The Future of BluffCityEd and Tennessee Education

Two years ago I started Bluff City Education with a vision – a place for teachers to come and share their stories and their perspectives on education policy in Tennessee and engage in a critical but solutions oriented discourse.

2 years and about 150,000 page views later, I feel confident that we’ve done that. During that time I’ve striven to continually provide regular content to the site (at least 1 piece a week) as well as editing others pieces, managing and curating the site and actively recruiting writers. Our work has been featured in blogs and newspapers across the state, online publications across the country and we’ve featured over half a dozen regular writers every few months. We’ve accumulated hundreds of facebook followers and over a thousand twitter followers during that time as well.

This has taken up a lot of time and energy on my part, which I’ve happily put in. However, I’ve recently moved into several new roles that require a considerable time commitment on my part. I’ve always told myself that I would only keep writing regularly as long as I felt like I could continue producing and publicizing quality content while maintaining a normal life. That’s becoming increasingly difficult given my time commitments.

So, for the time being I’m taking a hiatus from writing and managing BCE for the foreseeable future. I plan to keep writing occasionally for the Tennessee Education Report, which has graciously invited me to contribute regularly to their site. Bluff City Education will remain up for the foreseeable future and all stories we have written will continue to be accessible at the same links.

Thoughts on the future: Memphis

Since this is my final post for the foreseeable future, I want to finish with some final thoughts on the state of Education in Memphis and Tennessee and possible future outcomes and developments.

When I got here 4 years ago we had a long way to go. The schools had just voted to merge and nobody knew what that would look like. We were just about to embark on a new era of teacher evaluation and the ASD was just an idea yet to be implemented.

Four years later we’ve had a lot of good. We’ve seen SCS take the lead as an innovator in solutions to turn around struggling schools with the iZone, which has seen phenomenal gains in its short existence. Teacher evaluations continue to be developed and refined, things have settled down with the merger and de-merger and we’re taking a stand as a district and demanding more funding from the State of Tennessee in a recently announced lawsuit. Test scores have also continued to go up each year during that time. We adopted a new superintendent who has a positive vision for where he wants the district to go and is taking strides to move schools closer to that goal by expanding opportunities for parents in low income communities as well as recently announced efforts to provide more school choice within the district.

On the mixed/negative side, the district has continued to struggle with closing down poor performing charter schools despite a new state law mandating such closures. The ASD has continue to see community opposition to its school takeovers fall after fall, and it has only intensified in each subsequent year. The ASD has also seen some academic progress, but so far is struggling to deliver on its lofty goal of moving the bottom 5% to the top 25% of schools in five years.

We also saw the de-merger, which I think was a mistake from the standpoint of regional cohesiveness. It sent the message loud and clear that the county and the city of Memphis will continue to function as decidedly separate entities for the foreseeable future when it comes to education.

Thoughts on the future: Tennessee

At the state level we’ve had some good over the past few years, but a lot of questionable calls as well. I think that the best thing we’ve done over the past four years is transition from a disruptor in Kevin Huffman to a consolidator in Candice McQueen as Education Commissioner. Huffman was the person we needed to initiate the changes, but he ultimately caused so much disruption that he needed to step aside and let someone heal the divisions that were the inevitable result of these changes..

During that time we also saw the recipe for building support for Common Core among teachers, and it turned out to be nothing other than hard work and exposure. Our Core Coaches trained tens of thousands of teachers during the past few years, and among those teachers trained support for Common Core climbed. Let’s hope other areas of the country take note of this common-sense approach to building support for common core.

On the questionable side, we saw the state legislature pull out from the PARCC testing consortium, and then Common Core all together. We also saw a continued failure to support education financially as the strongly conservative state legislature seems to be allergic to any sort of revenue increases, even when it is desperately obvious that they are needed. Let us hope that at least one of the pending lawsuits compels a change in this behavior.

Predicting the Future

What does the future hold for Education in Memphis and Tennessee? The following is a list of predictions:

The end of reform and the beginning of consolidation: I personally think we’re at the tail end of the big, disruptive reforms. Race to The Top is over, the ASD is in place and isn’t going anywhere, teacher evaluation has been implemented state wide and we are in the midst of a retooling of our state curriculums for new standards and assessments. Whereas the past 4 years have focused on shaking up the system, the next few years will be a focus on consolidation and refinement of those reforms. Looking into my crystal ball, here are some predictions of what I think we can expect to see in Tennessee and Memphis in the next 3-5 years:

Testing and Common Core backlash (again): I fully expect there to be a backlash in the next 2-3 years in the state house with legislators making a push to either drop the TN Ready assessments or the Tennessee State Standards (or both). The impetus – falling test scores with the implementation of the (hopefully) more rigorous TN Ready tests. Even though this is exactly what you would expect when moving to a higher level of rigor, I have no doubt that a number of legislators will do their best to cash in on the inevitable frustration and confusion on the part of communities across the state. The success of these efforts will likely rest on how well the state department of education does in explaining this reality to Tennesseans.

Teacher Evaluation is here to stay: This isn’t going anywhere,and I don’t expect to see evaluations changed fundamentally anytime soon. Perhaps most likely change in this area is a continued movement from a traditional step-increase salary schedule for teachers to a performance-based compensation model in more counties across Tennessee based on teacher evaluation scores. Test scores will also likely remain as a component of teacher evaluations for the foreseeable future despite the growing outcry against using them in high stakes decisions.

ASD slows in Memphis, pushes into Nashville: A bill passed this last legislative session turned out to be surprisingly impactful in limiting the ASD’s options for expansion by placing schools that scored a 4 or 5 on TVAAS composite out of bounds for takeover. So many schools met this benchmark in Memphis that the ASD was left with only 10 possible takeover schools this year in Memphis and they duly responded by targeting 6 of them, including all elementary and middle schools on the list. If Memphis schools keep growing at similar levels, the ASD could find its expansion in Memphis continue to be slowed or even grind to a halt.

With that in mind, I expect to see the ASD expand more into Nashville. This seems pretty likely anyways given that the district has indicated that they intend to expand their footprint into Nashville in the near future.

If they do so without some major changes in their methods, however, Nashville could prove to be their Waterloo. The Nashville school board is much more militant than Memphis’ and the community seems much more ready and able to mobilize than communities in Memphis have been (see the Neely’s bend outrage last year).

That said, the ASD will probably be able to continue expanding as it sees fit for the simple reason that it tends to target schools in democratic held areas and won’t raise cause enough animosity among the ruling republican party to spark major legislative action around the district.

The iZone becomes its own quasi-district: the iZone continues to grow in Memphis and a $10 million grant from local philanthropic groups will likely continue to allow it to expand for the foreseeable future. With all the schools being added, it seems logical that the next step would be to spin the iZone off into something similar to the ASD but that still falls under the auspices of Shelby County Schools. I can’t see SCS letting go of the iZone entirely since the entire point is to keep the schools within Shelby County, but I don’t think its outside the realm of possibility for the district to recognize the need for more administrative freedom to address the unique needs of its schools.

Continued problems shutting down low performing charters: Its not that I don’t have faith in our school board – I do. I think that we will continue experience problems shuttering low performing charters because of the new TN Ready assessments. The department of education has already said that data from the new tests will come out much later than they have in the past. This lateness will make it difficult to shut down low performing charter schools as the data will probably not be coming in until a few weeks before the start of the school year. No board ever wants to shut down a school weeks before it is slated to open and face a backlash from teachers, administrators and parents.

The alternative then is to shut down the school the following year, but that gives politically connected individuals an entire year to lobby board members and even state officials to stave off a closure. I just think there’s too much potential for exceptions to be made and connections to be exploited to keep schools open for “one more year” or for them to get “one more chance.” And “one more change” tends to turn into never. For that reason I think we’ll continue to have a difficult time closing down poor performing charters locally.

SCS Opens several magnet schools: I’m going to predict that the recent announcement by Supt. Hopson about wanting to to open a STEM academy at East will turn out to be a hit with the majority of the community. What will follow should then be additional magnate schools being opened across the district.

This would seem to fit in well with the whole “portfolio model” that is taking root in Shelby County. More and more families are being given the opportunity to choose where they want to send their kids for school, and until now they haven’t had much in the way of options outside of the optional programs within SCS. Opening a series of magnet schools to provide additional choice for students who might not qualify for the upper end optional programs seems like a logical step for a district looking to draw students back into Shelby County through choice.

That’s all I have. I’ve loved every minute of the last two years and I hope I can pick this project back up at some point. See you all over at TNedreport!

Jon Alfuth, Bluff City Education Founder and Editor