Like many school districts across the country, Elizabethton City Schools entered the 2020/2021 school year with a new hybrid schedule that allowed students to split time learning remotely and in the classroom.The schedule was designed to address COVID-19 concerns and for elementary school students, it meant virtual learning every Wednesday.Dr. Tammy Markland says teachers at her Westside Elementary School quickly noticed challenges.

A new survey finds Tennessee teachers support the key academic initiatives the state has launched to recover learning and accelerate student achievement.That was one finding of the results of its 2022 Tennessee Educator Survey (TES) shared by the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) Friday

Few educational issues have generated more disagreement this year than Tennessee’s Third-Grade Retention Law.The legislation was designed in 2021 to ensure that students who a need additional help in reading would receive it before being promoted to the fourth grade.Wednesday afternoon Reginald Nash with advocate organization the Education Trust told members of the State House Education Instruction Committee that any tweaks need to include an emphasis on building the literacy foundations both at the start of third grade and much earlier.

Legislation to make the HOPE Scholarship accessible to graduate students received support from two key education leaders in the State House on Monday.

The Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) cleared an important hurdle Monday morning that ensures its eventual implementation for school districts across the state next school year.The Tennessee General Assembly’s Joint Government Operations Committee provided a positive recommendation to new rules that will govern TISA when it replaces the Basic Education Program (BEP) in the 2023/2024 school year.

LEAD Public Schools announced LEAD Neely’s Bend will be the first public charter school in Nashville to exit the state-run Achievement School District (ASD) and move under the authority of the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission.The ASD is a school system in Tennessee created to provide academic intervention for the state’s lowest performing schools. LEAD Neely’s Bend qualified to move out of the ASD through improved academic performance during the 2021-22 school year.

Memphis schools Hawkins Mill Elementary and Trezevant High have been on the state’s priority list since the list’s formation in the 2011-12 school year. This means their students are consistently in the bottom 5% of state tests or have less than 67% graduation rate.

There may not have been a single piece of legislation that was more impactful in 2022 than the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act.TISA as it was called, invested a billion dollars into K-12 education and fundamentally changed the way public schools are funded to be based on individual student needs.Still, the chair of the Tennessee Senate Education Committee says he wasn’t entirely sold on TISA at first.

The Tennessee Department of Education announced two additional educator preparation providers (EPP) are now available to provide teacher apprenticeships through the state’s Grow Your Own (GYO) initiative.The University of Memphis will offer a bachelor's teacher apprenticeship pathway and Arete Memphis Public Montessori will offer a licensure-only pathway through Grow Your Own.

Tennessee students may soon be able to use their HOPE Scholarship to obtain a master’s or other advanced degree.Legislation filed earlier this month by State Representative William Lamberth and State Senator Bo Watson would open the scholarship program to students who’ve completed their first baccalaureate degree early.

Newly elected Republican Representatives William Slater and Kevin Raper don’t even have their pictures posted yet on the Tennessee General Assembly website, but both are now occupying leadership positions in key House Committees.Tennessee Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton appointed Slater as the Vice-Chair of the House Education Administration Committee Thursday and assigned Raper to be the House Education Instruction Committee Vice-Chair.

State Senator Dawn White was always going to make an impact on education. The Murfreesboro legislator says even as a young child growing up in Eagleville Tennessee, she was attracted to teaching. “I mean my mother will tell you the stories of when my sister and I would play when we were little kids, I would always be the teacher so it’s just something that I always had a passion for and a heart for,” said Sen. White. 

Perhaps no issue was more impactful in last year’s legislative session than education. The 112th General Assembly ended with the historic passage of the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) Act that completely overhauled the way public schools are funded in Tennessee.The 113th General Assembly that begins at noon today likely won’t pass legislation as sweeping, but that doesn’t mean legislators won’t have an opportunity to make an impact on K-12 education.

When the Tennessee General Assembly returns to Nashville next Tuesday, Representative William Slater will be among 19 new members in the State House.Slater won the Republican primary for House District 35 last August and then ran unopposed in November to represent Trousdale County and part of Sumner County.  He’s succeeding former Representative Jerry Sexton who decided not to seek another term in office.

A Tennessee bill would allow every public school teacher in the state to have $500 to spend on classroom supplies.The bill would be an adjustment on the $200 initially stipulated for each teacher’s use in the new Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement funding formula, set to begin in the 2023-24 school year.

Wednesday the Tennessee Department of Education announced over $800,000 in grant funding to 34 school districts throughout the state. These dollars will be used for middle school career and technical education (CTE), school-based enterprise projects at the high school level and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.The department awarded  Middle School STEM Start-Up & Expansion Grants to 52 schools and 29 are receiving Middle School CTE Start-Up and Expansion grants. Seven schools will receive High School School-Based Enterprise grant funding. 

The Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) announced another sign of education recovery from the pandemic this week.The department says ACT participation among public school students is now back to pre-pandemic levels. In 2021, participation across the state sunk to 96%, but it has now risen to 98%. The 2018-19 graduating class is the last to have a participation rate that high.

A new report by the Tennessee Comptroller’s Office of Research and Education Accountability (OREA) found fewer Tennessee teenagers are taking drivers education classes in high school.According to the report, 60 school districts in Tennessee received state funding to provide more than 12,000 students with driver education classes last school year. That’s a noticeable decline from just four years ago when 65 districts received funding to provide the class to 15,000 students.