Education Week: Array of strategies aims to transform Tennessee’s largest district
With a growing charter school sector, a new state-run district with plans to expand, and a reconfigured central office, Memphis is poised to become the next national center for New Orleans-style school governance.
Even as a commission spent the past two years planning for the largest school district merger in the nation’s history—the former Memphis city district and an adjacent suburban system became the unified 140,000-student, 222-school Shelby County district on July 1—the landscape of governance within the legacy city school system was changing rapidly to favor parental choice and more autonomous schools.
The changes underway here include:
• A rapidly expanding array of charter schools. Home to just three charter schools 10 years ago, Memphis now has 41 charters, and more are on the way, including schools that will be part of some of the nation’s best-known charter networks.
• A growing Achievement School District. The nation’s second state-run school district, Tennessee’s Achievement School District oversees 12 schools in the city and plans to run more than 50, most of them within Memphis, over the next five years.
• An “Innovation Zone.” Created by the district as the analogue to the state-run district, the Innovation Zone, or I-Zone, encompasses 13 schools that have budget and hiring autonomy.
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