It’s been 20 years since ERS first started partnering with districts to transform schooling. As we celebrate this anniversary, we want to honor all our incredible partners, past and present. This is the first in our series of interviews where we’ll chat with our partners about their successes, lessons learned, and hopes for the future.

Transforming high school experiences requires a special combination of short-term, strategic investments and sustained, long-term vision. Under the leadership of Director of Schools, Dr. Adrienne Battle, Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) is a shining example of what that can look like in practice. MNPS’ commitment to creating a system that works for everyone—ensuring every student is a “ready graduate” with the skills, knowledge, and disposition to be ready for what comes next—has driven innovative approaches to how the district invests time and resources.  

We sat down with Dr. Battle to learn more about her district’s inspiring approach to high school redesign, the initiatives that have proven most impactful for students, and her vision for the future.  

MNPS students earned strong NAEP scores, particularly in reading. How were you able to leverage investments to achieve and sustain those results? 

We deliberately aligned our investments with our focused outcomes as a district, particularly improving students’ literacy and numeracy skills and building their social-emotional learning capacity. We wanted to prepare students deeply as they moved through our system, culminating in postsecondary plans for college and career experiences. 

In terms of prioritizing our investments, we committed to four specific areas. First, we wanted to build infrastructure for our students so that they could have access to quality learning experiences, regardless of where they were learning. Second, we committed to accelerating academics by prioritizing our Tier-1 approach through high-quality instructional materials. We invested in gold-standard, high-dosage tutoring, expanding advanced academics, and expanding summer schooling activities. Third, we prioritized growing our people.

We didn’t just hire new teachers and leaders, but rather thought about how we could retain and build existing faculty’s capacity. So, we invested in professional development, mental health, and social-emotional learning experiences for our educators.  

At MNPS, we have a mantra: “Every student known.” As our fourth priority, we thought about the strategies that help ensure every student is known and supported. We paired every student with a navigator, someone who checked in with them frequently and ensured they got all the wraparound services they needed. This process included implementing advocacy centers in our elementary schools and peace centers in our secondary schools. It was all about investing in the things that ensured every student was known and valued. 

How did you integrate both short-term “do now” actions in service of a long-term vision? 

We’re very intentional about tying short- and long-term strategies to return on investment (ROI). What did we invest in these particular strategies, and what was the ROI? Were we able to really accelerate the outcomes of our students based upon this kind of one-time infusion of funds?  

I’m very fortunate here to have strong partnerships. Our Board of Education are fierce advocates for our pre-K through grade 12 experiences, and we have a strong partnership with the Nashville mayor and council members. By working closely with them, we created a “bridge” for our ESSER funds, so we’ve been able to avoid the fiscal cliff that could have happened September of last year. We were able to demonstrate that bridge fund’s ROI, so now we’re leveraging it in partnership with our city leaders. 

Since the sunsetting of ESSER, we’ve continued those key investments. We’ve moved many of those investments into our operational budget already by working closely with the mayor, but we’re working on moving the remaining items so that we have recurring, committed, and sustained investments to continue this level of acceleration into the future. 

Can you share an example of a high-ROI initiative that’s garnered funding and support beyond the initial investment? 

When we develop key strategies, we start in a research-based space. If the research has already shown that particular investments result in positive outcomes, the likelihood of them having positive effects on your students already exists—if you implement them with high integrity. That’s one thing we’re celebrating: We haven’t had to pivot a lot because these strategies are paying off in the ways we anticipated. 

One strategy that we’ve seen overwhelming success and buy-in around is the adoption of high-quality instructional materials—something we really dreamed about before the pandemic. We invested in them so that both teachers and students could leverage those resources throughout the course of the year and build on their learning as they move toward mastery. Then, we deployed the appropriate, timely, ongoing professional development and learning that educators deserve as they’re implementing high-quality materials. We initially invested through ESSER, and we’ve since been very successful in committing to a recurring operational budget for the long haul.  

Our students deserve to have their needs met in a timely manner, so we’ve moved advocacy centers in our elementary schools to our operational budget, which has resulted in both academic and non-academic improvements. Attendance has improved, we’ve been able to decrease chronic absenteeism, and discipline incidents have dramatically decreased. It’s another way we’ve articulated our “why” in the beginning then monitored progress toward success to sustain these initiatives throughout the district. 

When you first started working with ERS, you were already being highlighted as a bright spot in high school education for your academy model. How did you maintain the momentum and motivation to pursue your larger vision? 

With any school transformation, it’s always a strong strategy to celebrate successes. Those successes really springboard teams into the next level of the work. Our goal for our students is that they end high school as “ready graduates.” They’re not just walking across the stage to receive their diploma, but rather leaving high school with a toolbox of skills, knowledge, and the disposition to be ready for what comes next. 

Being a ready graduate means that students are owning their next steps beyond high school and have guaranteed access to early postsecondary opportunities. It means that on nationally normed assessments, they’re performing at levels that predict later success and that they’ve obtained industry credentials that align with their career aspirations. 

Quite frankly, we were leaving points on the board. While we had made significant strides in improving graduation rates, we weren’t impacting every single student we served. Our goal was to design a system that works for every student—regardless of how they come to us. And now we’re celebrating the highest graduation record in the district’s history. 

We started this work years ago, but we’re accelerating it now with deliberate work grounded in student experiences. We’ve asked critical questions like, “What is the high school experience?” “What do our students have access to?” “What kinds of supports do they have?” Essentially, we want to ensure student success now that serves as the foundation for their future success as adults in our society. 

Many districts neglect to assess their current state before taking on major initiatives. How did this key step help you build toward your vision? 

Through our partnership with ERS, we were able to dig deeper into who we are as a district. We learned a lot about what we were doing well and about the opportunities we had to enhance and transform the high school experience. We’re a wall-to-wall career academy school district—something that we accomplished over a decade ago. We’re really proud of that. It’s a longstanding structure. And now the question is: How does this structure help us optimize personalized instructional time for students to support their aspirations, talents, and goals? 

Schedule shifts often take years to implement, but you made changes quite rapidly. How did you align stakeholders and manage the disruption to achieve this? 

As educators, it’s hard to shift when you’re accustomed to accomplishing goals in a certain way. It’s also tough when you’ve made some progress with existing structures. But we have to ask ourselves: Could we have made more progress if we thought about this challenge in an innovative and transformative way?

The master schedule is one of the big levers for your school transformation, so we took time to think through our investment in time, people, and resources in relation to our schedule. We identified some technical challenges right away, which allowed us to analyze how we’re leveraging strategies to accelerate student access and opportunity. 

It was all about coming together as a learning institution and committing to keeping our students at the forefront. If you lose sight of the students, your strategies won’t drive the outcomes you want. We’re clear about who we are, and we make sure that everyone, as much as possible, has a seat around the table—that really helped us to move efficiently toward our high school transformation model. 

Being a learning institution means knowing where you are but committing to not staying there. We took time to think through our scheduling structures and identify our “why.” Turns out, understanding your “why” allows you to move much more efficiently toward transformation. I use this African proverb all the time: “If you want to go fast, you’ll go alone. But if you want to go far, you’ve got to move together.” 

As a superintendent, how do you stay hopeful and optimistic amid these uncertain, challenging times? 

For me, it’s all about prioritizing as much time as possible to being in classrooms, being in schools. You just can’t miss when you’re spending time with your talented young people and the highest-quality, most-effective educators in the field every day. 

That gives me a lot of hope. In classrooms right now, I’m seeing students taking on the heavy lifting. I’m seeing students be more comfortable with productive struggle. I’m seeing more students seeing themselves in who we are as an educational institution and feeling confident that we’re working hard to ensure a path toward success for them. I’m optimistic because the level of parental engagement is improving. I see so many on-ramps for families to form respectful partnerships with us that will help us continue to realize the outcomes we want to see for our young people. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge all the great leaders I stand shoulder to shoulder with who commit every day to our mantra of ensuring that every student is known, that they’re supported, that they’re cared for, that they’re valued, and that we will remove every barrier to ensure their success moving forward. 

So, it’s the community. It’s the people. It’s our young people. And it’s the hope around our ability to continue to transform barriers and challenges into opportunities. Our high school transformation work, our partnership with ERS in this space, and our student-based budgeting work also gives me hope. All of this makes me hopeful and optimistic about what public education will continue to produce in the years to come. 

Learn how we partner with districts like Nashville to redesign high school experiences.