Dive Brief:
- During his trip to Nashville this week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tennessee was tackling the "courage gap" by implementing "controversial but common sense" education policies that other states are often afraid to take on.
- Duncan's admiration for Tennessee — one of the first states to be awarded Race to the Top funding back in 2010 — is due to new education laws promoted by former Gov. Phil Bredesen and current Gov. Bill Haslam, including "value-added" teacher evaluations, Common Core standards, and the statewide Achievement School District that turned schools in the bottom 5% into charters.
- Duncan's mention of pushback references a recent swelling of frustration toward such education overhauls. The state's teacher union is currently suing over the use of the valued-added evaluation method, and legislators have pushed Common Core testing back a year.
Dive Insight:
During his time in Nashville, Duncan pointed out Tennessee's tremendous progress for fourth and eighth graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. While the rise in scores in both reading and math is something to celebrate, opponents of overhaul efforts, like education historian Diane Ravitch, are not so convinced this means much or should be attributed to the new measures. On her blog, Ravitch wrote that while Tennessee, D.C., and Indiana made gains, many of the other "reformy" states did not.
"It is impossible to conclude, as some leaders have, that D.C., Tennessee, and Indiana have the right formula because so many states with exactly the same formula made no progress at all. Some of the states that were unlucky enough to win Race to the Top mandates made little or no gains or lost ground," wrote Ravitch.
What Ravitch means when she says those "unlucky enough to win Race to the Top" is that, in order to be awarded that funding, states had to make sweeping education overhauls — moves she does not believe are good for the states. Tennessee, for example, would not have received its $501 million in federal funds had it hadn't adhered to requirements like adopting the Common Core. Interestingly enough, the state's teacher's union, the Tennessee Education Association, was instrumental in the state's Race to the Top application.
