2013 Pathways to the Prize - School Winners | Page 2

Pathways to the Prize
Lessons from the 2011 SCORE Prize School Winners

Pathways to the Prize
Lessons from the 2011 SCORE Prize School Winners

September 2012
Dear Educators,

Table of Contents
3

Letter from Jamie Woodson

4

About the SCORE Prize

6

2011 SCORE Prize Elementary School Winner: Fairview Elementary School

16

2011 SCORE Prize Middle School Winner: Power Center Academy

24

2011 SCORE Prize High School Winner: Mt. Juliet High School

34

Common Themes Across Schools

38

Conclusion

40 Appendix: Discussion Guide
44 Glossary
46

2011 SCORE Prize Selection Committee / Staff

Throughout this document, there
are QR codes that directly link
to additional online resources.
To access these resources,
simply scan the code with your
smartphone. QR code apps
can be downloaded for free.
You can also access these
resources by visiting
the link provided.

Over the last three years, Tennessee has transformed into a national leader for education reform.
State and local leaders have come together to make a series of policy changes, including raising academic standards for our students, providing educators with more timely access to data, and focusing
on our lowest achieving schools to ensure that more of our students graduate from high school with
the skills they need to be successful in life. Although we have made significant strides in changing policy
conditions, our most important work concerns how these policy changes impact what’s happening in
classrooms, schools, and districts throughout the state.
Last year, SCORE awarded the first annual SCORE Prize to the elementary, middle, and high school, as
well as one school district in Tennessee, that have most dramatically improved student achievement. While
our aim in awarding the SCORE Prize was to identify and reward those schools and districts that are effectively meeting the state’s new academic standards, an equally important goal was to highlight best practices
and distill them into a usable format for educators. We began this work by sharing video vignettes and data
profiles of the finalists and winners after last fall’s announcement. Pathways to the Prize continues our work
of highlighting best practices and providing educators with the tools they need to replicate them in their own
communities.
In the following pages, you will find information from our 2011 SCORE Prize winners about their efforts
to support their students and improve student achievement. These best practices address what must happen
throughout a school to raise expectations and help students reach them. Our prize winners address what
must happen in classrooms, in addition to the ways teachers must collaborate to better serve students,
principals need to provide ongoing support to teachers and act as instructional leaders, district leaders must
set high expectations for all schools, and community leaders must be engaged to provide students with
the extracurricular supports they need. To meet our state’s goals, all of us – educators, parents, students,
policy experts, and state and local officials – have a role to play.
As Tennessee moves into the second year of wide-scale implementation of many of its policy
commitments, we must ensure that educators have access to information about those schools and
districts that are rising to these new challenges. We hope that Pathways to the Prize, which is
grounded in research and supplemented by additional tools on our SCORE Prize website
(www.tnscore.org/scoreprize), aids you in continuing the most important work: ensuring that
our students graduate from high school prepared for the global economy.

Very sincerely,

The SCORE Prize
www.tnscore.org/scoreprize/

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