Tennessee has an ed reform perception problem, but its not too late to fix it #TNedu #iteachiam

This article ran on The Educators Room on July 9th, 2014:

My 10th grade girls are all into HUGE purses, the size of backpacks. They can be very distracting as the girls rustle through the bag’s cavernous depths on a quest to find any and all manner of items. This spring I decided to institute what I thought was a fair and simple policy where purses would be placed in designated areas around the…

Charter High School Performance in Memphis

My school has a strong data driven culture. We use data not just to identify grade level or class wide trends, but trends with individual students. Because it’s not enough for me to know that the entire class scored, say, an 80 percent on a specific assessment. I need to be able to identify high, middle and low performers on each assessment and reflect on what has made them successful. This is a…