to compensate the family for the suffering they’ve endured — the Joneses are suing their old landlord. Though two previous lawyers have withdrawn from his case, he’s hopeful his current attorney will be able to bring him some measure of justice.

He’s angry any landlord would rent a house so dangerous to children. “(That house) ended up destroying our boy’s complete personality,” Jones said.

But mostly, Jones is trying to stay upbeat for the sake of his kids, enjoying the beauty of their play together and raising awareness about lead poisoning.

“I try to tell people about this, and they be like, ‘Naw, I don’t think that’s the case,’” Dre Jones said. “(People) act like it’s not a real thing … (or) a thing of the past. But this stuff is affecting kids today.”

In 2023, over 2,400 Tennessee kids tested positive for elevated levels of lead in their blood, a number that would likely be larger if testing rates weren’t so low.

For many of the affected children, the consequences will be moderate — a lost IQ point or two or a slightly higher risk of heart disease later in life.

But for some, lead’s effects will be heartbreaking.

Jacob Steimer is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Email him at Jacob.Steimer@mlk50.com

Promising Futures child care scholarship bill advances in Tennessee Senate

2023-03-15T23:25:09+00:00

A bill to create a scholarship program to help Tennessee’s low- and middle-income families pay for high-quality early child care cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday — even as some lawmakers questioned whether funding child care should be the state’s responsibility.

The Senate Education Committee voted 7-2 to advance the legislation, which could tap up to $40 million annually in tax revenue from the state’s newly legalized sports betting industry.

Dubbed Promising Futures, the program would take a cue from Tennessee Promise, the state’s groundbreaking 2014 initiative offering high school graduates a chance at two years of tuition-free community or technical college.

If Promising Futures launches, Tennessee would again become a national leader in using lottery- or sports betting-funded scholarships to address a major workforce challenge, according to Max Altman, director of research and policy for the Southern Education Foundation.

“There’s a wide open space, especially in the South, for states to step in and take on the mantle of leadership to increase child care access,” Altman told Chalkbeat.

An early child care “crisis” is costing Tennessee parents, businesses, and taxpayers an estimated $2.6 billion annually in lost earnings and revenues, according to a 2022 study. And business groups from across the state have signed a letter urging lawmakers to create the new government scholarship program.

High-quality child care programs emphasizing early literacy also would help children become proficient readers by the third grade — a major focus of Tennessee’s education improvement strategy, said Sen. Becky Massey, a Knoxville Republican who is co-sponsoring the legislation with Rep. Mark White of Memphis.

“This bill will have a double bottom line, because it will strengthen our workforce of today and the workforce of tomorrow simultaneously,” Massey told the committee.

But several legislators who voted against the bill noted that, while Tennessee’s constitution guarantees “a system of free public schools,” it does not identify child care as a state obligation.

“I worry that this isn’t our role,” said Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg, a Republican from Bristol.

He suggested that one reason child care is hard to afford is that the state added regulations in recent years that prompted many small, home-based child care businesses to close.

“Now we come back and say we have a huge problem,” Lundberg said, “and we’ve got to put in $40 million to solve this problem that we created.”

Leaders with Tennesseans for Quality Early Education, which is spearheading the Promising Futures initiative, said a review of regulations is appropriate — but so is a new investment to help children, parents, and employers.

Blair Taylor, the advocacy group’s CEO, noted that a 2022 survey of Tennessee parents with children under age 6 found that 80% reported employment disruptions due to inadequate child care, and nearly a fifth ended up leaving the workforce due to those challenges.

Tennessee legalized sports wagering in 2019 and collects 20% of the gaming industry’s adjusted gross revenues as taxes. Of that, 80% currently goes to the lottery fund used for higher education scholarships, 15% to the state to distribute to local governments, and 5% toward mental health programs.

The Promising Futures bill proposes starting the scholarship program with 60% of sports wagering tax revenues next year, increasing to 70% the following year, and 80% for each year thereafter.

But Lou Hanemann, chief of staff for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, testified that diverting lottery money would be “devastating” to financial aid programs such as the HOPE scholarship, Tennessee Promise, and Tennessee Reconnect, which helps adults go back to school to gain new skills.

“I would strongly encourage caution in pulling away revenue streams that are coming in and being used directly for scholarship programs currently,” Hanemann told the panel. “This is not a reserve account where money is just kind of hanging out. The earnings off of these dollars directly fund scholarships every term for students.”

Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Democrat from Memphis, pointed out, though, that sports betting is a relatively new revenue stream, beyond the Tennessee lottery created in 1974. She voted for the bill and has signed on as a co-sponsor.

At a legislative hearing in January, Mary Beth Thomas, executive director of Tennessee’s Sports Wagering Advisory Council, reported the state collected more than $68 million in sports betting privilege taxes in 2022, compared with $40.6 million a year earlier.

You can track the bill’s progress on the state legislature’s website.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Bill to ease Tennessee’s third-grade reading and retention law clears first legislative hurdle

2023-03-15T10:00:00+00:00

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State lawmakers advanced legislation Tuesday that would put fewer third graders at risk of being held back this year under Tennessee’s 2021 reading law.

The law, which pins retention decisions on how well a student scores in English language arts on the annual Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program test, would be revised to consider results from a second state-approved test, too — but only for third graders who score just under the state’s proficiency threshold on their TCAP.

The legislation also would direct the state Board of Education to develop rules for appealing any retention decision for students who scored as approaching proficiency.

And it would require that any public school student held back in kindergarten, first grade, or second grade undergo tutoring during their following school year.

The House K-12 subcommittee advanced the measure — which was similar to legislation filed last week by House Education Committee Chairman Mark White — after studying a flurry of other bills to revise the law. Parents, educators, and school boards have flooded lawmakers’ offices with complaints about the state’s stricter retention policy, which takes effect with this year’s class of third graders.

Committee members ultimately rallied around the compromise bill that passed on a voice vote. The measure widens reading test criteria for retention but keeps the state, not local educators, in control of those decisions.

The legislation still faces multiple votes in the House and Senate and could put lawmakers at odds with Gov. Bill Lee. The Republican governor pressed for the law and is urging the legislature to stay the course on the state’s literacy strategy.

His strategy draws a clear line in the sand to prevent “social promotions” and includes free tutoring and summer learning camps to help struggling students catch up on learning, as well as options for retesting third-graders who are at risk of being retained.

“Contrary to what critics will say, Tennessee’s reading success plan is about moving kids forward, not holding them back,” Lee wrote in a recent editorial published by The Tennessean.

A spokeswoman for the governor offered no further comment Tuesday night when asked about the bill’s advancement.

But the leader of the state’s largest teacher organization called it a “positive step.”

“Multiple measures are important when understanding student achievement for young children,” said Tanya Coats, president of the Tennessee Education Association. “A year-end test that runs for 180 minutes for 8- and 9-year-olds should not be the only way we understand where students are in English language arts.”

Only a third of Tennessee students read on grade level, according to state testing data. The existing law puts tens of thousands of third graders — and more than 2,700 students in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the state’s largest district — at risk of being held back this year if they do not take advantage of summer learning opportunities and tutoring.

“We don’t always get it perfect the first time,” said Rep. Sam McKenzie, a Knoxville Democrat, calling the proposed changes an improvement.

Asked by McKenzie what percentage of third graders would be at risk of retention under the proposed changes, the bill’s sponsors could not give an accurate estimate but said there would be an impact.

“There would be more retained if we didn’t pass this bill,” said Rep. Scott Cepicky, a Culleoka Republican, who is carrying the bill in the House for White.

Third grade is considered a critical marker for reading, which is considered foundational to all subsequent learning. But while the law is intended to set children up for success in school, critics say the retention policy could have significant unintended negative consequences by shaming students who are already struggling. And they note that children from low-income families are more likely to be retained in the early grades because they have limited access to high-quality early childhood education and support at home.

Most research suggests that retention has, on average, null or negative effects on students, and that it’s also linked strongly to dropping out of high school.

You can track the bill on the General Assembly’s website. To learn more about Tennessee’s current retention policy, visit the state education department’s answers to frequently asked questions.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Tenn. legislative leader wants to widen reading test criteria for determining third-grade retention

2023-03-07T11:00:00+00:00

A leading House Republican has filed legislation in Tennessee to widen criteria for determining which third graders are at risk of being held back if they aren’t deemed proficient readers.

A 2021 law pins the entire decision on scores from the state’s annual TCAP test given each spring for English language arts. But a proposal filed Monday by Rep. Mark White would consider results from a second state-approved test, too.

Under White’s legislation, third graders who don’t score as proficient on their TCAP could still avoid retention and related learning interventions if they score in at least the 50th percentile on their most recent reading benchmark test. Districts give those assessments periodically throughout the school year to measure students’ reading skills, fluency, and comprehension.

White is seeking to satisfy educators and parents who are unhappy that the state’s new retention policy hinges on scores from a single state test that could impact tens of thousands of third graders this year. However, his proposal would not give authority back to local educators to make the final decision, as called for by numerous school boards, the state superintendents association, and several teacher groups.

At the outset of this year’s General Assembly, legislative leaders said revisiting the controversial reading and retention law was their No. 1 education priority. Lawmakers have filed a flurry of bills with various ideas.

White’s legislation includes components from several of those bills but carries particular sway, because the Memphis Republican chairs the House Education Administration Committee and also sits on a K-12 subcommittee that is deciding which proposal moves forward. The Senate, where Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg is co-sponsoring White’s bill, is letting the House take the lead on vetting any proposed revisions.

After holding a legislative hearing last month on Tennessee’s reading problem, White huddled in recent days with other House GOP leaders to try to reach a consensus on how to address local concerns about the controversial law, which Republican Gov. Bill Lee pushed for as a key part of Tennessee’s pandemic learning recovery plan.

The law also created summer learning camps and tutoring programs to support students who are struggling in reading and math and to provide avenues to avoid retention if they don’t test as proficient readers in the third grade, which is considered a critical marker for learning in subsequent grades.

The K-12 subcommittee, chaired by Republican Rep. Kirk Haston, from Lobelville, is scheduled to discuss the various bills on March 14.

In addition to adding benchmark test results to the retention equation, White’s legislation seeks to make clear that a parent or guardian can appeal a retention decision under certain circumstances, or give written permission for their child’s teacher, guidance counselor, or school administrator to file an appeal.

White also proposes a new requirement that any public school student held back in kindergarten, first grade, or second grade be assigned a tutor and undergo tutoring for the entire next school year.

You can read White’s amendment below.

Tennessee looks to ‘Mississippi miracle’ as it grapples with stagnant reading scores

2023-03-01T17:29:52+00:00

Tennessee, which once counted on Mississippi’s worst-in-the-nation reading scores to elevate its own national ranking for literacy, is now looking to its neighbor to the south as a role model for how to improve.

In a turnaround dubbed the “Mississippi miracle,” the state saw its fourth-grade reading scores on a national test rise dramatically between 2013 and 2019, even for historically marginalized groups like Black and Hispanic students. Mississippi also maintained its reading gains in 2022, while scores in most other states declined after the pandemic caused unprecedented disruptions to schooling.

Now under several 2021 laws, Tennessee is employing many of the same tactics that Mississippi did under its 2013 law. Among them: prioritizing reading improvements and investments in grades K-3, training teachers on the “science of reading,” including an emphasis on phonics, and — most controversial of all — requiring third graders to pass a state reading test to get promoted to the fourth grade.

Carey Wright, Mississippi’s education chief from 2013 to 2022, praised Tennessee during testimony Wednesday before state lawmakers in Nashville who are considering whether to make changes to Tennessee’s policies for holding third graders back.

“You are really to be commended for the comprehensive nature in which you’ve approached this topic,” she said, noting that Tennessee has even required its teacher training programs to change how they teach reading instruction, which Mississippi did not.

Wright cited a recent Boston University study finding that Mississippi third-graders who were retained under that state’s law went on to achieve substantially higher scores in English language arts by the sixth grade. The study also found that retention had no impact on other outcomes such as attendance or identification for special education.

But national research about retention is mixed. Critics argue that there are more risks than benefits — from negative social and emotional effects to a disproportionate impact on student groups who are already marginalized, such as those who come from low-income families, are of color, or have disabilities.

Why Tennessee zeroed in on third grade

Literacy is foundational to all subsequent learning, and third grade is considered a critical marker. As the old saying goes: You learn to read up until the third grade, and after that, you read to learn.

But for years, reading scores have been mostly stagnant in Tennessee, with only about a third of the state’s third graders showing proficiency based on state tests.

In 2011, lawmakers passed a retention law to try to address the problem, but the statute was largely unenforced, with few third graders being held back by local school leaders.

“So here we are 12 years later having the same discussion,” said Rep. Mark White, who chairs the House Education Administration Committee and helped pass the state’s new reading and retention policies.

“I personally am grateful that we passed a retention law … because now we have everybody’s attention,” the Memphis Republican said to kick off Wednesday’s hearing.

House leaders have compiled a list of 14 bills that aim to revise or tweak the law. They range from gutting the retention provision altogether to giving local districts more authority to determine which students should be held back. Gov. Bill Lee pressed for the 2021 law and wants to stay the course.

To avoid retention, the law says third graders whose scores on state tests show they are “approaching” proficiency must attend a summer camp and demonstrate “adequate growth” on a test administered at the camp’s end, or they must participate in a tutoring program in the fourth grade. Students who score “below” proficiency must participate in both intervention programs.

Third graders are exempt from retention if they were held back in a previous grade; have or may have a disability that affects reading; are English language learners with less than two years of English instruction; or retest as proficient before the beginning of fourth grade.

Parents also can appeal a retention decision if their child performed at the 40th percentile on a different test that allows for comparisons with national benchmarks, or if the child experienced an event that reasonably impacted the child’s performance on the TCAP test. The appeal can be based on other criteria such as results from locally administered screening tests required by the state.

Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn has shepherded Gov. Bill Lee’s reading improvement plan including Reading 360, an array of programs to train teachers on reading instruction, provide more resources and mentoring networks to school districts, and support families to help their children read better.

Pushback against retention is widespread

While Tennessee’s tutoring and summer learning programs are popular, many parents and educators dislike the part of the law that makes results of the state’s standardized TCAP test for English language arts the only criterion to determine whether third-graders can progress to the fourth grade. Numerous school boards also have passed resolutions urging the legislature to revisit the new retention policy.

On Wednesday, several district superintendents echoed that call.

“I respectfully ask that you allow districts to use multiple data points when making the monumental decision to retain a student, which can have serious long-term consequences,” said Gary Lilly, director of Collierville Schools in Shelby County.

Beyond the state’s test, school districts generally give students multiple assessments that are specifically designed to gauge reading progress. All of those results could be considered, Lilly said, along with other factors such as a student’s overall achievement, attendance record, and emotional and social maturity.

Lilly noted that Tennessee also has among the nation’s highest thresholds for measuring proficiency. The state began working to raise them when a 2007 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report gave Tennessee an “F” for truth in advertising, because its standards were so low that most students were deemed proficient.

But Lilly suggested that Tennessee may want to rethink those high thresholds.

“I am not advocating to decrease the rigor of our standards,” he said. “What I am saying is that the TCAP test should not be viewed as the definitive authority to target students for retention.”

Another concern is the state’s one-year timeline for implementing the new retention policy at scale, affecting third graders who score either “approaching” proficiency or “below basic.” Some district leaders have argued that starting just with the students who score “below basic,” which is Tennessee’s lowest-performing category, would be a more targeted and logistically feasible approach.

Jeanne Barker, director of Lenoir City Schools, said her district won’t receive TCAP results until after the school year ends, leaving little time for students to take the test over or for families to decide about attending summer learning camps or appealing retention decisions to the state education department.

Penny Schwinn, Tennessee’s education commissioner, acknowledged the “tight timeline” but testified that no parent should be surprised by the end of the school year if their child is identified as having a reading deficiency.

“Parents should be receiving notification that their child may be at risk for needing additional supports two times before we even get into testing season,” said Schwinn, adding that preliminary TCAP results will become available the week of May 19.

Advocates look beyond third grade

Policy conversations that began with third grade reading continue to gravitate toward earlier grades.

Wright said Mississippi’s playbook emphasized the importance of literacy instruction and interventions for struggling readers as early as possible.

“My goal was that, by the time third grade came around, there shouldn’t even be an issue around third grade,” she said. “We should have captured those kids a long time ago and made sure that they were getting the interventions and the help that they needed.”

Tennessee education advocates shared similar sentiments.

Nancy Dishner, president and CEO of the Niswonger Foundation supporting students and educators in East Tennessee, said her biggest concern about Tennessee’s current initiative is that “we’re not doing it early enough.”

“We have to move back,” Dishner said. “Birth is when we need to start helping our kids, not when they enter elementary school.”

Amy Doren, a 35-year educator and former coordinator of early childhood programs at Kingsport City Schools, agreed.

“Children’s brains develop 90% to capacity by age 5. So why would we not seek to make an impact in those early years?” Doren asked. “That’s where we want our children to learn to be problem-solvers and critical thinkers, so that when they get to the third grade, they’ll be ready to handle it.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on March 1, 2023, to add that parents can appeal a retention decision based on the results of locally administered, state-required screening tests; and to clarify that the one-year timeline for implementing the third-grade retention policy “at scale” refers to potentially holding back students in two scoring categories, versus starting just with the lowest-performing category.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Bill to clarify Tennessee school library law would exempt classroom book collections from scrutiny

2023-03-01T00:34:44+00:00

When Tennessee enacted a 2022 law requiring each public school to publish a list of its library books online for parents to see, many educators were surprised later when state officials said the law applies to teachers’ classroom book collections, too.

Now two Democratic lawmakers have proposed legislation to clarify that Gov. Bill Lee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act was intended to scrutinize books in traditional school libraries, not collections that teachers keep in their classrooms to encourage reading.

The goal of the proposal, says Sen. Jeff Yarbro, is to shield teachers from having to spend their personal time cataloging their classroom collections, which often include hundreds of books. It’s a task that Yarbro views as burdensome and unnecessary — and which he worries could backfire if exasperated teachers opt to box up their books and take them home to avoid the hassle.

“I am hopeful we can work with folks on both sides of the aisle to remove this absurd burden from our teachers,” said the Nashville lawmaker, who is scheduled to bring his bill before the Senate Education Committee on March 8.

Teachers who are trained to teach children to read should be trusted to provide high-quality, age-appropriate books in their classrooms, Yarbro said.

That’s the way that Alice Irvin sees it, too. A second-grade teacher in Franklin, south of Nashville, she’s taught for 30 years, holds a master’s degree in early childhood education, participates in continuing education, and gets evaluated annually by her district.

“As a highly trained teacher, I find this law insulting,” said Irvin, who has 1,300 titles in her classroom collection. “My library center is the heart of my classroom. Over the years, I’ve purchased hundreds of high-quality children’s books for it.”

Governor called for greater transparency in school libraries

When Tennessee’s Republican governor proposed a review of school library books for age-appropriateness during his 2022 state address, he said the purpose was to “ensure parents know what materials are available to students in their libraries.”

But after the GOP-controlled legislature approved Lee’s proposal, a subsequent memo from the state education department’s attorney said a school library also includes “materials maintained in a teacher’s classroom.”

The law’s expanded scope, announced as the new school year was starting, surprised even lawmakers who had debated the measure just months earlier.

“I serve on several House education committees and don’t recall classroom book collections ever being brought up during our discussions about this bill,” said Rep. Sam McKenzie, a Democrat from Knoxville.

Yarbro said he hopes the department’s decision to interpret the law broadly was not “politically tainted” by recent Tennessee laws that aim to restrict what teachers can teach and students can read, especially related to race and gender.

Sen. Jeff Yarbro is co-sponsoring a bill that would exempt classroom book collections from Tennessee’s 2022 school library law.

Through his bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Darren Jernigan of Old Hickory, he also wants to preempt the challenges of complying with and enforcing the law as it relates to classroom book collections.

“Our early childhood teachers have a hard enough job without the state legislature putting up a bunch of hoops for them to jump through,” Yarbro said. “We’re seeking a common sense solution so that teachers aren’t put in the position of potentially running into legal or compliance issues every time they bring a new book to their classroom.”

“That would just be dumb,” he added.

School leaders have been working on compliance

Last fall, Hamilton County Schools and Murfreesboro City Schools were among several districts that directed teachers to begin cataloging their book collections right away so that schools could publish those lists early in the school year. But most districts spent several months studying the issue and exploring digital tools to help teachers create their inventories.

Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools sent guidance over winter break directing teachers to use an online platform called Libib to catalog and publish their lists of classroom library materials by the end of the school year.

“We have not asked any teachers to remove or prohibit access to classroom materials while the cataloging process is ongoing,” said district spokesman Sean Braisted.

Knox County Schools sought feedback from its educators before developing a cataloging app and a process to streamline publication of book lists, with some help from the district’s educational assistants, said spokeswoman Carly Harrington. “We expect cataloging will be completed by March 10, prior to leaving for spring break,” she added.

Other districts, like Irvin’s in Franklin, purchased a scanning app for iPads and used classroom aides to scan books for teachers beginning in January.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools did not respond to multiple requests from Chalkbeat for information about its compliance plan for classroom book collections.

Many teachers and parents haven’t been happy with the process.

“I spent half of my day scanning my library and sorting the books and a good chunk are gone due to them not scanning, being older, etc.,” wrote Natalie Vadas, a special education English teacher at Nashville’s Murrell School, in a Feb. 20 tweet. “How sad that THIS is how we have to spend our time.”

Leslie Wallace said her 8-year-old son came home upset in January when his Knox County teacher announced that students might have to start bringing their own reading books to school because of a new law.

“He loves to read and he said, ‘Mom, if they want us to learn how to read, why are they taking our books away?’” Wallace recounted to Chalkbeat.

“It was a good question,” she said.

To track the legislation, visit the General Assembly’s website.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Concern over Tennessee’s third grade reading and retention law prompts flurry of bills

2023-02-03T19:23:09+00:00

Lawmakers have filed at least 18 proposals to try to address concerns about a new Tennessee reading law that could force tens of thousands of third-graders to attend summer school this year to avoid being held back.

Several bills would gut the retention provision altogether, while others would keep the law mostly intact but extend related state-funded summer and after-school programs beyond this year.

Some measures would give authority back to local school districts instead of the state to determine which students should be retained. Others would add measures beyond Tennessee’s annual test for making such a decision. And one proposal would establish a new reading and retention checkpoint even earlier than third grade — making students who are finishing kindergarten take a reading test to determine whether they are ready for the first grade.

All are in response to a controversial law that passed in 2021 during a weeklong special legislative session called by Gov. Bill Lee to address learning disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The same law created summer learning recovery camps that began that year and tutoring programs that started in 2022.

The interventions have proven popular to help students catch up from the pandemic, but the law’s retention provision — which kicks in with this year’s class of third-graders — has sparked pushback and even outrage.

“It’s upsetting, because it feels like they’re punishing our children,” said Leslie Wallace, whose 8-year-old son is in third grade in Knox County Schools. “At this age, a child is going to be extremely discouraged if they’re held back, especially if they started kindergarten during the pandemic.”

The Republican governor pushed for and has stuck by the law, including the aggressive retention policy, which could hold back third graders who aren’t deemed proficient readers based on state TCAP tests administered each spring.

“If you really care about a child’s future, the last thing you should do is push them past the third grade if they can’t read,” Lee told Chalkbeat last fall before easily winning a second term in office.

But now many lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature want to take a closer look at the law’s far-reaching implications for third graders, their families, and schools.

“I’m not saying you should never retain a child,” said Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Knoxville Democrat and retired teacher who voted against the law. “But the decision should be made student by student, by their teachers and parents — not because of sweeping legislation that’s based on a single test score.”

Legislators drew a line in the sand

Third grade is considered a critical year for reading because literacy is foundational to all subsequent learning. But reading scores have been mostly stagnant in Tennessee, with only about a third of the state’s third graders meeting the law’s high threshold for proficiency based on state tests.

In 2011, lawmakers passed a retention law to try to address the problem, but the statute was largely unenforced, with few third graders being held back by local school leaders. That set the stage for the 2021 retention provision that, starting this school year, requires third graders to get extra help if they don’t show proficiency on their TCAP test for English language arts.

Backers of the new policy say the law might not be perfect, but they also worry that many Tennesseans don’t fully understand it.

“This was never about ‘fail one test and you’re automatically retained,’” said Rep. Kirk Haston, a Republican who is a teacher, coach, and health education administrator in Perry County. “It’s more about reading identification and providing a lot of supports for students who need help.”

The law says students whose scores on state tests show they are “approaching” proficiency must attend a summer camp and demonstrate “adequate growth” on a test administered at the camp’s end, or they must participate in a tutoring program in the fourth grade. Students who score “below” proficiency must participate in both intervention programs.

Third graders are exempt from retention if they were retained in a previous grade; have or may have a disability that affects reading; are English language learners with less than two years of English instruction; or retest as proficient before the beginning of fourth grade.

Numerous school boards across Tennessee have passed resolutions calling for revisions, though. Among other things, they’ve urged the legislature to let local educators make retention decisions, without giving final authority to the state. And they’ve noted that TCAP is not a reading diagnostic test and, therefore, isn’t the best measure of a student’s reading ability.

But should the line be drawn earlier?

It’s little wonder that the retention rule is controversial — because research is mixed, and holding students back is a controversial policy decision in education.

Supporters say having students repeat a grade can spur additional supports that struggling readers desperately need, and that those academic interventions matter, especially in the early grades.

Critics worry that retention falls disproportionately on student groups who are already marginalized, such as those who have disabilities, are economically disadvantaged, or are of color.

Most research suggests that retention has, on average, null or negative effects on students, and that it’s also linked strongly to dropping out of high school.

The best time to intervene in a student’s progression in school is also under discussion in Tennessee. Increasingly, lawmakers and education advocates are recognizing the importance of also providing interventions for struggling students in kindergarten, first, and second grades — instead of zeroing in on third grade.

That’s where discussion veered this week in a House education subcommittee chaired by Rep. Scott Cepicky, a Republican from Maury County, during an exchange with Reginald Nash, a former Memphis kindergarten teacher who now works for The Education Trust in Tennessee to advocate for education equity.

“The General Assembly should consider revising the law to permit students at risk of retention who opt into reading and tutoring at the beginning of third grade, as opposed to after it, and as early as kindergarten, to be promoted,” Nash told lawmakers. “This approach could possibly be easier to implement, requires less bureaucracy to track, and proactively gets more students into reading tutoring before and during third grade.”

Cepicky, who is co-sponsoring a bill that could delay kindergarten entry for many children and add another retention gate before kindergarten, clearly liked the idea of programs and policies directed toward students before they fall too far behind.

“We have to do something in early education to change the dynamic that we have right now,” he said. “We can’t keep going with the status quo.”

Legislators must sort through revision bills

Before the 113th General Assembly convened last month, revisiting third-grade retention topped most lawmakers’ list of education priorities this year based on feedback from constituents.

The large number of proposals filed by this week’s bill-filing deadlines bore that out as Republican leaders shared their plans for sorting through the barrage of legislation.

Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg said Thursday he’ll let the House take the lead in vetting the proposals, with hopes of eventually bringing a consolidated bill before his panel.

In the House, the first focused look is set for Feb. 14, when all of the bills are laid out before an education subcommittee chaired by Haston.

“We’re just trying to get organized,” said Haston, who added that he doesn’t expect votes for several weeks. “We want to get everything on one calendar to see the lay of the land.”

As part of the process, Rep. Mark White, who chairs the full House Education Administration Committee, has scheduled a Feb. 22 hearing to discuss early childhood literacy. Nine legislators are new to his 19-member committee, and White said he wants them to understand the big picture before voting on any potential revisions to the 2021 Learning Loss Remediation and Student Acceleration Act.

Among those testifying at the hearing, he said, will be a range of literacy experts, from third-grade teachers and school superintendents to Tennessee’s education chief, Penny Schwinn, and education officials in Mississippi, where students improved the most on national reading tests in 2019.

In the meantime, Tennessee schools have been sending out information and hosting meetings with parents of third grade students to inform them about what the law means for their child.

But many parents like Wallace, in Knoxville, are afraid.

“I appreciate the interventions being put in place, but I don’t appreciate the threat that my child could get held back if he doesn’t score high enough on a test,” she said. “I don’t feel like it’s a conducive environment for learning.”

The Education Trust has compiled a list that summarizes and analyzes each retention-related bill.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

How MSCS is trying to get pre-K programs — and preschoolers — back on track after COVID

2022-12-22T12:09:39+00:00

When Jairia Cathey switched from teaching elementary school to pre-kindergarten more than a decade ago, it was a tough adjustment. Some students didn’t know how to hold a pencil or a fork, she recalled. Some didn’t know their parents’ names, or even their own. And some didn’t know how to color.

“I was like ‘what did I get myself into?’” Cathey said. “I thought every child knew how to color.”

But those challenges didn’t come close to what she would experience trying to educate and engage with 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds during the depths of COVID-19 pandemic — or what it would take to try to get them caught up in the aftermath.

When schools closed abruptly in 2020, derailing education for students across Memphis and the country, Cathey, a teacher at Evans Elementary, scrambled to provide virtual learning any way she could think of. She sent parents pictures of worksheets and activities from her classroom. She searched Pinterest for other learning materials. At a certain point, she set up times to visit each of her students at their home, with a face mask on.

(From left) Lisa Patterson and Jairia Cathey have dealt with the challenges of trying to keep their early learners engaged during the pandemic and its aftermath.

“I just had to lay eyes on them, and I know they had to lay eyes on me,” Cathey said. “Even if it was just giving them a pencil or a coloring book or just a hug, I had to do it.”

Plummeting enrollment in MSCS early childhood programs during the pandemic left just a handful of students in her class. When classrooms reopened in the spring, the families of Cathey’s four students decided to keep them learning remotely. And by the time students returned to her classroom after 18 months of distance learning, the few students who came arrived with a severely disrupted preschool experience or having attended no school at all, at risk of falling behind academically, socially, and emotionally.

Now Cathey and co-teacher Lisa Patterson are part of a mobilization across Memphis-Shelby County Schools to get early childhood learning in the district back on track. The effort is focused on the classroom, but it’s also counting on community groups, advertising, family engagement specialists, and multiple offices within district headquarters, with the goal of getting more students enrolled in early childhood programs and making sure they are kindergarten-ready.

The bigger objective: Containing the pandemic’s long-term impact on children and their education in Tennessee’s largest school district, where most students are Black and come from low-income families who were hit hardest by COVID-19.

The task is daunting. After bottoming out at 4,430 in 2020-21, enrollment in MSCS’ pre-K programs has ticked back up to 4,776 this year. But it’s still far below pre-pandemic levels of above 6,000.

Meanwhile, just 32% of students starting kindergarten last school year were considered ready overall, as measured by early reading and math assessments. That’s down from 40% in 2020-21, and 46% before the pandemic.

A 2020 study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that children who are not adequately prepared for kindergarten are more likely to struggle for the rest of their academic career — in later elementary school, high school, and beyond.

“I’ve seen the results of when we get it wrong,” said Divalyn Gordon, a former kindergarten and first grade teacher who has also worked at alternative high schools and now heads MSCS’ early childhood office.

“Those students later drop out of school … they’re making tally marks and counting on their fingers because they don’t know any multiplication facts. They can’t read to learn or comprehend. Those foundational skills are vital for student success as they matriculate through high school,” Gordon said. “That’s why I push so hard for pre-K. We’ve got to get this right.”

Gains from pre-K program follow students into higher grades

District officials have made early childhood education a centerpiece of their strategy to improve the district’s academic performance and recover from the pandemic. Test score data helps explain the emphasis.

The April data shows that even amid steep declines in kindergarten readiness across the district, students who attended MSCS pre-K scored significantly higher in reading, math, and overall readiness compared with those who did not attend.

The same was true for students who are considered economically disadvantaged. And their higher performance followed them into third grade. Students from low-income families who attended a district pre-K program were slightly more likely to be proficient in English and language arts in third grade than those who did not participate in the program, according to the report.

The third-grade performance is critical, because a new state law that takes effect this year requires schools to hold back third-graders who aren’t considered proficient in reading. The law has added pressure on districts to intervene early.

MSCS prioritizes students who come from economically disadvantaged households for pre-K enrollment. But interest in the program dropped off dramatically after COVID hit and instruction went online. And persistent concerns about COVID led many parents to decide it was safer to keep their child at home than to send them to an optional program.

Because of that, Cathey said she is getting her students later, and they’re far behind — academically and otherwise. She has had to adjust her instruction accordingly.

The use of small group instruction in early childhood classrooms has become even more important to catch students up.

Small group instruction has always been a critical piece of early childhood education, but given the delayed progress for some students, it’s more important than ever, Gordon said.

Gordon pointed to Cathey’s classroom as an example: Cathey’s 19 students were divided into four groups based on their skill levels, but named for different colors. On that December morning, Cathey and her co-teacher Patterson circulated through the room, giving individualized attention and instruction to students in each group, depending on what they were working on and what they needed.

At one point, Cathey sat cross-legged on the floor next to one girl, and they talked about a book she was paging through. In another corner of the room, Patterson helped two students completing a spelling puzzle.

“You have to make those real-life adjustments when students don’t get it or don’t have the necessary foundation,” Gordon said.

And if teachers don’t, she said, “those kids fall through the cracks.”

District enlists community partners to boost enrollment

With pre-K enrollment across MSCS recovering slowly, Gordon said, the district is laser-focused on attracting more students to the program.

The district continues to work with the Salvation Army Purdue Residential Facility, a Memphis homeless shelter for women, and the Shelby County Division of Corrections to identify and enroll pre-K-age students who could particularly benefit from early academic intervention, Gordon said.

MSCS has also beefed up its advertising efforts, from billboards to social media ads, Gordon said. “The journey begins with pre-K,” the ads on Facebook and elsewhere in the community usually say. “Get your future scholar started early on their academic journey.”

Meanwhile, it has expanded its family engagement team to a staff of over 100 specialists who are charged with encouraging families who begin the online application process to finish it.

Family engagement specialists also help parents find another location if the school they requested is no longer available. Sometimes that means connecting families with other early childhood education providers in the community, Gordon said.

To ensure quality — the bigger challenge in Memphis, which does not have an acute shortage of child care services — the district requires those providers to follow the same bid process it uses for other services, and beginning this year, administrators visit the campus in person to confirm that best practices are being used in classrooms.

It’s part of a broader district effort, outlined in February by then-Superintendent Joris Ray, to increase community-wide collaboration in early childhood education.

The district has two representatives — Gordon and Angela Whitelaw, the district’s deputy superintendent of schools and academic support — in a community consortium dedicated to improving early literacy. The consortium includes prominent early childhood organizations and child care providers from across Memphis, including the Urban Child Institute, Porter-Leath, Literacy Mid-South, First 8, Next Memphis, and the Hyde Family Foundation, among others.

Since early childhood became a top priority for the entire district, collaboration with other departments across the massive district has also improved, said Detris Crane, director of MSCS Head Start programming.

“The district has realized that these pre-K families are the same ones who come in for K-12, and that the earlier we intervene, the more we can improve outcomes for both children and their families,” Crane said. “I collaborate with everybody in the district now, in every department.

“I used to be on a little island,” Crane said. “Now we’re on the mainland.”

Teachers in Memphis are also dealing with the trauma children have faced due to the pandemic and poverty.

COVID left emotional scars

Beyond the academic fallout, trauma related to COVID and poverty continues to loom large among MSCS students and families, several MSCS teachers said.

Ida Walker, a pre-K teacher at Douglass Head Start in northeast Memphis, said the social and emotional tolls of the pandemic have been the most noticeable among her students.

Many of them “have something going on at home,” said Walker, who’s been a Head Start teacher since 2018. Some lost family members or caregivers in the pandemic. Others’ families have yet to recover from the deep economic consequences of COVID.

Pre-literacy skills remain a large focus in Walker’s classroom. As she read aloud to one small group of students, her co-teacher Tequila Lockett helped two other groups of students draw koala bears as part of the class’ two focuses that week, the letter K and “awesome animals.”

But so are students’ social and emotional needs. Walker has rearranged her classroom to create a “cozy corner” where her students can take time away from whatever they’re doing to regulate their emotions and seek support from Walker or her co-teacher throughout the day.

Walker hopes her students learn how to express and process their feelings. If their social and emotional needs are met now, the rest will come later, Walker said.

“They pick it up fast,” she said with a smile.

For pre-K teachers like Ida Walker, pictured in her Douglass Head Start classroom on Dec. 1, social and emotional engagement is a large focus in the classroom.

Cathey takes a similar approach in her classroom — what she hopes is a “safe haven” from whatever children are dealing with at home. Beyond teaching them early literacy and math skills, she strives to build relationships with students and their families and ensure their social and emotional needs are met.

Cathey and Patterson also try to model caring for one another to their students, so that even if one of them isn’t nearby when a child is struggling, their classmates know to step in. Now, if a student falls or looks sad, Cathey said, their peers are quick to ask, “Are you OK? Can I help you?”

“It is a joy seeing students come in at the beginning of the year, complete blank slates. We introduce literacy. We promote language, math skills, teach them how to take care of themselves, and take care of others,” Cathey said. “When they leave, they’re writing sentences, they’re making words, they’re adding and subtracting, They learn how to work out their feelings, and it’s just so amazing to see them so independent.”

“It’s just so rewarding,” Cathey added. “We’re getting them ready for the rest of their lives.”

This story is the third and final installment of a Chalkbeat Tennessee deep dive into the role early childhood education can play in improving literacy in Memphis and across the Volunteer State. This effort is supported by the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program. Check out the first and second stories of the series.

Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.

Porter-Leath teacher coaching program aims to professionalize early childhood education

2022-12-15T11:00:00+00:00

Clarissa Odom had her hands — and lap — full when a visitor stopped into her preschool classroom.

Odom, a new infants teacher at a Porter-Leath center in Orange Mound, sat cross-legged on a colorful rug, bouncing two finicky babies looking for snuggles, one on each knee. At the same time, she tried to comfort a crying baby propped up on a boppy pillow in front of her.

The visitor, Nicole Williams, greeted Odom with a cheerful “Good morning!” and without another word, crouched to the floor to help her comfort the crying child. Once the baby calmed down a bit, Williams turned to Odom, smiled, and asked, “How’s everything with the curriculum going?”

Between cuddles, coos, and songs, Odom told Williams about her theme of the week — insects or “creepy crawlers.” Odom reviewed some books she’d read and songs she’d sung to the children so far. Williams suggested an art project: putting paint on the infants’ fingertips to create fingerprint ants. She offered to help Odom find another book, perhaps about spiders.

Williams’ visit on that November day is part of an ambitious effort by Porter-Leath, one of Memphis’ largest providers of preschool services, to professionalize early childhood education and help new teachers become superior educators. As an instructional coach in Porter-Leath’s Teacher Excellence Program, Williams provides teachers with real-time feedback on their instructional methods and student interactions, helps brainstorm new lesson plans or gathers classroom supplies, depending on what the educator needs that day.

A distinguishing feature of the program: Giving teachers a chance to participate in professional development during the school day, while another qualified teacher looks after their students and keeps lessons on track.

Porter-Leath officials hope the program will not only help teachers become better prepared and more effective in the classroom, but also improve educational outcomes for Shelby County’s youngest residents, as Memphis and Tennessee grapple with bleak literacy rates and overall learning loss after the pandemic.

Supporting and investing in early childhood educators is especially important as preschools and early childhood centers struggle to recruit and retain teachers and other staff — a problem that worsened during COVID and continues to wreak havoc on providers in Tennessee and across the nation.

A report from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment last week found that national child care employment is steadily increasing, but it’s still 8% below what it was in February 2020.

“The workforce itself is depleted,” said Elizabeth Pufall Jones, director of preparation and work environment programs at the research center. “And the solutions and initiatives to fix it are not getting a lot of traction.”

Against that backdrop, Porter-Leath’s Teacher Excellence Program stands out as a model for how other institutions and cities throughout the U.S. can improve teacher quality and morale in the early childhood education profession, and boost student outcomes.

By national standards, Memphis doesn’t have an acute shortage of early childhood education options. But developing high-quality programs has been a persistent challenge across the region’s fragmented network of small and independent child care centers.

So three years ago, Porter-Leath expanded the Teacher Excellence Program beyond its own preschool centers, and now provides coaching and professional development to 23 privately owned child care centers and 13 in-home daycares across the county, as well as First 8 Memphis pre-K. Officials with the nonprofit preschool giant hope to keep the program growing.

Much more still needs to be done to elevate the early childhood education profession and address widespread burnout among teachers and other child care workers, Jones said. The pandemic has fueled conversations about ensuring that early childhood teachers, who face debt burdens from the degrees and certifications they need, earn a living wage.

But a critical piece, Jones said, is having a supportive work environment. Jones has found that providing professional development and real-time coaching to teachers can be a powerful tool to reduce turnover and empower teachers.

“We know that ages 0 to 5 are the most critical and important years for a child’s development and if they’re not properly supported during the first five years, it’s that much harder for a child to recover and progress,” Jones said. “We need to value the work that child care workers do and support them. It’s much more than babysitting.”

Keva Smith reads to her class at the Porter-Leath & University of Memphis Early Childhood Academy at Orange Mound. An independent study on the impact of Porter-Leath’s teacher training showed significant improvement in students’ pre-literacy skills.

Teacher training boosts student literacy

Since launching in 2017, the Teacher Excellence Program has provided hundreds of Memphis early childhood teachers like Odom with professional development opportunities — both through classroom coaching and regular training sessions embedded throughout the school day. Participants come from within Porter-Leath network and the other providers it partners with. Porter-Leath spent about $420,000 on the program in the fiscal year ending in 2019.

“We need to value the work that child care workers do and support them. It’s much more than babysitting.”

A November 2019 study of the program’s impact by an independent consultant found that in the first year, an overwhelming majority of participating teachers said the instructional coaching was “very helpful” and had a large impact on their classroom practices. In turn, students’ pre-literacy skills and kindergarten readiness significantly improved, as measured by assessment scores at the beginning and end of the school year.

The pandemic prevented Porter-Leath from collecting more current data, but Kelley Nichols, vice president of early childhood services, said it’s clear that teachers participating in the program continue to improve — and so do the students.

“The goal is to really just come alongside teachers at any level, meet them where they are, find out what their unique goals are, and help them grow,” Nichols said.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools and state education officials have emphasized improving early childhood education as a way to boost academic results. But MSCS abruptly cut ties with Porter-Leath in June 2021, ending a seven-year partnership in which Porter-Leath provided pre-kindergarten and Head Start services to over 3,000 students.

Even so, the nonprofit remains one of Memphis’ largest providers of early education instruction, and an influential force in workforce training.

Lametria Rudd works with her 3- and 4-year-old students during center time. To provide training during the day, Porter-Leath assigns relief teachers to conduct lessons while the teacher focuses on their development.

Teachers get training — and relief — during the workday

Over the years that Nichols worked in child care centers and school districts, she attended training sessions regularly. But it often meant staying late, long after the school day ended, to attend a session from 5 to 9 p.m. Sometimes it meant coming in on the weekends.

Nichols understood why training couldn’t be held in the middle of the school day — who would take care of her classroom and others? — but those added hours for little or no extra pay in an already demanding field were exhausting.

On top of that, there was often little follow through on the training, Nichols said.

“You would go to a training, you learn stuff, you kind of check a box that you’ve done it, but nobody cared whether you implemented any of it in the classroom,” she said. “There really wasn’t accountability.”

Nichols complains of what she calls the “Monday morning effect” — when something learned over the weekend is forgotten by the next week.

That’s what makes Nichols so passionate about the Teacher Excellence Program she oversees. Though Porter-Leath holds larger professional development conferences a few weekends a year, most of its teacher training occurs during the work day, as in most other professions.

So who watches the children? That’s where the relief teachers come in.

These are not unqualified substitutes. Relief teachers in the Porter-Leath system must have at least two years of experience as an early childhood education classroom teacher, with formalized education or certification in the field, and are expected to continue the teacher’s lesson plan.

“You don’t have to worry about your class,” Nichols said. “A relief teacher will go into your classroom, they’ll teach the regular day’s lessons, meet children where they are, and keep them safe, so the teachers can focus on that training and then take that back into their classroom.”

“We created this program to really respect and honor the profession,” Nichols said.

The instructional coaches visit teachers at least weekly for around two hours at a time. They, too, must be highly qualified, Nichols said — Porter-Leath requires them to have a master’s degree, a minimum of six years of experience as an early childhood classroom teacher, and an ability to train adult learners.

“We created this program to really respect and honor the profession.”

Beyond typical first aid and CPR trainings, professional development provided by Williams and Porter-Leath’s six other instructional coaches centers on topics such as literacy, health, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), and social-emotional learning — an especially important focus given many of the children Porter-Leath serves come from Memphis’ poorest neighborhoods and are more likely to struggle academically.

Kimberly Eiland reads to her class at the Porter-Leath & University of Memphis Early Childhood Academy at Orange Mound. Professional development from Porter-Leath’s instructional coaches focuses on a range of topics, including social-emotional learning.

An instructional coach aims to reassure early education teachers

Williams recalls falling in love with early childhood education when she started working at a Memphis daycare at age 17. A self-proclaimed kid at heart, Williams enjoyed the laughter and love that came with playing with children and helping them grow.

But self doubt frequently plagued her in the classroom. Was she interacting with the children the way she should? Was she cut out to be the kind of teacher who set children up for success beyond preschool?

Ultimately, Williams’ passion won out over her doubts. Though she had long planned on studying criminal law, she switched majors during her sophomore year at the University of Memphis. She’s been working in the early childhood profession for over two decades in Shelby County — as a teacher, the director of three child care centers, a state program evaluator tasked with ensuring child care centers meet Tennessee regulations, and a consultant who helped child care providers select developmentally appropriate furniture, toys, and curriculum.

All of those experiences feed into Williams’ work today as an instructional coach at Porter-Leath.

“Every teacher is different, every personality is different. As their advocate, I have to meet them where they are.”

As a teacher, Williams felt that sometimes all she needed was a cheerleader — someone who could reassure her that she was doing OK, even if her lesson plan didn’t turn out exactly the way she had envisioned.

That’s the kind of mentor Williams aims to be for all the teachers she works with, though it looks different from person to person.

“My first goal with my teachers is to build relationships,” Williams said. “Every teacher is different, every personality is different. As their advocate, I have to meet them where they are.”

Rose Smith does a sign-along with her class of 2- and 3-year-olds.

From curriculum help to nap time: Teachers want extra support

Odom, a new employee at the Porter-Leath & University of Memphis Early Childhood Academy at Orange Mound, is still getting settled in her infant classroom. This is her first job in a larger center. Before this, she largely worked in home daycares.

So for Odom, Williams’ support is more hands on.

During her visit to Odom’s classroom Nov. 16, Williams’ suggestions ranged from how to incorporate Porter-Leath curriculum naturally into the babies’ days, to how to rearrange the cribs, to techniques for comforting an upset baby.

Later that morning, Williams met with Deanna Rayner, a Porter-Leath teacher for nearly a decade.

Rayner beamed with pride as she watched her 13 preschoolers — ages 3 to 5 — shuffle between stations before settling into their new activities. The question of the day was “What do we know about buildings?” and Rayner had students drawing their own buildings in one corner of her classroom, while others constructed buildings with Legos and blocks in other areas.

Keeping the attention of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds has become increasingly difficult as children are introduced to technology earlier and earlier, Rayner said.

But that day, as the children moved on to a hands-on group activity mixing dirt and water together to simulate mixing concrete for the foundation of a building, they seemed to have no trouble engaging.

Deana Rayner helps a student as he builds a popsicle house. Rayner credits the support and training from Porter-Leath with making her a better educator.

“You’ve got to get more creative in order for them to pick up what we want them to pick up,” Rayner said with a laugh. “We have to work really hard.”

It’s one of many challenges Rayner has had to navigate as an educator. But with the support of Williams and the Teacher Excellence Program over the last five years, Rayner doesn’t feel quite as overwhelmed.

After looking around the classroom and observing Rayner for a while, Williams suggested displaying the question of the day on another spot on the wall and pledged to bring Rayner more chart paper from the supply closet. When Rayner expressed concern over when she’d have time to hang up a new wall display, Williams offered to take care of it herself.

Rayner credits Williams and the program as a whole with helping her become a better teacher.

“She helps us. She is supportive. She comes in here to check on us and makes sure we have everything we need,” Rayner said. Instructional coaches “are that shoulder, that support that we need.”

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This story is the second installment of a Chalkbeat Tennessee deep dive into the role early childhood can play in improving literacy in Memphis and across the Volunteer State. This effort is supported by the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.

How a bilingual preschool is trying to close Memphis’ literacy gap

2022-09-30T10:00:00+00:00

One late September morning at Su Casa Preschool, seven 4-year-olds sat cross-legged on their classroom’s reading rug, anxiously awaiting their turn to share what they had accomplished that morning.

When tossed a tennis ball signaling her turn during recall time, or “tiempo de recordar,” Citlali declared in English that she’d played with blocks. She passed the ball to Alli, who recounted in Spanish making lemonade in their classroom’s play kitchen.

As the other five students continued to reflect on their morning work time activities and worked on their English- and Spanish- speaking skills, their co-teachers, Amalia Perez and Priscilla Victor, took turns asking questions like “¿Qué más cocinaste?” (“What else did you cook?”) and “¿Qué construiste con bloques?” (“What did you build with the blocks?”)

It was a typical Monday morning at Su Casa Preschool, in Memphis’ Berclair-Highland Heights neighborhood. Here, teachers and leaders of the nonprofit aim to provide a quality early childhood education to predominantly Spanish-speaking immigrant children in northeast Memphis who are less likely to have access to such a program and are more likely to struggle academically.

Students play with toys in a Su Casa Preschool classroom on Sept. 28. Parents say the preschool has allowed their children to improve both their English and Spanish speaking skills.

“We’ve got to start here, in early childhood, to build that foundation,” said Cherise Clark, the director of Su Casa Preschool. “We want to get to a place where we’re shipping off a great batch of kids to Kingsbury Elementary or to Treadwell Elementary … We just want to see our community blossom.”

Since launching with one class in 2016, the Christian bilingual preschool has expanded to four classrooms serving children ages 1-5, who attend two days a week. But as Memphis’ Hispanic community continues to grow, the organization has had to turn more interested families away.

Memphis’ Hispanic population has grown by 25,000 over the last decade, according to the most recent U.S. Census data. In total, Hispanics now make up just over 7% of the city’s population, and about 16% of Memphis-Shelby County Schools students. And the number of MSCS students whose first language is not English has increased to about 8,800, or 12% of all MSCS students. Statewide, Hispanics are the fastest growing demographic group in schools.

As Memphis and Tennessee as a whole battle to improve dismal literacy rates, Su Casa’s bilingual early childhood programming is one example of the search for solutions — especially for Hispanic or Latino immigrants, who face greater barriers to academic success than their white, native English-speaking peers.

While Tennessee students overall improved across all subjects and grades in the latest standardized tests under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, English language learners made the slimmest gains of any student demographic group. Just 15% of ELL students were considered on grade level in both math and English language arts last school year.

Despite those challenges, bilingual preschools like Su Casa and dual language programming are rare in Memphis. Su Casa is believed to be the first bilingual preschool to open in northeast Memphis, and remains one of very few within city limits.

While MSCS leaders have promised to continue efforts to improve early childhood programming and grow world language programming, Tennessee’s largest school district does not currently offer any bilingual pre-K classes, and only one school has a dual language program. The program, housed at Treadwell Elementary, serves 200 students.

Students play in Su Casa Preschool’s outdoor playground the morning of Sept. 28. As Memphis’ Hispanic population has grown over the last decade, so has the need for resources for Spanish-speaking immigrant families — including preschool.

Meeting a critical need

Su Casa started with volunteer work in a Memphis school, but the organization was never meant to house a preschool program.

It all started in 2005, when a group of volunteers from Second Presbyterian Church volunteered at Berclair Elementary as part of the Memphis “Adopt A School” program. As they built relationships with Berclair families — many of whom were recent immigrants to Memphis and spoke only Spanish — the volunteers noticed an unfilled need for adult English programs.

So they got to work.

“We’ve got to start here, in early childhood, to build that foundation.”

After growing its adult programming for several years, Su Casa Family Ministries officially became a nonprofit in 2008 with the overarching goal of being a place of safety and connection for Memphis’ Latino immigrant community.

But one piece was missing: What about their children?

Before joining Su Casa, Clark saw the need for more accessible, high-quality early childhood education throughout her 15-year career as a Spanish and English as a second language teacher in Memphis schools.

Recalling her work with kindergartners as an ESL teacher at a Memphis charter school, Clark said she was shocked by how far behind many students were — even from the very start of their time in school.

When she first joined Su Casa’s adult English class programming, Clark remembers many parents struggling to navigate Memphis’ complex education system and the U.S. education system as a whole.

Some of them came from countries where preschool is universal the way K-12 school is here. Some were daunted by the thought of calling around to different programs and schools to find an open spot for their child. Others simply could not afford any of the programs they did find.

Children choose solo activities during free play time in their classroom at Su Casa Preschool on Sept. 28.

Many of those parents had enrolled in the classes to figure out how to help their children in school. Yet despite their efforts to learn English, Clark said, many still struggled to enroll their children in preschool — let alone find a bilingual program where their children could improve both their English and Spanish speaking skills.

Even Clark, a former MSCS teacher who speaks English, struggled with questions when it came time to enroll her own children in preschool.

“How do I engage more with my children? How do I make sure that I’m being the best parent I can be? Those are universal questions that come back to a very universal desire — parents just want to help their kids do well,” Clark said.

“But for them, it was like ‘I don’t know how to navigate the system. I don’t know the language to do it. I can’t advocate for myself, let alone my child, so what do I do?’”

A bilingual program means parents can better communicate with their children’s preschool teachers. But beyond that, research over the last two decades has found many potential benefits to children learning a second language early, when their brains are more flexible.

A University of South Carolina study earlier this year found that Hispanic students who attended a bilingual preschool in Charlotte were better prepared for kindergarten, and went on to score higher in both reading and mathematics through second grade, as compared to their peers who did not participate in such a program.

Studies over the last two decades have found the advantages to early bilingualism in children stretches beyond academics. A 2003 study found that, by the age of 3, bilingual children show signs of heightened empathy and longer attention spans.

Those benefits are partly why it was important to Florinda Salcedo for her son, Angel, to attend a bilingual preschool. But more than that, she said, it was about preserving the heritage of her fiance, who emigrated from Mexico nearly a decade ago.

Though Salcedo speaks both English and Spanish, she struggled like Clark to find a bilingual early childhood program for Angel. She finally landed on Su Casa after a neighborhood friend recommended it.

A year after enrolling Angel, Salcedo says her 2-year-old son is engaging in more conversations and is learning more Spanish. She’s confident he will be better prepared for kindergarten than she was when she started at Kingsbury Elementary, with no preschool experience at all.

“This is the place for him,” Salcedo said.

Amalia Perez plays with a group of her 4-year-old students Sept. 28 at Su Casa Preschool. Perez wishes she and her siblings had been able to attend a bilingual preschool before starting kindergarten.

Perez, one of Su Casa’s pre-K teachers, said she can’t help but think back to what could’ve been if she and her siblings had access to a preschool program like Su Casa’s.

When she started kindergarten at Raleigh-Egypt Elementary School, she knew only a handful of words in English. Her siblings, who had immigrated to the U.S., started school with even less experience speaking English.

“If I came fresh (from another country) and I only spoke Spanish, I would imagine it would be hard for me. It’s a different environment, different language, the kids are different,” Perez said, as she watched one of her students, who recently emigrated from Colombia, draw. “I’m the youngest, so by the time I went to school, I already knew a few words from my siblings, but someone like him? And this is his first school setting?”

“We’re helping them get assimilated into this community, into this country,” she said.

Diversity helps children appreciate other cultures

Su Casa currently serves about 50 children who attend school two days a week — either Mondays and Wednesdays or Tuesdays and Thursdays. It aims to provide a Christian-centered, hands-on learning environment with small classes of about seven children.

The organization also keeps its tuition as low as possible at $2,300 a year — with scholarships available — so as not to add another barrier to low-income immigrant families. While tuition does not cover the program’s expenses by any stretch, Clark said Su Casa is able to fund the program with donations and grants.

Su Casa’s Highscope curriculum focuses on what children should be able to do at their age level in eight key areas: approaches to learning; social and emotional development; physical development and health; language, literacy, and communication; mathematics; creative arts; science and technology; and social studies.

“This is the place for him.”

But Su Casa also adds a ninth focus area: second language development. For the vast majority of Su Casa students, that second language is English. At least 75% of slots are reserved for families with one or both parents who emigrated from a Spanish-speaking country. But the nonprofit also serves some families in the neighborhood who simply wanted their children exposed to the Spanish language early.

That diversity is one of Su Casa Preschool’s greatest strengths, Clark said.

“We hope it makes some progress in the space of helping children on both ends learn to interact with other cultures, learn to see them as beautiful, and to see other people who are different and to interact with them and think that’s normal and good,” she said.

Over the last two years, Rachel Rodriguez has sent her two children — 4-year-old Luca and 2-year-old Lorenzo — to Su Casa. She, too, has appreciated the preschool’s commitment to diversity.

Margaret Ziegenhorn (second from right) and Maricel Casanova (right), co-teachers in Su Casa Preschool’s 2-year-old classroom, play and comfort the children the morning of Sept. 28.

Before having children, Rodriguez and her husband, who emigrated from Peru for medical school, agreed they would speak primarily Spanish at home to encourage bilingualism. She stands by the decision, but admits it put a lot of pressure on her as a mom to speak Spanish, her second language, at home.

Not only has Luca’s and Lorenzo’s Spanish improved since starting at Su Casa, but both of them are able to connect with both their parents’ heritages. When they visit Rodriguez’s family, they embrace their Japanese heritage, and at school, they are taught by a group of mostly Latina women.

“It makes them feel like our family is normal; there are other families that speak two languages, and they can really feel comfortable being themselves in this bilingual environment,” Rodriguez said.

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This story is the first installment of a Chalkbeat Tennessee deep dive into the role early childhood can play in improving literacy in Memphis and across the Volunteer State. This effort is supported by the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.

Students who were part of Tennessee pre-K program continue to trail peers who weren’t, study shows

2022-01-28T00:39:29+00:00

Economically disadvantaged children who attended Tennessee’s public pre-K program a decade ago are still faring worse in school than their peers who didn’t participate, according to the latest findings from an ongoing study.

And the students’ challenges by the end of sixth grade are even more comprehensive and pronounced than the troubling trends identified after finishing third grade. Long term, the students logged slightly poorer academic achievement and higher numbers of disciplinary infractions and special education referrals, the study shows.

“The whole package of outcomes we have found is disconcerting,” wrote researchers from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development.

The results, published this month, fly in the face — again — of conventional wisdom about the power of pre-K. Other research and data suggest such programs help students, especially in low-income communities.

For example, a recent study in Boston found participants in the city’s program were more likely to graduate from high school. And Head Start, the large-scale federal preschool program, has been shown to yield benefits including high school completion and health outcomes. However, a 2010 Head Start study also identified issues with pre-K benefits fading over time.

“Possibly the problem in Tennessee is not with pre-K, but with K-6 and how it treats children who went to pre-K,” said Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. “No one knows what went wrong in Tennessee, and that is a real problem.”

Tennessee has made significant changes to improve the quality of its Voluntary Pre-K program since the study’s cohort of students attended pre-K in 2009 and 2010.

But the study’s lead author, Dale Farran, said her team’s jarring findings should jumpstart conversations about whether early child care and education are headed in the right direction in the United States. She’d like to see other states replicate Vanderbilt’s studies to gauge the effectiveness of their pre-K programs, as well as more research into best policies and practices.

Tennessee is among about half of states that share oversight of public pre-K programs with local school districts. Farran said these programs steer toward an academic framework that focuses on basic skills like knowing letters and numbers instead of on child development strategies such as exploring learning through interaction and lots of outdoor play. There’s too much focus on group instruction and rigid behavioral controls, according to Farran. Even discussion during “story time” is generally limited to questions with a single “right” answer, instead of engaging children to think more deeply.

“There are people pushing to make pre-K a grade below kindergarten,” said Farran, a research professor of early childhood education. “Our data show that’s not likely to have good results for children.”

The multi-year study is the nation’s only thorough, ongoing investigation into the impacts of a statewide pre-K program for economically disadvantaged children using a random sample, which lessens the likelihood of bias.

The first findings, published in 2015, shook the early education community in Tennessee and across the nation. Researchers found that early benefits of participating in Tennessee’s program faded by the end of kindergarten. By the end of the third grade, the impact was slightly negative.

At the time, the authors cautioned against cutting pre-K funding pending further examination. The problems, they said, could lie with the program’s quality, or with uneven or mediocre schooling from kindergarten through the third grade.

The latest research tracked 2,990 children from the first study through the sixth grade. Half had attended the state’s pre-K program, the other half applied but didn’t land a spot. A third of the second group ended up in other learning environments such as federal Head Start classrooms, private pre-school, or a combination of the two.

By the end of sixth grade, the state pre-K cohort fared worse than the non-pre-K group, both academically and behaviorally.

Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K launched in 2005 after the state piloted 30 pre-school classes. Today, the program serves 18,500 4-year-olds in 925 classrooms. That represents about a fifth of the state’s 4-year-old population, and most districts have a waiting list to enroll in the 5½-hour, five-day-a-week program.

The first round of research, led by Vanderbilt’s Farran and Mark Lipsey, contributed to passage of a 2016 Tennessee law designed to raise pre-K quality. Among other things, districts must now use research-based curricula in their classrooms and provide teachers with coaching and other professional development.

Tennessee also requires that each pre-K classroom be capped at 20 students and staffed by a state-licensed teacher endorsed for early childhood education. The teachers are paid at public school teacher rates, and each room must also have an educational assistant.

“We know that quality is crucial,” said Blair Taylor, president and CEO of Tennesseans for Quality Early Education, which continues to lobby for improvements.

The advances have garnered notice. Last year, Tennessee was one of 12 states judged to meet nine of 10 quality benchmarks for pre-K effectiveness, according to the most recent preschool report from the National Institute for Early Education Research.

Of the 43 states that fund pre-K programs, Tennessee is considered above average in quality and arguably ranks in today’s top tier, according to the Vanderbilt report.

But Farran, who is a developmental psychologist and has observed hundreds of pre-K classrooms, believes Tennessee and much of the rest of the nation are falling significantly short on early child care and education.

The big question is why.

“It’s an issue that the country needs to come to grips with,” she told Chalkbeat. “I think the fundamental problem is we don’t need school for 4-year-olds. A lot of higher-income families don’t choose these kinds of academically rigorous programs for their children. They choose programs that involve exploration, or being outdoors. Why is it that we think poor children need more academic instruction?”

Dale Farran is a developmental psychologist and research professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development.

Pre-K advocates are well-intentioned, she continued. “But because our child care system is so fragmented and in such poor shape, people search for some magic bullet, like pre-K being in the public schools. That may be simpler to advocate for, but it just puts off the hard work we really need to be doing,” she said.

Barnett, with the National Institute for Early Education Research, disagrees and calls Farran’s diagnosis “purely speculative.”

He believes the issue is not about academic rigor but about having a coherent approach for helping 4-year-olds develop. Too many children in pre-K spend too much time “waiting to do something or in aimless activities.”

The biggest red flag for Tennessee, Barnett said, is that pre-K is funded at only about half the amount that his organization estimates is needed for quality pre-K. The state spends about $85 million annually and hasn’t increased its investment since 2007 — a concern that early education advocates are raising as Gov. Bill Lee considers overhauling the state’s education funding formula and the state maps strategies to help students catch up during the pandemic.

“Funding is not everything, but funding matters when we’re looking to strengthen our quality,” said Taylor, of the state’s early education coalition.

Parent Reva Schoenherr said she’s not seeing problems — only improvement — in her son since he entered pre-K in September at an elementary school in Lenoir City, near Knoxville.

“Without a doubt, Ezra has blossomed in every aspect, but especially with language skills. His speech was significantly behind after being at home pretty much all the time during the pandemic,” she said.

Schoenherr is convinced that Ezra will benefit from his pre-K experience this fall when he starts kindergarten, but also for years to come.

“Now he talks all the time. He tells me about his day. He’s making friends and he’s learned a lot about how to regulate his emotions,” she said. “Those are life skills.”

Chalkbeat reporters Ann Schimke and Matt Barnum contributed to this report.

5 education issues to watch as Tennessee lawmakers return this week

2022-01-10T12:00:00+00:00

One year after tackling pandemic-related school challenges during a special legislative session called by Gov. Bill Lee, Tennessee lawmakers return to the Capitol this week with another major focus on students: how to fund public education.

Lee wants to overhaul the 30-year-old formula that determines how much money the state distributes to school systems, as well as how much local governmental agencies should contribute. He’s expected to work with fellow GOP leaders to offer a legislative proposal this month.

But some say the legislature shouldn’t rush that discussion, especially since it took years to come up with the current formula known as the Basic Education Program, or BEP.

“It’s OK to hold this and keep working on it if we need to,” said Rep. Scott Cepicky, a Republican from Maury County. “Let’s get this right.”

Lawmakers also aren’t inclined toward a lengthy session during an election year. They’ll look to pass a budget and wrap up by mid-April, if possible, so they can return home to campaign.

Until then, here are five issues to watch:

Funding reform

Since October when Lee called for a review of the state’s funding formula, Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn has spearheaded the process that included eight town halls and dozens of meetings with policymakers and education leaders.

Last week, she called the issue “the biggest policy decision we make” and said Tennessee should seize this “moment in time.” She also hinted a draft proposal will be unveiled early this week.

“There is funding that is potentially available, there is momentum. We see need across the state,” she told a forum hosted by Tennesseans for Quality Early Education.

The review, which aims to shift Tennessee to a more student-centered funding approach, has drawn public praise but generated private concerns about its intent. Many public school advocates worry the goal is to pave the way for a new private school voucher program halted by ongoing litigation, though the governor has denied that.

“I’m trying to keep an open mind and not draw conclusions before getting all the information,” said Sen. Ferrell Haile, a Gallatin Republican who is on Lee’s 12-member review committee to create a new strategy.

Schwinn said any future formula must factor in the needs of individual children. That includes students who have disabilities, are English language learners, or come from low-income families.

Currently, enrollment is the main component of the BEP, a formula with 46 components that determine how much school systems receive to pay for teacher salaries and other needs like textbooks, technology, and bus transportation. But districts have flexibility on how to spend that money, which explains why the BEP is considered a funding formula, not a spending plan.

“We want to put more money into education, but we want to make sure the money is being spent well,” said Rep. Mark White, a Memphis Republican who chairs a House education committee and supports forging a new formula this year. “Let’s give it our best shot.”

More school nurses, counselors, pre-K

Whether the state revises its funding formula this year or not, the legislature must pass a budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1 — and is flush with cash. Tax collections during the pandemic’s economic rebound were higher than projected. The state also is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants intended to help working low-income families.

Meanwhile, Tennessee ranks 44th in the nation for student funding, according to the Education Law Center, which gave the state Fs last year for its funding level and funding effort.

The state’s BEP review committee, an influential panel of policymakers and education leaders, has urged the governor to prioritize more funding for school nurses and counselors to get Tennessee to nationally recommended ratios. A $110-million annual investment would fund 1 nurse for every 750 students instead of the current 1:3,000, and 1 counselor for every 250 students instead of the current ratios of 1:500 and 1:350 for elementary and secondary schools, respectively.

In addition to perennial discussions about raising teacher pay, there’s talk about expanding Tennessee’s pre-K program, which serves a fifth of the state’s 4-year-olds. Most districts have waiting lists.

During the pandemic, consensus has grown that pre-K and early grades are the best places for impactful interventions to address learning lag and social-emotional challenges.

“It’s a timely topic that is deserving of deep discussions,” Haile said.

Supplemental teaching materials

A controversial proposal to limit which supplemental materials teachers can use advanced last year in two House panels before stalling in the Senate Education Committee.

Sen. Janice Bowling, a Republican from Tullahoma, promised to bring her bill back for consideration this year and address worries that “good” materials from organizations like the Tennessee Farm Bureau could be excluded.

The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver of Lancaster, would prohibit teachers from using materials that supplant state-approved textbooks unless district leaders approve those materials in advance. Any approved print or electronic materials would be listed on district websites.

“We absolutely need to do something,” agreed Sen. Brian Kelsey, a Republican from Germantown, “but we need to do it in a way that doesn’t have unintended consequences.”

The president of the state’s largest teachers organization called the proposal “demoralizing” for teachers and logistically impossible for school districts. For instance, a teacher couldn’t use yesterday’s newspaper in a current events class.

“This is a move toward completely scripted lessons,” said Beth Brown of the Tennessee Education Association, noting that a new Tennessee law already restricts what teachers can discuss in their classes about racism, white privilege, and unconscious bias.

Testing

State testing went well last year, with a 95% participation rate despite the pandemic. But lawmakers are still expected to bring several proposals to change when and how tests are administered.

Expect one proposal to require that testing occur during the last 20 days of the school year, instead of the earlier testing window set by the education department.

“That’s going to give our teachers an extra 30 days of instruction time, which is a lot,” said Cepicky.

Other likely legislation would require students in grades 3-8 to continue testing on paper, while local school systems could opt to move students in higher grades to online exams.

This school year, Tennessee high schoolers are taking their exams online under the state’s plan to transition back to computerized testing after several years of technical snafus.

Teacher evaluations

Should teachers be judged on how much their students know — or how much they grow?

Tennessee has mostly focused on the latter when evaluating their educators and schools through an academic growth model that measures learning over time, regardless of whether students are proficient.

But the complexity and opaqueness of the state’s statistical growth method, combined with increasing frustration over low student proficiency, could renew that debate among lawmakers this year.

“We’ve been doing this for 10 years, and where are we?” asked Cepicky, complaining that only a third of the state’s third graders are reading on grade level.

“Meanwhile, we’ve created an evaluation system where a teacher can get an A in academic growth even if their students aren’t proficient readers. We’ve got to get that commitment back to getting our kids proficient,” he said.

Such a move would mark a dramatic change for Tennessee, considered a pioneer in using “value-added” measurements to judge teachers and schools. For a decade, the guiding principle has been that all students can advance, regardless of out-of-school factors like poverty that might hold them back.

Other issues are sure to surface before this year’s legislature, including more funding for charter school facilities and how to address the state’s worsening teacher shortage. The statistics on the teacher supply is especially troubling, with thousands of Tennessee educators expected to retire by 2024 and fewer candidates entering teacher training programs.

“We’ve got to be creating multiple pathways to teaching in our state, and we’ve got to have a competitive wage,” said JC Bowman, executive director of Professional Educators of Tennessee.

The 2022 session of the 112th General Assembly convenes at noon Central Time on Tuesday. Visit the legislature’s website to track legislation, livestream meetings, and contact legislators.

First 8 Memphis gives $1M to NEXT Memphis to strengthen early education

2021-11-01T22:16:26+00:00

A Memphis nonprofit dedicated to strengthening early childhood education offerings in Shelby County will invest $1 million in a shared services child care initiative.

In an announcement Monday, First 8 Memphis said the three-year grant to NEXT Memphis will improve the quality of 4,000 child care slots by 2023 by directly supporting local early care and education providers.

The investment is part of an ongoing community effort to improve the state of early childhood education — birth to third grade — and better prepare Shelby County children for kindergarten. According to the First 8 website, just over 40% of children in Shelby County are kindergarten ready, and only about a quarter of the county’s third-grade students can read at grade level.

The grant also comes as the pandemic continues to exacerbate the already-fragile child care industry — long affected by tight margins, low wages, and high turnover — and highlight its importance in keeping the U.S. economy going.

Kandace Thomas, executive director of First 8 Memphis, said the investment directly aligns with the county’s Early Childhood Plan by ensuring strong systems and supports for local providers.

NEXT Memphis is a shared services child care initiative housed at Porter Leath that provides high-quality education and health services for children, including advice from early childhood experts, training and support for teachers, and business assistance for child care centers. The organization also partners with family service providers to connect families with community resources.

As the central hub for early care and education in Shelby County, First 8 will track data and progress among the many child care and education providers in NEXT Memphis’ network.

“These dollars mean more teachers, family service workers, and caregivers will get the critical resources they need to help more families and children,” said Chloe Moore, director of NEXT Memphis.

As deadline for summer P-EBT eligibility looms, Tennessee addresses delays

2021-07-30T21:07:43+00:00

Tennessee parents and caregivers seeking extra money to cover summer meals have through Saturday to ensure their eligibility in the summer P-EBT program.

Parents and guardians of students who received free or reduced lunch during the 2020-21 school year or those who apply through their district for the National School Lunch Program by Saturday are eligible for the summer payment of $375 per child.

The federal aid is administered locally by the Tennessee Department of Human Services, which has not distributed any of the summer P-EBT money, also known as Pandemic-EBT.

“We are finalizing the details necessary for that and hope to announce a disbursement date soon,” said state spokesperson Sky Arnold.

“We understand the importance of these benefits and are working to provide them as soon as possible. Tennessee was one of the first 15 states approved for summer P-EBT and there is a lengthy process that has to occur before P-EBT can be provided. This includes working with schools to determine what children qualify and working with our card vendor who disburses benefits,” he added.

In addition to the delays with the summer money, the state is still processing payments that families should have received during the school year. Students eligible for free or reduced lunch during the year who opted for virtual or hybrid learning received Pandemic-EBT money to cover the costs of lunches at home. Many of those payments were stalled because some district-provided data was late or incomplete.

Shelby County Schools has a streamlined process because every child receives free lunch due to the district’s high number of students living in poverty, but other districts have a more cumbersome task of cross-checking student rolls.

Outdated addresses also have contributed to delays because some families have moved or failed to update their school records, making it more difficult for the state to mail the payment cards. Eligible families are encouraged to ensure that their information is accurate by visiting the state’s P-EBT Parent Portal or calling the P-EBT hotline at 833-496-0661.

The most significant reason for the delay is the sheer scope of the program, said Signe Anderson, director of nutrition advocacy for the Tennessee Justice Center.

“A lot of states are behind,” she said. “They’ve pointed to the EBT vendor processing not just Tennessee’s cards but a lot of other states’ cards too.”

According to the state, 765,000 school-age children are eligible for summer P-EBT, and 137,694 children under the age of 6 are eligible through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The Justice Center’s research found that food insecurity spiked in Tennessee during the pandemic from 1 in 7 Tennesseans to 1 in 4.

“Our parents have shared how much they’re struggling,” said Anderson.

Anderson added that the greater need requires greater administrative muscle to meet the demand.

“DHS needs more support and especially given all that they’ve been through. It takes a lot to process all of this. I get it. It’s a lot. And also on the school front. You know schools are getting tons of calls, and I know they’ve had a lot on their plates just dealing with the pandemic,” she added.

“I think the more support that we can give to our schools and even to our state agency the better because it’s important in order to make this process work better for families.”

Tennessee teacher vaccinations for COVID-19 open statewide next week

2021-02-16T21:27:20+00:00

Tennessee K-12 teachers statewide can schedule appointments beginning Monday to get their vaccinations against the coronavirus.

The state health department announced Tuesday that Tennessee is moving into its next phase of vaccinations. Teachers and child care staff are part of that group, as well as Tennesseans ages 65 and older.

The announcement is a boost to school districts working to fully staff and reopen their campuses, even as new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says schools don’t need to wait for staff to be vaccinated to reopen.

Since a limited supply of vaccines began arriving in December, Tennessee has prioritized vaccinations for health care workers and elderly people first.

“We are still constrained by supply,” Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey told reporters.

But beginning next week, Piercey expects the state will receive 10% more doses than its current supply. Those shipments will get Tennessee to 110,000 weekly doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, with the new single-shot vaccine by Johnson & Johnson expected to enter the rotation by early March.

“While we remain focused on our seniors, who are the highest-risk population, we’re able to expand vaccine eligibility to these additional groups as our supply continues to grow each week,” Piercey said, noting that more than 1 million doses have been distributed so far across the state.

About 100,000 people are in the group that includes teachers and child care workers. Some Tennessee educators already have gotten their shots, though, if they live in or travel to rural counties where supply is available.

Demand has been higher in metropolitan areas like Memphis and Nashville, where schools also have been slower to get students into classrooms for in-person learning.

The state launched a new online scheduling tool Monday for Tennesseans to book their appointments directly instead of registering online and waiting to hear back from local health departments and providers. Those who already have registered for their shots should not re-enter their information in the new system, officials said.

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Will holding back struggling third-grade readers improve literacy? Tennessee’s governor thinks so, but others aren’t sure.

2021-01-20T04:30:09+00:00

Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal to take a more aggressive stance holding back Tennessee third-graders who are struggling to read is drawing criticism from educators and parents who question his logic and timing.

As part of a plan to help stem pandemic-caused learning loss, Lee wants to strengthen a 2011 state law that has been largely unenforced, with few students actually being retained.

Beginning with the 2022-23 academic year, the governor wants to require schools to hold back third-graders who don’t meet a certain threshold on state standardized tests. Those students will be given a chance to take the test again or improve through new summer school or after-school tutoring programs slated to launch this year, but will be retained if they do not.

“When we stop the cycle of passing without preparation,” Lee told lawmakers Tuesday, “we give kids a better chance at succeeding in middle school and beyond.”

His plan, discussed briefly before a joint session of the General Assembly, has emerged as one of the most controversial among a slate of legislation lawmakers are considering this week during a special session on education. The legislature is looking at ways to get students back up to speed during the coronavirus pandemic and address longstanding concerns about student literacy and teacher pay.

Third grade is considered a critical year for reading because literacy is foundational to all subsequent learning. Research says students who aren’t proficient by that point are four times more likely to drop out of high school. Other research ties poor reading skills to higher rates of depression, teenage pregnancy, and pre-teen alcohol use.

But critics are concerned about the high bar for proficiency that the governor wants to set. Currently, only a third of the state’s third-graders could meet that threshold based on the results of the state’s most recent tests.

And that proficiency level would be determined by the results of a single test — the state’s annual spring assessment for English language arts which Tennessee has mostly struggled to administer cleanly since 2016 because of computer and logistical problems.

“We have a lot better readers in Tennessee than the state’s data suggests,” said Mike Winstead, superintendent of schools in Maryville and a member of the legislative committee for Tennessee’s superintendents organization.

He believes threatening young readers with remediation and retention if they fall just below the proposed threshold for proficiency is “misguided” and could end up demoralizing students.

Based on 2019 test results, about a fifth of Tennessee third-graders fall in the state’s bottom reading level, which Winstead views as needing remediation or potential retention. He’s most concerned about the 41% who are categorized as “approaching” grade level and also targeted by legislation that Lee has backed.

“A lot of those students just miss hitting the proficient mark by one or two questions and are labeled as significantly deficient in this bill,” Winstead said.

He thinks it would be smarter for the state to focus on students who score in the state’s bottom group — an approach echoed by many educators, said Dale Lynch, executive director of the Tennessee superintendents group.

“A lot of our teachers believe you can be proficient but still be categorized as approaching grade level,” Lynch said.

Some critics are questioning the governor’s timing. His retention proposal likely would eliminate many struggling third-graders from taking national reading tests scheduled for fourth-graders in 2024 as part of the National Assessment of Education Performance, also known as NAEP.

“If you keep kids in third grade so they don’t take the fourth-grade test, your NAEP scores look better and you have a Mississippi miracle,” Winstead said, referring to that state’s dramatic rise on the 2019 national test. “There’s a lot of ways to raise your test scores, and one way is to make sure that kids who can’t pass it don’t take it.”

State officials deny that’s their motivation. The goal, they say, is to help districts help their students who are most in need of improvement.

“This bill would provide significant and fully funded supports and pathways that have never been provided before, … with retention being the last of those pathways,” said a spokeswoman for the education department.

Others concerned about high-stakes testing question the bill’s dependence on a once-a-year test to gauge student proficiency. Tennessee plans to administer those tests in person this spring, even as the pandemic continues to disrupt schools.

Stephanie Love, a school board member in Memphis, said Tennessee’s embattled TNReady assessment has been unreliable during a normal year, much less during a public health crisis.

“I agree there should be some type of accountability measure,” she said, “but it has to be something we can trust.”

Nashville parent Sonya Thomas has other concerns about shifting to a punitive structure too soon. The state plans this year to start retraining teachers on phonics-based reading instruction and change how prospective teachers are taught in college to teach reading.

“I think we’ve got to put first things first,” said Thomas, who leads the Nashville Propel parents group. “We’ve got to equip our teachers. We can’t punish our children for something that is not their fault.”

Even before the governor proposed enforcing the state’s 2011 retention law, Memphis school leaders were considering whether to delay a new Shelby County Schools policy to start holding back struggling second-graders.

“The pandemic has changed everything,” Superintendent Joris Ray said earlier this month.

The school board approved the policy in 2019 and based it on students meeting eight of 12 criteria, not just TNReady test results. Ray now says he might wait to see the results of more district-administered reading tests before deciding whether to proceed.

“You’ve got to take that into consideration when you’re implementing anything that’s new and that’s going to possibly have an adverse effect on children,” he said.

Chalkbeat reporter Laura Faith Kebede contributed to this report.

Summer school and tutoring proposals expected as Tennessee tries to help students catch up

2021-01-13T00:18:47+00:00

Gov. Bill Lee is expected to unveil proposals this week to create or expand summer school options and after-school tutoring programs as Tennessee seeks to catch up students from learning disruptions caused by the pandemic.

House Education Chairman Mark White said Monday the proposals will be among a barrage of legislation on K-12 education filed in the coming days through the governor’s office.

The 112th Tennessee General Assembly convened on Tuesday and is gearing up for a Jan. 19 special session to focus on pandemic-related challenges for students, educators, and schools.

Other likely proposals, White said, would increase pay for educators; maintain next year’s state funding levels for schools that have lost students this year; and require all school districts to adopt high-quality literacy programs that are based on phonics.

The details come as Tennessee is due for another massive infusion of federal stimulus money to support its students and schools. Tennessee expects to get $1.1 billion, with about $990 million going directly to local school districts. That’s four times the $260 million received in the first round of emergency funding.

Addressing learning loss and reopening school buildings safely are among the major priorities behind the emergency money, and the state education department will get its own pot of about $200 million to work with.

White said the legislature eventually may consider proposals that could extend the school year to help students make up for missed learning time. But during the special session, the learning focus will be on summer school and tutoring, he said.

“If we’re going to have more summer school this year, I’ll advocate that it must be done in person,” said the Memphis Republican. He’s frustrated that most Memphis schools have not offered an in-person option this school year, even as Shelby County Schools Superintendent Joris Ray says reopening school buildings isn’t safe yet in his community.

“I just don’t see the value of having summer school virtually if we’re trying to catch students up,” said White.

Both summer school and tutoring are considered concrete ideas for helping struggling students get back on track.

Research shows that “seat time” matters for student learning, whether through summer school, extended school days, or turning spring break into a weeklong learning academy.

According to other research, tutoring in small groups can lead to large academic gains, although it’s expensive to provide a low student-to-staff ratio. Last summer in the pandemic’s early days, the family foundation of former Gov. Bill Haslam and his wife, Crissy, spent $1 million to hire a thousand college students to tutor elementary-age students at Boys & Girls Clubs across Tennessee.

A new state commission advising lawmakers on how to close learning gaps caused by the pandemic is calling for “aggressive” remediation programs that target the state’s most vulnerable students, including those who are of color, learning the English language, have disabilities, or are from low-income families.

The Tennessee Commission on Education Recovery and Innovation, created by the legislature when it became clear that COVID-19 would grind on, recently delivered the first of three reports to assess the effects of the learning loss on the state’s education systems and make recommendations.

“In reality, we don’t know the true effects,” said Tara Scarlett, the commission’s chairwoman and president of the Scarlett Family Foundation, during a recent meeting.

Because state tests were canceled last year when the virus spread rapidly across the U.S., the panel has had to rely on pre-pandemic data, national education trends, and results of a survey sent to Tennessee school superintendents.

Nationally, the nonprofit testing organization NWEA predicted that U.S. students started this school year having lost roughly a third of a year in reading and half a year in math, but newer data suggests that learning loss projections may have been overstated.

Even so, it’s clear that instruction models this school year have varied widely by district, including in Tennessee. Students of color and students from low-income families have been far more likely to be learning fully virtually, while the parents of students attending in-person school say the quality of instruction is better.

In its first report, the new commission said it’s critical for Tennessee to administer state tests this spring so the results can set a new baseline and inform interventions and innovations moving forward. Similar calls have come from the State Board of Education and influential education advocacy groups such as the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, or SCORE.

The legislature is expected to agree and require testing, but also to order a one-year pause in accountability policies that tie test scores to teacher evaluations and school ratings.

The nine-member commission recommends the state prioritize programs that shore up learning, including a laser focus on literacy and numeracy for students in kindergarten through the third grade. Other priorities should be student well-being, technology gaps, and preparedness for higher education and career opportunities, the panel said.

Last week, Tennessee’s education chief, Penny Schwinn, announced plans to invest $100 million of one-time federal funds in phonics-based reading programs, including new reading instruction training for teachers in the early grades. Her Reading 360 initiative includes new literacy resources, mentoring, and support for educators and families.

Tennessee unveils $100 million plan to help its youngest students read better

2021-01-04T23:40:15+00:00

Tennessee plans to invest $100 million of one-time federal funds in phonics-based reading programs in a sweeping attack on low student literacy rates that have bedeviled the state for decades.

Calling it an “exciting moment,” Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn on Monday unveiled Reading 360, an array of programs to train teachers on reading instruction, provide more resources and mentoring networks to school districts, and support families to help their students read better.

The goal is to reverse this year’s anticipated learning loss due to the coronavirus pandemic and then catapult third-grade reading proficiency rates from 37% to 62% by 2025 under a new campaign known as “25 by 25.” The state’s previous reading goal, set in 2016 by former Gov. Bill Haslam, was for 75% of third-graders to read on grade level by 2020.

“We are saying that we are serious about this as a state,” Schwinn said of the new charge against illiteracy using federal COVID-19 relief funds and two major grants from the U.S. Department of Education.

“Now we have this one-time opportunity to invest a significant amount of money — not just in one part of the reading continuum but the entirety,” she added during an interview with Chalkbeat.

The investment comes as Tennessee officials project a 50% drop in reading proficiency rates for third-graders because of disruptions to schooling that began last spring, though those projections are based on pre-pandemic data. Gov. Bill Lee also has identified literacy as one of five topics to be discussed during a special legislative session on education scheduled to begin on Jan. 19.

“We know that teaching reading is hard. It has always been hard. But it is even more so as a result of COVID,” Schwinn said.

It’s hard to know exactly how much the public health crisis has hurt students’ reading skills across Tennessee, or the nation. State tests were canceled last spring, and this school year’s assessments won’t be given for several months, if they happen at all. The nonprofit testing organization NWEA predicted that students started this school year having lost roughly a third of a year in reading and half a year in math.

The pandemic also worsened gaps in access to school resources. That means Tennessee’s reading investment, while significant, will be a drop in the bucket toward addressing learning losses that have disproportionately hurt students who were already behind academically, including students of color and those from low-income families.

The federal funding allows Lee’s administration to implement literacy programs that it couldn’t convince the legislature to pass last year as the economy sputtered, tax revenues dropped, and lawmakers struggled to reach a consensus on the best approach. A major component of that legislation would have set aside tens of millions of dollars to train teachers on the foundational principles of reading instruction and work with colleges and universities to retool their teacher training programs on literacy.

According to a request for proposals released in late December, the department plans to spend $8.9 million to hire a vendor to retrain up to 11,000 educators in prekindergarten through fourth grade with a weeklong virtual course this spring and another week in person over the summer. Teachers will get a $1,000 stipend after completing the training and also receive a classroom kit with reading resources, Schwinn said.

The contract might be renewed for up to $500,000 annually, which would require legislative approval for recurring funds.

Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn interacts with students during a visit to Forest Hill Elementary School in Germantown, near Memphis, on Sept. 2, 2020.

Schwinn emphasized that all programs under Reading 360 will be optional and separate from any reading legislation that lawmakers pursue this year.

“Nothing in Reading 360 is mandatory,” she said. “They are about supports and resources that districts have said they need or that would be helpful to them, so we are providing options using one-time funds.”

She also said that Reading 360 has “nothing to do” with a similarly named product by Renaissance Learning, a publicly traded company that sells Accelerated Reader and Star Testing programs. Rather, the name stems from Tennessee being positioned to tackle the literacy crisis “from all sides.”

The Tennessee State Board of Education is responsible for reading policies related to teaching methods, practices, and curriculum. Three of its leaders — Sara Morrison, Lillian Hartgrove, and Robert Eby — were among 15 education leaders issuing statements of support for Reading 360 in the department’s four-page news release.

Spokeswoman Elizabeth Tullos said the state board had input in the plan and will work alongside the department on its rollout. “Over time, the board anticipates it will assist through crafting policies for educator preparation providers, examining instructional materials, and providing oversight,” she said.

Tennessee moves up teachers on priority list to receive COVID-19 vaccine

2020-12-30T17:38:02+00:00

Tennessee has moved up teachers and child care staff on the priority list for receiving a coronavirus vaccine in hopes of getting and keeping students in classrooms during the pandemic.

The change, outlined in a revised distribution plan released on Wednesday, means that K-12 educators and school staff should be able to get their shots in the first few months of 2021. Previously, they were designated as part of the second wave of vaccinations, expected to happen in the spring.

The shift, announced by the state health department, comes as districts struggle to keep their schools staffed in one of the nation’s hotspots for virus spread. Two weeks ago, Tennessee began giving its first inoculations to frontline healthcare workers.

“COVID-19 vaccines remain limited at this time, and Tennessee’s allocation plan prioritizes those most at risk of illness and death from COVID-19,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey. “The plan also prioritizes critical infrastructure workers who have direct public exposure or work in environments posing a higher risk of exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19.“

The change aligns with new recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Earlier this month, an advisory panel for the nations’s health protection agency recommended elevating teachers and other essential workers as part of the first phase of Americans receiving the vaccine. That group, which also includes firefighters, police, and grocery workers, previously fell in the second wave of vaccinations.

Tennessee is currently vaccinating health care providers, first responders working directly with the public, and staff members and residents of long-term care facilities.

Under the updated plan, teachers will come next, leapfrogging over adults with two or more high-risk conditions, as designated under the previous plan. They’ll be able to get their shots during the same phase as Tennesseans ages 75 and above — and before those in the 65-74 age bracket.

During a morning briefing with reporters, Piercey said the decision to bump up teachers and child care workers stems from their importance in stabilizing society and the economy — not because of the rate of virus spread happening in schools, which is low, according to the data.

“When you talk about risk to society and the economy, we know how critically important schools are to the functioning of our society and our economy — not only keeping kids in schools so they can learn and be educated but also keeping parents at work. If the kids are in school, then parents can go to work,” she said.

The leaders of several teacher organizations praised the change.

“Indications have been that the vaccine is relatively safe, which was a major concern for many educators,” said JC Bowman of Professional Educators of Tennessee. “Safety of educators and students remains a critical priority to us as we seek a return to a normal academic structure.”

Beth Brown, president of the Tennessee Education Association, called access to the vaccine “a critical step to safely resuming in-person instruction.”

Proposal to revamp Tennessee reading instruction halted amid economic crisis and legislative power struggle

2020-06-03T21:58:12+00:00

A resurrected proposal to change the way Tennessee’s youngest students learn to read appears to have stalled for the year.

Without comment, Sen. Dolores Gresham on Wednesday tabled the proposal from discussion in the education committee she chairs before adjourning the panel for the year. A statement issued later by the Tennessee Department of Education suggested that the timing was off for creating a costly literacy initiative, given the current economic crisis.

The development came as the House and Senate resumed their legislative work after recessing in March, but the two legislative bodies remain at odds over their agenda amid the coronavirus pandemic. Senate leaders insist on limiting business to budgetary matters and other issues affected by COVID-19.

Gresham’s parliamentary move came without fanfare and appears to close the books, for now, on the Tennessee Literacy Success Act. It means the state won’t begin a systematic training this year of current and future teachers on reading instruction that is rooted in phonics.

The legislation is modeled after changes made in Mississippi, the only state to show gains in reading on the latest national tests known as the Nation’s Report Card.

Asked why she shelved the literacy bill, Gresham directed reporters to Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, who did not immediately comment.

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, who helped develop the framework for Gov. Bill Lee’s initial literacy proposal, did not comment either. But a statement from the education department said the state’s literacy rate — with only a third of third-graders reading on grade level — must be addressed “at the right time.”

“During this time of uncertainty and given associated costs for the proposal, the department looks forward to working with the Governor’s office and the Tennessee General Assembly to revisit legislation in the future,” the statement said.

Last week, the House Education Committee approved the revised literacy bill after several hours of often passionate discussion, including how to pay for the $36.5 million initiative as state revenues plunge. One idea: use millions of dollars in federal coronavirus relief funding coming to Tennessee, even as much of that money already is earmarked for other needs.

The latest plan costs roughly half as much as the governor’s comprehensive literacy initiative proposed in early February. But as the economy ground to a halt six weeks later, Lee tabled the idea and scrubbed most of his legislative agenda.

House sponsors wanted to salvage the initiative because they view reading improvement as essential to helping students who are falling even further behind while school buildings are shuttered during the public health emergency.

They proposed switching to phonics-based reading standards and training current and future teachers in kindergarten through fifth grade on that approach. The plan would have required participating districts to screen their youngest students for reading development. It also would have prohibited third-graders from being promoted beginning in the 2022-23 school year if they could not read and didn’t receive extra local instruction and support.

Tennessee has sought for years to improve its stubbornly low literacy rate and saw some encouraging gains in 2018 under the Read to be Ready program launched under former Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration. That year, the state enjoyed a 2.3 percentage-point increase to almost 37% of third-graders reading on or above grade level. Funding for that program, which paid for literacy coaching for teachers and summer reading camps for the state’s youngest students, has dried up under Lee’s administration.

Tennessee seeks to salvage literacy initiative during budget crisis — and use coronavirus relief money to pay for it

2020-05-29T22:03:08+00:00

Three months after Gov. Bill Lee tabled his comprehensive literacy initiative because of an impending budget crisis, a revised reading proposal has resurfaced and is advancing in the Tennessee General Assembly.

But legislators’ expectations to use federal coronavirus relief funding to cover next year’s $36.5 million cost is at odds with the state education department’s plans for that one-time money. And it’s uncertain whether relief funds at the governor’s disposal are available, given all of the needs spurred by the pandemic.

How to pay for the switch to phonics-based reading instruction appears to be all that stands in the way of changing how Tennessee’s youngest students learn to decode words on a page, based on decades of research.

“We’re on the precipice of something really, really big in Tennessee,” said Rep. Scott Cepicky, who has helped to craft the legislation. It’s modeled on changes that helped Mississippi become the nation’s only state to post significant reading gains on the latest national test known as the Nation’s Report Card.

The House Education Committee voted 18-6 to approve a scaled-down literacy bill on Thursday, including a switch to phonics-based reading standards. The initiative would train current and future teachers in kindergarten through fifth grade on that approach and require participating districts to screen their youngest students for reading development.

The proposal aims to attack Tennessee’s stubbornly low reading rate and would prohibit third-graders from being promoted if they can’t read and haven’t received extra local instruction and support beginning in the 2022-23 school year.

No committee members questioned the goal of improving literacy, but several challenged the timing. The legislature must make deep budget cuts over the next month to offset plummeting revenues and a shortfall estimated at between $500 million and $1.7 billion.

“It feels like my employer just gave me a pink slip, and I went out and bought a new car,” said Rep. Jason Hodges, a Clarksville Democrat, of GOP efforts to jumpstart the initiative.

But Chairman Mark White and Cepicky said the money could come from several pots of federal funding coming to Tennessee.

“In crisis, there’s opportunity,” said Cepicky, a Republican from Columbia. “The CARES Act gives us some flexibility here.”

But on Friday, Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn presented her department’s spending plan for $26 million approved last week by the U.S. Department of Education under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.

Half of the department’s allocation would pay for technology to support remote learning statewide. The rest would go toward a variety of needs such as competitive grants to help school districts innovate, a remote learning partnership with PBS television, support for student mental health needs and students with disabilities, and leadership development in a fast-changing teaching and learning environment.

“The U.S. Department of Education said the fund is for the state agency and the local education agencies to provide emergency relief to address the impact that COVID-19 has had on our districts,” Schwinn told the state Board of Education in her presentation.

“Certainly, we will continue to watch and see what the legislature ends up approving” on literacy, she added.

Most of the first-year cost of the Tennessee Literacy Success Act would pay for training for K-5 teachers on the new reading approach. It also would cover the cost of developing a test to screen students on their progress. Another $4 million would be needed annually to continue the program.

Local districts would share a cost as well, at a time when local budgets are under significant stress. Fiscal experts estimate a statewide local cost of $24 million in the first year and $14.2 million annually afterward to pay for aligned textbooks and instructional materials and ongoing coaching and support.

Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Democrat from Nashville, said his school district is already slashing its budget while trying to invest in technology and distance learning. He questioned whether federal coronavirus relief can be used “like it’s Monopoly money.”

But White argued that reading is foundational to learning and should be prioritized, even amid a pandemic.

“I can’t recall how many times in this committee we’ve [asked] why do only 34% of our kids read on grade level by third grade. This is an honest attempt to try to start addressing that,” said the Memphis Republican, adding that the governor supports the revised measure.

After COVID-19 hit shuttered schools nationwide, a survey of district leaders across Tennessee identified technology and internet access for students as the most significant challenges they face in a new learning and teaching environment. Only 10 out of the state’s 147 districts reported having a computer for each student to take home, with 80% needing better internet access for their students.

The survey — which helped guide the education department’s plan for its CARES spending — showed other district priorities are finding ways to serve special populations like English language learners and students with disabilities; providing mental health services for students; and giving their teachers and leaders professional development for remote instruction.

The literacy bill now awaits a recommendation from the House Government Operations Committee before heading to the chamber’s finance panel. That’s where its fiscal note will be scrutinized as the legislature also figures out where to cut the state’s $39 billion budget.

“I don’t want people to get bogged down on the money,” Cepicky said later. “That’s the job of finance. Our job is to pass legislation to help students be the best they can, and I believe we’ve done that.”

A spokesman for Lee said the governor supports the bill but did not answer whether he would use discretionary CARES funding to pay for it.

“We know that literacy is foundational to a child’s education, and we will continue to engage with the legislature in pursuing solutions that will dramatically raise literacy outcomes for Tennessee children,” said press secretary Gillum Ferguson.

First 8 hires new leader to oversee early childhood education efforts in Memphis

2020-02-21T03:44:47+00:00

The nonprofit overseeing early childhood education efforts in Memphis has a new executive director.

Kandace Thomas was approved Thursday by the board of First 8 Memphis, and will start work April 1.

Thomas had previously been with the Irving Harris Foundation in Chicago for the last 13 years, most recently as a senior program officer, according to her online LinkedIn profile. Irving Harris is a grant-making body that supports the development of young children, arts and culture, and social change.

Thomas said she is excited to join First 8 to work on behalf of young children in Memphis. “There has been so much amazing work that has happened in early childhood and early education in Memphis over the last few months,” she said. “I’m committed to the work that’s happened here and want to elevate youths 0 to 8.”

She said her first steps will include introducing herself to people and “getting grounded in the community.”

First 8 was launched last year as the fiscal agent to oversee public and private funding for early education initiatives in an effort to save thousands of prekindergarten seats that were in jeopardy when federal funding ended. Its goal is to build a strong foundation for children in Memphis and Shelby County focusing on early childhood programs, including home visits, quality childcare and pre-k programs, and grades K-3.

“For us it was very important that we had somebody that we felt could really understand our community and could operate effectively in our community,” board Chairwoman Kathy Buckman Gibson said. She added that Thomas will bring credibility with community partners.

“With her experience coming out of Chicago and the work that she has done across multiple communities, we felt that she demonstrated that she will understand the issues that we deal with here in Shelby County and the city of Memphis.”

First 8 initially was poised to hire its first leader last summer, but the candidate declined after taking another position. The board then hired another search firm that members said understood the needs of the Memphis job.

Here are the people who will shape Shelby County’s unprecedented collaboration on early childhood

2019-09-24T22:56:12+00:00

Thirteen advocates from the education, business, government, and healthcare communities have been named to build a new vision for early childhood education in Shelby County.

The board will be in charge of distributing funds, as well as shaping the vision of First 8, the new entity which aims to prepare children for kindergarten. First 8 was created as the fiscal agent to oversee public dollars for early education efforts and to leverage private funding as well.

The joint commitment to fund early education and prekindergarten services, including money for the first time from the city of Memphis, will save thousands of prekindergarten seats that were in jeopardy when federal funding ended June 30.

First 8’s goal is to bring together enough money to pay for pre-K for any child in Memphis who wants to attend, especially children in low-income neighborhoods. It is the first collaboration of its kind in Memphis and comes at a time when other groups around the nation are also trying to figure out sustainable funding for pre-K.

Shelby County Schools also has asked to be on the board, said Mark Sturgis, executive director of the nonprofit Seeding Success, the parent organization from which First 8 was born. First 8 and the school district have been negotiating a contract that would detail the terms of their relationship, and First 8 would provide some funding for Shelby County classrooms.

First 8 board members voted Tuesday to grant the district a board seat for at least one year.

The organization has secured a $7.5 million loan, according to budget documents, which is expected to be repaid from local taxpayer dollars. City and county governments have set aside $11 million in an escrow account for pre-K.

Besides public money and local philanthropic support, First 8 has applied for the three-year, $100 million MacArthur challenge grant and has advanced to the second round. The grant would provide national expertise and present the county’s early education efforts for consideration to other national funders. First 8 will find out if it won in November 2020.

At their second meeting on Tuesday, board members approved a $31,200 annual contract for accounting services with Hughey’s Debits and Credits, and discussed next steps to hire a search firm to find a permanent CEO.

Here are First 8’s board members:

Tomeka Hart, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Tomeka Hart

Hart serves as a senior program officer, leading education policy and advocacy grantmaking to civil rights and equity organizations and managing the social-emotional learning policy portfolio. She served two terms on the Memphis City and Shelby County school boards.

Patrice Robinson, vice chairwoman of Memphis City Council

Robinson was elected in November 2015. She was a former Memphis City and Shelby County school board commissioner and board president in 2004 and 2007.

Jim Boyd, executive director of the Pyramid Peak Foundation

Boyd served more than 15 years as president of BRIDGES, a Memphis youth leadership organization. Pyramid Peak has been a longtime funder in the Memphis education space, and Boyd sits on the board for local charter schools, including KIPP Memphis and Aspire Public Schools.

Amber Huett-Garcia, education policy fellow at the Shelby County Mayor’s office

Huett-Garcia serves under Mayor Lee Harris. She also is the director of development for Memphis’ chapter of Teach for America.

Alex Smith, chief human resources officer at the City of Memphis

Smith is the lead on city Mayor Jim Strickland’s initiatives involving talent management, training, employee relations, compensation, benefits, and diversity initiatives.

Michael Whaley

Michael Whaley, Shelby County commissioner

Whaley was elected in 2018. He serves as the Tennessee Director of Leadership for Educational Equity, where he works with current and former teachers to build their civic engagement and leadership. Whaley also was the founder and executive director of Memphis College Prep, an elementary charter school.

Carol Johnson, interim president of LeMoyne Owen College

Johnson is the executive director of the southern region of New Leaders, a national organization providing leadership development for aspiring principals and teacher leaders.

Marion Hare, a pediatrician at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital

Hare has been involved in numerous community projects and research, particularly in underserved communities. Her current clinical and research includes the Family Resilience Initiative, a clinical program designed to screen for and mitigate adverse childhood experiences and unmet health concerns in children younger than 5 years old.

Yvonne Madlock, retired Director of Shelby County Health Department

Madlock was Shelby County’s first female and first African American public health director and served in that role for 20 years under three county mayors.

Tanya Hart, senior vice president of total rewards at First Tennessee, a regional bank headquartered in Memphis

Hart was instrumental in developing and leading the founding class of First Tennessee’s Emerging Leader Program, expanding the company’s employee resource groups and developing a formal mentoring program.

Rebecca Yeung, staff vice president at FedEx Corporation

Yeung joined FedEx in 1999 and her responsibilities are now to accelerate operational excellence and customer experience within FedEx.

Mary McDaniel, president at MHM Investments

Kathy Buckman Gibson

For almost 31 years, McDaniel led a team at FedEx of more than 400 employees and managed a multimillion-dollar operating budget. She now runs a consulting firm.

Kathy Buckman Gibson, CFO and president of KBG Technologies

Headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, KBG Technologies is a woman-owned business providing specialty chemistries and smart technologies to pulp and paper. Buckman Gibson also served on Shelby County’s Early Childhood Education Plan, and is a board member of Seeding Success and Tennesseans for Quality Early Education.

Under one umbrella: Memphis coordinates preschool funding and evaluation to boost quality

2019-09-11T02:25:24+00:00

Shelby County is coordinating — and paying for — early education initiatives through an unprecedented public and private collaboration being overseen by the new nonprofit First 8 Memphis.

“This is is really an aligned strategy for the entire city and the entire county,” Regina Walker, interim executive director of First 8, told her board members Tuesday. “And it gives us the opportunity to work collectively so as a county we can be marching to the same beat.”

The joint commitment to fund early education and prekindergarten services, including money for the first time from the city of Memphis, seeks to save thousands of prekindergarten seats that were in jeopardy when federal funding ended June 30. First 8, which aims to prepare children for kindergarten, was created as the fiscal agent to oversee public dollars for early education efforts and to leverage private funding as well.

This year, 10 operators will run 70 prekindergarten classrooms for about 1,400 of the county’s neediest 4-year-olds, most in Memphis.

The providers are the same ones who oversaw existing programs previously funded under the federal Preschool Development Grant or directly funded by Shelby County government as part of its matching funds for that grant program that expired in June, said Mark Sturgis, executive director of the nonprofit Seeding Success, the parent organization from which First 8 spun off.

The pre-K providers are a mixture of traditional and charter schools and include Aspire Hanley, Bartlett City Schools, Shelby County Schools, the Achievement School District, Millington Municipal Schools, Freedom Preparatory Academy, Libertas School of Memphis, Memphis Scholars, KIPP Memphis Collegiate Schools, and Capstone Education Group, which runs Cornerstone Prep. Additionally, Libertas, Capstone and Porter-Leath, the city’s largest provider of early education services, are contracted to provide wraparound services such as developmental screenings, home visiting support programs, parent coaching, and after-school programs to accommodate parents’ work schedules.

The pre-K classrooms are open now, although some contracts still have to be signed, officials said. The goal is to eventually expand beyond existing pre-K providers and to also bring support services and quality curriculums to day care centers and ultimately in-home providers.

A critical component of the First 8 strategy relies on “outcomes-based financing,” which means that funding depends on results. “First 8 will fund pre-K programs through its resources, and as that program delivers on outcomes, the city and county dollars will then pay back that investment,” Sturgis said.

First 8 has secured a $7.5 million loan, according to budget documents, which is expected to be repaid from local taxpayer dollars. City and county governments have set aside $11 million in an escrow account for pre-K, he said.

The outcomes that must be met are satisfactory attendance, early literacy growth and quarterly reporting.

The results-based funding model helps satisfy some local politicians who wanted proof about the quality of the pre-K programs and assurances that classrooms wouldn’t sit empty.

The group Seeding Success will provide the data to First 8 to measure outcomes. Specifically, the group will collect daily student attendance, reading assessments and tests measuring development skill mastery. They will also track academic progress in reading during the kindergarten year.

Besides public money and local philanthropic support, Sturgis said that First 8 has applied for the three-year, $100 million MacArthur challenge grant and has advanced to the second round. The grant would provide national expertise and would present the county’s early education efforts for consideration to other national funders. First 8 will find out if it won in November 2020.

This article tackles a topic raised during our 2019 Listening Tour. Read more about the Listening Tour here, and see more articles inspired by community input here.

Porter-Leath announces partnership with University of Memphis as part of major early childhood expansion

2019-08-15T22:10:07+00:00

A Memphis prekindergarten giant plans to build three new childcare academies over the next three years – and announced Thursday that one of them will be in partnership with the University of Memphis.

Porter-Leath raised $36 million to build the academies, which will be similar in size and quality to its prized Early Childhood Academy in South Memphis, according to documents made available at a Shelby County Schools board committee meeting this week.

The expansion comes at a time when school, city, and county officials are discussing expanding quality pre-K seats. Research shows that students benefit from both well-funded schools and access to quality early childhood education. That’s particularly important in Memphis where 35 percent of children live in poverty and have limited access to many childcare services.

Porter-Leath President Sean Lee emailed the district on Monday to inform leaders of the proposed centers. The change could relocate existing Porter-Leath Head Start sites in Memphis to those neighborhoods.

“Replacing these centers will improve the overall health/safety of the program and will put more funds into programs that are currently spent maintaining aging facilities,” Lee wrote.

What’s unclear is whether or not Shelby County Schools will approve the Head Start classrooms to move to new locations.

“This is the first step in a process to get approval from the district to continue scaling early childhood quality across the county,” said Porter-Leath spokesperson Rob Hughes. “We look forward to engaging in each neighborhood.”

The organization announced earlier this month that it would build one of the centers in the Frayser neighborhood in partnership with Girls Inc., a Memphis nonprofit organization. The center working with the University of Memphis would be located on Park Avenue, and both centers are set to open in 2021.

The Park Avenue center would allow the university to expand its elementary and secondary reach in Memphis – the University of Memphis already operates an elementary school and middle school in partnership with Shelby County Schools.

A third potential center, which would be located in Hickory Hill, is set to open in August 2022.

Porter-Leath educates most of Shelby County Schools prekindergarten students. The nonprofit opened its South Memphis campus in 2017.

Porter-Leath has served the city’s poorest children since its founding in 1850 as an orphanage. Its offices are in the former orphanage building on land donated by Sarah Leath, a widow and mother who took the lead in organizing the charity. Today, the nonprofit organization has emerged as the leading provider of early childhood education in Memphis. Through a contract with Shelby County Schools, it provides Head Start classrooms across the city and wraparound services such as special education screenings and health care.

At its South Memphis center, which opened in 2017, Porter-Leath has trained more than 500 Memphis educators in an effort to boost the quality of early education instruction in Memphis.

According to a statement, the organization would be able to provide similar training at the University of Memphis center, as well as research opportunities for university professors.

A number of seats will be available to children of university students, faculty, and staff, but Porter-Leath and university officials declined to say exactly how many.

“We are excited about this partnership and the support it will provide for the children of our faculty, staff, students, and community members in addition to the robust research, training, and observation opportunities it will promote for our academic programs,” said Sally Parish, the university’s associate vice president for educational initiatives.

Pre-K benefits faded in Tennessee — but not for the reasons you think, says new study

2019-08-02T20:15:23+00:00

When a landmark study found that children in Tennessee’s pre-K program eventually fared worse than peers who didn’t participate, the surprising results unleashed a new wave of research to understand why.

Now the latest examination of the same program suggests that the pre-K program may not be the culprit. Rather, it’s what those students experience in kindergarten, first, second, and third grade that helps determine whether early academic gains will continue or flicker out.

The early findings, released last month by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, says pre-K students maintained their advances in math and reading through at least the third grade if exposed in the early grades to highly effective teachers and a high-quality school.

Conversely, pre-K benefits wore off if participants went on to classes with ineffective teachers, in low-quality schools, or both — with preschool graduates eventually faring even worse than their peers who didn’t attend pre-K.

The study adds to emerging literature showing that pre-K is not a cure-all to later factors like poor instruction and a poor learning environment, said Dale Farran, a Vanderbilt University professor involved with both studies.

“We can’t depend upon pre-K to cure a K-12 system that’s not working for poor families,” she said on Thursday. “We can’t put the blame on children who are placed in low performing schools and then just say that they weren’t ready. If we really care about children from low-income families and the schools that serve them, we’ve got to take a bigger view.”

Farran and her Vanderbilt colleague, Mark Lipsey, stunned pre-K advocates — and buoyed pre-K skeptics — when they released the results of their five-year study in 2015 that contradicted conventional wisdom about the power of pre-K. That study, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, was the first to thoroughly investigate the effects of state-funded pre-K programs, which remain popular to policymakers seeking to address the gap in learning between economically disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers.

Both Farran and Lipsey were surprised by their “fadeout” findings, which garnered national attention, but cautioned policymakers at the time not to abandon pre-K as they promised more studies to look closer at the data.

That data is the basis for the latest research led by a former Vanderbilt student, Francis Pearman II, now at Stanford University.

Pearman’s findings have implications for the ongoing debate about early education in Tennessee, which in recent years has sought to improve the quality of its pre-K program — and fended off several legislative proposals to cut it back.

“It validates the value of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K Program,” said Mike Carpenter, executive director of Tennesseans for Quality Early Education. “Since the beginning, we’ve said pre-K is not an inoculation against subsequent poor instruction or other environmental factors later on.”

The findings add to a growing body of evidence about the importance of sustaining high-quality learning environments for pre-K graduates, as well as all students.

For example, 2017 research through the National Bureau of Economic Research found that students benefit from access to both early childhood education and well-funded schools.

The Annenberg study also underscores educational equities that plague students across Tennessee and most of America.

Out of Tennessee’s 3,025 pre-K graduates in the Vanderbilt study’s control group, only 12 percent went on to attend a high-quality school between kindergarten and third grade and had one or more highly effective teachers during these years, based on Tennessee’s academic growth model for evaluating teachers and schools.

It’s “encouraging that high-quality learning environments after pre-K can possibly sustain pre-K effects,” the latest study says, “but sobering that business as usual results in so few low-income children being exposed to such conditions.”

“That’s the tragic part,” adds Farran, now a professor emerita at Vanderbit’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development.

Carpenter hopes the study continues to draw attention not only to early education quality and alignment but to inequalities across Tennessee public schools.

“Poor kids are more likely to be in schools that are lower performing and more likely to have a teacher that’s less effective. So how do we level the playing field?” he asked. “It’s not so much about scaling up the program as it is about leveling out and putting the right resources into our schools to serve disadvantaged kids.”

Researchers with another Vanderbilt study, funded by the Gates Foundation and launching this month in cooperation with the state education department and Tennessee Education Research Alliance, will visit 100 early classrooms in 25 elementary schools to identify best practices and look for better ways to align early curriculum and instruction.

“We know surprisingly little about the connections among the experiences children have across the early grades of school,” Caroline Christopher, who is leading the work, told Chalkbeat earlier this year.

Funding approval will save 1,000 pre-K seats in Memphis

2019-06-25T02:51:02+00:00

Shelby County commissioners signed off Monday on $2.5 million in new prekindergarten funding — replacing federal early childhood funds that are expiring June 30.

The “seed funding” is part of a total $8 million commitment from Shelby County Schools and from city and county governments to preserve 1,000 pre-K seats for the upcoming school year. A federal grant had previously covered these seats, serving some of the neediest 4-year-olds throughout Shelby County.

The multi-year local funding effort will gradually increase over the next three years, while also leveraging private philanthropic dollars.

Commissioners voted 12-1 in support of the initiative, with Commissioner Mick Wright abstaining. But earlier, the county funding piece appeared to be in jeopardy. Before discussion began, the commission’s chairman, Van Turner, addressed education advocates in the audience, warning that the commission likely wouldn’t be able to fully fund pre-K and K-12 requests, citing a “tight budget because of missed [revenue] projections.”

A few moments earlier, the commission had voted down a $7.5 million request from Shelby County Schools over its original billion-dollar budget. But parents and advocates touted the virtues of pre-K and pleaded with commissioners to fund it.

Taviannca Worsham, a parent and pre-K teacher at LIbertas School of Memphis, implored commissioners to continue the funding. “I admit that I don’t understand this [budget] process and all the components that go into this decision, but I do know there is no dollar amount that can be placed on the magic when a child is afforded the opportunity to be educated,” Worsham said.

And Glen Hancox, who has grandchildren in the district, contended that while many of the things that commission funds will be outdated in several years, pre-K will not. “When we fully fund the pre-K, we make an investment in the early lives of these children,” Hancox said. “Thirty years from now when you and when I am no longer here that investment will continue to pay off.”

The pre-K funding will come from the county’s reserves. Those funds are expected to be replenished once a court case has been resolved, said Turner, who did not say what case he was referencing.

Turner said the funding is a nonrecurring amount, meaning that the county isn’t obligated by law to continue funding the program in future years like it would be with Shelby County Schools. Under state law, local government bodies are required to maintain local funding for public schools from one year to the next.

Later in the meeting, commissioners reconsidered the Shelby County Schools funding request and agreed to $2.2 million in one-time spending for phonics and coding. Commissioners also approved a three-year contract with the nonprofit First 8 to serve as the fiscal agent to oversee the countywide pre-K program starting July 1.

Is Tennessee moving its weakest teachers to early, non-tested grades? New research says yes.

2019-02-22T17:07:57+00:00

Tennessee’s education insiders have whispered for years that some elementary school principals were moving their least effective teachers to critical early grades, which are free of high-stakes tests. That’s despite clear evidence that those years are the most important for preparing students for a lifetime of learning.

Now a new study has confirmed that the shift is real.

Researchers examining 10 years worth of state data through 2016 found that low-performing teachers in grades 3 through 5 were more likely to be reassigned to non-tested early grades than their more effective peers.

The findings, released Friday by the Tennessee Education Research Alliance and Vanderbilt University, may be an important piece of the puzzle in figuring out why almost two-thirds of the state’s students are behind on reading by the end of the third grade.

“These trends matter because having effective teachers in the early grades helps establish a foundation for success as students progress into later grades,” the research brief states.

The authors used Tennessee’s teacher evaluation system, including classroom observation scores and student achievement data, to track the reassignment of elementary school teachers by their principals. They found that only a hundred of the lowest-rated teachers were shifted to the lower grades in any given year, making for a relatively small impact across Tennessee. However, the pattern was consistent for all reassigned teachers who scored in the bottom three evaluation ratings on a scale of 1 to 5.

It’s not conclusive, though, whether those teachers remain ineffective when moved to kindergarten, first, or second grades.

“This could be counter-productive, but it could actually be productive if school leaders are finding better fits for their elementary school teachers,” said Sy Doan, who authored the research brief along with Laura K. Rogers.

Another study is in the works to examine whether students’ academic growth is stunted by re-assigning less effective teachers to lower grades.

Like other states, Tennessee doesn’t require testing until the third grade, when student scores are used to begin gauging the performance of students, teachers, schools, and districts.

But research elsewhere has shown that the pressures of such accountability systems for higher elementary grades can unintentionally give administrators incentives to “staff to the test” and move their weakest teachers to the early years.

“The patterns we found in Tennessee are consistent with similar studies conducted in other states,” Doan said.

Advocates of early education say the latest findings — while not surprising — should be a powerful reminder to school administrators that kindergarten through second grade are high-stakes for students’ learning and development, even if those years are free of high-stakes testing.

“I think it’s going to raise some important conversations,” said Lisa Wiltshire, policy director for Tennesseans for Quality Early Education. “If we want to improve third-grade outcomes, Tennessee has got to start prioritizing investments in the early grades, particularly in the quality of teachers.”

Sharon Griffin, a longtime Memphis school administrator who now leads Tennessee’s school turnaround district, made that point last week during a presentation to state legislators on the House Education Committee.

“When I was a principal …. there was this unprecedented norm where you would put your most effective teachers in grades that are tested,” she said. “Now we know from lessons learned that it’s really pre-K, kindergarten, first and second grades where you need the strongest teachers, so that our kids can be on grade level by third grade and we are not trying to close the gap continuously from third grade on.”

Tennessee has done some serious soul-searching about why most of its third-graders can’t pass the proficiency bar in reading, which is considered the foundation for learning and success in all subject areas.

The frustrations deepened in 2015 when a landmark Vanderbilt study showed that academic gains achieved by students in Tennessee’s public pre-K classrooms were fading out by first grade and vanishing altogether by third grade.

Since then, the focus has been on why. Is it the quality of pre-K? Or could it be missteps and misalignment in instruction and curriculum from kindergarten through the third grade?

Upcoming research will dig into those questions as other Vanderbilt researchers visit Tennessee classrooms next school year to observe instructional quality and teaching practice in the early grades.

“We know surprisingly little about the connections among the experiences children have across the early grades of school,” said Caroline Christopher, who will co-lead the work with Dale Farran, director of the Peabody Research Institute.

Their study will be funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted through the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a partnership between Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development and the Tennessee Department of Education.

Pre-K money could be diverted to other needs under Tennessee lawmaker’s bill

2019-01-25T22:29:07+00:00

Frustration over Tennessee’s lagging third-grade literacy rate is resurrecting discussion about whether the state is investing its money wisely for early childhood education.

Rep. Bill Dunn has re-filed a bill that would let school districts divert state funds from public pre-kindergarten classes to other needs in early grades if they think the dollars could be better spent.

“Right now, we’re spending close to $90 million annually on an early education program that our own studies show isn’t delivering the results we want, and it’s even getting negative results,” said the Knoxville Republican, a frequent critic of Tennessee’s publicly funded pre-K program.

He wants local flexibility to shift pre-K dollars to pay for needs like smaller kindergarten class sizes and more reading specialists or teacher coaches for early grades. Another idea: Instead of yearlong pre-K classes for 4-year-olds, a district could provide an abbreviated program in the six to eight weeks before kindergarten begins.

Dunn’s bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Dolores Gresham of Somerville, is the first early education proposal filed in 2019 after little legislative activity on that front last year. Lawmakers have wanted to give sweeping changes under a 2016 law time to work to improve the quality of Tennessee’s pre-K program, which launched in 2005 as states looked for ways to help low-income students facing unequal educational opportunities.

Tennessee’s pre-K overhaul came a year after a landmark study by Vanderbilt University found that children who didn’t participate in the program actually showed better academic outcomes over time than those who did.

As a result, the state changed how it funds its 900-plus pre-K classrooms, awarding money to districts based on the quality of their programming instead of the number of needy students they serve. It’s also tried to make strategic investments to improve reading in the early grades.

Last year, Tennessee’s reading scores increased by more than 2 percentage points so that almost 37 percent of third-graders were reading on or above grade level. But to reach its goal of 75 percent by 2025, the state will have to move 5 to 6 percentage points more third-graders to proficiency every year.

Dunn is not encouraged.

“It just hasn’t panned out,” he said of the state’s efforts. “We’ve done this for 10 years and where’s our reading levels? It’s time to deal with the facts.”

Rep. Bill Dunn

Dunn proposed similar legislation in 2017 to pilot a program that would have let five districts come up with other ways to spend their pre-K money. But his bill never made it out of a House subcommittee as colleagues urged patience to let reforms play out.

The Knoxville legislator has since been elected to the House’s No. 2 leadership position, and the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee has signed on as co-sponsor of his 2019 bill.

“We have a limited amount of funds,” Dunn said. “What we always hear from the locals is for the state to quit sending us money with strings attached — that they know how to use it better. This is a perfect opportunity to let them try.”

Rep. Mark White, chairman of the House Education Committee, said he’s open to discussing Dunn’s proposal, but he doesn’t want to siphon off pre-K dollars.

“My position is that we need to find new dollars for what Rep. Dunn wants and not hurt our current pre-K system,” said White, a Republican from Memphis.

Legislation is expected to be filed soon that would do just that. Tennesseans for Quality Early Education, a nonprofit group formed in response to the Vanderbilt study’s findings, is working on a bill that would pay for literacy and math coaches for both pre-K and kindergarten, according to executive director Mike Carpenter.

“We all agree that it’s critical for children to be reading on grade level by the end of third grade,” Carpenter said. “If we can find common ground on that, surely we can find the resources to invest in evidence-based practices that are going to improve literacy.”

Carpenter lauded the state’s current efforts to address inconsistent quality across Tennessee’s pre-K classrooms. He also warned that pre-K is not an inoculation against poor instruction later on.

“Historically we’ve put pressure on pre-K to be the silver bullet for all future learning,” Carpenter said. “It’s a critical foundational step, but we also have to commit to sustaining those gains in subsequent grades.”

New pre-K report gives Memphis bronze medal, Nashville gold

2019-01-23T06:30:28+00:00

A new report on quality and access to early education programs across the country gives Memphis a bronze medal, mainly for providing prekindergarten for at least 30 percent of the city’s 4-year-olds, and Nashville a gold medal for meeting both quality and accessibility standards.

The report said in addition to accessibility, Memphis met benchmarks related to classroom size, teacher-child ratio, and teacher education level, but missed the mark when it came to curriculum or learning goals, teacher professional development, and local funding commitment.

Nashville met criteria for accessibility, classroom size, teacher-child ratio, teacher education level, local funding, and professional development. Both Memphis and Nashville met standards for salary equity, meaning that prekindergarten teachers were paid similar to K-12 teachers.

The report was produced by CityHealth, a policy advocacy group, and the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, an authority on pre-K research.

Memphis officials were quick to take issue with the report’s finding regarding local financial support. “Mayor (Jim) Strickland has been committed to pre-K funding since he’s been on the council,” said Doug McGowen, the city’s chief operating officer. He also noted that as a councilman, the mayor advanced two pre-K referendums, although both were defeated by voters.

Most of the 5,600 subsidized preschool seats in Shelby County Schools are funded through state and federal grants. Last year, the Memphis City Council allocated $8 million to replace an expiring federal grant and another $8 million to add 1,000 preschool slots, McGowen said.

After 2021, he said, the city will maintain $6 million in annual funding. Shelby County government is working on additional funding streams.

Read the full report below:

New early learning initiative brings Sesame Street lessons into Memphis classrooms

2018-12-04T23:50:34+00:00

Dozens of grown-ups crowded into a meeting room Tuesday at an early childhood center in Memphis to celebrate a new partner in educating the city’s youngest learners: Elmo and Sesame Street.

Officials with Porter-Leath, which provides early education to hundreds of children in the city, and ACE Awareness Foundation, which provides support and spreads awareness about adverse childhood experiences, announced the new collaborative with Sesame Street in Communities.

“Our vision here is to be the leader in early childhood, and what could be better than to have the national leader in early childhood education?” Sean Lee, president of Porter Leath, said referring to Sesame Street.

Increasing access to early childhood education has been a priority for Shelby County Schools and Shelby County elected officials. A growing body of research shows high-quality early childhood programs nurture brain development, enhance school performance and boost the likelihood of graduating from college and earning higher incomes.

Elmo was in Memphis Tuesday for the launch of a new partnership between Sesame Street in Communities and Porter-Leath, the city’s largest provider of early education services, and ACE Awareness Foundation, which provides support and spreads awareness about adverse childhood experiences or childhood traumas.

Through the partnership, Lee said that lessons and content from Sesame Street will be incorporated into its pre-kindergarten classes, and parents will receive take-home materials to reinforce the classroom learning. Additionally, he said, the collaboration will allow them to expand teacher training beyond traditional preK settings, including day care centers and family day homes.

Jeanette Betancourt, a senior vice-president at Sesame Workshop, said the national initiative embeds in existing programs to add support and resources from its research-based materials on early education, trauma experiences and school readiness.

In pursuing its mission to help kids grow smarter, stronger, and kinder, Betancourt said that Sesame Workshop realized they couldn’t just simply “place things on the screen, but we also had to be in communities.”

Sesame Street in Communities operates in seven other cities outside Memphis. The goal is to expand into 35 communities throughout the U.S. in the next five years, said Betancourt.

“I truly believe that having that [Sesame Street] title, having those connections will draw more parents and grandparents and childcare givers to the work that we’re doing,” said Renee Wilson-Simmons, executive director for ACE Awareness.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris said that the Sesame Street initiative dovetails into one of the county’s priorities to expand quality, needs-based pre-K programs throughout the county.

“We are working really hard to implement a plan to make sure that every child regardless of their income has access to a pre-K program,” he said.

Tennessee launched a pre-K pilot program aimed at boosting literacy. Here is what happened.

2018-08-23T18:37:32+00:00

A pilot program led by the State Department of Education at 134 early childhood programs across the state led to more growth in literacy skills among 7,000 of Tennessee’s youngest students.

The one-year pilot is one piece of a larger war on literacy the state has been waging for years. But the state has slowly zeroed in on pre-K and other early education programs as the best vehicles to get 75 percent of its third-graders reading on grade level by 2025. Fewer than half of its third-graders are there.

“This is a real priority area for us, but the pilot takes it a step further to show there are things we can do before kids get to school to shore up foundations and accelerate growth,” Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said.

Last year, the state put more books into participating classrooms and gave teachers more training in early literacy. Eighty classrooms also received in-depth coaching for teachers.

The state monitored progress by testing children in participating classrooms throughout the year, as well as testing children from control groups who weren’t in the program. Children from the pilot sites were more likely to move up one or more levels on the state-given assessments by the end of the year, according to a state press release.

The sheer number of books in the classroom was also a factor in student growth, McQueen said. Pilot classrooms had about double the number of books than the control classrooms, thanks to donations from the Governor’s Books From Birth Foundation.

McQueen told Chalkbeat that when she talked to teachers in the pilot, they told her they were more thoughtful in their classrooms with book choice, writing, and phonics instruction as a result of their training.

“One teacher directly said that she hadn’t done anything with phonics because she didn’t have a good foundation herself, but that the training helped her gain confidence with her own instruction,” McQueen said.

The counties and districts participating in the first year of the pilot were: Anderson, Blount, Campbell, Claiborne, Davidson, Greene, Hamblen, Sevier, Shelby, Sullivan, Unicoi, Union, and Washington. The pilot focused on daycare schools and child centers that were run either by the Department of Education or Tennessee Department of Human Services.

McQueen said the department wants to expand the program, but said the state doesn’t have specific details yet.

Read the state’s report on the pilot below:

Shelby County Commissioners recommend less aggressive pre-K funding plan

2018-06-13T00:17:52+00:00

Shelby County’s pre-K committee has recommended delaying additional early childhood spending until 2020.

The committee voted 4-2 Tuesday in favor of a plan that pushes back by a year funding increases for free, need-based pre-K programs. The full Commision is slated to vote Monday on the county budget for the fiscal year 2019, which includes pre-K funding.

Tuesday’s vote walks back Commissioner Steve Basar’s recent proposal, which had the county adding an additional $2.5 million for pre-K this calendar year and contributing $15.1 million a year toward pre-K by 2021.

In the committee session, Commissioners Van Turner, Melvin Burgess, George Chism, and Reginald Milton voted to approve the new recommendation, crafted by Wanda Richards, director of administration and finance for the county. Commissioners Steve Basar and Willie Brooks voted against it.

“I want us to add seats at the same level as in my proposal,” Basar said, of his desire to fast-track additional pre-K seats. “That’s why I voted against this plan today.”

Under the new recommendation, the county would contribute $3 million for pre-K in the fiscal year 2019, as it has for the past several years, and the number of free pre-K seats in the county would hold steady at about 7,500. The county would then add an additional $2.5 million for 2020, and continue to scale up to a total $8 million by 2022.

Currently, about 7,420 of the country’s 4-year-olds attend free school programs, and those seats are funded with a combination of city, county, state, federal and philanthropic dollars. A coalition of nonprofit groups led by Seeding Success — an organization tasked with improving educational outcomes countywide — has been working to close the funding gap. The consortium is seeking to raise $16 million in public funding for the pre-K seats.

That money is part of its $40 million plan to raise the level of early childhood education in Memphis. The group is counting on private philanthropy to cover the remaining $24 million, and that money will be earmarked for home visitation services, high-quality childcare, and tracking data.

The expiration of an $8 million federal grant in 2019 could reduce free pre-K seats by 1,000 if additional revenue doesn’t come through. To pay for every child who can not afford pre-K, Memphis would need about 8,400 seats, according to Seeding Success, at the total cost of about $16 million a year.

A sticking point for the committee was over whether Shelby County Schools district or the county itself would add to its pre-K budget for the 2019 year.

The school district approved an increase of $2.4 million to $4.8 million in pre-K funding for 2019, said Shante Avant, the Shelby County Schools board chair, who was present at the meeting. But the school budget won’t be officially approved until the county commission votes on it this month. The county is the funding body for the schools.

If approved, the district’s increase in funding will allow the county to maintain its 7,500 pre-K seats for 2019-2020 despite the expiration of the federal grant. The county’s own increase in money, combined with new city funding and district funding, would total $16.6 million by 2022 — creating 1,000 new seats and making free pre-K available to all who qualify.

Melvin Burgess, the committee’s chair, said he felt Tuesday’s vote was a good step forward.

“We needed to get the ball rolling,” Burgess said. “We can always amend this recommendation once we approve the [Shelby County Schools] budget.”

Meet the new leader of Memphis’ emerging pre-K training program

2018-06-04T21:38:33+00:00

Elementary school teacher Kelley Nichols wanted to teach in preschool because she knew she would get a discount for enrolling her own children.

But even as she grew into teaching prekindergarten, she realized there was a need for experienced educators to mentor pre-K teachers.

“I ended up falling in love with pre-K,” she said. “But I also saw the gaps in how educators are, or aren’t, mentored.”

This lack of mentoring for teachers eventually led Nichols to Porter-Leath, the city’s largest provider of early childhood education, which partners with Shelby County Schools for Head Start classrooms.

Nichols is now the vice-president of teacher excellence and will help lead the Teacher Excellence Program, a year-old training strategy to boost the quality of early education instruction in Memphis through mentoring and coaching.

Read more about the origins of the Teacher Excellence Program here.

Nichols, who started last month, was previously the director of curriculum and instruction at Capstone Education Group, a local charter organization. She replaces Rafel Hart, who helped launch the program.

The program trained more than 500 pre-K teachers in Memphis this school year, which is focused on four subject areas: socio-emotional learning, which aims to help students manage their emotions and learn self-awareness; literacy; health, and STEAM, shorthand for science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

All new Porter-Leath and Shelby County Schools early childhood educators go through this training, but longtime teachers are also encouraged to attend. Porter-Leath provides trained substitutes for those who can’t afford them to encourage Memphis daycare operators to send their teachers.

Nichols said feedback from past participants is helping her shape the program’s second year.

“We heard from teachers that they felt like they could walk out of a training and implement what they learned the next day,” Nichols said. “We also got feedback that the relief teachers made daycare operators comfortable to come to training. They didn’t feel like they were losing a day of instruction with their kids, because an experienced teacher was subbing for them.”

Some of the teachers who go through the trainings are assigned a coach from Porter-Leath, who work with them all year long. Nichols said she hopes to add more coaches to Porter-Leath’s staff. Currently, eight coaches oversee 12 teachers each.

“Teachers have voiced that coaches need lower caseloads, Nichols said. “Our coaches have developed really trusting relationships with teachers that help teachers really dive into how to improve instruction. We definitely want to grow this.”

Shelby County Commissioners reveal tentative plan to fully fund pre-K for families who can’t afford it

2018-05-31T20:07:41+00:00

A committee of Shelby County Commissioners floated a new funding plan for preschool on Thursday that would not only fill a gap created by the expiration of a federal grant, but would also provide free pre-K for all in the county who need it.

County government could add an additional $2.5 million for pre-K for the new fiscal year starting on July 1, according to a recommendation from Commissioner Steve Basar.

This would be on top of the $3 million the county — the funding body for local schools — has contributed yearly to pre-K programs, and the increase would add about 300 seats. The recommendation is also $1 million more than what county Mayor Mark Luttrell suggested earlier this month.

But the proposal would also significantly increase the county’s investment in early childhood over time. The county would put $15.1 million toward pre-K during the 2020 year, which would drop to $13.6 annually for 2021.

However, the committee opted to wait a week to approve the recommendation — which would go to a vote before the full County Commission — after Lin Johnson, chief financial officer for Shelby County Schools, told them that the district is considering doubling its funding for pre-K from $2.4 million to $4.8 million.

“We need to synchronize numbers to make sure we’re on the right track,” Commissioner Willie Brooks said. “I’m committed and my colleagues on the commission are committed, but we want to make sure taxpayers understand what we’re trying to do.”

Currently, about 7,420 of the city’s 4-year-olds attend free school programs, and a coalition of nonprofit groups led by Seeding Success has been pushing to maintain — and even grow — the number of free, needs-based pre-K seats in Memphis. The nonprofit group has led the charge to put together the $16 million annually for pre-K seats as part of its $40 million plan to raise the level of early childhood education in Memphis.

The group is hopeful private philanthropy will pick up the remaining $24 million, which will go toward home visitation services, high-quality childcare, and tracking data.

County Commissioner Steve Basar (right) discusses a budget item with fellow commissioner Heidi Shafer (left) during the Commission’s budget and finance committee meeting in 2016.

However, the expiration of an $8 million federal grant in 2019 made finding a new source for money even more urgent because the city would lose 1,000 pre-K seats without new dollars. To pay for every child who can not afford pre-K, Memphis would need about 8,400 seats, according to Seeding Success, or $16 million a year.

DeAnna McClendon, director of early childhood for Shelby County Schools, said at the meeting that 2,000 children had requested a seat in a district pre-K classroom, but the district didn’t have space for them. The district provides the vast majority of total pre-K seats in the county — around 7,000.

If Basar’s recommendation is approved, it would put funding well over the $16 million mark by 2020 when combined with the City of Memphis’ contribution.

The city announced earlier this year that it would commit $6 million to pre-K programs — the city’s first major new investment in Memphis classrooms since 2013, when city and county school systems merged. The city would commit $3 million for the 2019 year, but the full $6 million won’t go into effect until 2021.

Basar said he hoped the city would contribute more in the future.

Memphis “is the one getting the limelight, and we’re the ones doing the heavy lifting,” Basar said. “We’re going to be the ones contributing the biggest share. I don’t think that’s fair or right.”

Thursday’s meeting came a day after Shelby County Schools presented its $1 billion budget to the commission for approval. During Wednesday’s talks on the overall budget, Commissioner Heidi Shafer said she wouldn’t support additional pre-K dollars that take away from K-12 funding, which could happen under the recommendation.

“It’s so cute to be able to think well, if we just got them educated in pre-K, then we wouldn’t have to spend as much in K-12,” Shafer, a former pre-K teacher, said Wednesday. “And y’all, that’s a pipe dream.… I don’t want us to take our eyes off the ball of our main focus, K-12.”

But Seeding Success and its partners are banking that more pre-K classrooms will lead to better outcomes for kids.

Mark Sturgis, executive director of Seeding Success, has helped lead the charge for Shelby County’s early childhood education plan.

“We have a significant number of children in poverty,” said Kathy Buckman Gibson, a Memphis business leader on the board of Seeding Success. “We need to ensure they are receiving the level of education needed to be successful, and increasing quality pre-K seats is a way to set them up for success.”

Seeding Success will manage the new funding from the commission, as well as funds from the city and private philanthropy. The majority of the classrooms sustained by new funding would be in Shelby County Schools, but four classrooms in Millington Municipal Schools and 24 classrooms in the state-run Achievement School District would also benefit.

The pre-K committee will meet again on the recommendation June 7 at 10 a.m. It includes members from Seeding Success, Shelby County Schools, and Commissioners Basar, Brooks, Melvin Burgess, Van Turner and Reginald Milton.

Reporter Laura Faith Kebede contributed to this report.

Tennessee continues funding for 900 free pre-K classrooms. How many will be in your district?

2018-05-03T22:57:57+00:00

Tennessee will dole out $86 million in state funding next school year to maintain more than 900 free preschool classrooms.

The awards, announced Thursday by the State Department of Education, will go to nearly 95 percent of the state’s 146 districts to serve at-risk 4-year-olds, or about 18,320 children. The full list of funding and districts statewide is here for 2018-19 (or you can scroll down to the bottom of this article).

Funding and enrollment for the program — known as the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K — has been largely stagnant since 2010.

For Tennessee’s largest school district in Memphis, the new investments will mean about $10 million for 112 pre-K classrooms in Shelby County Schools — about $1,000 more than the 2017-18 school year for the same number of classrooms.

This is the second year the awards were granted based on the quality of a district’s pre-K program rather than the quantity of students served. Districts now have to prove to the state that they are using strong curriculum, supporting and training their pre-K teachers, and reaching out to families to support at-home learning.

Education Commissioner Candice McQueen has emphasized pre-K as one of the best tools to achieve the state’s goal of having 75 percent its third-graders reading on grade level by 2025. Currently less than half of its students are there.

“It is important that we set our students up for academic success from day one with high-quality early learning opportunities, especially for those students with the greatest need,” McQueen said in a statement Thursday.

The state will offer districts more support for the 2018-19 school year based on needs in an effort to see quality grow. This could include leadership and teacher trainings and strengthening curriculum implementation, said Chandler Hopper, spokeswoman for the Department of Education.

Tennessee’s public pre-K program launched in 2005 with the goal of helping students from low-income families start kindergarten on an equal footing with their more affluent peers. But a 2015 Vanderbilt University study shocked pre-K advocates with findings that the program’s benefits faded by the second grade. State lawmakers responded in 2016 with a law that, among other things, put the onus on local districts to address some of the findings.

The state department has since worked with educators to select high-caliber curricula and to improve teacher training. However, a national report earlier this month dinged Tennessee for not doing enough to measure quality in its pre-K classrooms.

Here’s the list of districts awarded pre-K classrooms, how many classrooms they will have next school year, and how much state funding they will receive.

Report says Tennessee’s pre-K program needs consistent monitoring and more rigor to get better

2018-04-24T16:37:03+00:00

All parents look for a quality program when they send their children off to preschool. But in Tennessee, parents may have to look a little longer and harder than families in many other states.

Tennessee met only five of 10 quality benchmarks designed by a national research institute that released its annual preschool report last week. The report criticized the state for its lack of both a rigorous curriculum and a system that measures improvement in classroom quality.

Children enrolled in privately funded programs were not included in this data.

The quality benchmarks range from professional development to classroom size to curriculum. Only three state-funded pre-K programs met all 10 of the new standards — Alabama, Michigan, and Rhode Island.

The report also showed that funding for Tennessee’s preschool program — known as the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K — has been largely stagnant since 2010.

These findings come from the “State of Preschool 2017,” a report released last week by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. The annual report looks at state spending, enrollment, and quality in the 43 states and Washington D.C. that provide state-funded preschools.

Tennessee responded that the state has moved toward improving quality, but doesn’t have a plan in place yet for measuring outcomes.

“We are currently considering our next steps for monitoring quality, but currently do not have the infrastructure for site-based monitoring of these quality indicators,” state Education Department spokeswoman Sara Gast said in a written statement.

However, the state recently contracted with 15 educators and experts to review and help select higher caliber pre-K curriculums that will be taught in state-funded classrooms starting in the 2018-19 school year.

But the founder of the institute that led the study said that to really make progress, Tennessee has to first start measuring and tracking the quality of its classrooms.

“It all comes back to this — there’s nobody at the state level that’s engaged and paying attention to the system to first, identify problems and second, to fix them,” Steven Barnett, co-director and founder, told Chalkbeat.

When analyzing Tennessee, the report pulled from a 2015 study by Vanderbilt University that showed the benefits of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program faded by the second grade — and that students who attended eventually performed worse than their peers.

At the time, the state pledged to shore up quality of pre-K teachers and offer more professional development for them.

In the current report, Tennessee’s ratings fell in the middle of the pack — ranking 27th for 4-year-old access to preschool, 25th for 3-year-old access and 23rd for state funding.

The report said Tennessee’s stagnant funding has kept enrollment hovering near 18,500 pre-K students since 2010 — or 22 percent of 4-year-olds and one percent of 3-year-olds.

Gast said in her statement that the state is filling 90 percent of available pre-K seats with 4-year-olds from low-income families.

Tennesseans for Quality Early Education, a statewide advocacy group, said they want to see the state shore up program quality before adding new seats.

“Quality pre-k works, but program quality is inconsistent across the state,” said Lisa Wiltshire, policy director at the advocacy group. “Tennessee should stay the course and double down on pre-k quality improvement efforts… so that pre-k gains can be sustained.”

Nonprofit charged with getting Memphis’ youngest students kindergarten-ready says city’s $6 million is just the start

2018-03-26T19:53:36+00:00

A Memphis nonprofit’s job is to coordinate how $40 million annually would likely be spent on prekindergarten education by 2020. But first, it has to finish the immediate task of making sure a federal grant expiring in 2019 is offset before Shelby County and the city of Memphis lock down their budgets for next year.

Though Memphis recently committed $6 million toward pre-K funding, Mark Sturgis, executive director of Seeding Success, said the nonprofit hopes both the city and county governments fund a combined $16 million for pre-K seats.

Seeding Success, affiliated with a national group formed to focus on “cradle to career” education, has led the charge to put together the $16 million in recurring funds for pre-K seats as part of its $40 million plan to raise the level of early childhood education in Memphis. Time is short because city and county budgets to determine spending for next year need to be finished before July 1.

“If the city didn’t get involved, we felt like the conversation with the county wasn’t going to go anywhere,” Sturgis said. “Now, we’re able to authentically go to the county commission to talk about an increase in their funding.”

In addition to fully paying for pre-K for all children whose families cannot afford to pay for it themselves, the nonprofit and its partners — such as the Early Success Coalition and Porter-Leath — will focus on home visitations, high-quality childcare, and tracking data to ensure the plan is actually improving kids’ lives.

Sturgis said if $16 million comes through from the city and county, he’s confident that Seeding Success can find $24 million more through private donations to make the early childhood plan a reality.

The expiration of an $8 million federal grant in 2019 made finding a new source for money even more urgent because the city would lose 1,000 pre-K seats without new dollars. To pay for every child who could not afford pre-K, Memphis would need about 8,400 seats, according to Seeding Success. Currently, more than 7,400 of the city’s 4-year-olds attend a free school program.

Memphis’ $6 million commitment – $2 million less than what the City Council had first discussed – is the city’s first major new investment in Memphis classrooms since 2013, when city and county school systems merged. Shelby County government has since carried the load on funding Memphis schools, including contributing $3 million yearly to pre-K programs.

The nonprofit’s vision is to prepare 90 percent of Shelby County’s children for kindergarten, a big leap from the current 52 percent of children who are kindergarten ready.

Currently, about 1,000 children throughout Shelby County receive home visits, but the goal is to raise $7.5 million annually to increase that number by more than 6,000 children.

Sturgis said home visitations can range in type from nurses helping with prenatal care to early interventions in child development.

The plan also calls for $11.6 million dedicated to bolstering high-quality child care in Shelby County.

There are currently more than 800 child care centers in the Memphis area, Sturgis said, but there is little collaboration between them. Seeding Success’ vision is to create a “shared service” childcare network, which would provide supports including professional development, accounting services, curriculum development and marketing strategies.

“If we fully implement this plan by 2020, we’ll be serving the vast majority of at-risk families in Shelby County during the first five years of their child’s life” Sturgis said. “We believe the impact that will have, not only on kindergarten-readiness but the quality of life of these families in general, will be massive.”

Memphis gets back into education game with vote to fund pre-K classrooms

2017-12-20T00:34:04+00:00

The Memphis City Council committed on Tuesday to find a way to invest at least $8 million in pre-kindergarten classrooms before 2019, marking their first big investment in Memphis schools in four years.

The measure, which was approved 11-0, did not provide a funding stream for the multimillion-dollar need, but essentially holds Memphis to find a way to come up with $8 million for 1,000 pre-K seats that the city stands to lose with the expiration of a major federal grant in 2019.

Councilwoman Janis Fullilove recused her initial yes vote without comment.

Councilman Kemp Conrad, who introduced the resolution, told his fellow council members that this measure is a way for the city to once again fund programs that help children. Tuesday’s vote marks the first new money for Memphis classrooms since 2013 when city and county school systems merged.

“We can make a statement, a formalized action to the mayor who is very supportive of this issue, as a policy-making body,” Conrad said. “We’re making a statement to other funding bodies, Shelby County Schools, the Shelby County Commission and private entities that the city can come to the table with money.”

At an executive session two weeks ago, Mayor Jim Strickland said he supported the initiative and that the seats could mean the difference in children developing the reading skills they need by third grade to be successful in school.

Councilman Bill Morrison, a former Memphis teacher, brought forth an amendment before the vote that would have expanded the measure to also guarantee funding for schools beyond pre-K, such as after-school programs and career and technical training. However, he withdrew his amendment after Councilman Berlin Boyd suggested he bring the issue as a separate resolution in the future.

Currently, about 7,420 of the city’s 4-year-olds attend free school programs, and a coalition of nonprofit groups led by Seeding Success has been pushing to maintain — and even grow — the number of free, needs-based pre-K seats in Memphis. The group estimates that about 1,000 additional seats are needed to offer free pre-K to all who need it.

Mark Sturgis, the executive director of Seeding Success, told Chalkbeat after the meeting that the council vote will spur further collaboration between private and public funders to bolster pre-K in Memphis. Seeding Success will help to lead a closed-door meeting tomorrow between City Council members, Shelby County Commissioners and philanthropic and private donors.

“Now, it’s about leveraging the momentum from tonight with coordinated conversations,” Sturgis said. “We have to build the infrastructure to do this right. It’s all about creating quality pre-K.”

Charles Lampkin, a Memphis parent whose three sons were students in pre-K classrooms, said during public comment that the free early education made a big impact on this family’s life.

“My (now) first-grader is reading on grade-level and above and my kindergartener is at grade level,” he said, adding that his third son was currently enrolled in pre-K classes at Porter-Leath. “I don’t know what my children would have been like if they did not have that benefit, where they would be in terms of performance. There’s a lot of disparity here with our children. Fortunately for me, my children have benefited.”

Memphis mayor endorses pre-K investments as City Council plans vote

2017-12-06T00:39:07+00:00

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said Tuesday that his administration supports investing in pre-K programs that the city stands to lose with the expiration of a major federal grant in 2019.

Meanwhile, the City Council’s executive committee recommended approving a resolution that would commit Memphis to coming up with at least $8 million to fill the gap.

At issue are at least 1,000 pre-K seats in classrooms serving mostly low-income families. Strickland said the seats could mean the difference in children developing the reading skills they need by third grade to be successful in school.

“The limited funds that our community has for pre-K is showing real success for those students who are participating,” he told council members. “I’m looking forward to identifying what city funds we can contribute to quality pre-K. It can truly be a game changer not only for these individual students but the entire community.”

The council likely will vote Dec. 19 on the resolution. If it’s approved, the city would have until next April to determine a funding source as part of its new budget. Raising the hotel-motel tax has been floated as one idea, but that option wasn’t discussed on Tuesday.

READ: Will pre-K put the city of Memphis back in the education business?

Contributing to early childhood education programs would mark the city’s first major new investment in Memphis classrooms since 2013 when city and county school systems merged. Shelby County government has since carried the load on funding Memphis schools, including contributing $3 million to pre-K programs. The void has sparked frequent gripes from county and community leaders asking when the city will pony up for public education again.

Several council members expressed concern about the resolution’s lack of specifics on funding, even as they heralded the benefits of pre-K.

Councilman Martavius Jones brought up the challenges of sustained funding as city councils come and go, while Councilman Worth Morgan expressed concern about the quality of education that pre-K students will get eventually as grade-schoolers.

“My biggest concern is the … continuity once students get to the K-3 system,” Morgan said. “More than a promise, we need a real commitment from Shelby County Schools that if a child comes through our high-quality pre-K, they won’t regress or fade out.”

Morgan’s comments echoed concerns prompted by a five-year Vanderbilt University study about the quality of Tennessee’s public pre-K program. The study, released in 2015, found that children who participated benefitted significantly at first, but that those benefits faded out by the third grade. Researchers suggested that one reason might be the quality of education those students receive once they get to first grade and beyond.

You can read the council’s resolution in full below:

Will pre-K put the city of Memphis back in the education business?

2017-12-01T15:21:52+00:00

For the first time since the city of Memphis ceased funding schools after the historic merger of city and county districts, it’s looking into getting back into public education — by putting dollars into pre-K classrooms.

Several members of the City Council say they will introduce a resolution next week to support expanding pre-K in Memphis. The measure does not provide a funding stream for the multimillion-dollar proposal, but essentially commits to finding a way to come up with the money.

“We’re introducing a resolution Tuesday stating why we need to fund pre-K, why Memphis should be at the table,” said Councilman Kemp Conrad.

Last month, Conrad spoke about a potential hotel-motel tax increase to pay for free, need-based pre-K. On Wednesday, he said such a tax won’t be part of the resolution.

“That’s one option, but we want to hear more,” he told Chalkbeat. The resolution, he added, “is saying that we’re committing to figure out how to do this.”

Council members Patrice Robinson and Berlin Boyd are also on board with the proposal. If passed, the resolution would commit the council to securing at least $8 million to pay for about 1,000 pre-K seats that would be eliminated after a federal grant expires in 2019. Currently, about 7,420 of the city’s 4-year-olds attend a free pre-K class.

Approving the resolution would demonstrate a shift in thinking about the city’s willingness to invest in public education. The city has not directly contributed to Memphis classrooms since ceasing funding for Shelby County Schools following the 2013 merger.

The discussion also comes at a time of growing agreement among education, government and philanthropic leaders that both Memphis and the entire state of Tennessee will never be able to address its reading gaps without a major emphasis on early childhood education.

A 2017 billboard campaign, paid for by Stand for Children, highlighted frustration among city, county and school leaders over education funding in Memphis.

The city’s decision to stop funding local schools made Shelby County government the primary funder and sparked frequent complaints from county officials that the city isn’t carrying its weight. One commissioner, Terry Roland, has even compared the city to a “deadbeat dad.” (The county now contributes $3 million a year to pre-K classrooms.)

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who took office in 2016, has been a proponent of pre-K investments and spoke in favor of universal pre-K on the campaign trail.

Conrad and Robinson said their resolution provides a gateway to get the city back into the business of education.

“I was on the (school board) in 2003, and then we were looking into what we could do to support pre-K,” Robinson said. “It’s almost 2018, and we haven’t done anything, and children’s lives are being impacted daily. We’re not in the education business, but those children are still our constituents.”

Council members have been working closely with Seeding Success, the Memphis member of StriveTogether, a national initiative focusing on “cradle to career” education. The group is partnering with other local organizations to create an early childhood education plan for Memphis aimed at full funding for needs-based pre-K.

Seeding Success is most concerned about filling the gap that looms with the 2019 expiration of an $8 million federal grant. Executive Director Mark Sturgis said his organization is serving as the “quarterback” of local efforts to recruit and braid together funding to cover the loss — and even expand pre-K.

Seeding Success worked with Conrad on the possible hotel-motel tax but is open to other ideas.

“Come 2019, we don’t want to tell 1,000 4-year-olds that we don’t have space for them,” Sturgis said. “That’s priority No. 1. Priority No. 2 is filling the gap so all children who need a pre-K seat have one.”

That means that, besides the impending funding gap of $8 million, Seeding Success hopes to secure $8.6 million more to fund a thousand additional pre-K seats. Those investments would bring Shelby County’s pre-K reach to 8,500 children.

Seeding Success is also looking for philanthropic help.

“We’re all getting to a place where we can think more strategically about how county and city government invest in this opportunity, which will invest in their workforce development in the long run,” Sturgis said. “Philanthropy has been a driver behind our early childhood plan. … We might look to a system where philanthropy matches civic dollars.”

You can read the full proposal by Seeding Success below:

How a Memphis pre-K giant is changing the way early childhood educators are taught

2017-10-18T19:25:32+00:00

Morgan Bradley thought that teaching children at her church’s Sunday school would have prepared her to work in early childhood education.

But the recent college graduate was shocked by all she learned at a recent training at Porter-Leath’s new Early Childhood Academy.

“I thought I knew how to work with little kids, but I didn’t know how much a child’s brain develops during those years before kindergarten,” said Bradley, who will be helping in a Head Start classroom through AmeriCorps. “I’m realizing now how necessary good teaching in pre-K is to getting a baby ready for kindergarten, especially when it comes to using my words to build a child’s vocabulary.”

Bradley is one of more than 500 educators who will go through Porter-Leath’s training this year in an effort to boost the quality of early education instruction in Memphis. Porter-Leath is the city’s largest provider of early childhood education and has a partnership with Shelby County Schools for Head Start and other services, including training.

The program comes as Tennessee grapples with a low literacy rate and mixed quality of early education programs. Education Commissioner Candice McQueen has emphasized the need for better early childhood education across the state for Tennessee to improve as a whole.

Porter-Leath’s trainings are held almost monthly and revolve around four tenets: socio-emotional learning; literacy; health; and STEAM, or science, technology, engineering, art and math.

The socio-emotional and literacy pieces are what make the program different from usual professional development for early educators, said Rafel Hart, vice president of teacher excellence for Porter-Leath and the training program’s leader.

“When we think about professional development in early childhood, we think about training on CPR and first aid,” he said. “That’s important, but Teacher Excellence focuses on classroom practices. How do we make our quality of instruction better?”

A Memphis organization since 1850, Porter-Leath serves about 6,000 children in its preschool program and employs 670 people. It serves students in some of Memphis’ poorest neighborhoods who may be dealing with the trauma of food or home insecurity at early ages. This makes training teachers in socioemotional learning especially crucial, said Hart.

Porter-Leath’s program draws from organizations like Acknowledge Alliance that trains teachers to help students regulate their emotions and learn self-awareness.

AmeriCorps members who will work in Porter-Leath classrooms are among more than 500 educators to go through the training.

“I’ve been in early childhood for 25 years, and socioemotional learning is rarely used,” Hart said. “That’s a tragic mistake we’re correcting. Students can’t grow to develop strong academics if their emotional health isn’t growing first.”

All new Porter-Leath and Shelby County Schools early childhood educators will go through this training, but it’s also open to and encouraged for longtime teachers.

Kelly Thieme, a former literacy specialist and now Porter Leath instructional coach, is especially excited to see the focus on literacy.

“A lot of people don’t understand literacy starts from birth, and speaking to children makes reading and literacy easier,” she said. “We go through current research on how young children learn to read. To me, this helps us and others understand that we’re not just babysitters; it helps us professionalize our profession.”

Memphis early education giant merges with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library affiliate

2017-10-02T21:23:00+00:00

If Memphis is going to help its children become better readers, it needs to get books into their hands as early as possible.

That’s the thinking behind the newly announced merger of Shelby County Books from Birth with Porter-Leath, the city’s leading provider of early childhood education for children in low-income areas.

Since 2005, Books from Birth has distributed free books to children up to age 5 as the Shelby County affiliate of entertainer Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Under an agreement finalized late last week, the program will now live under Porter-Leath, a nonprofit organization that oversees Head Start classrooms and wraparound services in partnership with Shelby County Schools.

The merger marks a concerted effort by Porter-Leath to move literacy education beyond the classroom by giving parents the tools they need to be their child’s first teachers. It also should expand the reach of the book delivery service in one of the state’s highest-poverty counties.

State and local leaders increasingly view better early education programs as key to higher rates of literacy in Shelby County Schools, where less than a third of third-graders are reading on grade level.

“(Books from Birth) will help us drive home the literacy lessons were making in the classroom,” said Rob Hughes, Porter-Leath’s vice president of development. “We want our students reading on grade level in kindergarten, so that they grow to be on grade level in elementary school, so they have a better chance of graduating high school. We see this a key piece of that strategy.”

Porter-Leath serves about 6,000 annually in 300 early childhood classrooms, and all of its children will now be enrolled in the Books from Birth home delivery program.

Read how Porter-Leath is seeking to up the quality of pre-K instruction in Memphis.

Through Porter-Leath, the group’s leaders hope to expand monthly book deliveries beyond 46,000 children, or 70 percent of pre-K children in Shelby County. (Memphis has a high rate of mobility, making it difficult to keep track of and serve youngsters.)

“It’s always been a challenge to keep families enrolled, and this partnership helps us really support the families that Porter-Leath serves,” said Jamila Wicks, executive director of Books from Birth. “We can better reach parents where they are.”

Tennessee wants to boost third-grade literacy. Here’s why it’s looking to early childhood education as the answer.

2017-08-18T03:05:34+00:00

Calling reading the “equity issue of our time,” Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said Thursday that Tennessee will increase its literacy rates when it improves the quality of its early education programs.

The state has been waging war on illiteracy for years but is zeroing in on pre-K and other early education programs as the best vehicles to get 75 percent its third-graders reading on grade level by 2025. Currently less than half of its students are there.

Beginning this year, the state attached more strings for local districts to receive pre-K funding, tying the amount received to the quality of programming instead of the volume of students.

But McQueen said the state still has a lot to learn about developing young readers, and data is key.

“Before kids get to third grade, we have very little information statewide with whether or not those students are on track,” McQueen said. “We have very little data statewide to know where we should be putting investments.”

The state is seeking to fill that void by working with local leaders to better track its youngest students to determine what’s working best. In Memphis, Porter-Leath is taking the lead in that effort. The nonprofit organization opened a major pre-K center this year to serve as a teacher training hub to bolster the quality of all of the city’s pre-K classrooms.

From left: Sandra Allen of LeBonheur Center for Children and Parents, Rafel Hart of Porter-Leath, Sharon Griffin of Shelby County Schools, and Education Commissioner Candice McQueen.

McQueen was part of an early reading panel discussion hosted in Memphis by Tennesseans for Quality Early Education and the PeopleFirst Partnership. The event featured Shelby County Chief of Schools Sharon Griffin, state Rep. Mark White, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and Tennessee first lady Crissy Haslam, who has championed literacy during her husband’s administration.

Since launching its Read to be Ready initiative last year, Tennessee has invested $30 million in summer reading camps and another $4.2 million in a coaching network to support teachers with literacy instruction.

The stakes are high because reading is foundational to lifelong learning — and is critical to closing the achievement gap.

“When kids are not reading on grade level by third grade, they are four times less likely graduate high school,” McQueen said. “Kids scoring in the lowest proficiency level on literacy almost never catch up. Guess who is in that bottom level? Students who are African American. Students who are Latino. Students with disabilities. Students who are English language learners.”

With clock ticking on federal pre-K grant, districts in Shelby County and Nashville explore next steps

2017-06-29T23:28:21+00:00

Tennessee’s elation at winning a $70 million federal grant to expand pre-K offerings in Memphis and Nashville is now being tempered by the realization that the four-year grant will run out all too soon.

The funds used to pay for dozens of new pre-K classrooms began flowing into five school districts in 2015 and will end in May of 2019.

How to sustain the expansion in Greater Memphis was on the minds of school leaders and pre-K advocates who gathered Wednesday for the second annual Shelby County Pre-K Summit.

Calling pre-K “one of the biggest economic investment opportunities we have,” Shelby County Schools Superintendent Dorsey Hopson said early childhood programs must be a priority.

“In order for us to create an educational system where our most fragile constituents can change their circumstances in life, we’ve gotta make sure that we’re giving them a better opportunity in our district and it starts with pre-K,” he told about 50 people at the summit.

Announced in 2014, the grant from the U.S. Department of Education was a huge win for Tennessee as Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration sought to grow and build a public pre-K program that began under a 2005 state law.

Shelby County Schools was among five needy districts chosen as recipients because of its commitment to developing and funding high-quality programming for their youngest children. The others were Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, the state-run Achievement School District, and districts in the suburban Shelby County towns of Bartlett and Millington.

The money has added 50 pre-K classrooms in Shelby County and four pre-K centers in Nashville.

Nashville school officials already have begun to develop a strategy to sustain the investments after 2019. At the city’s early education summit last week, Director Shawn Joseph said the district is working to shift money to allow the expansions to continue.

Hopson asked the crowd Wednesday to advocate for ways to sustain expansions in Memphis too — work that he said is key to the success of both the district and the city.

“When you think about correlations between poverty and poor student outcome, our babies who are living in poverty situations through no fault of their own … need to have the early start that it takes so that they can enter kindergarten ready,” Hopson said.

Research shows that disadvantaged young children who participate in high-quality pre-K enter school are more ready to learn than their peers, while also contributing to their success in adulthood.

The quality of Tennessee’s pre-K programs has come under a microscope following the 2015 release of a five-year Vanderbilt University study showing that students who participated saw the effects dissipate by first grade — and even turn negative compared to students who didn’t participate in the program. The researchers suggested that quality might be the issue, and the state has been working ever since to up its game.

The federal grant has been significant in Memphis, which has a high concentration of low-income students and low-performing schools. It now pays for 13 percent of pre-K programs for about 6,500 children in Shelby County. Each classroom costs about $160,000 annually to operate. The county’s long-term goal is for every 4-year-old who needs pre-K to have access to a high-quality seat.

For the first time, Tennessee awards pre-K funding based on quality, not quantity

2017-05-31T10:00:21+00:00

Tennessee will spread $84 million in state funding across more than 900 pre-K classrooms next school year under a new awards process designed to incentivize the quality of programming over volume of students.

The awards, announced Tuesday by the State Department of Education, will go to nearly 95 percent of the state’s 146 districts to serve at-risk 4-year-olds.

The competitive process marks a major shift aimed at tying state funding to quality for Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program. In a landmark study released in 2015, the program came under fire by researchers of Vanderbilt University who found it mostly ineffective.

“High-quality early learning opportunities are one of the best investments we can make in our kids,” Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said in a statement. “We want to ensure we are supporting strong early learning opportunities for our students with the greatest need, and that is reflected in the updated application process and in these grantees.”

For Tennessee’s largest school district in Memphis, the new investments will mean about $10 million for 112 pre-K classrooms in Shelby County Schools.

The full list of funding and districts statewide is here for 2017-18.

Tennessee’s public pre-K program launched in 2005 with the goal of helping students from low-income families start kindergarten on an equal footing with their more affluent peers. But the Vanderbilt study shocked pre-K advocates with findings that the program’s benefits actually faded by the second grade. State lawmakers responded in 2016 with a law that, among other things, put the onus on local districts to address some of the findings.

As part of the overhaul, the Tennessee Department of Education created a new funding application that asked districts for details about standards such as curriculum and how they’ll structure their days to maximize student engagement and learning.

Districts that received funding for next year also will adhere to the state’s first pre-K evaluation system to determine teacher effectiveness.

McQueen wants to prevent non-tested early grades from becoming a dumping ground for weaker teachers

2017-04-18T22:27:38+00:00

The temptation for principals to place their best teachers in grades with high-stakes testing has Education Commissioner Candice McQueen concerned about the quality of teaching in Tennessee’s earliest grades.

Like other states, Tennessee doesn’t mandate testing until the third grade, when student scores are used to begin gauging the performance of students, teachers, schools and entire districts.

McQueen says local administrators are learning the hard way that reassigning lower-performing elementary school teachers to non-tested grades doesn’t help their students get the foundation they need for lifelong learning, a charge backed up by research from Vanderbilt University.

“They would say … since we’re starting our value-added measure, starting our work around teacher evaluation, starting how we look at districts at third grade, they made some poor decisions about who they were putting in their kindergarten, first, and second grade classrooms, and pre-K,” she said Monday during a panel discussion about prekindergarten at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.

The fix? Next school year, Tennessee will require its pre-K programs to evaluate teachers using “growth portfolio models,” which are based on samples of student work. The evaluations will help teachers identify their own strengths and weaknesses, and guide professional development. The state already has piloted portfolio models for kindergarten and first-grade teachers.

“All of our pre-K and kindergarten teachers in 97 percent of our districts will be going through a portfolio growth model that will allow us to actually look at effectiveness of our pre-K and kindergarten teachers,” she said.

McQueen isn’t the only Tennessee education leader seeking to address concerns around early education instruction. Sharon Griffin, Shelby County’s chief of schools, says pressures around testing have long warped teacher placement priorities in her district.

“I will be very honest and transparent,” Griffin told local school board members earlier this month. “There was once upon a time that when the test was only grades 3 through 12, we put the least effective teachers in K-2. We can’t do that anymore. We’re killing third grade and then we have students who get in third grade whose challenges are so great, they never ever catch up — because three years with an ineffective teacher is hard for you to catch up.”

The new teacher evaluation system is one of many changes around early education that the state is making with the support of researchers at Vanderbilt University. The changes are in response to a 2015 study that found the benefits of the state’s public pre-K program faded by second grade.

Tennessee lawmakers vote to leave pre-K alone this year

2017-03-24T19:57:36+00:00

Ever since Tennessee started its public pre-kindergarten program in 2005, Rep. Bill Dunn has questioned whether it’s money well spent.

His skepticism seemed vindicated in 2015, when a landmark five-year study by Vanderbilt University found that children who participated in Tennessee’s program didn’t make sustainable academic gains. In fact, they fell behind their peers by third grade.

The legislature responded to the study’s surprising results last year with a new law designed to strengthen Tennessee’s pre-K program.

Rep. Bill Dunn

This year, Dunn proposed allowing districts to spend their pre-K money elsewhere. But his bill was killed on Wednesday in the House by colleagues who said they want to give new changes to public pre-K more time to work.

“I’m shocked,” said Dunn, a Republican from Knoxville, of the decision by the Instruction and Programs subcommittee. “This is coming across as anti pre-K, but it’s really anti-bad results.”

Dunn’s bill would have piloted a program to allow five districts to come up with other ways to spend their pre-K money — for instance, making kindergarten classes the smaller. The Tennessee Department of Education would have to approve any change and monitor the impact on student achievement.

But lawmakers said they aren’t ready to meddle with early education while it’s in transition.

“I personally would like to see what comes from those changes … before we do anything else,” said Rep. John Forgety, a Republican from Athens.

The State Department of Education recently overhauled its application for local districts to receive pre-K money according to best practices identified by Vanderbilt researchers. Those changes are an effort to tie funding to quality.

The new applications, which seek state funding for next school year, are due to the state in April, and district officials have been attending trainings as part of the transition.

Tennessee’s pre-K wasn’t working, a 2015 study found. Now the state is putting new focus on teaching.

2017-02-27T23:29:30+00:00

Catalyzed by a landmark study showing its public prekindergarten program is ineffective, the Tennessee Department of Education is tying funding to quality and evaluating teachers as part of a sweeping overhaul.

The changes are in response to a Vanderbilt University study that showed the benefits of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program faded by the second grade — and that students who attended eventually performed worse than their peers. The state department has since been exploring how to improve the quality of pre-K classrooms while staying true to 2005 initiative’s original goal: helping students from low-income families start kindergarten on an equal footing with their more affluent peers.

“We know the findings from the 2015 Vanderbilt study are real, and we’ve got to take those study findings seriously,” Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said last week. “We have made changes to the VPK application to focus on quality and ensure we are funding programs that are high quality and serving students who most need this strong start.”

The state won’t change its $86 million in funding for Voluntary Pre-K, and the goal of the overhaul isn’t to cut programs. Department officials hope that revamping how districts can access the money will push them to improve their pre-K practices. Before, distribution was based on how many students were served by districts; from now on, it will be based on a rigorous application process.

The state also has hired an assistant commissioner to oversee early education and literacy, part of Tennessee’s priority to improve the reading skills of its youngest readers.

The study’s surprising results shook the nation’s pre-K community and prompted concerns from Tennessee pre-K advocates that state lawmakers might even scrap state funding for pre-K. Instead, state officials heeded the urgings of Vanderbilt’s researchers to look into quality. While the program wasn’t working as a whole, some districts were getting pre-K right, according to Vanderbilt’s Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey.

For instance, more successful programs limit whole-class instruction and focus on hands-on learning so that students stay engaged throughout the day. Meanwhile, less effective ones have their students spending a lot of time switching locations or waiting in line for the bathroom. That takes away from learning time.

The new application for state funding asks districts for details about curriculum and how they’ll structure their days to maximize student engagement and learning. It also asks that localized plans be developed for getting parents and families involved in their child’s pre-K experience. Research shows that parental involvement, like reading to students at home and attending parent-teacher conference, helps students be more successful at school.

“The Vanderbilt report has opened our eyes to (what programs need),” said Candace Cook, who directs Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program. “We’re focusing on what we can do to better serve our children.”

The new application, which seeks funding for the 2017-18 school year, is due in April. District officials have been attending trainings this month to understand what the state is looking for, and why.

“We are currently … meeting with VPK directors to go through these changes in detail and provide them with tools and resources,” said Elizabeth Alves, the state’s newly hired assistant commissioner of early education and literacy.

Districts also are being asked to take a harder look at which students enroll in their pre-K classrooms. Vanderbilt researchers found that nearly 20 percent of students statewide did not meet the state’s high-needs criteria.

“We have been really trying to advocate for using this (state) money in the way it was intended, which is to serve low-income pre-K students,” Cook said.

The pre-K evaluation system is Tennessee’s first. It goes into effect next school year for pre-K and kindergarten teachers as part of the 2016 Pre-K Quality Act, and will use videos and portfolios of student work in reading, language, counting and shapes to determine teachers’ effectiveness. The state already has developed a similar model for evaluating first-grade teachers, as well as teachers of fine arts and foreign language.

Ultimately, McQueen says the tool should help district administrators and the Department of Education figure out how to better support pre-K teachers.

“We’ve not had the ability to really dig into the effectiveness of our (pre-K) teachers,” she said. “The intent of portfolios … have really been about making sure that we are training and educating our teachers.”

Tennessee’s pre-K wasn’t working, a 2015 study found. Now the state is putting new focus on teaching.

2017-02-27T23:29:30+00:00

The state also has hired an assistant commissioner to oversee early education and literacy, part of Tennessee’s priority to improve the reading skills of its youngest readers.

“We have been really trying to advocate for using this (state) money in the way it was intended, which is to serve low-income pre-K students,” Cook said.

Ultimately, McQueen says the tool should help district administrators and the Department of Education figure out how to better support pre-K teachers.

Memphis is about to open a major pre-K center. Advocates hope it’s just the start.

2017-02-09T15:20:09+00:00

Even the hallway walls of Memphis’ glowing new pre-K center are designed to engage 4-year-olds. Rows of textured blue grooves, symbolizing the city’s mighty Mississippi River, beg to be touched.

Classroom windows are positioned at eye level for small children to peek through. And an array of sturdy new props supports an environment for both learning and play.

Porter-Leath’s new Early Childhood Academy will open Friday as the first of its kind in Memphis. With 32,000 square feet of space developed with $9 million in private funding, the center will serve some 220 kids through Head Start, a federally funded program for the nation’s poorest children.

But equally important, the South Memphis center will become a hub of teacher training in an effort to bolster the quality of all of the city’s pre-K classrooms.

Porter-Leath serves children 5 and under in Head Start classrooms.

Porter-Leath has served the city’s poorest children since its founding in 1850 as an orphanage. Its offices are in the former orphanage building on land donated by Sarah Leath, a widow and mother who took the lead in organizing the charity. Today, the nonprofit organization has emerged as the lead provider of early childhood education in Memphis. In partnership with Shelby County Schools, it provides Head Start classrooms across the city and wraparound services such as special education screenings and health care.

Pre-K advocates are calling the new academy — and especially its focus on training quality pre-K teachers — unlike anything else in Tennessee.

How to define and measure “quality” pre-K has been a source of debate, especially since a Vanderbilt University study concluded in 2015 that academic gains achieved by students in Tennessee pre-K classrooms flickered out by third grade. The surprising findings prompted a reexamination of the quality of early learning programs across Tennessee, and state lawmakers responded by passing a 2016 law designed to improve pre-K classrooms.

The new Memphis academy represents a major investment by Porter-Leath and its supporters to determine what practices are most effective in its own classrooms and to share those lessons across the city through teacher trainings. Speakers and highly ranked teachers will be brought in to share their expertise.

An observation room allows teachers in training to peek into a classroom.

“Thanks to the classroom observation rooms, educators who just came from a seminar will be able to see that skill they just learned about in action,” said Rob Hugh, the organization’s development director. “Before they leave, they will have to go into the classroom and practice for themselves. We see this as a chance to raise the quality of our staff and the staffs of daycares throughout the city.”

Porter-Leath will provide “relief teachers” for those who can’t afford a substitute to encourage Memphis daycare operators to let their teachers take advantage of the training.

Tennessee has a three-star evaluation system for early childhood providers, but it focuses more on safety and health than quality of instruction, said Daphanie Swift, early childhood director at PeopleFirst Partnership, a coalition of business, government, academic and civic leaders.

“The vast number of child care providers in the city have a long way to go with providing quality education,” Swift said. “This new training academy is a new concept for early childhood, and we hope will raise the bar for rigor in instruction.”

Hughes said all of Porter-Leath’s 300 classrooms across the city, which serve almost 6,000 students a year, have three stars. However, only 15 classrooms reach the level of instructional quality required to be accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which Porter-Leath views as the gold standard.

A worker assembles toys at the new academy.

The 16 classrooms added under Porter-Leath’s new academy are significant as the city searches to provide more pre-K seats, especially in low-income areas.

The academy is located next to Alton Elementary School, a strategic move. The hope is that its pre-K students will feed the Shelby County school, which serves one of Memphis’ poorest zip codes.

Memphis has a shortage of quality pre-K seats, and the academy already has a wait list of 144 families. Estimates of how many income-eligible children lack access to quality pre-K range from 2,200 to 5,000.

Swift said that PeopleFirst Partnership will continue to push for more quality pre-K seats — and philanthropic support to pay for them. The coalition organized a pre-K summit last summer to discuss what impact a recent $70 million federal grant has made on Memphis pre-K so far.

“I think a light bulb has finally come on in the city that pre-K is a needed investment,” Swift said. “We have to pay attention to those critical years of 0-5. So much of what we’re trying to address, from crime to low third-grade reading levels, can be warned against in those early years.”

North Carolina just countered Tennessee’s findings on pre-K fadeout. Here’s the difference, according to researchers.

2016-11-16T23:07:58+00:00

A new study suggests that Tennessee might want to up spending and look toward its neighbor to the east if it wants to get prekindergarten right.

This week, Duke University released research showing that North Carolina’s investment in public pre-K programs led to better outcomes for its students. Its researchers found that the positive effects — including higher test scores, less grade retention, and fewer special education placements — grew or held steady over the years.

At first glance, the findings seem to contradict those released last year by Vanderbilt University researchers about Tennessee’s public pre-K programs. That study’s authors concluded that by third grade, the students who attended pre-K actually fared worse academically, calling into question how much return states and communities can expect from their investments in early childhood education.

“Money does matter,” said Helen “Sunny” Ladd, a co-author of the Duke study. “It’s important that (it’s) used well. But if something is important, like preschool, it seems to make sense to spend money on it and keep improving it.”

In fact, the Duke results echo what Vanderbilt researchers Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey have said all along: that pre-K’s promise can only be realized if programs are high-quality and work in tandem with other parts of the education system. They theorized that a lack of support before children turn 4, as well as the low-performing elementary schools that those children attend after pre-K, might be to blame for the Tennessee’s program’s disappointing results.

The Duke study looked at more than 1 million North Carolina public school students born between 1988 and 2000, and how their counties funded two early education programs: Smart Start, which focused on ensuring that infants through 4-year-olds entered school healthy and ready to learn, and More at Four, a pre-K program.

By the end of fifth grade, children living in counties with average levels of early education funding saw a gain of more than six months of reading instruction and more than three months of math instruction, regardless of poverty level. The children also had significantly higher mean math and reading scores in grades three, four and five, and their odds of needing special education during elementary school were lower.

Ladd said several factors might put alumni of North Carolina’s pre-K programs at an advantage: Smart Start served as a foundation for pre-K, and North Carolina historically has had higher-performing elementary schools than Tennessee, which might help sustain pre-K gains. Tennessee also spends about $500 less than North Carolina per pre-K student, up to $10,000 less per classroom.

“The effectiveness of preschool undoubtedly depends both on what happens before and what happens after,” Ladd said, adding that it was impossible to separate out the effects of Smart Start on North Carolina students.

“There’s evidence from lots of studies across the country that preschool is important,” she said. “What the Tennessee study suggests is that maybe Tennessee needs to keep working on their program.”

Spending more on pre-K doesn’t guarantee success, say Vanderbilt researchers

2016-10-26T20:18:44+00:00

Researchers at Vanderbilt University are using Tennessee as a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation to pause before expanding pre-kindergarten programs.

In their landmark study released last year, Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey found that academic gains achieved by students in Tennessee pre-K classrooms flickered out by third grade. In their new report, published by Behavioral Science & Policy Journal, the authors share similar challenges they’ve observed in other states’ pre-K programs.

“The idea that a year of pre-K can close the achievement gap for at-risk children is appealing to policymakers, school administrators, businessmen and law enforcement officials, but this kind of magical thinking doesn’t benefit children,” said Farran, a professor at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education. “Expansions are being conducted without much attention to the question of how to design and support those programs so they are effective.”

The researchers cited inconsistent curriculum implementation and teacher quality as contributors to the fade-out, as well as lack of supports for the children when they reached the second and third grade. All children in the study were from low-income families.

Successful pre-K programs held up as exemplars are generally expensive, and states shouldn’t expect to replicate their results without making big investments, the researchers argue.

"Expansions are being conducted without much attention to the question of how to design and support those programs so they are effective."

Dale Farran, researcher

Farran and Lipsey still believe in early childhood education. They just argue against thinking pre-K in itself is a silver bullet. It needs to be supported and include research-based practices, they say.

They also note that positive evaluations of state pre-K programs frequently stem from examinations conducted or commissioned by the departments charged with their oversight.

“If the (evaluators) adopted a more critical approach, the reports policymakers base their decisions on would be more forthright about the limitations of the studies and less rosy about their conclusions,” said Lipsey, research professor at Peabody Research Institute. “They would also acknowledge the considerable difficulty of implementing an effective program at scale and avoid claiming or implying that scale-up had been successfully accomplished.”

You can read about the researchers’ collaboration with Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools here, and see their new study here.

Want to reduce suspensions and expulsions in pre-K? Find a coach.

2016-09-28T14:49:54+00:00

Pre-schoolers might be tiny, but they get suspended and expelled in big numbers.

Now, a new study suggests that even for teachers who want to shift that dynamic, real change only happens with real training.

The study, from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education, looked at what happened in Nashville and Tampa when teachers there learned about a new preschool discipline approach called the Pyramid Model.

They found that teachers who got 13 weeks of in-person and email feedback about their use of the new model changed their practices more — and reported better behavior among their students — than teachers who knew about the model but weren’t getting one-on-one support.

The finding comes as discipline for preschoolers comes under increased scrutiny. Nationally, preschoolers are suspended at three times the rate of older children — a discrepancy that raises questions about whether preschool teachers are equipped to handle behavior typical of young children.

It’s hard to say if students actually behave better when their teachers are trained more, or if teachers just perceive students’ behavior differently, said Mary Louise Hemmeter, the researcher who led the study. But she said it’s progress either way.

“We have to support teachers as a way to really see [misbehavior] as an opportunity to teach,” she said. “When he bites, he wants attention. How can I give him attention in a meaningful way? When he takes a toy, he wants to play. How do we help him do that in a [better] way?”

Hemmeter said this kind of training can also help the teachers challenge their own assumptions at a time when students of color are suspended and expelled at far higher rates than their white classmates. Another new study found that implicit racial biases among preschool teachers could be fueling that discrepancy.

Under the Pyramid Model, “We say, ‘This child kicked another child five times,’ rather than ‘This child was defiant or aggressive,’” Hemmeter said. “When we start labeling behaviors, that’s when our biases kick in.”

Intensive coaching isn’t easy at many preschools, where resources are often thin. Hemmeter said her team is looking at other ways to give preschool teachers a hand in curbing suspensions and expulsions. But she cautioned that a single workshop is unlikely to make a lasting difference.

“That’s really not how you get people to implement effective practices,” she said. “You need support on an ongoing basis to really effect change.”

In latest effort to combat lagging literacy rates, Tennessee launches reading coach network

2016-09-27T02:39:28+00:00

The next step in Tennessee’s ambitious literacy plan is a statewide game of telephone to get teachers fluent in strategies that research says will help their students read better.

Two hundred reading coaches from across the state will participate in a new coaching network, the Department of Education announced Monday. Then they’ll take what they learn during the three-year training program to more than 3,000 teachers in two-thirds of the state’s 146 school districts, including Shelby County Schools.

The initiative is the latest step in the state’s seven-month old “Read to Be Ready” campaign, which Education Commissioner Candice McQueen announced last summer and officially launched in February. The initiative’s goal is to get 75 percent of Tennessee third-graders reading on grade level by 2025, compared to 43 percent in 2015.

The legislature set aside $9 million in this year’s budget to train the reading coaches over three years, enough money for each district to send up to five coaches to the state trainings. Districts are responsible for paying the coaches’ salaries, but many have already been investing in the positions. Eighty percent of Tennessee districts added reading coach positions last school year.

Some of the 200 coaches in the coaching network are new, but others are being retrained using current research and success stories from classrooms across Tennessee.

Throughout the three years, coaches, and in turn, teachers, will focus on how to teach a specific reading skill, such as reading aloud, for a semester. Officials hope that going in-depth on six specific skills will help teachers actually change what they do in the classroom and understand research on effective literacy instruction.

“Teaching students to read empowers them to take charge of their education,” McQueen said in a press release. “Reading is foundational to a student’s academic success and by cultivating the skills and desire to read we can develop them into deeper thinkers, problem-solvers, lifelong learners, and future leaders of Tennessee.”

What Tennessee’s decision to pull out of a social-emotional learning collaborative means

2016-09-13T00:06:49+00:00

Social-emotional skills are what enable people to calm down when they’re upset, persist when a task is hard, feel empathy in situations needing compassion, and have positive relationships when working with others — all qualities that teachers have nurtured for years in their students.

But when Tennessee was tapped in August to become a national pioneer in developing social-emotional to standards for its students, a firestorm reminiscent of the Common Core pushback erupted, with some criticizing the initiative as a national program to have public school children taught how they should feel.

Last week, the State Department of Education, which had gotten an earful from state lawmakers responding to concerns from some of their constituents, confirmed it pulled out of the multi-state initiative designed to help teachers support students’ emotional well-being. A spokeswoman cited concerns about transparency and the project’s one-year timeline.

The decision means Tennessee will continue the work on social-emotional skills — but without the collaboration of education leaders in seven other states and without the “standards” label. Instead, the state’s calling the guidelines “competencies.”

The pullout also means that the other states in the initiative — California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Washington — won’t get the benefit of collaborating with Tennessee in the area of social-emotional learning, according to leaders of CASEL, which had selected the states from a field of about 20.

“I can tell you the Tennessee’s application was great,” said Roger Weissberg, chief knowledge officer for the Chicago-based nonprofit organization. “I think they would have contributed a lot to others, and I think others would have contributed a lot for them. … We’d always be excited to work with them.”

CASEL formed in 1994, initially as a scientific research organization delving into what effective programs to support kids’ social and emotional growth look like and how they impact academics. Research shows that boosting social-emotional skills help kids succeed in school. (The organization’s funders can be found here.)

In 2001, the group began working directly with school districts across the nation to help implement such programs, and in 2003 helped Illinois become the first state to develop statewide standards in the area. Illinois’ standards have three goals: To help students develop self-awareness and self-management skills; to teach students how to establish and maintain positive relationships; and to demonstrate decision-making skills and responsible behaviors in personal, school and community contexts. Each standard includes benchmarks describing what students should know and be able to do according to their grade level

Now, all 50 states have social-emotional standards for early learning, and three states have them for all grades: Illinois, West Virginia and Kansas. (Here are Tennessee’s early learning standards.)

How schools use the standards varies a lot, Weissberg says. “They specify what kids should know and be able to do, and that provides guidance so teachers aren’t starting this work from scratch,” he said. “We’re not talking about a cookie-cutter approach. It’s scaffolding and support.”

Unlike academic standards, no state formally measures social-emotional growth, although that might change as the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new federal education law, goes into effect. ESSA requires states to evaluate schools based on non-academic measures as well as test scores.

Despite the variation in practice, results have been consistent. A 2014 analysis of districts and states with formal social-emotional learning programs found an 11 percent gain in achievement compared with schools without any programs.

This year, CASEL decided to dig more into state standards work and bring together eight states to share ideas and best practices, creating state-specific state standards by the end of the year. To date, 18 states, now excluding Tennessee, are involved somehow in the state standards project.

“Sometimes one group may have good ideas and the other might say, ‘That’s great. Can we see what you’ve done?’” Weissberg said. “We have a strong belief that collaboration and cooperation are good things among kids, educators, and states.”

Weissberg said other states will be watching what Tennessee does in developing social-emotional competencies. CASEL will also continue its work with Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, a partnership that began in 2012.

“We think there’s a lot of interest in Tennessee,” he said. “We’re always open to collaboration.”

Tennessee preschool selected as national model for fixing racial discipline gap

2016-08-22T18:45:05+00:00

A Nashville preschool will serve as a national model for how to address discriminatory school discipline practices.

Cambridge Early Learning Center, a pre-kindergarten program operated by Metro Nashville Public Schools, is one of two schools nationwide selected for $1 million grants from the Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, the U.S. Department of Education announced last week.

The preschool will partner with the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development to help pre-K teachers develop skills to support their students emotionally and prevent behavioral problems down the road. The other model early learning center is in Clifton, N.J.

The grant comes as education leaders in Memphis and Nashville try to figure out pre-K’s role in creating equal education opportunities for low-income kids of color. Shelby County Schools added nearly 300 pre-K seats this fall, but it’s not clear how effective its pre-K programs are at helping kids succeed in later grades.

Statewide, Tennessee is grappling with equity issues related to school discipline. The state has the largest discipline gap in the South, meaning that students of color, especially African-American students, are disproportionately suspended or expelled, beginning when students are as young as 4. The discipline gap contributes to achievement gaps because the more class time missed, the worse that kids do academically. It’s also key to the school-to-prison pipeline, which results in many black students ending up in the criminal justice system rather than in school.

The problem isn’t unique to Tennessee. Through My Brothers’ Keeper Initiative, President Barack Obama has asked all states to take a hard look at discipline practices and seek ways to eliminate suspensions and expulsions in preschool.

Will more pre-K seats mean better outcomes for kids in Shelby County? Depends who you ask.

2016-06-28T23:12:21+00:00

What has Tennessee’s recent $70 million federal pre-kindergarten grant bought so far?

About 280 new pre-K seats in four Shelby County districts this fall, to start, according to movers and shakers in the state’s early education world who tackled that question during a pre-K summit Tuesday in Memphis.

Local education officials are counting on pre-K as a way to ensure that students start kindergarten on the right track — even as a recent study questioning the effectiveness of Tennessee pre-K programs complicates that assumption.

Here’s the news that came out of this week’s summit — and the unsettling warning that a study’s lead researcher shared.

1. Shelby County will have 280 more kids in pre-K this year than last.

Last year, the expansion grant paid for dozens of new pre-K classes for the “Shelby County Consortium,” or Shelby County Schools, the state-run Achievement School District, Millington Municipal Schools and Bartlett City Schools. The four districts received $32 million of the grant, which will be given out over the course of four years. According to district officials, this year’s funding will allow:

Shelby County Schools to add seven classrooms, serving 140 students
The Achievement School District to add five classrooms with 100 students
Bartlett City Schools to add one pre-K site for 20 students
Millington Municipal Schools to add one site serving 20 students

Altogether, about 2,000 4-year-olds eligible for free pre-K in the county still don’t have access to early education, according to Lorri Jobe, executive director of the PeopleFirst Partnership, a coalition of business, government, academic and civic leaders that helped organize the forum.

2. Shelby County is leaning heavily on partners to make sure pre-K students don’t go hungry.

Pre-kindergarten isn’t just a time for children to get a first taste of school. It’s also a chance for the county to understand — and meet — some kids’ needs for the first time.

“Many of our children were hungry and underweight by a large extent,” said DeAnna McClendon, director of early childhood programs for Shelby County Schools. “There are so many issues we don’t know until we hear from parents. We’ve had parents say come to us and say things like their lights have been off or that they didn’t understand how important it was to brush their child’s teeth.”

Officials from the four districts said they are leaning heavily on nonprofit partners, including Porter-Leath, to provide support services that the districts cannot.

Those services can include mentoring and nutrition support and are known as “wraparound” or “comprehensive” services. Another way to look at nonprofit partners, McClendon said: as “an advocate for each family” in navigating out-of-school challenges.

Panelists (left to right): Kristy Ford of Bartlett, Jerri Jackson of Millington, DeAnna McClendon of Shelby County Schools and Katie McPherson of The Achievement School District.

“Many students that we see in kindergarten have never been to school anywhere before,” said Jerri Jackson, who heads support services for the Millington school district. “They are starting a disadvantage. [Comprehensive services] are trying to reach those families first.”

3. More bad news about the impact of pre-K programs could be coming.

Many speakers alluded to last year’s sobering Vanderbilt University study that suggested that public pre-K programs in Tennessee might actually negatively impact students as they advance through school. They said the study proved that more pre-K is only better if the quality of instruction is strong — exactly the conclusion that prompted state legislators to pass a law designed to improve Tennessee’s pre-K classrooms by requiring local districts to address some of the findings.

Dale Farran, the researcher who is leading the Vanderbilt project, said the “worst news” of the study was that at the end of second grade, children who didn’t have any preschool started to perform better than children who had. Now, she and her colleagues are reviewing the same children as fourth-graders.

“I can tell you that the preliminary data are suggesting that the kids who have been in pre-k are more anxious about themselves, they feel less conscientious, and report themselves as feeling as they have more problems,” she said.

Farran’s research team is also looking at the new pre-K classes being opened with the new federal funds. Researchers have visited 139 classes so far, she said, and what they’ve seen so far hasn’t inspired them.

“We should be expecting the same problem with sustained effects,” Farran said, “because the classroom practices we observed are very similar to the classroom practices we saw in the statewide pre-Ks.”

It’s “like the definition of being insane,” she said. “Why would we expect different outcomes?”

Six months after sobering study, bill to up pre-K quality heads to governor’s desk

2016-03-21T23:11:14+00:00

When Tennessee’s public pre-kindergarten program was found lacking last year in a nationally scrutinized study, advocates of early childhood education braced for a legislative agenda this year that might scrap the initiative.

Instead, lawmakers passed a bill Monday evening designed to make Tennessee’s pre-K classrooms stronger. The measure also would put the onus on local districts to address some of the findings of the Vanderbilt University study.

The House voted unanimously in favor of the bill, which was approved easily last week by the Senate. The legislation is expected to be signed by Gov. Bill Haslam, whose administration has cited pre-K as a significant strategy for closing the state’s achievement gap. The governor has allotted $1 million in his proposed budget to develop a screening tool to assess kindergarten readiness as part of the effort.

The vote is a victory for advocates of early childhood education, still reeling from the five-year Vanderbilt study released last September that found that students who attended Tennessee’s public pre-K program eventually did worse in elementary school than their peers who had no pre-K at all.

At the time, the study’s researchers said they hoped that the findings would lead to improvements in the quality of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program, rather than fuel efforts to end the state’s decade-old initiative.

Sponsors say the 2016 legislation aims to do just that. It will require local districts to develop plans for implementing certain “best practices” in pre-K classroom before they can receive state funds for pre-K, including offering “meaningful” professional development for teachers. The local plans also must show how the district would improve instructional alignment in pre-K classrooms with K-3 classrooms — cited by researchers as a possible reason for a drop-off in pre-K students’ academic performance by grade 3.

“We took that Vanderbilt study and said, ‘We need to improve what we’re doing,'” said Rep. Mark White of Memphis, one of the sponsors. “When a (district) makes an application to the state, we need to hold them to a higher standard.”

Lead Vanderbilt researcher Dale Farran said Monday that the bill is a “great thing,” but added that districts might struggle to develop local plans on their own.

“I’m not sure that districts will be able to give anything that’s genuine in response, because it’s so hard to do,” she said. “It’s certainly a great goal, but districts need help achieving it.”

The Vanderbilt research team has been working with Metro Nashville Public Schools to implement the best practices outlined in the bill — something that won’t be possible for every Tennessee district, she noted.

The researchers hope to release a document based on their work with Nashville to help guide other districts.

Before Monday’s vote, there was little debate in the House. But Rep. Bill Dunn of Knoxville, a frequent pre-K critic, spoke for 10 minutes on his concerns about the current state of Tennessee’s pre-K program. Other representatives, including Rep. Antonio Parkinson of Memphis, used the issue to urge the legislature to incorporate other Vanderbilt studies, including one on Tennessee’s Achievement School District, as the basis for future legislation.

Correction: March 28, 2016: The story has been corrected to reflect that the $1 million fiscal note was eliminated because Gov. Bill Haslam included $1 million for screening in his budget proposal.

Once seeking to scrap pre-K, Tennessee’s biggest pre-K critic votes to improve it

2016-02-24T22:17:56+00:00

When a thorough study of Tennessee’s public pre-kindergarten program last year suggested the program actually set kids back, state Rep. Bill Dunn was validated. The Knoxville Republican had been railing against the state’s pre-K program for years, calling it a waste of money that should be dropped in favor of other investments in early childhood education.

But in a House subcommittee meeting on Wednesday, pre-K’s most vocal opponent gave the program a second chance. Dunn voted in support of a bill that would keep the state’s Voluntary Pre-K program for low-income students, and make it better.

Rep. Bill Dunn

The bill, which would help require certain “best practices” in pre-k classrooms, passed and now goes to the House Education Instruction and Programming Committee. The support of Dunn means the legislation likely has overcome its most formidable hurdle in the House.

“It tries to make the best out of a situation that I think, if you look at the Vanderbilt study, should cause a lot of concerns to people,” Dunn said before the vote.

His reluctant support reflects the key lawmaker’s acquiescence to the commitment of Gov. Bill Haslam and the State Department of Education to improving the state’s pre-K program, viewed as a significant tool in closing the achievement gap. Rather than offering a knee-jerk response to the troubling Vanderbilt study that questioned the power of pre-K, Haslam and Education Commissioner Candice McQueen have taken a measured approach directed at refining the program.

The landmark study, released in October by researchers at Vanderbilt University, showed that children who attended Tennessee’s public pre-K programs did better than their peers in kindergarten, but that their academic performance flattened out by the second and third grades — and eventually they did worse in elementary school than did their peers who had no pre-K education at all.

Haslam had been waiting to see the results of the five-year study before deciding whether to expand pre-K. This year, he included funding in his proposed budget to pay for improvements.

The legislation addresses some of the researchers’ takeaways, including concerns about the quality of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program, an initial lack of investment in teacher development, and a transition to possibly mediocre early elementary school programs.

Specifically, the proposal also calls for developing a plan to better coordinate between pre-K classrooms and elementary schools so that elementary-grade instruction builds upon pre-K classroom experiences; engaging parents and families of students throughout the school year; and delivering relevant and meaningful professional development for teachers.

All of those practices already are in action at Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools’ model pre-K centers, according to Dana Eckman, the district’s director of early childhood learning, who testified in support of the bill.

“We want this for every child and family who attends a voluntary pre-K program,” Eckman said. “If we’re going to invest in children, let’s invest in the right resources, not to only get a ‘return on our investment,’ but to have an impact on students that will be sustained … for the rest of their lives.”

Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K was spearheaded by Gov. Phil Bredesen in 2005, answering a call from researchers and educators to serve low-income students as 4-year-olds to get them on equal footing with their more affluent peers by kindergarten. Statewide enrollment jumped from 9,000 students during its pilot year to 18,000 within three years, which has since remained steady.

The bill that advanced on Wednesday is sponsored by Rep. Mark White of Memphis, who noted that the inequities that the original program sought to fix remain especially prevalent in his home city. He encouraged his colleagues to use the Vanderbilt study to inform improvements to the state’s existing pre-K program.

“A lot of times we want to just throw things out, but then we just create something new … and have the same problems all over again,” White said. “One of the best things that can happen to us as we go through the process over the years is we learn from studies from higher ed.”

Dunn, however, reminded fellow legislators that pre-K isn’t the only solution to early learning challenges. He said the money ultimately might be better spend in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms.

“We have very limited resources,” Dunn said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that this bill came with a $1 million fiscal note. The bill was amended to remove the $1 million cost of implementation, which would have gone to the development of a kindergarten readiness screening test.

Memphis Head Start leaders seek iPad investment for district’s littlest hands

2015-11-24T00:53:37+00:00

Computers fascinate 4-year-olds in teacher Kaveshia McKinnley’s pre-K classroom in Memphis, but only two are available for use by her 20 Head Start students — almost all of whom have little or no access to digital devices at home.

That ratio would change, however, if Shelby County’s Board of Education votes Tuesday night to approve the proposed purchase of 500 iPads as a first-of-its-kind investment in technology for use by the district’s youngest students.

“It would almost be like having another teacher in the classroom, who can keep some of our children engaged and learning while we’re working with other small groups of children,” said McKinnley, whose class would receive six to eight of the Apple tablets to complement existing computers in her room at Frayser Head Start Center.

The tools could be a game-changer for the district’s nine Head Start centers, serving children who meet federal poverty guidelines.

“More than 75 percent of U.S. children under age 8 have access to iPads, smartphones and tablet devices, but those generally aren’t the children we serve,” said Deanna McClendon, director of early childhood programs for Shelby County Schools.

“This is another way we can close the Digital Divide and make sure that children who don’t have access at home have an opportunity to stay current in the digital world.”

It’s also a tool for developing fine motor skills so that — in addition to drawing, building with linking blocks, and cutting a straight line with safety scissors — children learn how to touch, drag, zoom and scroll on a multi-touch screen.

“The iPads are better for little hands than working on a computer with a mouse because children are actually able to manipulate the content with their hands,” McClendon said. “It’s a natural progression to one day using a mouse and a keyboard.”

The board is being asked to approve the use of $337,000 in Head Start funds to buy the iPads and related technology to create hands-on, customizable pre-K learning experiences for Head Start students. Each of the district’s Head Start centers would receive 40 to 60 iPads, targeted for classroom use by January.

“It’s a significant investment because a lot of our Head Start centers only have one or two computers, and those may not have been updated in three to five years,” McClendon said. “So for us to put these carts in our centers where we are serving about 200 children each, it’s going to put iPads in a lot of little hands.”

Board member Kevin Woods, who oversees a local workforce development network, said Monday that new Head Start technology will open up new opportunities for Memphis children needing a helping hand.

“I see individuals come to our facilities everyday to get online, and it’s clear that many of our families don’t have access to technology at home,” he said. “It’s crucial that we expose our children and young people in order to close the Digital Divide.”

Even before they reach the workforce, students need expanded digital skills to be successful in school in the TNReady era. Beginning this school year, Tennessee public school students in grades 3-11 are expected not only to better understand content on the state’s new standardized test, but to have the keyboarding skills to take the assessment online.

“Even for our pre-K students, TNReady is coming,” McClendon said. “One way to prepare them is to make sure we’re getting technology in the hands of 4-year-olds now. Our children won’t be looking at screens for four hours at a time, but we do want them to use these tools for brief periods of time that are developmentally appropriate.”

McKinnley is excited about the iPads because they’re particularly effective for teaching literacy skills — a big push in a district where 70 percent of third-graders are reading below grade level.

“They’re great for teaching vocabulary, phonetics and word knowledge,” she said.

Power of pre-K gets boost from new report countering Vanderbilt study

2015-11-18T12:02:33+00:00

On the heels of a major five-year study questioning the long-term effectiveness of Tennessee’s publicly funded pre-kindergarten program, a new regional report calls on states to raise the quality of such programs and make early childhood development a priority.

The report, released Tuesday by the Southern Regional Education Board, said investments during a child’s critical first years can increase the likelihood of high school graduation, college attainment and workforce readiness.

“Economically, it’s a no-brainer,” said Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who chaired the Early Childhood Commission that developed the report with national experts during a two-year project.

The commission’s work offers a counterpoint to a landmark study released in September by Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education, which upends conventional wisdom about the power of preschool. Vanderbilt researchers found that at-risk students who participated in Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program showed significant gains initially, but by third grade performed worse than non-participants on both academic and behavior measures.

While the Vanderbilt data and a 2011 state comptroller’s report have some Tennessee lawmakers questioning the wisdom of more pre-K investments, state Rep. Mark White of Memphis said Monday that the bigger takeaway is that Tennessee must improve the quality of its early childhood programs.

“We don’t need to throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said White, one of three Tennessee lawmakers who served on the SREB commission. “Pre-K, done well and done appropriately, does help, especially in urban areas like Memphis where children face a lot of challenges.”

The commission recommends that its 16 member states boost the quality of both pre-K programs and teacher training — and align curricula from pre-K through third grade so that children’s learning builds over time.

Those are key messages for Tennessee leaders mulling over the Vanderbilt study, says Joan Lord, vice president of education data, policy research and programs for SREB.

“There’s a whole body of research that tells us that gains don’t fade away if you have a high-quality program that’s well-aligned from pre-K through the third grade,” Lord said on the eve of the report’s release.

She said pre-K teachers also must be trained to provide the kind of small-group interaction that can develop high-cognitive functioning in children.

“This is not a babysitting enterprise. It’s not child care,” Lord said. “It’s an educational enterprise. We need to understand what a high-functioning pre-K looks like.”

White, who represented Tennessee on the commission along with Rep. Harry Brooks (R-Knoxville) and Sen. Delores Gresham (R-Somerville), said the state should “slow down and examine the quality of our programs and level of teacher training.”

“A year ago, we looked at putting more money into pre-K but put everything on hold because we knew the Vanderbilt study was coming out. Now I think it’s time to move forward, but let’s not throw away the good just because it’s not perfect,” White said.

“In urban areas like Memphis, we have many children coming out of toxic environments and they need a jumpstart to be ready for kindergarten,” White said. “I have principals and teachers tell me that if it wasn’t for pre-K, these kids wouldn’t be ready. They are so far behind.”

Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program, which was started in 2005 and cost about $86 million in 2013-14, serves about 18,000 children.

Pre-K proponents: Vanderbilt study will inform early learning programs, not dissolve them

2015-10-20T11:00:33+00:00

Policymakers angling to dump pre-kindergarten programs in Tennessee might not be impressed initially with how 4-year-olds at Bordeaux Early Learning Center spent their first day back from fall break in Nashville: hip-hop dancing, painting with pine cones, and picking peppers in their school garden.

But pre-K advocates say such activities teach youngsters the academic and behavioral skills necessary for later grades. They say the resulting positive school environment also addresses many problems with Tennessee’s public pre-K classroom highlighted by a landmark study released last month by Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education.

The five-year study found that students who attended Tennessee’s public pre-K programs eventually did worse in elementary school than their peers who had no pre-K at all.

In the aftermath, Gov. Bill Haslam and lawmakers openly pondered divesting from the state program known as Voluntary Pre-K. Meanwhile, in Washington, a proposal before Congress would end a federal grant funding pre-K in school systems across the nation, including five districts in and around Nashville and Memphis.

Even so, early childhood educators and advocates in Tennessee are stubborn in their commitment to early learning programs.

They say the study’s findings were anticipated, and that changes have been implemented in the last two years to address weaknesses highlighted by the report. They also are helping to spread best practices to pre-Ks across the state.

"Things I thought were right were not developmentally appropriate, but I had no way to know they weren't."

Danielle Norton, instructional coach

Danielle Norton, a career pre-K teacher now coaching younger teachers at Bordeaux, said it’s been a learning experience for everyone who’s committed to quality pre-K.

“The past year I’ve grown a lot,” she said. “Things I thought were right were not developmentally appropriate, but I had no way to know they weren’t. Now we have coaches and principals who know so much about early childhood education. But before, we didn’t have that in Tennessee.”

Learning curve

However, developing a high-quality pre-K program was not the initial focus. Pre-K teachers often were viewed more like babysitters than educators. And though state pre-K classrooms frequently are located in elementary schools, they were treated as separate entities. Researchers and pre-K teachers think that might be why any developmental gains made in pre-K were quickly lost.

“A lot of principals don’t understand early childhood [education],” Norton said. “They just think it’s cute. You pretty much got left alone. There was no one to support me or help me grow as an educator.”

In their study of the Voluntary Pre-K initiative, Vanderbilt researchers Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey found that children who went to pre-K did better than their peers in kindergarten, but that their academic performance flattened out by the second and third grades.

They noted that pre-K teachers often had wildly different approaches, so that best practices weren’t being shared and spread to make pre-K worth the public investment.

And even when pre-K teachers were guiding young learners in developmentally appropriate ways — letting them learn while playing, allowing constant movement, and letting students lead the way, rather than responding to teacher lectures — their counterparts in kindergarten through third grade often were not. Thus, many proponents of pre-K say a transition to mediocre early elementary school programs may be equally to blame for the Vanderbilt study’s disappointing findings.

“You absolutely have to have that bridge from kindergarten to third grade to keep that momentum,” said Dana Eckman, Metro Nashville’s director of early childhood learning. “You can’t look at one year as a silver bullet. Every year matters.”

Addressing quality

In the fall of 2014, Metro Nashville Public Schools launched three model pre-K centers, including Bordeaux, where Vanderbilt researchers offer feedback on what practices are helping children learn and what practices aren’t. District leaders then help disseminate that information to the 174 classrooms across the school system, 55 of which are Voluntary Pre-K classrooms, and 10 of which were part of the Vanderbilt study.

By design, there are few quiet moments at Bordeaux.

When children walk down the hall to learn hip-hop with the nonprofit Global Education, or go outside to garden with Plant the Seed, another nonprofit organization, they often are singing or snapping their fingers. That’s because of coaching that teachers receive to keep students engaged during transition times between activities. A simple activity like clicking fingers seems fun to 4-year-olds, and helps them develop fine motor skills.

A pre-K student at Bordeaux waters plants while learning about vegetables, nutrition and agriculture.

The teachers also have been coached to speak with children in warm and friendly tones and to create more spaces that encourage kids to play together.

This year, all Nashville district pre-Ks are using The Creative Curriculum, which incorporates playtime as a way to learn and was piloted last year in the model pre-Ks.

And for the first time this year, all Nashville pre-K teachers have access to professional development and to 17 instructional coaches, such as Norton.

The Nashville district has used a federal pre-K grant, which will infuse $33 million into the program over the next four years, to hire six family services specialists, an extended learning coordinator and a data specialist to track pre-K students outcomes in later grades.

“We’re focusing not just on the school day, but the whole child,” Eckman said.

All of the changes have meant a paradigm shift for pre-K teachers, with a greater focus on assessing student skills — just by observing basics such as playing, counting, and how a child holds a pencil.

“They don’t know they’re being assessed. They’re playing,” said Kathy Daws, who has taught in Nashville for more than 30 years. “Everything is very intentional now.”

Planting their feet

Though federal and state pre-K funding is under threat, pre-K advocates are adamant that they’ll keep pushing and say they have a lot of support. Both Memphis and Nashville recently elected mayors who favor pre-K for all children, not just those who are from low-income families. At the state level, Education Commissioner Candice McQueen identifies early education as a priority in her strategic plan for the state. She also has named an Early Learning Council.

Nashville is luring early educators from across the country, including Eckman, who moved this spring from California, and Diana Lyon, the principal of the Bordeaux program, who relocated from Ohio.

In Memphis, Shelby County Schools is making changes that leaders hope will put pre-K on the map — and keep it in the budget.

“A lot of things are already happening in our pre-K classrooms that I think will reap results,” said Barbara Prescott, the city’s longtime pre-K advocate. “I think we have the ability to really make a positive difference.”

"A lot of things are already happening in our pre-K classrooms that I think will reap results."

Barbara Prescott, pre-K advocate

In recent years, the Tennessee legislature has turned back cost-saving bills that would scale back pre-K to summer programs. However, such proposals are likely to resurface next year in the wake of the Vanderbilt study.

Still, Shannon Hunt, who heads the Nashville Public Education Foundation, says support for pre-K is strong in a city seeking to improve the quality of its schools and its workforce.

“In Nashville, we have made a real priority out of pre-K,” she said. “I don’t see that changing given the extraordinary high-need population we serve.”

Landmark Tennessee study contradicts conventional wisdom about the power of pre-K

2015-09-28T18:47:53+00:00

A new Vanderbilt University study suggests that public pre-kindergarten programs in Tennessee might actually negatively impact students as they advance through school, surprising experts and advocates alike. But the study’s lead researchers say that policymakers shouldn’t abandon pre-K as they seek to close the achievement gap between minority and lower- and higher-income students.

The U.S. Department of Education-funded study, released on Monday, is the first to thoroughly investigate the impacts of state-funded pre-K programs, which are increasingly popular as policymakers across the nation promote pre-K as a salve for unequal educational opportunities.

Lead researchers Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey found that Tennessee’s pre-K program for economically disadvantaged children, called Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K or TN-VPK, is not producing the positive impacts on academic achievement in the later grades that its advocates and sponsors expected. However, they said the potential for pre-K should be further investigated.

“We’re pretty stunned looking at these data and have a lot of questions about what might be going on in the later grades that doesn’t seem to be maintaining, if not accelerating, the positive gains the VPK attendees made in pre-K,” Lipsey said in a news release.

The five-year study was a joint effort between the Tennessee Department of Education and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development, where pioneering experiments on the early education of “disadvantaged” children helped to inspire the creation in 1965 of early childhood programs under Head Start.

Gov. Bill Haslam has been waiting on the Vanderbilt study before determining whether he will propose spending more next year on pre-K. Haslam and state lawmakers have been hesitant to expand pre-K — some wanting to scrap the program altogether — citing a 2011 comptroller’s report finding that the impacts were negligible.

Vanderbilt researchers found that students who participated in TN-VPK benefitted significantly at first. But by first grade, there was no difference. By third grade, the students who attended pre-K actually fared worse on a variety of measures assessing both academics and behavior.

“We’ve got a platform out there that’s serving thousands of disadvantaged kids (in Tennessee) who are worthy of our attention,” Lipsey told Chalkbeat. “If we’re not getting what we wanted yet from that platform, we should at least explore its potential before we give it up.”

Groundbreaking report

National experts called the Tennessee study important and compelling.

“It’s a very exciting report because it’s the first time it’s been done on a state level,” said Bruce Atchison, director of early learning for the Education Commission of the States.

“The fadeout is definitely disappointing, but in the context of other studies, the Tennessee findings suggest that we need to raise the quality of programs to avoid the fadeout. It punctuates the fact that pre-K alone is not a silver bullet,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley.

Both Fuller and Atchison questioned whether uneven or mediocre elementary programs might contribute to a flattening out of academic performance by second and third grades.

“You can have high-quality pre-K and talk about a kindergarten-ready child,” Atchison said, “but if you don’t have a high-quality K-3 programs in place, some fadeout is going to occur.”

Kyle Snow of the National Association for the Education of Young Children called the report “courageous” for going against popularly held beliefs in the policy community that pre-K is a panacea. He said he eagerly awaits follow-up from Farran and Lipsey on what factors in elementary school interacted with the skills learned in pre-K to cause students’ achievement to decline, after initially outperforming their peers.

“What is so important about this study is that it leads to these questions about sustaining gains and momentum,” he said. “What is the (elementary school) environment doing to support these skills?”

Payoff vs. cost

Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program, which was started about a decade ago and cost about $86 million in 2013-14, serves about 18,000 children. It ranks high among state-funded pre-K initiatives, meeting nine out of 10 benchmarks set forth by the National Early Education Research Institute for quality pre-K.

Gov. Bill Haslam and first lady Chrissy Haslam read to children in 2014 at the University of Memphis Child Care Center.

Farran and Lipsey launched the study in 2009, focusing on 3,000 students who applied. They compared the academic trajectories of students who gained seats through a lottery system, to those who applied for the program but didn’t make it in. All of the students were eligible for free and reduced lunch, a requirement for Voluntary Pre-K. The results only reflect students whose parents gave the researchers consent. Lipsey and Farran are still waiting for data for the rest of the students — almost 2,000 — from the Department of Education and will continue tracking them through the sixth grade. The researchers hypothesize there might be some potential long-term behavioral gains associated with attending pre-K.

Rep. Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), a member of the state House Education Committee, called the study “invaluable.”

“When you’re in government, the question you always asks is how do we use taxpayer dollars effectively and efficiently,” said Dunn, a vocal critic of spending on pre-K. “This study would lead one to believe this approach isn’t very effective and efficient.”

Dunn said he’d rather see state dollars go to improve teacher quality. A more effective pre-K program, he said, might be to prepare at-risk students for kindergarten during the summer leading up to school, rather than the whole preceding year.

“We can help some of these at-risk kids get ready for kindergarten without spending all of that money,” he said.

Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said the department is continuing to focus on improving the quality of existing pre-K programs across the state. “This is why the department is anchoring our work on establishing early foundations for our students and monitoring and emphasizing high-quality pre-K instruction,” she said. “We also believe that it is important that the Vanderbilt study continues to follow student gains over time to better understand long-term outcomes.”

Farran said policymakers should remember that classrooms observed in the study were diverse in their approaches — and that much can still be learned from the classrooms that did see positive impacts on students in later grades. Farran and Lipsey also are further evaluating the 160 Voluntary Pre-K classrooms that were part of the study to ascertain what qualities most helped children in kindergarten, first, second and third grades.

“TN-VPK was rolled out very quickly and not all pre-K classrooms in Tennessee are alike,” Farran said in the news release. “What might you get from the same pre-K program if you had a common vision and could push the quality up? These are among the questions we are raising in light of the findings of our study.”

"Pre-K is a good start, but without a more coherent vision and consistent implementation of that vision, we cannot realistically expect dramatic effects."

Dale Farran, Peabody researcher

Lisa Wiltshire, executive director of the Tennessee Department of Education’s office of early learning, said during a roundtable discussion last week that a common vision and common standards for pre-K classrooms is one of her top priorities.

The researchers emphasized that the potential of pre-K to produce positive academic achievement cannot be dismissed.

“Pre-K is a good start, but without a more coherent vision and consistent implementation of that vision, we cannot realistically expect dramatic effects,” Farran said. “Too much has been promised from one year of pre-school intervention without the attention needed to the quality of experiences children have and what happens to them in K-12. There is much work to be done.”

Read the full report here.

Educators, researchers grapple with future of pre-kindergarten in Tennessee

2015-09-24T21:22:06+00:00

Creating and maintaining high-quality pre-kindergarten programs that prepare students for school and shrink achievement gaps is doable — but will take time and resources, say educators and researchers from Nashville and Memphis, two cities where pre-K expansion is a topic of growing interest.

In addition, pre-K teachers must receive more support through professional development and coaching, and there must be a stronger relationship between policy and what research says works.

Such was the consensus of participants in a roundtable discussion in Nashville on Thursday, just days before the anticipated release of a study that could impact state funding of public pre-kindergarten programs.

“We have got to have the resources in place to support quality. Otherwise, we’re really quite frankly just tiptoeing around the edges,” said Lisa Wiltshire, executive director of the Tennessee Department of Education’s office of early learning.

Many education leaders believe public preschool classes are critical to narrowing a stubborn achievement gap in Tennessee, confounded by stagnant reading scores and grappling with the realities that cause many poor children to start kindergarten without basic literacy skills.

But whether funding for expansion comes from the state depends on the results of a study due out next week from researchers at the Vanderbilt Peabody College of Education. Gov. Bill Haslam has said he will not increase state pre-K spending until he sees the results of the six-year study on the efficacy of the state’s program.

Four years ago, a comptroller’s report suggested that Tennessee’s current pre-K program wasn’t boosting achievement throughout elementary school. Early results from the soon-to-be-released Vanderbilt study suggest the program does not have a lasting impact on academics, but does have positive impacts on behaviors such as paying attention in class.

Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program, which was started about a decade ago and cost about $86 million in 2013-14, serves about 18,000 children.

Last year, Haslam applied for and received a $70 million pre-K grant from the U.S. Department of Education for five Tennessee districts — but only after debating whether the funding would provide academic benefits.

Researchers agree there’s no reason to spend money on programs that don’t work. They say policymakers should ask what does work in order to help children be prepared for kindergarten.

“We are pushing the benefits of pre-K … without taking the time to define what we really mean, and worse, to determine if what we implement has the outcomes to what we have promised,” said Dale Farran, a Vanderbilt Peabody professor and the study’s lead researcher. “It is time to take a step back and determine what we really need to scale up … and how we can take that vision and make it happen with consistency.”

DeAnna McClendon, director of early childhood programs for Shelby County Schools, said her district has come to terms with the fact that many of its pre-K classes have been sub-par. Of 800 students tracked by the district after leaving pre-K and entering kindergarten, less than half had the skills necessary for kindergarten. Thus, simply offering a pre-K program isn’t enough.

McClendon said the Memphis district has taken “a hard look” at its programs and what their most effective teachers do. It has made changes, connecting more teachers with coaches and thinking more critically about what pre-K should look like. Now, McClendon reports, about 72 percent of children who attended the Shelby County programs demonstrate some early literacy skills, such as vocabulary recognition, knowing the alphabet, and writing their names.

“Those things might not sound important, but to a kindergarten teacher or a principal who has a lot riding on the line with those third-grade scores, they’re important,” McClendon said.

The state Department of Education has made similar arguments in pushing early literacy as a key part of its plan to boost test scores.

McClendon said a common theme among Shelby County’s reward schools — those improving at a faster rate than 95 percent of schools in the state — is pre-K availability.

One factor to success, she said, is for teachers to remember that 4-year-olds learn differently than older students. In fact, teachers of slightly older students should be looking at the techniques used by effective pre-K teachers. “Sometimes we think we’ve cornered the market on small groups and other early learning market strategies. But those are the same strategies we should be using in kindergarten, first and second grades,” McClendon said.

Farran agreed that developmentally appropriate kindergarten programs are key. “We are having difficulty preventing elementary school expectations to ratchet down to 4-year-olds,” she said.

In addition to the federal grant, Metro Nashville Public Schools has made a commitment to “universal pre-K” — available public programs for all 4-year-olds — by 2018, with considerable financial support from the city. Incoming Mayor Megan Barry has pledged even more support for pre-K. In Shelby County, however, calls for local pre-K funding have floundered.

Billed as a discussion of issues surrounding pre-K expansion, the roundtable was co-sponsored by the Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies, Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education, and the Nashville Public Library.

Audience members included Haslam’s education analyst and several state representatives, including Rep. Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), a high-profile skeptic of pre-K programs.

‘Opportunity Lost’ author on poverty, race and the biggest challenges in transforming Memphis schools

2015-08-25T10:50:24+00:00

In Memphis, Marcus Pohlmann has become the go-to guy for anyone who wants to understand the history of education in Tennessee’s largest city, particularly related to the impact of race and poverty on the city’s schools. A professor of political science at Rhodes College, Pohlmann has written extensively on the topic. He is the author of “Opportunity Lost,” a 2008 book that analyzes the former Memphis City Schools before and after desegregation.

Pohlmann, 64, has been teaching at Rhodes since 1986 and was chairman of the Department of Political Science for 16 of those years. Next spring, he is teaching a class on urban education policy.

In a recent Q&A with Chalkbeat, he discusses the 2013 merger of the city and county school systems, the subsequent split of six suburban municipal districts, the growing charter school sector, the critical need for pre-school education, and whether current school turnaround efforts are hitting the mark. Here are the highlights.

Describe the biggest change or shift you’ve seen for public schools in Shelby County over the last 10 years?

Consolidation and fallout is the obvious answer. However, the reality … turned out to be just a reconstruction of the old country schools and the old Memphis City Schools. (See Chalkbeat’s in-depth coverage of the merger of legacy Memphis City Schools and legacy Shelby County Schools, as well as the municipality split). In other words, what is now Shelby County Schools is pretty much the old Memphis City Schools. And the municipalities are the old Shelby County Schools. So, even though the most obvious change is the consolidation and the fallout, the biggest change in my estimation is the diversification of alternatives.

Between the Achievement School District, the iZone, the municipalities, the charters, Shelby County Schools and all of the private (schools) — that’s quite an array from a system that even 20 years ago was just city, county and private. I won’t call it school choice, because it’s not a choice for most kids, but it is a diversification. Sometimes, we think that if we just make the options available, then we have a school choice situation. But for kids who don’t have tuition or transportation, we’re kidding ourselves.

What’s the biggest challenge facing public schools in Memphis today?

In the suburbs, you’re trying to find ways to provide enough honors and AP classes to keep already reasonably privileged, educated kids stimulated and performing. In the city, you’re talking about a disproportionate number of people who come out of low-income circumstances … (and need to become) school-ready. Ages 0-4 remains the most crucial education period, and the most crucial education challenge we have. We can tinker all we want with what to do with kids K-12, but they are still going to drop out and fall through the cracks if they come to kindergarten two years behind in reading ability. It’s just going to follow them all the way through. The reality is that schools can only do so much for these kids, particularly if they arrive significantly behind. It’s been too convenient to assume that teachers can educate everybody equally no matter what deficits they bring when they walk in the door. Schools can’t be social workers, nurses, teachers, guidance counselors and do all of that at the same time. So, we’ve got to start talking more about early childhood education.

Can these various challenges be overcome and, if so, how?

Early Headstart and Headstart is what needs to be thought of as a solution for curbing the number of kids who struggle, drop out or aren’t college-ready. We have to get more kids in preschool and reach them before they ever walk through the door of an elementary school to overcome those big urban education dilemmas. Transportation could also be a solution. There are charter schools or alternative schools out there with specialized education programs that struggling students can benefit from; but if they don’t have the transportation to get there, then it doesn’t benefit them. In a city like Memphis with a very minimal transportation system, if you’re not providing free transportation to these kids, some of those options will never be options for them.

What are your thoughts and observations about recent education reform efforts in Shelby County, particularly related to the Achievement School District but also to the iZone within Shelby County Schools? Are these efforts working, not working, sluggish, on point, misguided?

"We can tinker all we want with what to do with kids K-12, but they are still going to drop out and fall through the cracks if they come to kindergarten two years behind in reading ability."

Marcus Pohlmann

Well, we can’t talk about the ASD without talking about charter schools. Charters have become the bane of many in the teaching profession. A lot of people worry about charters, ASD and the school choice movement because they’re afraid that in the end, they are going to water down and kill universal public education. It doesn’t have to, and it probably won’t. One of the things that the ASD, charters and the iZone all have in common is that they move us a step toward individualizing education. It’s allowing schools in a particular area to operate in a manner that most closely meets the needs of those particular kids. Moving away from a one-size-fits-all formula and allowing flexibility at a school level is a step in the right direction.

My problem is that it’s still not getting to the heart of the matter, which is your 0-4 years-old-age group. There’s only so much the iZone or ASD or anybody is going to be able to do with kids who come in with virtually no mental stimulation in the first four years of life. Now you’re asking teachers to correct all that four years later after the brain’s already formed and behavioral patterns are already set. Sure, they can do something, but they’re fighting an uphill battle. Attention on K-12 and innovation is good. But it’s not going to get to the heart of the problem, which is ages 0-4.

How do recent efforts to turn around Shelby County schools compare with past efforts in the district?

What we’ve seen in last 10 years is much more extensive than what we had seen prior. Because of Race to the Top, money from the Gates Foundation and state involvement, we are all in in terms of school reform, for better or for worse. We’re doing much more intensive experimentation than ever before. I worry that at the end of all this, whether that’s at the end of the Race to the Top-driven ASD program or not, the numbers aren’t going to move very much and people are going to throw up their hands and say there’s nothing we can do. Again, it’s because we’re not getting at the heart, which is pre-kindergarten. We’re experimenting and playing with many different approaches with kids in the K-12 window. We’ll see. Hopefully we’ll learn from it and various programs will share their information. What’s working in the iZone will be adopted in charters and by the ASD and so on. As a student of politics, I’m not 100 percent sure that’s going to happen. There’s a tendency in any bureaucracy for people to hoard their own information and not share it. It’s going to take astute leadership.

Enrollment declines and fluctuations have been a huge challenge in stabilizing Shelby County Schools and the ASD in the wake of the merger and the ASD’s entrance into the mix. Do you see the student population stabilizing? Are policymakers making the right moves to address these challenges?

Will the floor continue to fall out from the Shelby County numbers? No. I think there will be a floor. Lower-income students typically don’t have a choice but to go to neighborhood schools within the SCS system. And I’m not convinced the ASD options will be there 10 years from now when the Race to the Top flavor of the month disappears. The bigger challenge for SCS is how to remain attractive to kids who do have choices. That’s really what I was hoping would happen in consolidation. I thought, how many times does a school system get to start from scratch? How many times does it get a complete do-over? We can look around the nation at best practices. We can rebuild this county-wide school system state of the art. And of course, that didn’t quite happen. If we really did that effectively, we would have public schools like White Station (High School) as an option that would be pulling back kids from the private school system — that the public schools would be just as attractive, if not more so. There’s been talk of need for another high school in midtown or downtown to meet some of movement of population back into those areas. What about an exclusively college-prep high school that you would have to test into and have to maintain grades to stay in? If done right, a lot of kids going to mediocre private high schools would run to that in a heartbeat.

How significant are poverty and race in understanding and improving the educational landscape in Memphis?

If you look in the metros, you’ll find high-achieving black students. You’ll find high-achieving black students in Shelby County. It’s not just race, but it is clearly poverty. The bigger issue is poverty. It tears at school readiness, it tears at brain development, it tears at transportation to take advantage of options. It tears at parents’ ability to provide a home environment that’s educationally rich.

The municipality split garnered attention with lawsuits from Shelby County and the city of Memphis that the split was racially motivated. What do you think were the main factors driving the split?

I live in (the Memphis bedroom community of) Cordova, so I went around to the various forums during consolidation. Lived through it, watched it. (I saw) a couple of things going on. I don’t want to play down race, but part of it was resentment to the process. People in the suburbs felt secure that (Shelby County Schools) would always be available to them, thought it was their school system, would always be their school system, (that) we could never have consolidation without their vote. But we did, because the city gave up its charter.

"I think what’s going on is that both black and white parents in the suburbs don’t want their children going to school with poor black kids. "

Marcus Pohlmann

Part of the rapid switch to the metro alternative was a knee-jerk anger at the fact they were left out of that process. If cooler heads had prevailed, and they would have given it even five years, I think they would have found that with decentralization nothing would have really changed in those old SCS schools. They just would have been under a broader umbrella. But the minute that consolidation vote came down, they were headed for the door. I’ll attribute that, at least in part, to some of the leadership and some of the lack of leadership in the suburbs. I understand it’s easy to say that when your kids aren’t in school. When you’re doing a five-year gamble with your kid’s education, that does up the ante. But they could have exacted guarantees. There were ways to do this to let it play out, (to) see if it didn’t actually develop into a better situation.

They were headed to the exits the minute that vote came down, and no one stepped up to stop it. I think saying it was racially based is an overstatement. Racially tinged, sure, but there are black kids in those schools. I think what’s going on is that both black and white parents in the suburbs don’t want their children going to school with poor black kids. Because they have stereotypes — poor, black, crime, bad language skills, teen pregnancy, all the problems associated with the inner city that people in the suburbs have run away from. And I think it’s more low-income black kids.

What is the biggest challenge facing these smaller municipal districts as they try to establish themselves?

Money. The bill to build a quality school system is just going to keep going up and up. The operating costs, the capital improvement and construction costs (are) going to keep going up. And if their populations grow, (it’s) going to go up even faster. Way more expensive than they were led to believe.

Overall, do you see the six municipal districts becoming successful school systems?

I think Collierville and Germantown will be successful because they have the money and they will spend what they have to spend. To be attractive public schools options. Bartlett, Arlington and Lakeland, jury’s out. I think there may be a limit to what they can spend. I don’t think Millington is going to make it. Millington does not have the money. Maybe they can get Bartlett to merge with them. Clear battle going on at Lakeland and Arlington because they weren’t big enough to begin with. In the short term, there will be some effort to pool resources. If they have an ESL program in Bartlett, they don’t need one in Arlington and Lakeland. Then (they’re) just moving closer and closer to old (legacy) Shelby County Schools. The question is: Are the two wealthiest districts going to be interested in helping the others out? At one point, I would have predicted that in five years, they would have reconstructed the old county system by merging the six metros. But I’m not so sure Germantown and Collierville are going to be that interested in jumping back in bed with Bartlett and Millington.

Long term, it’s hard to predict. I do think that some of these metro districts are going to have to merge to be viable. And even if they do, they’re going to have to convince their populations to spend a whole lot more on education than they are now. Those property taxes are going to go up.

Editor’s Note: Each month, Chalkbeat conducts a Q&A interview with a different leader, innovator, influential thinker or hero across Tennessee’s education community. We invite our readers to email Chalkbeat your suggestions for future subjects to maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

First bilingual preschool in northeast Memphis to open this fall

2015-07-14T16:43:41+00:00

For 9-year-old Emilia Soriano, the first day she walked into her kindergarten classroom was her first day ever that she was expected to know English.Now a third-grader at Kingsbury Elementary School in Memphis, she recalls it was “hard” and scary” to start kindergarten, especially since Spanish was the only language she had heard at home.Emilia is among the almost 10,000 English language learners (ELL) in Shelby County Schools, many of whom don’t know any English when they start school.To help address the challenge, one organization plans to open the city’s first bilingual preschool this fall in northeast Memphis, where the majority of the city’s Spanish-speaking community resides. The goal is to help prepare Spanish-speaking students to enter English-speaking public schools.The preschool represents new territory for Su Casa, a Christian nonprofit organization that predominantly has focused on providing English classes for adults in the Heights and Berclair neighborhoods of Memphis. The organization also provides children’s programming like homework help and Bible lessons for the children of their adult students.

“We started providing child care for parents who were taking our ESL (English as a second language) classes,” said Helene Harris, children’s ministry director at Su Casa. “We felt there was a huge need for a bilingual preschool for our littlest kids, who weren’t interacting with English speakers until they showed up for kindergarten.”

Crizman Villatoro enjoys a petting zoo during summer camp at Su Casa.

Harris said Su Casa will start small, with about 10 children in one class, but the plan is to grow annually and have a fully functioning preschool within a few years. Instruction will be in both Spanish and English, Harris said, and priority enrollment will be given to children whose parents are in ELL classes at Su Casa.

“We want our students to learn Spanish well in addition to English,” Harris said. “Celebrating the culture is important to us. And we found that though many kids are fluent, they can’t read or write in Spanish well.”

For Emilia’s mother, Silvia Herrera, maintaining Spanish language skills while learning English is important. Herrera came to the United States from Honduras 10 years ago and started taking English classes at Su Casa five years ago, after her daughter’s teacher asked her to start speaking more English at home.

“The first rule in my home was we speak in Spanish,” Herrera said. “It’s where we are from. But it was difficult in school for my children at first. They had so much to learn.”

Herrera believes the preschool will be a big help to the Spanish-speaking parents in Memphis, who often can’t help their children learn English since they are still learning themselves.

The Hispanic population in Memphis has more than doubled over the last decade, with up to 52,178 Hispanic residents in the metro area, according to the latest U.S. Census data. District schools now teach 13,758 Hispanic students, almost 6,700 more than there were in Memphis City Schools five years ago. There are also about 3,467 more English language learners now in the district than in Memphis City Schools five years ago.

While the numbers continue to grow, bilingual opportunities for students in Memphis have lagged.

Treadwell Elementary School, located a couple of miles from Su Casa, houses the state’s only dual language program and also is part of the Innovation Zone, a district academic turnaround program. There are a few private bilingual preschools across the city, most geared toward teaching Spanish to-English speakers.

Intern Paty Glory teaches a Bible lesson to children attending a Su Casa program.

Harris said the cost for the preschool will be determined according to income, taking into account the economic situation of each family. Currently, Su Casa is seeking local funding to make it as affordable as possible, she said.

“Our kids ultimately go to public elementary schools and can’t afford a private preschool,” Harris said. “We want to offer them a preschool that’s the same level of education as the best in the state. That’s what’s going to help break a poverty cycle.”

For instance, a public school that Su Casa’s preschool would feed into is Berclair Elementary School, which is 50 percent Hispanic, 49 percent ELL and 92 percent economically disadvantaged.

Jennie Mariella Campos, 12, said she thinks she would have learned to read faster if she had been exposed to English earlier. She said she had to work harder to catch up to her peers in elementary school.

“We never spoke English at home because my parents hadn’t learned any of it yet,” said Jennie Mariella, now a rising seventh-grader at Collegiate School of Memphis. “Even with ESL classes, coming to Su Casa after school was a big help in learning to read faster and get a better idea of what I was writing.”

Harris said the ultimate goal of the preschool is to assure that Spanish-speaking students have equal opportunities as the English-speaking students when starting kindergarten.

“Other children are entering kindergarten with five years of education on these kids, plus a working knowledge of the English language,” Harris said. “How can a child that doesn’t even understand what the teacher is saying catch up?”

La Primera Escuela Preescolar Bilingüe del Noreste de Memphis al Abrir este OtoñoEl programa está dirigido para ayudar a los niños hispanos en su transición a K-12Para Emilia Soriano, una niña de 9 años, el primer día que llegó a su clase de Kindergarten fue el primer día de su vida que requería el uso del inglés.Ahora en el 3º grado en Kingsbury Elementary School en Memphis, ella recuerda que era “difícil” y “aterrador” empezar Kindergarten, especialmente porque español era el único idioma que había escuchado en la casa.Emilia es una entre casi 10.000 Aprendices del Idioma Inglés (AII) en Shelby County Schools, muchos de los cuales no saben nada de inglés cuando comienzan la escuela.

Para ayudar abordar el desafío, una organización planea abrir la primera escuela preescolar bilingüe de la ciudad este otoño en el noreste de Memphis, donde la mayoría de la comunidad hispanohablante vive. La meta es ayudar a preparar a los estudiantes hispanohablantes para cuando entren a las escuelas públicas de habla inglés.

La escuela preescolar representa un terreno nuevo para Su Casa, una organización cristiana sin fines de lucro que ha enfocado predominantemente en proveer clases de inglés para adultos en los barrios en Memphis de The Heights y Berclair. La organización también provee programas para niños, que incluye apoyo en su tarea y lecciones Bíblicas, para los hijos de estos estudiantes adultos.

“Empezamos a proveer cuidado de niños para los padres que estaban tomando nuestras clases de ESL (Inglés como Segundo Idioma),” dijo Helene Harris, la directora de los ministerios de niños en Su Casa. “Sentimos que había una necesidad enorme para una escuela preescolar bilingüe para nuestros niños más pequeños, los cuales no estaban interactuando con personas de habla inglés hasta que se presentaban para Kindergarten.”

Harris dijo que Su Casa va a empezar poco a poco, con alrededor de 10 niños en una sola clase, con el plan de crecer cada año y tener una escuela preescolar en pleno funcionamiento dentro de unos años. La enseñanza será tanto en inglés como en español, según Harris, y la prioridad para inscripción se dará a los niños de padres que están en las clases de inglés (ESL) en Su Casa.

“Queremos que nuestros estudiantes aprendan español además del inglés,” dijo Harris. “Celebrar la cultura es importante para nosotros. Y supimos que aunque muchos niños tienen fluidez, no pueden leer ni escribir bien el español.”

Para la madre de Emilia, Silvia Herrera, mantener las destrezas del idioma español mientras aprenden inglés es importante. Herrera vino a los Estados Unidos de Honduras hace 10 años y empezó a tomar clases de inglés en Su Casa hace cinco años, ya que la maestra de su hija le pidió que hablara más inglés en la casa.

“La primera regla en mi casa es que hablemos en español,” dijo Herrera. “Es de donde somos. Era difícil en la escuela para mis niños al principio. Tenían mucho que aprender.”

Herrera cree que la escuela preescolar será una gran ayuda a los padres hispanohablantes en Memphis, quienes no pueden ayudar a sus hijos aprender inglés ya que muchas veces siguen aprendiéndolo ellos mismos.

La población hispana en Memphis ha incrementado más que el doble durante la última década, con hasta 52.178 residentes en el área metropolitana, según los últimos datos del Censo de EE.UU. Ahora las escuelas del distrito enseñan a 13.758 estudiantes hispanos, casi 6.700 más que los que había en Memphis City Schools hace cinco años. También hay unos 3.467 más aprendices del idioma inglés ahora en el distrito que había en Memphis City Schools cinco años atrás.

Mientras los números continúan creciendo, las oportunidades bilingües para estudiantes en Memphis se han estancado.
Treadwell Elementary School, ubicado a unas millas de Su Casa, tiene el único programa bilingüe en el estado, y también es parte de la Zona de Innovación, un programa académico del distrito para mejorar. Hay algunas escuelas preescolares privadas y bilingües por la ciudad, la mayoría dirigida a enseñar español a los hablantes del inglés.

Según Harris, el costo a los padres para la escuela será determinado de acuerdo con su ingreso, tomando en cuenta la situación económica de cada familia. Actualmente, Su Casa está buscando la financiación local para hacerla lo más accesible posible.

“Nuestros niños básicamente asisten a las escuelas primarias públicas y no pueden pagar por una escuela preescolar privada,” dijo Harris. “Nosotros queremos ofrecer una escuela preescolar que tenga el mismo nivel de educación que la mejor del estado. Eso es lo que va a ayudar romper un ciclo de pobreza.”

Por ejemplo, una escuela pública a la cual asistirían los niños preescolares de Su Casa es Berclair Elementary School, que tiene 50 por ciento Hispanos, 49 por ciento AII y 92 por ciento económicamente limitados.

Jennie Mariella Campos de 12 años dijo que ella piensa que hubiera aprendido a leer más rápido si hubiera sido expuesta al inglés más temprano. Dijo que tenía que trabajar más duro para ponerse al día con sus compañeros en la escuela primaria.

“Nunca hablábamos inglés en la casa porque mis padres no habían aprendido nada de ello todavía,” dijo Jennie Mariella, ahora a punto de empezar el séptimo grado en el Collegiate School de Memphis. “Incluso con las clases de ESL, venir a Su Casa después de la escuela era de gran ayuda en aprender a leer más rápido y en tener mejor idea de lo que yo estaba escribiendo.”

Harris dijo que el objetivo final de la escuela preescolar es asegurar que los estudiantes hispanohablantes tengan una oportunidad equivalente a los estudiantes de habla inglés cuando comienzan Kindergarten.

“Otros niños entran a Kindergarten con cinco años de educación más que estos niños, más un conocimiento práctico del idioma inglés,” dijo Harris. “¿Cómo puede ponerse al día un niño que ni siquiera entiende lo que dice la maestra?”

Jesse Register on his legacy as director of Metro Nashville Public Schools, and advice for the future

2015-07-01T20:06:30+00:00

Jesse Register’s six-year run as director of Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools came to an end last week. During his tenure, the state’s second-largest school district was transformed by forces often out of his control — including explosive growth of the city’s charter school sector and state reforms that changed academic standards and the way teachers are evaluated. Yet, amid all the changes, the school system of about 82,000 students progressed from being on the brink of state takeover to showing steady academic improvement.

On his last official day on the job, Register, 68, spoke with Chalkbeat about what he’s learned. A former schools chief in Hamilton County, Tenn., and Iredell County, N.C., he also offered his advice for Nashville’s next director of schools, who is expected to be named later this month. Here are the highlights of our interview:

When you came to Nashville, Metro Schools were on the verge of state takeover or mayoral control. What were the biggest steps in advancing to this point of stability?

When I came in 2009, there was a lot of concern about public schools. The community wanted to see improvement, and Mayor (Karl) Dean was concerned about the state of the schools. At that time, state government was making administrative appointments and a lot of the decisions for the school system. Since that time, we’ve gotten to where we are an achieving school district. I’ve actually seen some of the preliminary test scores this year, and of course those are embargoed, but we’re going to be in good shape this year. We’ve made very steady, very substantial progress in the school system

In 2009, the organizational culture in the school system was not healthy. There really was a defensive culture, not a collaborative culture. Some people describe it as a culture of fear. People weren’t willing to take risks. There were no people stepping out to take leadership roles in the school improvement process. Since that time, I’m very proud of the fact that the district’s organizational culture has changed significantly. We’re building leadership capacity, and have been doing that all along, and I think we’re beginning to see the results.

It takes a long time to change culture, attitude and beliefs. You just can’t do that overnight. We started early on trying to build instructional leadership capacity at the school level. One thing I did was to decentralize instructional leadership. We took the curriculum coordinators out of the central office and built a system of school-based instructional coaches. We wanted to beef up instructional leadership at the school level, and at the same time we were quite concerned that the principal, who is so important in leadership, had not had a lot of training in how to be highly effective instructional leaders. We started a program six years ago and used a consultant out of Charlotte, N.C., and started giving principals professional development on how to be expert observers of good instruction and excellent coaches for teachers. That program was called the Skillful Observation Lab. That program reached every administrator in our district. We built that program to the point where we now have a cadre of leadership trainers, and it’s institutionalized. I dare say our principals are light years away from where they were in being expert observers of good instruction and helping teachers focus on best practice and improve.

The thing that goes along with that is a student-based budget. We are giving more funds directly to schools, and giving principals and the school leadership teams greater autonomy and flexibility in how to use those funds. The big one is staffing. Principals have much more flexibility in how to hire teachers and counselors and stuff like that, and that’s going to scale this year.

One program I’m really proud of is the Teacher Leadership Institute. That’s 60 teachers a year. One group is the highest performing third-year teachers — the rising stars if you will — we give them a year’s leadership experience, but they stay in the classroom. They have monthly meetings and summer institutes to really build those leaderships skills. And then we have a second cohort of veteran teachers who are leaders in their schools. We want them to be a much bigger voice in the district. We’ve been doing this now for four years, and these people are really expanding our leadership capacity. I feel like it’s really pushing us forward.

How did changes in state policy, especially those related to Race to the Top such as teacher evaluations and new standards, impact what you do?

I think the change in teacher evaluation is very good — to a point. The state put some brakes on it last year, and I think I agree I with that. Teachers aren’t ready to be evaluated yet on student achievement. They don’t trust the system well enough. I think it’s wise to slow down on that, which the state is doing. I hope that what we’ve done with leadership training has our teachers well-prepared for where the state’s going.

"Teachers aren’t ready to be evaluated yet on student achievement. They don’t trust the system well enough."

I think the change for higher standards is a very positive move, when I think about what we want our children to know and be able to do. The hard part is getting past the transition, that we don’t lose a lot of teachers in that process.

Frankly, I’m very excited that Candice McQueen is our state education commissioner. I think she’s absolutely the right person for job. She’s an expert in teacher training. I had the opportunity to work for her some when she was at Lipscomb (University) in Nashville, and I think she’s terrific.

What advice do you have for the next mayor and superintendent?

Mayor Dean really has been a great advocate for public education, and it’s been a great pleasure to work with him. He and I haven’t agreed on everything, but that’s OK. The support we’ve had in Nashville from Metro Council and the mayor has been outstanding. We went through pretty tough economic times in the country, and they kept education funding as a top priority. We don’t have everything that we need, but I’ll tell you, this support is unlike anything else I’ve experienced in the two different states I’ve worked in. (Dean) cares about education, and we’re very proud of some of the programs we’ve worked on together.

I hope that when we look at the new director and new mayor, whoever that will be, that they develop a collaborative working relationship. That’s what has to happen. As you know, there’s been some divisiveness and differences of opinion on some big issues in Nashville, and the community needs to come together, and the leadership in the community needs to come together.

What do you foresee happening with the BEP formula, which the state uses to determine how much money that school systems should receive. Many local district leaders say the state is not fully funding districts based on the formula. Why is that money important?

I hope that the governor and the legislature will take advantage of the fact that we’re having pretty good economic times in Tennessee. One way it’s been quantified and defined is that we’re probably about $500 million a year short of fully funding the BEP. I hope it can be a plan moving forward where the state really looks at this and makes sure it’s adequately funding schools in the state.

The big concern for me is teacher salaries. The salary component of the BEP is significantly less than the real world, what we need to pay teachers. We can’t solve these problems in a year, but we need to constructively look at how to do that in the next three and four years.

I don’t think you can constructively solve that problem in court. It will take seven, eight, ten years. I don’t think courts are the answer. If people who care about education will come together and look at solutions and then make a commitment to that in Tennessee, I think we’d all be better off.

What has been your relationship with the state-run Achievement School District (ASD), which will be in charge of two former Metro Nashville schools beginning this fall?

I disagreed with the decision for the Achievement School District to take Neely’s Bend (Middle Prep). It was our highest-performing priority school, and I felt like we had a fix in place. I communicated with (ASD Superintendent) Chris Barbic and our charter providers, but I didn’t feel like that was a good decision.

The other side is Brick Church (Middle School) is the first Achievement School District school in Nashville, and it’s proven to be pretty successful. There just has to be good communication there. We have several other schools that could be taken by the Achievement School District, and I think it’s really important that the state and local districts talk it through and see if it’s really the best decision to do the ASD takeover, or have some other process for having good schools. We need improvement plans that will work, that are aggressive. Whether it’s the ASD or district-approved charter schools or zoned schools or magnet schools, the point is to have good schools.

What types of school turnaround programs would you like to see expanded?

I was really pleased with the work that was done in our priority schools this year. We increased resources, and we took actions to help us find and bring on board early turnaround leadership for these schools. We gave them authority to hire high-quality teachers, and that’s the bottom line: teachers and leaders.

We’re looking at the community schools effort, wraparound services for students and families. Tony Majors is our chief officer for student services, and he’s working really hard to make sure we’re doing things to support the education of children in a holistic way.

"Quite frankly ... this present charter school debate is very polarizing — and I think destructive."

In Nashville, we have 30 percent of all English Language Learners in the state. We have high percentages at some schools of students who are just learning to speak English, and we have recent immigrants, refugees in some cases, and we have to look at making sure we have resources going into those programs, and that people in those schools are well-trained to help those children learn.

We have a pre-K at Caza Azafran that’s very international. We’re seeing kids who are not speaking English just advance so quickly. It’s language development, it’s communication skills development, and I think we have some important lessons to learn from that.

What are the biggest challenges facing your successor?

I think it’s a big school system, it’s a big organization. To keep the work going, we have a new strategic plan, and it’s very good. My advice would be for the new superintendent to learn about the community as much as he or she can. I think we can do better in that area of community engagement and improving our communication systems. Our communications department is working on a new plan, and there’s a lot to gain from implementing that.

Quite frankly, and I don’t want to get into a lot of detail here, but this present charter school debate is very polarizing — and I think destructive. That needs to come together. I’m hopeful that Project RESET and other efforts will help us develop a common vision. I think that’s going to be a challenge for the new director: developing a good working relationship and pulling the board together.

Editor’s note: Each month, Chalkbeat conducts a Q&A interview with a different leader, innovator, influential thinker or hero across Tennessee’s education community. We invite our readers to email Chalkbeat your suggestions for future subjects to maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

What we talk about when we talk about ‘universal’ preschool

2014-12-22T04:26:10+00:00

Hellen Juarez was excited when she heard Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announce that the city would introduce universal preschool.

“Universal means there will be open slots for those who need it,” said Juarez, a single mother of three whose youngest, a three year old, is not yet in school.

But that isn’t how things have turned out. Emanuel’s plan adds only about 1,500 seats, for low-income families only. Juarez’s local Chicago Public Schools program has a three-month wait to get in, and it provides only two and a half hours of instruction a day.

“It’s not universal,” said Juarez, who decided not to try to take advantage of the city program after realizing how much it would cost her in train fare and lost work time.

Juarez’s experience is not unusual as more school districts and states expand access to early childhood education in an attempt to add learning time at a crucial point in children’s development. Politicians and advocates alike have seized on research that says starting school young offers lasting dividends — as well as on the political expediency of promising a benefit to every voter. As they have, the meaning of “universal” preschool has become, well, not so universal.

“People end up using ‘universal’ to cover the notion that they want to serve more than just poor kids and maybe they want to open it up to all kids,” said Steve Barnett, the director of National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. “But that doesn’t mean they’re going to serve everybody.”

In many places, including Chicago, promises of universal programs extend only to low-income families, but other cities have branded “universal” preschool as being accessible to families of all income levels. Some districts are picking up the full tab for preschool classes, but others, such as Denver, call their programs universal but don’t promise to cover all costs. And many other programs that are billed as universal fall far short of serving every student, at least right now. For example, West Virginia passed a universal preschool bill this year while emphasizing that not all children would be served for at least a decade.

Only a very few districts have attempted to do what New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has done: provide free, full-day early childhood education for every child in the city whose family wants it, regardless of their income. (De Blasio’s program builds off of a decades-old city program, also called “universal,” that served only a fraction of eligible families.) And even there, where universal preschool is limited to prekindergarten, the city isn’t planning to be able to accommodate all families until next year.

That parents like Juarez can wind up perplexed about what “universal” means comes with the territory when securing preschool funding is a political feat, Barnett said.

“It’s undoubtedly confusing,” said Barnett. “If [politicians] started out trying to create a universal program and came up short, they don’t want to stop calling it universal.”

The confusion around the term doesn’t just stem from politicians and district leaders. In Denver, most news reports refer to the city’s program as “universal” preschool and many advocacy organizations have praised the city’s “universal” approach. But the word rarely appears in city-published materials, which instead say the program makes preschool “possible for all four-year olds.”

That may be because cities and states are still in the midst of figuring out what’s possible to do, right now. When it’s used, the term “universal” is often aspirational.

For example, in Denver, city officials gained support from more affluent voters by presenting a program that helps to cover at least a portion of every family’s preschool tuition, rather than fully subsidizing the poorest families.

“I could never have afforded it,” said Samantha Ruiz, a single parent in Denver whose four-year old daughter started preschool last spring. Without aid, she would have had to pay over $1,000 a month for her local preschool. Instead, she cobbles together state aid, federal Head Start funds, and money from the Denver Preschool Program to bring down the cost to just over $100 a month.

De Blasio in New York City largely repurposed what providers were already doing by funding them to extend their half-day programs to a full day. In Chicago, the mayor’s plan is intended to fill in the gaps between what the state and federal government already provide.

“In an ideal world, we’d have universal access for every child and family who needed or wanted services,” said Samantha Aigner-Treworgy, the national policy director for Ounce of Prevention, which advocates for early learning initiatives. “That said, we are in a time of limited public dollars. The way that ‘universal’ has played out is individual communities are looking at what feasible steps are.”

But sticking to what is feasible has left some families disappointed — and unable to secure the early education that might change their children’s lives.

“My family is not the only one that needs it,” Juarez said. “When they said universal, it’s not what I thought.”

Because each state defines “universal” preschool in its own way, it’s difficult to come up with a comprehensive list of states that currently have or are working toward “universal pre-K” or “preschool for all.” Chalkbeat attempted to create that list by researching cities and states, and speaking with the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, Steven Barnett. If you see a city or state missing, let us know.

This story was produced as a collaboration among all news organizations participating in the Expanded Learning Time reporting project.

Tennessee wins $70 million federal pre-K grant

2014-12-10T21:20:25+00:00

Tennessee won the first, $17,500,000 installment in a four year, $70 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to expand prekindergarten, the federal department announced today.

The grant will provide a total of 50 new pre-K classes in Memphis and Nashville.

The money will be split evenly between Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, and the Shelby County School Consortium, which encompasses Shelby County Schools, Millington Schools, the Achievement School District, and Bartlett Schools.

Gov. Bill Haslam applied for the grant in October, after some back and forth about whether the funding would provide academic benefits. He has been adamant that he will not increase state spending on pre-K until a Vanderbilt study on the efficacy of the state’s program concludes next year.

Tennessee was one of 18 states to win money for pre-K expansion. While most states applied for the money to be used statewide, Haslam applied on behalf of just five districts, leaving other districts feeling snubbed. House minority leader Rep. Craig Fitzhugh has said that the exclusion of other districts went against the state’s legal obligation to equally fund districts.

Officials in Memphis and Nashville have been fighting for more pre-K funding for several years. Because of reluctance on the state level, they’ve largely relied on local funding in the past.

“We are very pleased to have the opportunity that this grant affords us and we accept the challenge,” Shelby County Schools superintendent Dorsey Hopson said in a prepared statement.

In both Nashville and the Memphis area, officials hope the grant will not only increase the number of public pre-K seats available, but improve the pre-K experience overall.

“Because of the way the grant was written, it really changes the quality of programs across the district,” said Metro Nashville director of schools Jesse Register.

Some of the grant money will be spent on professional development for district pre-K teachers and Head Start teachers, as well as elementary school principals. Lisa Wiltshire, the director of early education for Metro Schools, said the part of grant about professional development was written by pre-K teachers, who know what kinds of trainings and support are most appropriate.

The grant will also allow the school systems to track students through the third grade.

“We’ll really be able to have good data to show what’s working,” Wiltshire said.

Pre-K centers will also feature wraparound services, including health and mental health screenings, nutrition services, and workforce development for parents.

“The idea is to intervene early, and to get students and our families on the right track early in the process, and ensure they stay on track,” Register said.

Other components of the grant include accountability measures — researchers from Vanderbilt will evaluate pre-K centers — and “age-appropriate assessments” for prekindergarteners.

A comptroller’s report three years ago suggested that Tennessee’s current pre-kindergarten program wasn’t boosting achievement throughout elementary school, and results from the ongoing Vanderbilt study are mixed.

But leading researcher Dale Farran told Chalkbeat that policymakers should look at what makes pre-K programs effective. She said that because many of the pre-K classes she and her team studied were not high-quality, a decision to halt pre-K expansion based on those classrooms might be premature.

In 2013-14, 18,000 children were enrolled in Tennessee’s pre-K program, at a cost of $85 million.

Read the state’s application here, and more of our coverage on attempts to expand pre-K here.

House minority leader says other districts should have had a shot at pre-K funds

2014-10-21T18:21:57+00:00

House Minority Leader Rep. Craig Fitzhugh wants to know why Tennessee’s other 132 districts didn’t have a shot at $70 million in federal pre-kindergarten money Gov. Bill Haslam applied for last week on behalf of five school districts, The Tennessean reports.

From The Tennessean:

“’No matter what source, it seems to me you put $70 million in the pre-K school program for two counties, you’re probably going to have to put some like amount or some reasonable amount for the other 93 counties. And you don’t have the luxury of federal funds,’ Fitzhugh said Friday afternoon. ‘That’s a big budgetary issue.”’

The governor applied for a grant for funds to expand pre-K for Shelby County Schools, the Achievement School District, Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, and Bartlett and Millington Schools, all of which lie within Tennessee’s two major metropolitan areas.

Memphis-area efforts to fund pre-K, including failed proposals to raise taxes for more local pre-K classrooms, and Nashville’s push for universal pre-K have been well publicized. But other areas in the state have worked on expanding pre-K too.

Buzz Thompson at the Great Schools Partnership, which helps fund public education in Knox County, said he wondered why that district was excluded from the grant when he read about it in the paper. He has worked with efforts to expand pre-K in the Knoxville area in the past.

The Tennessean reported that Dave Smith, a spokesperson for the governor, said the Memphis-area districts and Metro Nashville Schools were the only districts that contacted the state about applying for the grant.

Issues of disparities in school funding across the state have come up before. In 2002, a coalition of small school systems in Tennessee successfully sued the state for unequal funding and teachers salaries.

The governor’s office appeared hesitant to apply for the grant. When Chalkbeat first reported on it, in August, Smith told Chalkbeat that the governor would not consider expanding pre-K in the state unit a Vanderbilt study on the state’s pre-K program was completed in 2016, implying that state officials would not apply for the grant.

When the governor’s office submitted a note of intent to apply for the grant in September, Smith cautioned that it didn’t mean officials would definitely apply. The governors’ office and Department of Education officials wouldn’t confirm the state had applied for the grant until after the deadline had passed last week.

Pre-K is a politically charged issue in the state. A 2011 comptrollers’ report said the state’s current program are ineffective at preparing students for higher grades, and the preliminary results of the Vanderbilt study on the state’s program also shows that academic advantages from attending pre-K seem to dissipate by the first grade. Legislators like Rep. Bill Dunn, a Republican from Knoxville, say those results should be taken into account before the state invests even more in pre-K.

“This is a clear case of the emperor has no clothes,” Dunn said.

But Dale Farran, a lead researcher on Vanderbilt’s study, said that if the state’s current program isn’t showing results, it might be the fault of the program, not pre-K in general.

“We didn’t just want pre-K for the sake of pre-K,” Farran said. “We wanted to reduce the achievement gap and prepare kids for school. Pre-K is a mechanism to get there. If it’s not doing what we need it to, we should be saying, ‘what can we do to make it better?’”

Haslam applies for federal Pre-K grant on behalf of five districts

2014-10-17T16:29:11+00:00

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam applied for about $70 million from the U.S. Department of Education for the expansion of prekindergarten in Nashville and Shelby County Wednesday, although he will continue to wait until a Vanderbilt study on the current state pre-K program is complete before expanding it.

The state submitted the application on the behalf of Shelby County Schools, Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, Millington Schools, the Achievement School District, and Bartlett Schools.

“Districts in these communities came up with the implementation plans and the local matching funds, and it does not expand current state pre-K programs,” said Kelli Gauthier, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education.

Earlier this year, when state officials seemed hesitant to apply for the grant, Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools officials attempted to apply directly, and was denied. Metro Schools is already using local money for pre-K, with hopes of having universal pre-K by 2018.

At the time, Metro superintendent Jesse Register said, ” “I would love for Nashville to be a model where federal funding flowed in to offer pre-K on a wider scale.”

Gov. Haslam has adamantly said that will not increase spending on pre-kindergarten until a Vanderbilt study on the efficacy of the state’s program concludes next year. A comptroller’s report three years ago suggested that Tennessee’s current pre-kindergarten program wasn’t boosting achievement throughout elementary school. In 2013-14, 18,000 children were enrolled in Tennessee’s pre-K program at a cost of $85 million.

Other studies, including ones done by the same researchers at Vanderbilt, suggest pre-K can have positive impacts on student achievement through high school.

Read the state’s application here, and more of our coverage on attempts to expand pre-K here.

Tennessee might now be in running for federal pre-K money

2014-09-15T18:08:19+00:00

Gov. Bill Haslam submitted a letter of intent last week to apply for a federal grant to expand prekindergarten after all, a spokesman for the governor told Chalkbeat.

That’s good news for pre-K advocates and education officials in Memphis and Nashville, who are determined to expand pre-K with or without help from the state. If Tennessee gets one of ten pre-K expansion grants, the state could receive up to $70 million in the next four years, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said while he was on tour in Tennessee last week. Thirty-four other states are qualified for the grants.

Initially, Haslam said that he would wait to decide on pre-K expansion until at least next year, when a Vanderbilt University study on the effectiveness of the state’s current model is released. But last week he submitted a letter of intent for the grant, although he still will not alter the state pre-K programming until he sees the study results.

“We’re working to understand more about what the state’s long-term role would be when it comes to funding and didn’t want to take Tennessee out of contention at this time,” an aide for Haslam told Chalkbeat.
A comptroller’s report three years ago suggested that Tennessee’s current pre-kindergarten program wasn’t boosting achievement throughout elementary school, causing a group of legislators, led by Bill Dunn, a Republican representative from Knoxville, to assert pre-K was a bad investment for the state.

Early results from the five-year Vanderbilt study Haslam is waiting on suggest that students might not sustain academic gains in elementary school, but might develop other skills, like time management, that could serve them in middle and high school.

Education officials in Chattanooga, Nashville and Memphis have expressed interest in the federal funds, which they say will help raise achievement in their districts. Director of Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools Jesse Register, who this year began rolling out a plan for universal pre-K in his city by 2018, looked into applying for the federal grant directly, but was denied.

At the time he said he was hopeful that Haslam would apply.

“I would love for Nashville to be a model, where federal funding flowed in to offer pre-K on a wider scale,” he said.

U.S. Sec. of Education pushes for Haslam to apply for pre-K money

2014-09-11T18:35:53+00:00

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Tuesday that Gov. Bill Haslam should apply for federal money available for prekindergarten expansion, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported.

But a spokesperson for Gov. Haslam’s office told Chalkbeat earlier this month that the governor will not apply for the grant.

The comments came during a cross country bus tour Duncan is taking. He stopped in Memphis and Nashville Wednesday.

Gov. Haslam has said that he will not work to expand pre-K until at least next year, when a Vanderbilt University study on the effectiveness of the state’s current model is released. That means that the money the federal government is offering this year is a non-starter.

Duncan said that if Tennessee officials did apply for the money, the state could receive up to $70 million for pre-K in the next four years.

“To me, this is just a triumph of common sense,” he said. “Too many children start kindergarten a year to 18 months behind.”

A comptroller’s report three years ago suggested that Tennessee’s current pre-kindergarten program wasn’t boosting achievement throughout elementary school, causing a group of legislators, led by Bill Dunn, a Republican representative from Knoxville, to assert pre-K was a bad investment for the state.

Education officials in Chattanooga, Nashville and Memphis have expressed interest in the federal funds, which they say will help raise achievement in their districts, but cannot apply for the Pre-K grant directly.

Applications are due Oct. 14.

Tennessee’s largest districts expand focus on pre-K despite Haslam’s hesitancy

2014-09-04T22:07:38+00:00

About 40 four-year-olds bounded from a school bus into an East Nashville prekindergarten center on its opening day in August. Their parents, who had ridden with them, followed close behind, holding up iPhones and video recorders.

The parents were documenting not only first day of school for their children, but the beginning stages of an ambitious pre-kindergarten initiative that district leaders hope will serve as a model for early education in Nashville.

Both of Tennessee’s largest school districts, in Nashville and Memphis, are not only pushing to expand pre-K, but to also make it more effective. Shelby County Schools says it plans to use more standards and increase accountability in a group of Head Start early learning classes it took over, and Metro Nashville Public Schools just opened three “model centers”—including the one the students were bounding into in August—where it will host cutting-edged early learning practices with help from researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education.

More high-quality, accessible pre-K, advocates argue, will reduce the achievement gap between affluent and economically disadvantaged students and boost college and career readiness down the line. “I would love for Nashville to be a model, where federal funding flowed in to offer pre-K on a wider scale,” said Metro Nashville Public Schools director Jesse Register.

But the districts’ expansion comes without state support. According to a spokesman, Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, will not increase spending on pre-kindergarten until a Vanderbilt study on the efficacy of the state’s program concludes next year— even if that increase were supported with federal, rather than state, funds. A comptroller’s report three years ago suggested that Tennessee’s current pre-kindergarten program wasn’t boosting achievement throughout elementary school.

Early expansion before a pause

A decade ago, Tennessee’s legislature passed the Voluntary Pre-K (VPK) for Tennessee Act of 2005, which successfully increased access to pre-K programs for low-income children. In 2004-2005, only 3,000 Tennessee four-year-olds attended a public pre-kindergarten other than Head Start; in 2013-2014, 18,000 did. Seats in the program are filled through a lottery, with low-income children and children with disabilities receiving priority. The state spent more than $85,000,000 on the VPK program in the 2013-14 school year.

Now, despite a big push on pre-K from the Obama administration and bipartisan support for its expansion in other states, Haslam says he is waiting for more data before expanding Tennessee’s program again.

Tennessee was one of 35 states eligible for one of 10 pre-K expansion grants from the U.S. Department of Education to be awarded this December, which could be from between $10 million to $35 million (the final award would be based on population), but the state did not apply for the grant. Metro Schools sought to apply directly for federal dollars but was declined.

Even if the new Vanderbilt study convinces officials to expand state spending, the legislature would still have to approve any increases. Local districts likely wouldn’t see the money until at least 2016, said Betty Anderson, the director of Stand For Children in Tennessee.

District and city leaders in both Memphis and Nashville have turned to alternate routes for funding. Twice, a movement to raise the sales tax in Shelby County to create more prekindergarten seats has been put on the ballot, and twice it has failed. The county’s commission set aside $3 million for new classes earlier this summer.

Nashville prekindergarten advocates have been more successful. The Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools added more than 300 prekindergarten seats this year with more than $27 million set aside by the city, and aims to have universal pre-K within the next four years.

Research on efficacy, improvement

The state comptroller’s 2011 report recommended the state continue its expansion of pre-K, as it seemed to better prepare low-income students for kindergarten. But the research committee stated in their final report, they didn’t have enough evidence to show that the pre-K gains were sustained after kindergarten.

The researchers noted that much of the lack of evidence was because of limited funds and test scores available for the children studied. But a group of Republican legislators, led by a representative from Knoxville named Bill Dunn, championed the report as proof that pre-K was a bad investment for the state of Tennessee.

Dale Farran, an early education researcher at Vanderbilt, is working with Metro Schools on its model centers. She’s also the head of the study on Tennessee’s current pre-K program whose results Haslam is awaiting. She says that policymakers should look at what makes pre-K programs effective, and be careful not base decisions about whether to expand programs based on ineffective pre-kindergartens.

Farran points out that many of the pre-K classes she and her team studied were not ideal, so making decisions about the potential efficacy of pre-K based on the program as currently implemented might be premature. For example, she has found that many classes in the voluntary pre-K program spend more than an hour a day in whole-group instruction, which researchers at Vanderbilt and other institutions have found impedes young children’s learning.“We didn’t just want pre-K for the sake of pre-K,” Farran said. “We wanted to reduce the achievement gap and prepare kids for school. Pre-K is a mechanism to get there. If it’s not doing what we need it to, we should be saying, ‘what can we do to make it better?’”

Farran said so far, findings show that the difference in academic gains for those who attended state-funded pre-Ks compared to children who did not level off by the 1st grade. She said students who attended pre-K could possibly show better mastery of other skills, like paying attention and controlling how hard they work, that might last longer.

The National Institutes of Health is funding the research team at Vanderbilt to continue to follow a group of Tennessee students who attended pre-K into middle school.A model for prekindergartenNashville superintendent Jesse Register said the three new model centers, which will serve 350 students this year, will help improve the quality of pre-K throughout the district. “Our program prior to this year was in 57 sites, and we knew we had a lot of variation in quality from site-to-site,” Register said.

The leaders of the new model centers, currently housed at the former Ross and Bordeaux elementary buildings, are working with researchers from Vanderbilt, including Farran, to make sure the centers are at the cutting-edge of pre-K practices.

“We want the model centers to be something that we can use as a district to benchmark quality…in terms of programming, curriculum, teaching practices, and how much support pre-K teachers get,” said Lisa Wiltshire, the director of early education in the district.

On a recent day in a classroom at Ross Elementary, some students were played blocks while others played house and drew.

Ty’len Cunningham, Ella-Elaine Tisdale, and Yeshua Salazar-Almedia show their teacher, Ms. Jessica, their block creations at Ross Elementary in Nashville.

The teacher, Ms. Jessica, floated around the room to ask students questions about what they were doing, but was careful not to tell them what to do. Students at the model centers much of their day in self-directed play in centers. The center is using a program called the Creative Curriculum, which emphasizes playing as a way to learn.

“You want them to be making connections and seeing how things relate to each other,” Farran explained. ‘You have to have those things in that environment that engage their interest.”

One little boy was vigorously using a real mop to pretend to clean up. His classmate pointed at him. “This is what kids do!” he said.

Pre-K money will be split between two suburbs, ASD and Shelby County Schools

2014-08-12T13:52:22+00:00

More pre-K classrooms will be coming to four districts across Shelby County by Sept. 2.

Shelby County Schools, the Achievement School District, Bartlett City Schools and Millington Municipal Schools will each receive money for new pre-K classrooms, according to the Shelby County Schools Education Foundation, which is administering the funds.

The Shelby County Commission approved $3 million for pre-K expansion on July 21 but gave it to the Shelby County Schools Education Foundation, a small non-profit with a long history of supporting suburban schools. There was conflicting information coming from several commissioners, articles in the press and among the districts themselves in the days and weeks after the vote about where the money was going to go.

The foundation has decided that the money will be divided up proportionally according to how many students were enrolled in pre-K programs last year, according to commissioner Terry Roland. The only suburban districts to run pre-K last year were Bartlett and Millington. Bartlett has already started advertising spots in a new classroom and Millington’s superintendent said if Millington received enough money it would also add a classroom.

Bartlett decided to add another class once it learned that the district was eligible and that the programs would be fully funded. David Stephens, the superintendent of Bartlett, hadn’t been invited to the foundation’s first meeting and had heard that the foundation wanted Bartlett to start two new pre-K classrooms. He thought Bartlett only had the capacity get only one new class off the ground this year.

“When they had their first meeting we hadn’t sat at the table,” said Stephens.. “Once we got to the table and saw what was proposed, we saw that it was doable.”

Bartlett has two already existing pre-K classrooms that are funded by the state, but those programs require that the district provides matching funds. The money from the county commission will fully fund its new pre-K class without requiring matching funds.

In addition, the county’s money will go to wrap-around services for Bartlett’s students — which can include services such as health care and counseling — in both its new pre-K classroom and its already existing state-funded pre-K classrooms, according to Stephens.

The new programs must give priority to children from low-income backgrounds and the money has to be spent on new classrooms and can’t go to pay for already-existing programs, according to Chris Price, president of the Shelby County Schools Education Foundation.

When the county commission initially granted the money, it wasn’t clear which districts would receive it. The Memphis Daily News and Commercial Appeal initially both reported that the money was headed for Shelby County Schools. Representatives from Bartlett and Millington said they weren’t expecting new pre-K money and were not looking to expand this year beyond the state funds they had already secured.

“That’s not us,” said Georgia Dawson, Millington’s preschool coordinator, just after the $3 million had been voted on by the commission. “Ours are voluntary pre-Ks from the state. You need to talk to Shelby Unified about their pre-K program. We have no involvement with that whatsoever.”

But commissioner Roland, who made one of the deciding votes on the issue, wanted to make sure the suburbs received their fare share.

“I’m not really even in favor of pre-K because a lot of people use it for a daycare,” said commissioner Roland, whose district covers the suburbs. “But I knew if Shelby County Schools was going to get some of that money, then the other suburbs deserved some too.”

The foundation will receive $50,000 of the $3 million to administer the pre-K funds. The grant application that each of the four districts have to fill out will be available on Wednesday, according to Price. Some districts, such as the Achievement School District, still aren’t sure how many new classrooms the money will allow them to fund, according to Letita Aaron.

Shelby County Schools is expected to discuss the new pre-K classrooms at its board work session next week.

The foundation has just recently begun to play an intermediary role for distributing funds for educational purposes accross the county. Between 2001 and 2011 the foundation awarded less than $100,000 per year in money it raised to support suburban schools. But in 2011 and 2012 it raised more than $1 million each year, according to its tax filings. It spent most of the money in 2012 just before the Shelby County Schools merger, when it was responsible for funding the transition committee for the merger of Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools.

Shelby County Schools’ pathway to pre-K funds runs through foundation with suburban roots

2014-07-28T22:24:19+00:00

Shelby County commissioners who voted last week to spend $3 million on expanding prekindergarten access are finding that they don’t control where the money will go.

That’s because when the commission earmarked the funds not directly to Shelby County Schools but to a tiny local foundation, some members were unwittingly funneling funds to a group that has strong ties to the suburban districts that have left SCS. Shelby County Schools Education Foundation’s plans for the funds — which amount to 30 times what it has typically given to schools annually — are unclear.

Mayor Mark Luttrell will meet with the foundation tomorrow to plan out how the program will be administered.

Commissioners say funneling the funds through the foundation was politically expedient, and it’s not at all clear whether any suburban districts will apply for the funds.

But the prospect of the six suburban districts, whose students are far less needy on average than Shelby County Schools’ students, getting access to pre-K funding did not come up during the commission’s debate last week, which focused instead on whether SCS could be trusted to spend the money only on pre-K.

Terry Roland, a commissioner who represents a largely suburban district, said he had proposed earmarking the funds to the foundation rather than the district explicitly because he wanted the new suburban districts to have a crack at expanding pre-K, too. He also said he intentionally didn’t mention that during the meeting, because he knew some of his colleagues would object.

“That’s politics,” he told Chalkbeat Tennessee.

Roland said some municipal districts — including Germantown and Collierville — run pre-K programs and would potentially be interested in some of the funds. A third municipal district, Bartlett, has two fully enrolled pre-K classes already, but would not look for more funding until next year.

But commissioner Heidi Shafer said last week that suburban districts do not want to expand pre-K offerings. And Mike Ritz, a commissioner from suburban Germantown, told Chalkbeat that he doubted suburban districts would try to secure much of the pre-K funding. Lakeland has said it is not interested and the other districts have not yet responded to Chalkbeat messages.

Ritz said he thought the commission steered the funds to the foundation simply because too few commissioners in attendance would have voted last week to send the dollars straight to Shelby County Schools.

Even Luttrell said he doesn’t know exactly where the pre-K money will wind up being used.

“The foundation will be responsible for really coming up with the framework for prekindergarten programs and we don’t know exactly how that will be done,” he said. “It stands to reason that Shelby County Schools, being the largest school system, will receive a significant amount of it, but we really don’t know how much at this time.”

That leaves a lot up to a foundation that has little track record of supporting Memphis schools, which enroll the highest-need students in the area.

Instead, the foundation’s past allegiance has been with the suburbs. Its office is located in Bartlett, one of the six municipalities that left SCS, and its website says clearly that its mission is to support “suburban and unincorporated areas … outside the municipal limits of the city of Memphis.” Its Facebook page — where photographs feature overwhelmingly white faces, even though more than half of Shelby County residents are black — recently highlighted the foundation’s gift to an elementary school in suburban Collierville.

Director Diane Polly said the website had not been updated to reflect the foundation’s post-merger mission. “Our mission will be to serve all public schools in the county,” she said. “That will include charters, achievement, and municipalities, everybody, public school education.”

The foundation, which Luttrell said played an important role in planning for the merger last year, will take $50,000 of the $3 million to support its own costs.

Representatives from Shelby County Schools released a statement after the commission meeting last week saying that the district would spend the money it receives on expanding pre-K for children with high need. The day after the decision, they were already poring over maps to decide which high-need areas would get the classes, according to the Commercial Appeal.

But Polly declined to comment on the foundation’s plans for the pre-K funds, including whether the foundation would prioritize programs that serve high-need students, until after the meeting tomorrow with Luttrell.

Steve Mulroy, a commissioner from the city of Memphis who has been a leading champion of boosting pre-K funding, said he would be disappointed in Luttrell if suburban districts wind up claiming a chunk of Shelby County’s pre-K funds.

“It will erode the county commission’s trust in the administration and that trust is already at a low point to begin with,” he said.

But even Mulroy said he voted to funnel the funds through the foundation because he saw doing so as Shelby County’s best shot at moving forward with a funding priority that hit a major roadblock last year, when voters rejected a referendum that would have paid for expanding pre-K.

“I figured a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” Mulroy said. “At the end of the day, as long as the lion’s share goes to Shelby County Schools it’s better than what we originally had — which was nothing.”

County Commission approves $3 million to expand pre-K

2014-07-21T21:08:29+00:00

The Shelby County Commission will give $3 million to the Shelby County Education Foundation to expand prekindergarten this year, according to local media reports.

Last week the commission’s education committee recommended spending $6 million on additional prekindergarten classrooms using surplus money from the county’s budget. The full commission only approved half of the recommended amount.

The vote was 7-3 with commissioners Ford, Thomas and Billingsley voting against the plan, according to WREG.

Prekindergarten advocates have been pushing to provide more options for the approximately 15,000 low-income students under the age of five in Shelby County. After a failed ballot measure last fall, advocates have been pursuing a series of smaller strategies, such as the funding measure passed Monday. They hope the expanded prekindergarten efforts will ensure that all children are better prepared for kindergarten.

County commission will consider giving SCS $6 million for pre-K

2014-07-17T17:01:23+00:00

The County Commission’s education committee voted on Wednesday to provide an extra $6 million to Shelby County Schools for pre-kindergarten classes.

But the initiative was not supported by all of the committee members and it isn’t clear whether this will be supported by the full commission.

“Amending the budget by $6 million essentially takes us right out of balance,” said Harvey Kennedy, the county’s chief administrative officer, according to the Commercial Appeal.

Commission Chairman James Harvey said that money from a budget surplus and from savings could pay for it without throwing the budget out of whack.

Mayor Mark Luttrell’s office tried to push a smaller $3 million dollar pre-K proposal and is planning on developing its own public-private partnership to fund pre-K.

Several educators and politicians have been working to find alternative methods of funding for pre-K after a referendum to expand the county’s offerings lost last November.

Advocates contend that only 30 percent of students currently enter kindergarten prepared for school and universal pre-K would help fix that.

Earlier this month, the Shelby County Schools board accepted $33 million in federal and state grants to take over the area’s Head Start. Administrators said at the time that they will use their control of the city’s program, that offers health, social and education services to low-income children under five, to emphasize reading skills, teacher accountability and kindergarten readiness.

The commission is expected to vote on the initiative at its Monday meeting.

The Education Committee also voted to raise the salaries for county school board members from $4,200 to $14,000.

Pre-K advocates pursue small strategies toward big goal

2014-06-18T18:55:48+00:00

A coalition of pre-K advocates are moving forward with a collection of small strategies that they hope will result in every child being prepared to start kindergarten. They are regrouping after losing a second referendum in November to fund universal pre-K with an increased sales tax.

“We have to be pursuing multiple strategies at the same time,” said Kathy Buckman Gibson, one of the leaders of the effort at the Chamber of Commerce. “Putting all our eggs in one basket is not going to move the basket sufficiently and as quickly as we feel we need to.”

Advocates contend that only 30 percent of students currently enter kindergarten are prepared for school and universal pre-K would fix that. But the referendum to fund pre-K last November lost, in part due to criticisms that a sales tax disproportionately falls on the poor and that the revenues might be used to lower the property taxes of the rich.

Pre-K advocates at the non-profit People First and the Memphis Chamber of Commerce brought in stakeholders from across the city a little more than a month ago to discuss their next steps. The meeting included nearly 50 interested politicians, non-profits, philanthropists, professors, church and business leaders to brainstorm and discuss new ideas. Although they’ve stopped short of calling what came out of the meeting a full-on strategy, they are now pursuing several possible ways forward, including identifying new funding, raising standards for daycare centers, and even returning to voters to ask for more funding.New sources of fundingOne potential source of funding fell through two weeks ago. The Shelby County Commission voted down a proposal to spend $2.8 million to fund pre-K for 500 children that had been cut as a result of losing Race to the Top funding.Commissioner Steven Mulroy believes some form of that proposal could still pass if it’s bundled with other initiatives favored by commissioners who are currenlty on the fence. Even if it doesn’t pass this budget cycle, Gibson said that pre-K advocates will be paying close attention to the makeup of the board after the coming election and could return again.At the most recent Shelby County Commission meeting, Superintendent Dorsey Hopson argued once again that it’s no coincidence that only 30 percent of third graders are proficient in literacy and 30 percent of 7th graders are proficient in math: only 30 percent are prepared for kindergarten.The importance of commission funding, isn’t just local, according to advocates; it could bolster an application for a new federal program that funds pre-K expansion.“By demonstrating our commitment to pre-K funding at the local level, we’ll be able to leverage that funding at the federal level, so more than 500 children would be able to receive pre-K instruction,” Mulroy said.But there are two major hurdles for accessing the millions of dollars in funds that have been made available through the US Department of Education through a program intended to seed the expansion of pre-K. The first problem is that the funds are supposed to pass through states not local districts. Gov. Bill Haslam has made it clear that he won’t support any expansions of pre-K funding in Tennessee until a new pre-K study from Vanderbilt is released.So supporters are hoping that they can negotiate a political work-around, so that several of the large municipal districts in the state, such as Shelby County and Nashville, can apply for the funds directly, rather than applying through the state. But even if this worked, the funding is only temporary and they would have to look for more funds again in four years.If supporters can cobble together some funding and put together a more detailed proposal for tax-payers, Cardell Orrin, the Memphis director of Stand for Children, thinks they could even go back to voters a third time to ask for a permanent source of funding“Some people think that people just don’t support pre-K,” Orrin said. “I don’t think any of the data shows people don’t want pre-K. I think they would support it if you developed the details of how you’re going to distribute the money.” He also thinks voters want to know the plan for what will happen to the private pre-K providers.“The issue is caught up in a vicious cycle of politically polluted waters,” said Keith Norman, president of the Memphis NAACP, who blamed political opponents for spreading misinformation about how the money would be spent during the November pre-K referendum. “I don’t think that [the referendum] was understood by the general population.”Leveraging Day Care and Head StartSupporters are also looking to take advantage of federally-subsidized private daycare for working parents. If the daycares functioned more like pre-K classrooms, they wouldn’t need to find as much funding.They are planning to push for tougher certification standards for daycares at the state level: the current three star rating system is more focused on child safety, they say, than preparation for school. They also believe that if parents were better informed, they would put their children in higher quality daycares.“We have to do some real awareness with parents about selecting places that will really help their child be prepared,” said Barbara Prescott of People First. “We have thousands of children in child care, but only 30 percent are reaching kindergarten with pre-literacy skills.”“We want all those daycares that are in the community to be a part of the solution as well,” said Andre Dean, an advocate from the Chamber of Commerce. “We’re not trying to put anyone out of business or recreate the wheel. But we want to raise the levels and standards.”There is also some hope that improvements in the local administration of Head Start — a federal program for children below the poverty line that includes preschool as well as nutritional and health services — will help. Shelby County’s contract to administer Head Start expires on June 30. Representatives for Shelby County Schools could not confirm that the school district will be the new administrators of the program on July 1. But pre-K advocates are hopeful that, if the school system does take control as many are expecting, they will do a better job at preparing students for kindergarten.“If it is Shelby County Schools,” Prescott said. “They really would be looking toward having entities deliver services that would be…more focused on children reaching kindergarten with the pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills that would set them up for success.”More than 20 Head Start workers protested looming layoffs at Monday’s school board meeting. Read our story here.

Head Start workers protest the loss of 350 jobs serving low income children

2014-06-18T17:43:01+00:00

At least 20 Shelby County Head Start workers protested the loss of as many as 350 jobs outside the Shelby County Schools monthly board meeting Tuesday night. The workers have been given notices that their jobs with the county end this month and they say that SCS has made no assurances that they will be hired back if it takes over the Head Start contract on July 1.Head Start is a federal program for children below the poverty line that includes preschool as well as nutritional and health services.“Some of the employees have been with Head Start for forty years or more,” said Netra Weatherby, the union spokesperson for the protesting workers last night.As a result of the job losses, the protesters say SCS may not have enough workers to avoid a disruption to the educational and health services Head Start programs offer to more than 5,000 predominantly low-income children in Shelby County. The workers have heard that they may not be hired back because of the the high salaries and pension costs of experienced workers, says Weatherby, who has more than 20 years of experience.An SCS spokesman wrote in an email that they won’t know whether the district has been awarded the Head Start contract, or whether it will be awarded to the other applicant, Porter-Leath, until July 1. But the district put out a Request For Prosposal on June 13 to outsource Head Start services for 2,200 of the 4,262 children that it proposed to serve in its federal Head Start application. Weatherby says that the numbers in the RFP don’t add up and will lead to a reduction in the number of children being served.“Head Start is the best program that you can have,” Weatherby said. “Not only do we provide educational services, we’re a social service. We deal with the whole family. Some of the parents who come in don’t know how to advocate for themselves and their children. We teach them all that.”

Commission votes down pre-K proposal

2014-06-03T20:17:49+00:00

The Shelby County Commission voted down a proposal to fund pre-K classrooms Monday.Commissioner Steve Mulroy wanted $2.8 million to restore funding for 26 pre-K classrooms, according to Action News 5. But Mayor Mark Lutrell wants to use the money to give suburban and rural residents a tax cut, so that they are taxed at the same level as Memphis city residents.Teachers showed up to the meeting to support the pre-K funding. “This country has a responsibility to educate all children,” said Keith Williams, the president of the teachers union, to Action News 5.The pre-K proposal lost by one vote.Although Council Chair James Harvey voted against funding this time, he plans to bring universal pre-K in Shelby County to vote soon, according to News 3.“What they don’t see coming is I’m going to propose we fund pre-k. Period,” Harvey said to News 3. “All of Shelby County. Not the suburbs, or certain demographics, not the poor. Shelby county will fund pre-k.”

Shelby County Schools to ask commission to fund pre-K, capital needs

2014-04-14T20:48:51+00:00

As Shelby County Schools prepares to finalize its 2014-15 budget, Superintendent Dorsey Hopson II said he may ask the commission to fund a portion of pre-kindergarten classes initially eliminated due to budget constraints, according to the Commercial Appeal.

Hopson said in an interview with The Commercial Appeal that he may make a recommendation to the board during its next meeting.

“When you have an obvious need that nobody can deny, it would make some sense,” Hopson said in the article.

Nearly 20 percent of the district’s budget is dedicated to improving students’ skills in kindergarten through third grade with a strong emphasis on improving student literacy, according to school officials.

It would cost $9.3 million to restore SCS’s pre-kindergarten offerings to 214 classes.

In addition to pre-K requests, SCS will also ask for $52 million in capital costs to build new schools and building repairs.

The county commission has $381 million in its budget for education for next school year. For the first time, it will be divided between Shelby County Schools and the six municipal districts – Bartlett, Germantown, Cordova, Millington, Lakeland and Collierville.