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.

By any measure, Chattanooga Preparatory School’s first high school basketball season was a slam dunk success.The newly established public charter school entered the 2020/2021 season with only a 9th grade class, so the varsity boys team consisted solely of freshmen. The Sentinels still went 10 and 5 on the year, coming one game shy of qualifying for the 8-team state tournament.That record included a 5 and 1 district result for the only public charter school in Tennessee’s Division I Class 1A Region 3 District 5. The Sentinels only district loss came to Polk County rival Copper Basin. The two teams split their season series and then faced off in the district championship game where Copper Basin won a nail-bitter by just two points.It would appear one season of facing the Sentinels was more than enough for Copper Basin.During last month’s Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (TSSAA) annual regional meetings, the small Polk County school proposed moving all public charter schools out of the Division I that they are currently in with traditional public schools. Under the proposal, public charter school athletes would instead compete in Division II with private schools.

Tennessee’s private school voucher law, which now only affects districts and some students in Memphis and Nashville, would widen to include Hamilton County Schools under new legislation filed this week.Sen. Todd Gardenhire, a Chattanooga Republican, wants the legislature to expand the eligibility criteria for the education savings account program to include students in districts with at least five of the state’s lowest-performing schools, as identified in the last three “priority school” cycles since 2015.

Districts throughout Tennessee and the nation are working to help students recover from learning losses spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. But another respiratory illness is threatening to undermine that work.Last month, flu outbreaks sparked school closures in at least 10 districts. And while the spread of flu hasn’t prompted closures in any Shelby County schools, the area isn’t immune to the threat.

K-12 teacher shortages — one of the most disputed questions in education policy today — are an undeniable reality in some communities, a newly released study indicates. But they are also a hyper-local phenomenon, the authors write, with fully staffed schools existing in close proximity to those that struggle to hire and retain teachers.The paper, circulated Thursday through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, uses a combination of survey responses and statewide administrative records from Tennessee to create a framework for identifying how and where teacher shortages emerge.

The Tennessee Department of Education, in partnership with the Governor’s Early Literacy Foundation, announced a free reading opportunity for students and families Wednesday. This winter, parents will have the opportunity to order free, at-home reading resources for children in grades K-2.Based on the child’s age, they will receive an At-Home Decodable Book Series. Decodable books are sequenced to include words familiar with the reader and allow the reader to practice word sounds, phonics and decoding at their grade level. These books allow families to work with their students to practice word sounds and advance the student’s reading skills.

Tennessee is taking steps to ensure that private schools get the opportunity to receive nearly $60 million in unused federal COVID relief funds set aside for them in 2021.But the state is considering loosening some of the strings that the federal government initially attached to those funds. In particular, under several options outlined Monday by Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, private schools wouldn’t necessarily have to serve a “significant” share of students from low-income families to be eligible for aid, as the Biden administration had required.