Urban Schools Catching Up

Nashville’s public elementary and middle schools are making gains in math at a faster rate than the state as a whole, according to a new study. The Council of the Great City Schools analyzed data from state assessment tests. Like No Child Left Behind standards, the study is concerned with the number of students considered […]

Rabbi Philip Rice of Nashville’s Congregation Micah said a traditional Jewish prayer today at the state Capitol Hill during a Holocaust remembrance. He was joined by survivors of the World War Two Nazi death camps and the U.S. Army veterans who opened the camps and bore witness to the terror. The Deborah Ray Broyles, a […]

Eight months after moving in to its new home at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, the Nashville Symphony has announced a music education program that it hopes will be as impressive as its opulent hall.

After four hours of impassioned debate, the Metro School Board approved a proposal for standard school attire last night, 7 to 2.Hundreds of parents, teachers and students showed up to voice their support or opposition to the dress code of khakis and polo shirts. Some parents blasted the school board and schools’ director Pedro Garcia […]

The Bredesen administration and its allies today are planning how to resurrect the wording of the “education first” proposal to hike cigarette taxes and use the 200-million dollars for education. State Representative Gary Odom of Nashville got the proposal out of the hostile House Agriculture Committee yesterday but not without amending the bill beyond recognition. […]

Belmont University will launch a pharmacy school in fall 2008. The announcement was made (this morning/yesterday), making it the second school in a three-mile radius to do so in the past few months. Belmont officials say their pharmacy plans have been in the works since the mid-90s and that there is plenty of room for […]

Members of the state legislature’s legal staff has reviewed tape of today’s debate in the House Agriculture Committee. They say the amended version of HB 2354 that passed out of committee today effectively reduces the tax to twenty cents per pack and removes all funding aimed for education.

Another Nashville mayoral canidate has released first quarter campaign finance figures. Vice mayor Howard Gentry raised just over 55-thousand dollars from mid-January through the end of March, bringing him to a total so far of almost 211-thousand dollars. In the same period, former Congressman Bob Clement raised 175-thousand dollars, former Metro Legal Director Karl Dean […]

Hearings into the fight between AT and T and the state’s cable providers were supposed to have finished today, but the debate will continue in at least one more week of testimony before the state legislature. A proposed law would give the telephone company a statewide franchise to provide video service. Cable providers with current […]

The governor’s cigarette tax increase today/yesterday leaped its first hurdle, a hostile House Agriculture Committee. The jostling was so severe that for hours afterwards no one knew how much of the tax had survived – all forty cents or only twenty cents? Amendments to the bill first hiked the amount of money for agricultural programs […]