State Announces First Batch of Reward Schools

Cheerleaders and a marching band help Kenrose Elementary School celebrate making the Reward Schools list. Blake Farmer/WPLN

Tennessee’s Department of Education has named the state’s top performing schools in what is intended to become an annual incentive for improvement. The 169 “Reward Schools” represent the top five percent. (see the list here)

To celebrate making the list, Governor Bill Haslam, the First Lady of Tennessee and the Education Commissioner appeared at Kenrose Elementary in Brentwood.

The event was a pep-rally for education, webcast to satellite locations from Memphis to Knoxville – other schools that either showed enough year-over-year improvement or exceptional test scores.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made an appearance by live video link.

“If Tennessee is going to be the fastest improving state in the country, it needs a set of schools to set the pace and lead them there. And these Reward Schools are doing exactly that.”

The top performers come from 70 of the states more than 100 districts. Most are schools serving economically disadvantaged students that got in because of how much they’ve improved. Fourteen schools are in Nashville, and include the district’s high performing magnets.

Rutherford, Williamson and Sumner counties are well-represented. Maury and Wilson counties have just one school each on the list. Robertson and Dickson counties have none.

Highlighting Williamson County

A select few schools have shown both progress and high performance. That’s why Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman chose to announce the Reward Schools at Kenrose.

“Sometimes when you’re starting from a really high baseline in scores, it’s hard to grow results, and they got really great growth here as well. So we were really excited about the work they did.”

While wealthy Williamson County is consistently one of the highest performing systems in the state, more than 100 schools on the Reward list serve disadvantaged students. Nineteen of them are in Memphis. Most made the top five percent based on year-over-year progress.

At some point – according to a state spokesperson – Reward Schools may become eligible for additional state funding.