WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.

Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.

“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”

Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.

The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.

But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.

The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.

Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.

“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.

If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.

That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by  the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”

The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.

Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.

Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.

“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”

The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.

The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.

“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.

Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.

The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent.  Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.

And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.

Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.

Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.

Related: States stuck trying to fix early ed pay as feds drop the ball

Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.

“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.

Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.

“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”

Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.

Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.

Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.

As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.

“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”

Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.

The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.

“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”

This story about D.C. child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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KINGSPORT, Tenn. — It was just after nine on a Monday morning in early February when Lori Smith, the associate principal at John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Kingsport, received a text from her sister, the instructional technology coordinator for Monroe County Schools.

Schools in Monroe, along with several other districts across Tennessee, had begun administering the first round of the state’s new tests, which students were taking on computers.

“She messaged me and asked how things were going,” Smith recalled. “I told her we had done a test on our technology and things were going well. Apparently, they weren’t going well for her.”

What neither of them knew at the time was that all across the Volunteer State the testing technology was breaking down.

Kingsport was planning to begin testing the following day, and Smith had done everything she could think of to prepare her teachers and students. With any spare time she’d had over the last few weeks, Smith had met with teachers to go over procedures and reassure them that they were as prepared as they could possibly be. She had organized all their testing paperwork and separated it with colorful tabs.

“I knew this was new for them and I wanted it to be very spelled out,” Smith said.

That afternoon she talked to her fifth-graders about the test.

“I reminded them that if things mess up . . . it’s going to be ok,” Smith said. “I told them, ‘We will get you another device and it will be ok. We are all in this together.’”

After the last bell sounded and students headed home, Smith stayed late to oversee a professional development session, while teachers from grades 3 through 5 logged on to the school’s Google Chromebooks to ensure that the online testing platform was cooperating. It was.

(Earlier in the year, anticipating testing glitches from the school’s handful of improperly working old computers, Smith organized a walk-a-thon to raise money for 16 new Chromebooks.)

During the professional development sessions, Smith ran into one of the school’s technology coordinators.

“He said there had been a conference call [about the tests] earlier that day and that it was pretty brutal,” Smith said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is not sounding good.’”

At 5:51 p.m., Smith packed up her things and headed home, still feeling positive about the next day’s testing schedule.

“We were totally ready to roll and I felt like a million bucks when I left school,” she said.

But exactly an hour later, at 6:51 p.m., an email reached her inbox: The online test was canceled and the entire state would instead administer a paper test to be given on a yet-to-be-determined date.

“I felt like I’d been punched in the gut, and that everything we’ve done all year and everything we’ve prepped for was taken away,” Smith said.

The setback, though meant to be temporary, dealt a significant blow to the state and the school district, both of which are considered leaders in the Obama administration’s reform efforts.

Kingsport, the contortionist

The ditching of the online exams is just the latest in a series of significant testing alterations that have rocked Tennessee over the last three-plus years and made it a poster child for the volatile testing atmosphere that’s sweeping the country.

That volatility has upset morale and induced anxiety among teachers and students, who are now, once again, worried about what to expect next.

“It’s just unsettling because there have been so many changes,” said Sunshine Light, a seventh-grade math teacher at Ross N. Robinson Middle School in Kingsport.

“It’s like, ‘Ok this is the way it’s going to be, get prepared,’” she said. “And you talk yourself up, work yourself up, and do what has to be done, and now once again in the middle of the game we’re changing the rules. Can you imagine if in the middle of the Super Bowl there was a new rule?”

This latest change — the most abrupt to date — was the result of a near-system-wide outage of Measurement Inc.’s online testing platform. (The Durham, N.C.-based testing company won the $108 million contract in November 2014 to design a replacement for Tennessee’s state test, known as the TCAP.)

“Unfortunately, issues have continued to arise with the online platform,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said in a statement that Monday, Feb. 8.

McQueen, formerly the senior vice president and dean of the college of education at Lipscomb University, took over the school system last year upon the departure of Kevin Huffman, the divisive education reformer who oversaw significant changes to the state’s K-12 system.

“Despite the many improvements the department has helped to make to the system in recent months and based on the events of this morning, we are not confident in the system’s ability to perform consistently,” she said. “In the best interest of our students and to protect instructional time, we cannot continue with Measurement Incorporated’s online testing platform in its current state.”

The testing company is currently printing thousands of paper exams that it will ship to districts in the coming weeks; students will take the tests with No. 2 pencils instead of clicking a mouse.

The decision is particularly painful for Kingsport because for the first time in three years students there were going to be taking tests directly aligned to what and how they’ve been learning — a monumental moment for teachers whose evaluations and compensation are based in part on students’ test scores.

“Finally we’re no longer serving two masters,” Light said prior to the testing snafu.

Since 2012, teachers have been using Tennessee’s version of the Common Core state standards, while simultaneously preparing students for a state test still aligned to the state’s old standards.

“We were being pulled two different ways and they were equally important, but there wasn’t enough time to do both,” said Light.

Despite the setback, students will still only be taking tests aligned to the current Common Core academic benchmarks.

“We have to remember that honestly it does not impact that hard work we’ve done,” said Light. “The only thing that’s changing is the modality.”

Still, she added, “it feels like a massive decision that’s been made in the middle of the game.”

As for Smith, she said she’s trying to remain positive, but is having a hard time fielding concerns from teachers about the last-minute change.

“One thing I’ve learned in this position is that sometimes you don’t see the whole picture,” Smith said. “I’d like to believe that they made the best choice for our state based on the information they had, but it’s hard to accept that after all we’ve done to prepare.”

Kingsport, the believer

Since 2009, the country’s school systems have undergone a dramatic overhaul, largely driven by the education initiatives prioritized by the Obama administration.

For about a dozen states, including Tennessee, those changes began with the administration’s signature competitive grant, Race to the Top, which offered states a piece of a $4.35 billion pie in exchange for adopting a range of significant education policy changes.

Tennessee was one of the first to win the competition, nabbing $500 million to adopt the Common Core, revamp teacher evaluation systems to include student test scores, improve the worst-performing schools and increase the number of charter schools.

Race to the Top spurred similar policy changes in school districts across the country — even in states that didn’t win. The Obama administration brought more states on board by offering to waive the most burdensome parts of the then-federal education law, No Child Left Behind, if the states promised to make many of the same changes.

As one of the first Race to the Top winners, Tennessee led the charge in overhauling its K-12 system. And within the state, Kingsport stood at the ready, doing anything and everything the state asked of its districts.

Related: Tennessee’s Common Core backtrack strands teachers, students

Kingsport schools have always been high-achieving — consistently ranking among the top 10 in the state and boasting ACT scores that exceed state and national averages and Advanced Placement participation rates and scores among the highest in the state. The district is bolstered by the $9 billion Eastman Chemical Company, a sprawling plastics plant that drives the economy of the sleepy working-class city.

“We are a high-performing district, and I hope we always will be,” said school superintendent Lyle Ailshie. “We don’t want to rest on our laurels or think we have everything figured out. We can always improve and, like all systems, we always want to do more for minorities and low-income students.”

So when Tennessee’s education department said, “Jump,” Kingsport asked how high — and then jumped higher.

It began using the Common Core a year before the state required it of districts; it was one of the first to revamp its teacher evaluations, and it went a step further, tying those evaluations to a new compensation model designed by teachers themselves; and in preparation for the new Common Core-aligned tests, it held training sessions on top of those that the state provided.

By the 2014-15 school year, the state was finally set to use its new Common Core-aligned test, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.

But amid political pushback from both the right and the left, aimed largely at the Common Core, Tennessee’s state legislature pressed the pause button, a move that all but pulled the rug out from under Kingsport.

The state dropped the PARCC exam altogether, launched a review of its Common Core standards and, in doing so, left teachers and students in districts like Kingsport in limbo, forcing them to use the old state test, which wasn’t aligned to the standards they had been using, but would be used to evaluate teachers and impact their pay.

“That was the most frustrating part,” said Ailshie, who consistently credits the district’s success to its nearly 600 teachers and administrators who have trusted the direction of the state and district’s education officials and have worked so hard to adjust to reforms.

“For me, especially in districts like ours, you feel for your teachers,” he said.

Related: Can the mighty US military save embattled PARCC?

As a result of that test change, Kingsport’s scores from the 2014-15 school year remained largely flat in grades 3 through 8, with 69 percent of students scoring proficient or above in math, 59 percent in reading and 76 percent in science. Scores were also largely flat in high school subjects, with the exception of chemistry, which saw a 14-point gain in the number of students scoring proficient or higher, and English II, which saw a 6-point gain.

Under Kingsport’s compensation system, teachers are eligible for pay raises and bonuses based in part on student performance. The district’s flat scores, however, meant few scored boosts in pay.

“But we’re going to hold our heads up and continue on because we really believe that once our curriculum is aligned, we will be truly rewarded,” Ailshie said after districts’ scores were released last summer.

Kingsport, the stoic

Kingsport was supposed to be getting its first taste of that alignment right now by administering its first Common Core-aligned tests to students.

Scrapping the online tests means that teachers and students will have to wait a couple of more weeks. Although there is still a sense of relief that lessons and tests will finally match, it won’t make the testing any less stressful, even for a teaching corps in which more than 70 percent of teachers and administrators have advanced degrees.

“The biggest thing is making sure our teachers feel supported and easing their fears about the unknown,” said Brian Partin, the principal of Ross N. Robinson Middle School, who’s been an administrator for 13 years and is slated to lead the National Association of Elementary School Principals after this school year.

“It’s all about staying the course and helping them understand we’re providing them with all the best practices and we’re confident that everyone is doing what they need to do to support the children’s growth,” he said. “And if the assessments come back and they tell a different story, then we’ll adjust and move forward. But you can’t spend too much time focusing on the what-ifs.”

Even for someone like Light, who was hand-picked by the state to be one of its 700 Common Core coaches, the transition to a more rigorous exam is nerve-wracking, because of how it will impact her evaluation and pay, and, even more, because of how it may impact her students’ confidence.

“This is a huge undertaking that’s been several years in the making, so why are we having these problems?” asked Light about the technical difficulties. “The kids are going to be anxious. I know teachers are anxious. I’m anxious.”

Partin said, “At this point, anything we can do to ease that fear and apprehension of the unknown is what we’re trying to do. I feel good about the work our teachers are doing and I feel confident in the support and training our district is providing, but everyone is anticipating there will be a dip in scores.”

Prior to the testing change, Light, Partin and others said most of the anxiety was driven by the fact that students were going to be taking the new exam exclusively on computers.

Indeed, according to a new analysis from Education Week, students who took the PARCC tests on computers last year tended to score lower than those who took the tests on paper.

And while teachers were originally nervous because of the new online platform, they’re now nervous because that’s all they’ve allowed students to practice with all year.

“When you’re used to working with these kids and you know what they’re capable of, sometimes a test like this paints a false portrait of what they do on a daily basis,” Partin said. “And that’s the part that can be discouraging for teachers.”

But Partin said he’s directed teachers to focus instead on the interim tests they use throughout the school year to continually monitor student progress and ensure no one is falling behind.

“At the end of the day, the formative assessments really drive our instruction and we’re able to see if that child has that grade-point gain or not,” he said.

Kingsport, the committed

Teachers and principals credit Kingsport’s district office with making an otherwise maddening process somewhat more tolerable.

“There is always an open line of communication with my superiors within the district,” said Light. “I would have no problem sending an email to the director of schools to voice a concern or share something great that happened. And I feel that there is a personal relationship with all of the staff that you don’t find other places.”

Partin said he knows firsthand from his perch on the national principals association how lucky he is to be working in a district like Kingsport. That’s especially true, he said, when it comes to training and support.

Tennessee spent more of its Race to the Top winnings on Common Core training sessions than any other state. But Kingsport has doubled-down on that effort, spending millions of its own money on additional training sessions, especially after the state’s competition coffers ran dry.

“I feel very fortunate that we’ve had the level of support and training that we have,” Partin said. “And the fact that the district has continued to provide those trainings even after the Race to the Top money was gone has been a game-changer for us at this point.”

“They really do provide us with quality professional development,” agreed Lori Smith, who’s in her second year as associate principal at John F. Kennedy Elementary School after teaching elementary school for more than a decade. “And I know that [professional development] always sounds so lame, but I have learned so much since I started working here in Kingsport. It’s almost like I have a whole new college degree.”

Kingsport isn’t like most other districts in the state, where many of the tumultuous education policy changes of the last seven years have sparked frustration and resistance.

As Carrie Upshaw, the president of Kingsport’s board of education said sarcastically during the convocation celebration before the school year started last August, “We can survive whatever achievement autopsies and standardized tests that come our way, and we can get through the ‘Road to Insanity.’”

Kingsport, ever-changing

Kingsport and other districts in the state may be on that road to insanity for a bit longer.

In the midst of the intense political pushback to the Common Core, the state legislature assigned a committee to review its academic benchmarks and suggest changes. Those recommendations — though minimal — are currently before the state legislature, which is expected to adopt them.

Should that happen, the state’s Common Core test would have to be altered yet again to ensure it’s properly aligned.

Other changes on the horizon could reverse some of the stress of recent years, however.

The new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which President Obama signed into law in December, rolls back the footprint of the federal government. In doing so, it hands more control to states over things like accountability, testing, standards and teacher evaluations.

For example, the law eliminated an accountability system that punished schools which failed to increase the percentages of students proficient in math and reading each year — a policy largely blamed for creating the high-stakes culture of over-testing.

Instead, the law keeps in place the annual testing requirement, but allows states to use the results however they want in a new accountability system of their own design. Such a swinging of the pendulum, intended to lessen the pressure of year-end exams, has many in education, including teachers, breathing a sigh of relief.

Implementation of the new law isn’t expected to take place until the 2017-18 school year, however, and Kingsport has no plans to change its current evaluation system — though it does plan to continue refining its compensation system by creating new avenues and career paths that will allow teachers to earn more.

“I’m hopeful in thinking that it will relieve a little bit of the stress and focus more on the whole child,” said Partin. “Because it’s not just about coming and preparing for an assessment. We’re preparing these kids for life.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news website focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Common Core.

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“She stands up and almost / flops over backwards. / She sticks out a foot like / she’s going somewhere and / falls down and / smacks her hand,” they read.

Cotey asked her students to analyze the poem–“74^th Street” by Myra Cohn Livingston–and think about why the author had used such language. What was she trying to convey?

Her students later wrote essays about the sound effects, using examples and explaining their significance. The exercise was meant to spur the deep thinking required of students in the Common Core State Standards, a set of academic benchmarks that teachers across Tennessee are using.

But Cotey’s lesson plan didn’t stop there. She then turned her attention to making sure her students knew the specific vocabulary term for each sound effect: alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia, rhythm, and rhyme.

The terms were just a few on a long list of standards that her students will need to know to perform well on a looming state exam. But that exam, widely criticized for emphasizing rote memorization over critical thinking, tests students not on the Common Core, but on the state’s retired standards.

Related: At Lipscomb, aspiring teachers look past Common Core

“The Common Core is a much deeper way of thinking,” explained Cotey. “So when you get to the [old standards] and … you have to get the kids to back away from that deeper thinking to more surface level thinking, that’s a challenge.”

Cotey didn’t know she would be responsible for teaching two sets of standards until she was hired by Kingsport City Schools just a week before the first day of classes last fall. And while she knew that the state was battling through growing pains associated with the Common Core and had seen her fair share of Facebook posts railing against the standards, she wasn’t prepared for the contentious atmosphere that has become the norm for teachers in Tennessee.

Some education policy researchers and professors in schools of education worry that the politicized education arena and the state’s indecisiveness over the Common Core could have significant ramifications for its teaching corps.

In a profession that already suffers from staggering attrition rates among new teachers, the state’s schizophrenic attitude toward the standards could end up pushing out its brightest newcomers, or even worse, prevent them from pursuing a career in education altogether.

Related: New York school beats the odds by “going rogue” on Common Core

Indeed, after her first seven months in the classroom, Cotey is already questioning whether education is a career she wants to continue pursuing.

“There have been moments throughout this year where I’ve asked, ‘What am I doing here? What’s another path I can take,’” she said. “There are so many other things that I could be doing. There are lots of other professions I could have chosen.”

Craving Consistency

Cotey grew up in Kingsport, a close-knit community of about 53,000 residents nestled along the Virginia border in the northeastern corner of the state.

She was inspired to pursue an education degree in part by her elementary school teacher, who taught her for three years of her childhood, in a commingled class for grades three through five. When she enrolled at Samford University, a small Christian college in Birmingham, Alabama, she followed a regimented teacher-training track, where most of her preparation focused on the Common Core.

“Their approach was on teaching how to write a lesson plan from a standard so that we would be prepared to use any set of standards we were given,” she said. “Of course, the standards we were using were Common Core.”

Cotey wasn’t necessarily looking to return to her hometown after graduation, but when the district offered her a job a week before the start of the school year, she jumped at the opportunity.

Like Alabama, Tennessee has been transitioning to the Common Core for years. In fact, the Volunteer State has spent more than $40 million preparing its teachers for the switch, which officially occurred this school year, even though many districts–including Kingsport–have been using them for the past two years.

But last year, amid growing antipathy towards the standards, Tennessee’s General Assembly passed a law repealing the new state-wide test, aligned to the Common Core, that the state had been ready to use. Students were slated to take the now-repealed exam–the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, or PARCC–for the first time at the end of the current school year.

Related: What this spring’s Common Core tests promised, and what they will actually deliver

Left without an assessment and without enough time to craft a new one, the education department directed districts to instead administer the old state test, the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP. And since the TCAP tests students on the old standards, teachers must prepare their classes them using both sets of academic benchmarks—a difficult task for any teacher, but even more so for newcomers like Cotey, who had little to no experience with the old standards until she began teaching in August.

“Having two sets of standards, two lists, is just very daunting, even though they do overlap to some degree,” said Cotey. “And then having an assessment that doesn’t align to what the standards are focusing on is a very large challenge.”

Adding another layer to the pressure on rookie teachers is the fact they are evaluated, and in some districts, like Kingsport, even compensated based on their students’ test scores. On top of this, Gov. Bill Haslam is currently orchestrating a review of the Common Core that could result in the state pulling out of the standards altogether.

The state’s wavering over the Common Core and aligned tests has made teaching more difficult for every educator, but especially for new teachers like Cotey, who feel like they can’t be effective in the current climate.

“One of the big things they taught us in school is consistency: Be consistent with your students,” said Cotey. “It’s hard to do that when nothing is consistent.”

Teacher Preparation and Attrition

Cotey’s experience is exactly what some researchers are worried about.

Teaching is notorious for its attrition rates and most teachers who leave do so in their first five years, typically due to a combination of low pay, long hours and high levels of stress.

In Tennessee alone, more than 5,000 educators leave the teaching profession each year, costing the state somewhere in the range of $23 million to $50 million, according to a 2014 report from the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington, DC-based policy organization.

Doris Santoro, an assistant professor of education at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, who studies why teachers leave the profession, said she’s seen an uptick in recent years among educators who are demoralized because they feel the political climate prevents them from teaching to the best of their ability.

And while there’s never been a time when education hasn’t been political, she said the current atmosphere is unprecedented, making it difficult for teachers to feel like they’re in the driver’s seat.

That sentiment is precisely what Cotey conveyed recently one morning during a professional development day in March.

“We don’t have control over a lot of the decisions that are made, and a lot of times the true professionals aren’t consulted by the lawmakers,” said Cotey. “I know they have pressures trying to keep other people happy, but we are the ones who are in the classroom every day with the students. We have a lot of good information and experience to contribute to these discussions, but what we’re saying isn’t being heard.”

Related: Does Common Core really mean teachers should teach differently?

The debate over academic standards, however, is just one aspect of effective teaching, pointed out Carrie Abood, assistant professor of education in the undergraduate department of Lipscomb University, which is consistently ranked as having one of the best teacher preparation programs in the country.

“If the climate is in limbo now about Common Core, then in 10 years it may be about something completely different,” said Abood. And for that reason, she said, Lipscomb focuses on building skills like adaptability and flexibility in its students.

Abood said she often gives her younger students a refresher about what the Common Core is, how it was created, and the difference between standards and curriculum, the latter being one of the biggest sources of misinformation about the Common Core.

“I try to make sure they are paying attention to what the truths are versus what’s on Facebook,” said Abood. “But I’m not focusing so much about what the controversy of the day is, rather on how I can prepare my students for being the best.”

She also pushed back against the notion that first-year teachers are at a disadvantage when it comes to the current standards debate in Tennessee compared to more veteran teachers.

“To them Common Core is not a big deal because it’s all a big deal,” she said.

And, Abood added, some first-year teachers are more prepared than others, depending on the type of training they’ve received.

Aubryn Hudson, for example, says the training she received likely gave her a leg up over other new teachers. The 25-year-old newly-minted science and social studies teacher at John Adams, enrolled in a teaching licensure program at nearby Milligan College, a 14-month program that emphasizes hands-on classroom experience.

As part of her training, Hudson spent an entire school year shadowing two of Kingsport’s best teachers. She said balancing both sets of standards is difficult, but admitted that Milligan College’s required internship likely allowed her to transition to the profession more easily than others. And because Kingsport was an early adopter of the Common Core, the teachers she shadowed had previous experience juggling the two sets of standards.

Plus, she added, teaching science and social studies using both sets of standards isn’t nearly as difficult as teaching a core subject, like English/language arts or math.

“I can teach students [an old standard] and then with my reading groups I can bring in Common Core almost like an umbrella,” Hudson said. “It’s not that difficult for me to have that mindset because I was able to see the best of the best do it, and that’s all I’ve known.”

New Common Core Test

New and veteran teachers alike are trying to find solace in the fact that next school year–if everything goes according to plan–the state will finally use a test aligned to the Common Core standards that they’ve been teaching.

After the last year’s repeal of the Common Core-aligned PARCC test, the state re-opened the bidding process to testing companies for the creation of a new state exam. It ultimately awarded North Carolina-based testing manufacturer Measurement Inc. the more than $100 million contract last fall.

But the new test comes with its own set of challenges.

Unlike PARCC, which had more than three years to work with teachers across several states to design and test its exam, Measurement Inc. has less than a year before it begins field-testing its assessment next fall, ahead of statewide use of it next spring. The development timeline has many in the field concerned.

Related: Common Core tests were supposed to be immune to test prep. So why are kids spending weeks prepping anyway? 

“It’s really hard to create a test that has validity and really gets at what we hope it will get at,” explained Barbara Stengel, a professor of education and the director of secondary education in the department of teaching and learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development.

Stengel said that developing a good exam requires several rounds of field-testing and data collection in order to be certain it assesses and measures as it should. In her view, several months is not nearly enough time.

“We’re not going to have a good test in Tennessee next year,” Stengel said. “I just know how hard it is to come up with a really good test that actually asks what you really want to know and then is scored reliably so that performance is pretty stable.”

Emily Helphinstine, the literacy coordinator for Kingsport City Schools, agreed.

Helphinstine belongs to a group of teachers and administrators across the state with whom the testing company is consulting as it develops the exam and designs test questions. She was supposed to meet with the company the first week in March to provide feedback on various parts of the blueprint for the test, but the meeting was canceled due to a snowstorm that paralyzed much of the east coast. Instead, the company sent Helphinstine part of the blueprint, on which she marked edits and suggestions; she then sent it back to the company.

Helphinstine called the timeline “crazy,” and said she expects that Measurement Inc. will have to continue tinkering with the test, even after it is administered statewide next year.

She’s particularly frustrated with the lack of time teachers will have to prepare. The state education department scheduled two test training sessions for the summer, in an effort to give teachers as much preparation as they can, but it’s unclear whether the test will even be finalized by then.

Helphinstine and other administrators in the district’s central office have been trying to ready teachers and parents to expect a significant drop in student achievement scores as a result of both the delayed shift to Common Core-aligned tests and teachers and students adjusting to the tougher standards.

Kingsport’s scores already dipped last year, when the district began transitioning to the Common Core but used the old state test, aligned to the old state standards. That decline in scores is likely to happen again this year, as well as next year, when students are finally tested on the more difficult standards.

The repeal of PARCC and the expedited timeline for Measurement Inc. is especially troubling for Kingsport’s teachers, whose salary is based in part on student test scores. The new compensation system was created by the district’s teachers, who never considered the possibility that the state would backtrack on a transition three years in the making.

Faced with the likelihood of poor performance across the state, Helphinstine is trying to focus on a potential silver lining for Kingsport: Because the district was an early adopter of the Common Core, its students may fare better than most. To put it another way, Kingsport’s students may account for the highest of the low scores.

Looking Ahead

Teachers in Kingsport are generally hopeful that the state will ultimately complete its transition to the Common Core and aligned tests. That transition may get some additional support with the recent appointment of Candice McQueen, who took over as education commissioner on January 20.

McQueen, a Tennessee native and formerly the senior vice president at Lipscomb, has been a public supporter of the standards for years. In her new role, she has said she’s intent on making sure the state doesn’t back away for the more rigorous standards.

Already in her first few months on the job, she has pledged to ensure teachers’ voices are included in the state’s review of the standards and to work to soften the impact the expected drop in student test scores have on teacher evaluations and compensation.

Meanwhile, Gov. Haslam has convinced a group of Republican state legislators to withdraw–at least for now–a bill that would repeal the state’s adoption of the Common Core entirely while the state’s review of the standards is underway. The proposed legislation would be a blow for a state considered a leader in the standards movement, and would likely have ramifications for other states whose legislatures are similarly wavering over the Common Core.

“Once we actually make the transition to Common Core, I’ll be able to rock and roll,” said Cotey. “But get me to that point.”

Getting teachers to that point, however, isn’t a sure bet, especially at a time when pushback against the standards at the national level only seems to be growing.

Case in point: At the end of February, Republican leaders in the US House of Representatives were forced to abandon a vote on a GOP-backed bill to overhaul the No Child Left Behind law after a post on an anti-Common Core blog went viral. The post falsely stated that the bill would force states to continue using the Common Core, which caused many Republicans to withdraw their support for their own party’s legislation.

Such incidents, Cotey said, make her feel like she might never get to “rock and roll” with the standards she’s devoted so much time and energy to learning. Still, she’s currently planning to continue teaching.

“If I’m not here, then who else is going to be here for my students?” Cotey asked. “If we don’t have good teachers, then the system just becomes more broken, so I’m going to do my best no matter what the state of anybody else says. I’m going to do my best for them.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news website focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Common Core.

The post Tennessee’s wavering over the Common Core discourages new teachers appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Kingsport, Tenn. – On a hot August day during the first week of school, Heather Hobbs, a 26-year-old teacher at Andrew Johnson Elementary School in Kingsport, Tenn., asked her third-grade class to do something she knew that they wouldn’t be able to do.

She handed out two passages, one about Eliza Scidmore, a writer and explorer whose idea it was to plant cherry blossom trees around the nation’s capital, and another about George Washington Carver, an African-American botanist born into slavery who taught poor farmers how to grow alternative crops to cotton.

Together, the texts totaled more than 1,000 words, and an attached worksheet asked the students to write an essay describing the challenges that the historical figures had faced in their lives.

“This will be difficult,” Hobbs said. “But if you give me your very best, I promise I’m going to teach you how to do this by the end of the year.”

The exercise was part of a practice test aligned to the Common Core State Standards, a set of academic benchmarks that Tennessee adopted in 2010 and began using with success in classrooms in the 2012-13 school year but may now abandon.

Related: Common Core has students writing — on just about every subject

By the time Hobbs collected the assignments, some students had underlined key words in the passages, but hadn’t written more than a couple of paragraphs in their workbooks. Others had written pages, but little of it was about either Scidmore or Carver. One student had written only one sentence, which looked as though it had been erased and rewritten: “One day Eliza went to Alaska, she liked it.

The writing prompt helped Hobbs assess her incoming students’ abilities. They performed so poorly that most of their essays couldn’t be graded. Later, at a full-day Common Core training session in September attended by hundreds of teachers, Hobbs recounted that, over the course of three weeks, she had taught her students how to use an acronym, “POW TIDE,” as a tool to help them structure an informational essay. She had learned the acronym from the state’s Common Core coaches over the summer. Each letter in the acronym stands for a step of the writing process, and it is intended to help students organize their thoughts. Once Hobbs believed that most of her students grasped the concepts, she gave them the exact same writing exercise and was “blown away” by their improvement.

“You cannot deny that these children have grown, especially when you look at the beginning of their draft books and see how they could only write one sentence and now they can write six pages,” Hobbs said.

Kingsport is a largely isolated town in the Tri-Cities region, nestled at the foot of rolling mountains in the northeast corner of the state. It’s known as the home of Pal’s, a local greasy burger joint, and for its award-winning high school marching band, which played in the presidential inauguration parade in 2013.

More than half of Kingsport’s 7,300 students come from economically disadvantaged families, and nearly a quarter of them have learning disabilities. But the school system consistently ranks among the top 10 in the state, with the best proficiency rates in reading and math; its students’ ACT scores exceed state and national averages; and it boasts Advanced Placement participation rates and scores among the highest in the state.

Much of the district’s success, Superintendent Lyle Ailshie likes to say, is a direct result of teachers like Hobbs — hard-working, energetic, and willing to trust the direction of the state and district’s education officials. For the past three years, that’s included a significant shift away from the state’s traditional academic benchmarks and toward the Common Core, a set of more difficult standards.

Related: Will weak teacher training ruin the Common Core?

But in the past few months, the Volunteer State has signaled a weaker commitment to the Common Core amid increasing opposition to the standards. In addition to delaying new, Common Core aligned state exams, Gov. Bill Haslam, once a staunch supporter of the standards, recently announced a plan to publicly vet them — a process that could end with the state abandoning them altogether. Each move is notable on its own, but, combined, they represent a sea change in Tennessee, which has spent millions of dollars adopting the Common Core and is widely considered a leader in the standards movement.

A complete departure from the Common Core standards could disengage teachers, who are already struggling to navigate the standards gauntlet, as well as embolden other states that are toying with the idea of rolling back their standards. Throughout the year, we’ll be following this issue through the lens of its effects on Kingsport’s teachers.

The backtracking puts teachers in a precarious position. Teaching to a new set of more difficult standards is tough enough. But in Tennessee, where an educator’s evaluation, and in some cases compensation, is based on student test scores, teaching to the Common Core while not aligning tests to those standards is problematic.

How Did Tennessee Get Here?

Hobbs is one of Kingsport’s teacher leaders — among a crop of high-performing teachers trained by the state to be experts on the Common Core standards for their schools.

The group is part of an ongoing and massive $40 million standards preparation effort that’s been taking place across the Volunteer State for the last three years, during which more than 70,000 teachers have participated in multiple training sessions.

Tennessee’s intensive Common Core coaching effort — the largest and most expensive in the country — is just one item on a laundry list of commitments the state made in order to win a slice of the $4 billion Race to the Top grant, the Obama administration’s signature competitive education program.

In 2010, Tennessee and Delaware became the first two states to win a portion of the grant, which itself was a small part of the massive economic stimulus package designed to right a flailing economy.

Tennessee’s winning grant application, which secured the state $500 million in funds, laid out an aggressive plan to overhaul public education. The state promised to turn around its poorest performing schools over the course of four years, evaluate teachers based in part on student test scores, increase the use of technology in the classroom, and use more rigorous academic standards along with new tests aligned to those standards.

Though Tennessee wasn’t required to adopt the Common Core — the competition specified only that states adopt a set of common standards that would prepare students for college or a career — it did, along with 45 other states and the District of Columbia.

Standards Leader

Teachers across Tennessee began preparation for the new state test aligned to the Common Core standards in 2013. The state planned to begin testing students using the new exam, known as the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers test, or PARCC, in the spring of 2015.

The Partnership is one of two testing consortia, each supported by different groups of states, that developed tests aligned to the Common Core. More than a dozen other states also initially opted to use PARCC.

Related: The ‘common’ in Common Core fractures as state support falters

The 2014-15 school year actually marks Hobbs’s third year using the new standards and her second year prepping her students for a new test. That’s because education officials in Kingsport and a smattering of other school districts in Tennessee proactively embraced the state’s education overhauls and have worked double time to start using the standards, which they see as key to graduating students ready for college or a career.

Kingsport has additional incentive to produce well-prepared students. It is also corporate headquarters for Eastman Chemical Company, a $9 billion operation that produces, among other things, the plastic used to make bottles for commercially sold beverages. The plant is a top employer in the region, and education officials here see the Common Core as a no-brainer insurance policy to keep their corner of the state competitive, both nationally and internationally.

As part of its proactive approach to the standards, Kingsport spent a significant amount of time last year preparing teachers and students for the new PARCC exam. The school district hired education consultants and ramped up its technology so that teachers could better track which students understood a specific skill and which students needed additional instruction. The district even field-tested the new PARCC exams to give teachers and students an idea of what the new tests would look like.

The transition was difficult, especially since teachers also needed to prepare their students for the traditional state exam, the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP. That test is aligned to the state’s old standards, not to the Common Core — meaning teachers were doing double duty, transitioning students to new standards while ensuring that they also had a grasp of the old benchmarks.

Though Tennessee was moving away from its old standards and tests, preparing students for the TCAP was still especially important to teachers, because the state’s evaluation system uses student achievement scores on the TCAP to account for 35 percent of a teacher’s appraisal.

Still, things seemed to be falling into place, both in Kingsport, which secured about $1.6 million in Race to the Top funds to help with things like Common Core implementation, and statewide.

A 2013 survey of 28,000 teachers by the Tennessee Consortium on Research, Evaluation and Development, which is housed at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development, found that teachers generally believed that the implementation of Common Core was going well, and thought that the standards would result in improved student outcomes.

“I felt like, finally we’re doing something right,” said Emily Helphinstine, the literacy coordinator at Kingsport City Schools who works with Hobbs. “They’ve been training for almost three years for this and teachers really understood and were ready to move forward. It’s difficult work but it’s work worth doing.”

Those sentiments were further bolstered last November, when Tennessee proved to be the fastest academically improving state in the country, according to its scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. From 2011 to 2013, Tennessee’s fourth-graders had moved from 46th to 37th in math and 41st to 31st in reading.

While Tennessee still languishes in the bottom half of states, the progress was no small feat, and the state’s transition to the new standards was touted as one of the main reasons for the bump in scores.

Even President Barack Obama name-checked Tennessee during his State of the Union address in January, 2014, as an example of a state that’s taking big steps to improve its education system: “Teachers and principals in schools from Tennessee to Washington, D.C., are making big strides in preparing students with the skills for the new economy,” he said. “Some of this change is hard. . . . But it’s worth it-–and it’s working.”

Recoiling from Common Core

Amidst all the fanfare, however, was a growing backlash against the standards, especially among conservative state legislatures whose members increasingly saw the Common Core as a federal initiative, a directive to states from Washington.

A small fraction of Republicans in the Tennessee state House, led by Rep. Rick Womick (R-Rockvale), tried to drum up support to pause the standards for up to three years, though that effort ultimately failed.

The standards had also become ensnared in a statewide debate about state education commissioner Kevin Huffman, who recently announced plans to step down from his post at the end of the year. His aggressive pursuit of the education overhauls contained in the state’s Race to the Top grant were a prime point of contention. In September 2013, 60 superintendents wrote to Gov. Haslam criticizing Huffman’s brash leadership style, and a slate of state House Republicans, mainly tea-party types, called for his resignation.

Related: More teachers are souring on Common Core, finds one survey

But the governor stood behind Huffman, arguing that the growing resentment toward the education chief was an expected response to the challenging overhauls taking place across the state.

Then, in April, state lawmakers in both chambers successfully pushed through a bill delaying the use of the PARCC tests by one year, despite an intense lobbying effort by Gov. Haslam and Huffman to shut it down. The measure also reopened the bidding process for the state tests, meaning Tennessee may very well never use the PARCC exams.

The bill, which Gov. Haslam signed much to the chagrin of Huffman, meant teachers and students in Tennessee would once again be responsible for teaching to the Common Core’s more difficult standards while preparing students for the old state tests based on the old state standards.

“That was personally upsetting,” said Hobbs, remembering her reaction to the news. “I make sure my students are exposed to both standards, but it’s only fair that they’re assessed genuinely and authentically to the way they’re instructed.”

Also troublesome for Hobbs and other teachers in Kingsport is that, beginning this year, they will be compensated based in part on those state test scores. The district’s new pay scale rewards teachers based on how high they rank on the state’s 1-to-5 value-added evaluation scale, 35 percent of which is based on student test scores.

“It’s so frustrating,” Dory Creech, assistant superintendent at Kingsport City Schools, said of the PARCC delay. “I really hate it for our teachers because our new strategic compensation is based on teacher effectiveness and yet the assessments won’t be aligned to what they’re teaching.”

Moving Forward

The state department of education has emphasized, as it did last year, that teaching to the Common Core will prepare students for the old state tests too — though student scores from last year’s TCAP indicate otherwise.

In Kingsport, for example, the district’s value-added literacy scores (derived from TCAP scores) for grades three through five dropped, from a 3 on the 1-to-5 scale during the 2012-13 school year to a 1 during the 2013-14 school year.

To help teachers plow through another year of double duty, Kingsport City Schools developed what it calls “power standards,” skills that overlap between the old set of standards and the Common Core. It also provided teachers with a breakdown of standards — some that they could tick off their checklist in one day, and others that might take a month or more for students to fully comprehend.

But despite the uncertainty, for now Kingsport teachers are still planning their lessons using the Common Core as their primary compass.

At the standards training at the Kingsport Center for Higher Education in late September, coaches taught Hobbs and other teacher leaders more new methods. The next standards session is already scheduled for January.

At the end of October, Hobbs gave her students a third writing test to ensure that they were still making progress. The exercise was largely the same as before: Students read passages about famed baseball player Jackie Robinson and three-time Olympic track and field gold medalist Wilma Rudolph, and wrote essays comparing and contrasting the two African-American athletes’ challenges.

“The passages are very long, so it requires a lot of stamina and perseverance,” Hobbs explained. “But with that said, almost every single student made it through the test and was able to plan with POW TIDE.”

Because of the results she’s seen—like her students’ success with POW TIDE—Hobbs remains upbeat. “I believe Kingsport will continue to teach on a high level with rigorous curriculum regardless of an repeal of the Common Core standards,” Hobbs said. “Of course, I would like to know because there is safety in knowing what lies ahead.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news website focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Common Core.

Lauren Camera is a Staff Writer for Education Week.

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