The full program study is available now. Read it here! Nashville’s charter schools have changed significantly over the past decade. Most are fully grown now, with experienced leaders, stable communities, and students who have been with them for years. For many of those schools, the question has shifted from how do we build a special education program to whether what we’ve built actually works for every student who needs it? In partnership with Tennessee SCORE,

If you talk to almost any school leader who serves students with disabilities or multilingual learners, you’ll likely hear some version of the same teacher retention story. They tried a new onboarding process, stipend, or a restructured planning block. For a while it worked, or seemed to, but then the school year picked up, priorities shifted, and by spring, things looked pretty much the same as before. Rarely is this a story about bad leaders

Three years ago, the Diverse Learners Cooperative published a teacher retention report that named what many schools already felt: special educators and multilingual learner educators were leaving at rates the field couldn’t sustain. The report identified the conditions that made it possible for educators serving students with the most complex needs to stay, thrive, and build careers in schools. Over the past three years, DLC has been treating that report as a call to action,

The final weeks of school are a lot between testing schedules, classroom celebrations, transition paperwork, and the general beautiful chaos of the end of a school year. For special education case managers, there’s one more thing that deserves a dedicated spot on your calendar before you close out: a purposeful review of your students’ IEP data. In this short video, DLC members discuss the importance of a reflective, forward-looking analysis of student outcomes. A data