First, we must set higher expectations for our students.
- Tennessee is on the right path with the Tennessee Diploma Project which expects all high school graduates to be college or workforce ready. We must do a better job making sure our students, parents, teachers, and school leaders understand why this is so important.
- Workforce projections show 63% of all jobs in Tennessee will require either an associate's or bachelor's degree by 2018. Today, only 45.3% of adults have an associate's degree or higher - meaning our state has a long way to go over the next ten years.
- We need to better define the steps required to achieve college readiness and the interventions required to accelerate progress along the way.
- We should not just push high school completion. We should also provide students with a clear understanding of the best career opportunities and why education is connected to getting a good job. The K-12 system, higher education system, and the business community must create a clear, coherent, and seamless opportunity pipeline for every willing and able student.
- Knox Achieves is one model of how individual communities can help high school students transition into college. As a public-private partnership, Knox Achieves provides mentors to high school students to help them navigate the college admissions process and then provides last-dollar scholarships to ensure students can afford college.
Second, we must ensure that every school is led by a great principal.
- Our current system prevents some talented, committed executives from becoming principals in our schools. We should remove barriers that prevent Tennessee's most talented and committed leaders - regardless of their background - from entering our schools and being a catalyst for making every school great.
- Great leaders are born with something special, but they also need relevant training, experience, and support to flourish and succeed. We must do everything we can to build great principals and put them in situations where they will create great schools.
- As Governor, I would create a statewide principal leadership academy to develop a pipeline of high-quality principals. Partnering with higher education institutions, we would build regional hubs across the state that would work with local school districts to identify and train the best and brightest to become principals.
Third, we must ensure every classroom is led by an excellent teacher.
- We must aggressively recruit the best and brightest into teaching by widening the teacher pipeline to allow talented, experienced, and passionate people to enter the classroom through non-traditional routes like Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, and Teach Tennessee.
- We should identify the very best, most effective teachers in the classroom and help replicate their talent, skills, and practices throughout the profession. We can learn from studying the very best teachers and also having those teachers provide insight and mentoring for other beginning and struggling teachers.
- We should help every school develop a school environment that nurtures, supports, and rewards great teaching and student success. For example, in Knoxville, three of our schools have adopted the nationally renowned Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), which creates time during the school day for teachers to collaborate and for experienced teachers to mentor new teachers.
- We need to do a better job of encouraging, empowering, and supporting excellent teachers who are working to create a profession centered on the continuous improvement of student outcomes.
- The Distinguished Professionals Education Initiative (DPEI) is a perfect example of how we can get talented professionals into the classroom. DPEI recruits, trains, mentors, and licenses professionals working in math, science, and foreign language occupations and allows them to serve as adjunct faculty in our high schools. These talented individuals continue to work in their profession while teaching part-time.
Fourth, any meaningful and accurate assessments, interventions, and accountability measures must be rooted in rich and reliable data. We must use data already being collected in our schools to monitor our progress and help parents and teachers find ways to ensure that every child is reaching his or her full potential.
- We have the nation's richest testing data right here in Tennessee (known as the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System - TVAAS), which can predict the probability of success for every child in core subject areas. This gives us an enormous advantage in focusing targeted interventions where we need them, and it also gives us the ability to ensure that our best students are continually challenged.
- We need to make sure teachers and principals get the right training to interpret the wealth of data we have to tailor instruction to meet every child's individual needs, no matter where a child is on the academic ladder.
- In addition to guiding teachers to meet each individual student's needs, this data also has a fundamental role in holding teachers and principals accountable for their performance. I learned in business a long time ago that everyone wants to be accountable, as long as they are being evaluated fairly with good information and are provided the support to improve where necessary.
- Knox County Public Schools and the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership are collaborating to create a powerful database that will enable all school system employees to quickly obtain easy-to-understand information and translate that information into action that improves student achievement. For example, this database will identify potential drop-outs so schools can implement targeted interventions, tailor student progress reports to the needs of individual students and parents, and allow administrators to monitor costs at the individual school level.
Fifth, we must give parents more control over the education of their children.
- Parents understand the needs of their individual child better than the government. We must ensure we are not forcing students into a one-size-fits-all education.
- Parents should have more decision-making power over how their children are educated. Options like homeschooling should be available to all parents, and the government should ensure parents who choose this option are supported.
- Students should not be trapped in low-performing schools. We must encourage the expansion of high-quality charter schools by actively recruiting proven national charter school providers to Tennessee and developing a statewide charter school incubator to support the creation of high-quality local charter schools.
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