Monday, April 26, 2010 -
BILL DRIES - The Daily News -

The momentum surrounding school reform has rarely been higher than it is now in Memphis.

But the president of the nonprofit foundation instrumental in creating some of that momentum is warning of a “shock wave” that could come in the fall.

Barbara Hyde of the Hyde Family Foundations told a Leadership Academy luncheon new state proficiency standards that take full effect this year likely will show drops in student achievement in Memphis and throughout the state.

“It’s going to look like all of a sudden a lot of schools are going on the failing list,” Hyde told a group of 300 people last week in East Memphis. “It’s going to look a little scary.”

Hyde said it is important to remember the state standards are being raised from those last fall that showed most city school students were proficient.

Proficiency is judged by the outgoing state standards that Gov. Phil Bredesen has long said are too low compared to national standards.

“Only about 20 percent of our students in Tennessee were actually performing at national standards. That’s the truth,” Hyde said of interpreting last fall’s results on proficiency tests on a national proficiency scale.

Bredesen and other political leaders have warned some school systems may pressure the Tennessee Legislature to lower the standards in the new Tennessee Diploma Project to make the numbers better.

“We have to stay the course,” Hyde said. “We can’t solve the problem by changing the standards back to make ourselves feel better. This will be, I believe, a policy issue.”

She called on advocates to become “evangelists” for the cause and even run for elected office, including school board positions.

Education reform efforts in Memphis are getting a lot of attention locally and nationally after a $90 million Gates Foundation grant was awarded to the Memphis City Schools system last year for a Teacher Effectiveness Initiative.

Months later, Tennessee was awarded $500 million in federal government funding through the Race to the Top reform program. The city school system’s share of the federal funding will be approximately $68 million.


The Hyde Foundation played a major role in drafting both proposals for the funding competitions.

Lower proficiency rankings for the city school system might lead some critics to believe the reform efforts funded by the money have failed when they are just getting started, Hyde said.

She also urged the audience, which included Memphis school superintendent Dr. Kriner Cash, to not focus on the money as a cure for long-standing education problems.

Winning the funding isn’t the solution, she said. The solution is reaching the goals of finding ways to measure teacher effectiveness and student performance and creating a better “teacher pipeline.”

“All the money sounds big. It’s really not the money that matters. The money is the trigger,” Hyde said. “The money is the catalyst. But if money were going to solve education problems, they would have been solved a long time ago.”

Hyde talked about the reform efforts the same day Gates Foundation officials were in the city to work out more details about the six-year Teacher Effectiveness Initiative proposed by the Memphis school system.

Hyde is working with the school system to come up with $20 million in matching funding from other foundations, which is one of the conditions of receiving the Gates Foundation money. She said finding the matching part will be “challenging.”