Over the past several years, the Chamber Education Report, formerly known as the Education Report Card, has served as a community tool to highlight the successes, challenges and opportunities in Metro Nashville Public Schools. This has been one of the primary ways in which the Chamber contributes to the education discussion in our city and state. Each year, the education report committee, a group of business and community volunteers, select a special topic they want to learn and focus on. This year, the committee selected, “The Challenges and Opportunities Presented by COVID-19,” as their main topic.

In past years, the Chamber Education Report Committee has used a number of different metrics to offer a statement on the progress of Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). These academic and non-academic measures helped the committee paint a more complete picture of how the system is functioning.

The profound and far reaching impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on virtually all aspects of our daily lives, coupled with the intensified national and local dialogues on racial inequity, presented us with a topic that we felt was an obvious choice.

It is our hope that we can have in-depth discussions on this important topic so that we can better work together to create a more equitable school system.

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2020 Education Report Recommendations

The Chamber Education Report committee encourages Metro Schools, the MNPS School Board, Mayor’s Office, and the Nashville community to strongly consider the following recommendations, described in greater detail in the following sections. The committee believes that each recommendation will help the advance district and community goals.

  1. Metro Council should work with MNPS to create a targeted special committee tasked with expanding the Nashville Plan for Reopening Schools, focused on incorporating the best SEL practices for the safe return of all students to the school building.
  2. The Mayor’s Office, Metro Council, MNPS, and community partners should develop a plan for allocating dedicated resources to the district for the purposes of using schools as community hubs.
  3. MNPS should add “Technology” as a core value and internally develop a working definition that outlines the vision for how technology should be incorporated moving forward.
  4. MNPS should use learnings from the pandemic to identify strategies for leveraging technology to increase access for all families and produce a report outlining these opportunities.
  5. MNPS should provide the community with an aspirational funding amount that reflects what a high-quality education costs in order to guide budgetary conversations and encourage more private-public partnerships. Also a recommendation from 2019.
  6. The Mayor’s Office should convene MNPS, Metro departments, the nonprofit sector, business leaders, and community stakeholders to craft a 2030 vision and aligned plan for a whole city approach to public education that is informed by an assessment of the needs of the school system and outlines cross-sector collaboration in addressing the gaps in support. Also a recommendation from 2019.

2020 Chamber Education Report Committee

  • Laquita Stribling
  • Dr.Ryan Balch
  • Burkley Allen
  • Denise D. Bentley
  • Bob Bernstein
  • Brandon Corbin
  • Lance Couch
  • Gary Cowan
  • LeShane Greenhill
  • Joseph Gutierrez
  • Ted Ilanchelian
  • Rachel Moore-Beard
  • Ashley Northington
  • Juliana Ospina Cano
  • Monica Reyna
  • Jerome Richardson
  • Terry Vo
  • Tamara Fentress

Click here to get your copy of the 2020 Education Report.