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  • 2011Nominees and Winner
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  • 2011Nominees and Winner
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  • 2011Nominees and Winner
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  • 2011Nominees and Winner
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Learn About The Prize

The SCORE Prize annually awards $10,000 to the elementary, middle, and high school and $25,000 to one district in Tennessee that have most dramatically improved student achievement. In awarding the SCORE Prize, we aim to recognize those schools and districts that are doing the hard work of education reform, highlight and share their best practices, and show other schools and districts throughout Tennessee that improvement is possible.

Winners are chosen in a two-step process. For the first phase, SCORE utilizes a multi-staged criteria selection process to narrow the schools and districts down to finalists. This process ensures that schools and districts meet a certain benchmark before advancing to the next round. The criteria that each school or district must meet to advance are listed in order below:

• Schools and districts must have an attendance rate of 93 percent
• The school or district must have a TVAAS three-year growth standard t-statistic of at least 1.5 in both reading and math
• Remaining schools are ranked by their two-year change in TCAP on reading and math and their TVAAS three-year growth standard

TVAAS is weighted three times heavier than TCAP. This weighting is intended to ensure that schools that exhibit high growth are also achieving at a high enough level to prepare students for next steps. A series of complementary analyses are also conducted to provide schools and districts with a number of “bonus points” that are used to supplement a school’s or district’s ranking. These analyses included:

• ACT college readiness benchmark rates
• AP achievement data
• AP and IB participation rates
• Cohort dropout rates
• College-going rates
• TVAAS scores for individual subjects beyond reading and math

Overall, the selection criteria were designed to identify schools that have been able to meet and exceed the state’s new academic standards.

The second phase of the selection process consists of a series of site visits to document the policies and practices that have enabled schools and districts to make significant gains in student achievement. SCORE has produced a site visit protocol—aligned with our Roadmap to Success—that includes a scoring rubric to ensure that all schools and districts are judged according to the same measures and criteria.

For the 2011 SCORE Prize, initial analyses were conducted utilizing 2008-2010 data. 2011 data were incorporated into the analyses on August 1, 2011, when the data became available. Finalists were chosen in mid-August. Site visits were conducted in late August and early September.