Dr. Berthena Nabaa-McKinney

Student achievement has fallen nationwide. But the Metro Nashville district began to see this decline earlier, and has been working to address it since 2019. In the years since—and despite a global pandemic—they’ve seen marked improvements. The district is one of only two in the country to place in the top 10 for both reading and math, according to a joint report from Harvard University and Stanford University, and significantly outpaces the rest of the country in academic recovery. A key strategy is high dosage tutoring, where students meet in small groups with a designated tutor three times a week for 45 minutes. Tutoring can cover reading, math, or both, depending on student needs. And tutors are made up of both qualified teaching staff and dedicated volunteers (many of them leaders in the school community and beyond) who facilitate both in-person and virtual tutoring. Since the Accelerating Scholars program launched in the fall of 2021, the district has provided high-impact tutoring to more than 7,000 students, supported by more than 2,000 tutors. According to Superintendent Adrienne Battle, the district has emphasized high quality whole-class instruction, in addition to “being very strategic and deliberate in the way we intervene when students were off pace, where there was an opportunity gap that we needed to close.”