From cell phones to principal pipelines: How TERA empowers evidence-based decision making in Tennessee schools

Founded in 2016, the Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA) brought together leaders from Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development and the Tennessee Department of Education to launch one of the first state-level research-practice partnerships aimed at informing education policy and practice. Through TERA, researchers at Vanderbilt and from across the country conduct actionable research, and findings have influenced how policymakers view and shape policies regarding teacher evaluation, school turnaround and school leadership, among other topics.

As TERA approaches its tenth anniversary next year, it has much to celebrate, including its new executive director, Amy Owen, MLAS'12, MPP'14, and the legacy of former executive director, Laura Booker, MPP'08, PhD'14, as well as the enduring influence of the Tennessee Educator Survey and growing partnerships to improve educator labor markets, school leadership and student mental health outcomes.

Given TERA's productivity, the Peabody Journal of Education dedicated its spring issue exclusively to TERA scholarship, and on October 23, TERA hosted its second annual research symposium with the Tennessee Department of Education.

TERA symposium group. Sean Corcoran, professor of leadership, policy and organizations, sits at the top left. (photo credit: Tennessee Department of Education)

Welcoming Amy Owen

Amy Owen

In August, TERA welcomed Owen as its third executive director to continue to lead its long-standing partnership with the Tennessee Department of Education and to expand on partnerships across the state with individual school districts, advocacy organizations, and other state agencies that seek to make a difference for children through evidence-based policies and practices.

"TERA is such a respected partner in state policy and practice circles," Owen said. "I am excited to continue to build onto its legacy and reputation."

Owen has a rich and varied background in education policy, research and practice. A former social studies teacher in North Carolina and Tennessee, she has spent her career working across classrooms, state government and national policy organizations to improve education systems and outcomes. Before joining TERA, Owen held key leadership roles at the Tennessee State Board of Education and the Tennessee Department of Education, where she led research studies that directly influenced state legislation and policy. Her work included leading stakeholder engagement to revise Tennessee's K-12 academic standards and redesigning the state's accountability dashboard for educator preparation programs. Nationally, Owen has led policy analysis teams at the Foundation for Excellence in Education (ExcelinEd), where she focused on teacher policy and ethical implications of digital learning and generative AI.

Amy Owen speaking at the TERA symposium (photo credit: Tennessee Department of Education) Jason Grissom

"Amy brings many years of experience at the intersection of research and policy with an eye toward making research accessible and relevant to decision makers," said Jason Grissom, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and faculty director of TERA. "She is deeply respected across the Tennessee education policy landscape and will empower us to further elevate TERA's impact."

Laura Booker

Owen succeeded Laura Booker as executive director, who led TERA for three and a half years and now serves as a TERA research affiliate. Under Booker's leadership, TERA strengthened education data systems, expanded partnerships with school districts and other stakeholders, developed strategies for communicating research findings to a range of audiences and diversified funding streams. As an almost exclusively grant-funded organization, TERA and its research affiliates have received more than $25 million in federal, state and non-profit grants.

"Laura led TERA through a period of significant transition, helping to create new partnerships and new opportunities for funding our work," Grissom said. "She also thought a lot about how we reach non-academic audiences by sharing findings from the Tennessee Educator Survey and other research in ways that empower the work of administrators, teachers, policymakers and others interested in improving student outcomes."

The Tennessee Educator Survey

Kaitlin Binsted presenting at the TERA symposium (photo credit: Tennessee Department of Education)

TERA grew out of the Tennessee Consortium for Research Evaluation (TNCRED), a prior collaboration with the state that evaluated Race to the Top initiatives during the Obama Administration. As part of these evaluations, TNCRED developed the Tennessee Educator Survey in 2012. Since 2016, TERA has partnered with the Tennessee Department of Education to produce the annual survey, allowing all public-school teachers, administrators and certified staff to give feedback on education policies and practices in Tennessee.

Jonathan Criswell

The Tennessee Department of Education and TERA collaborate to determine survey topics and design and administer surveys to districts across the state. "TERA's ability to craft questions that ensure we get good quality data allows us to understand immediate concerns and to utilize longitudinal data to see changes over time," said Jonathan Criswell, chief programs officer at the Tennessee Department of Education. "The survey is a valuable resource to inform decisions all the way from the school to the district to the department, and then legislatively as well."

"The survey is a valuable resource to inform decisions all the way from the school to the district to the department, and then legislatively as well."

Kaitlin Binsted

Schools and districts that achieve 45 percent response rates receive their survey results. "We hear feedback from school and district leaders that having educators' perspectives represented and recorded has been really beneficial to understanding their school culture and climate and making improvements within schools to better support teachers and students," said Kaitlin Binsted, MPP'22, senior research specialist at TERA.

Kaitlin Binsted speaking at the TERA symposium (photo credit: Tennessee Department of Education)

As part of TERA's efforts to make findings accessible to practitioners and policymakers, the team produced 8 snapshots-brief insight reports-from the 2025 survey. Snapshots cover teacher retention plans, teacher evaluation, math curriculum and supports, early-career teachers, career and technical education, cell phones in schools, AI in schools and student discipline. Cell phones and AI are more recent survey topics.

This year, most high school leaders reported that their policies allowed cell phone use outside of the classroom. While 84 percent reported policies that allowed students to use cell phones during breaks in the school day, 83 percent of high school teachers found cell phone use disruptive to academic achievement.

Teachers and administrators are finding ways to integrate AI into their practices, but it is not used in equal measure across positions and levels of experience. Four in 10 teachers and 6 in 10 administrators reported using AI in their professions. High school teachers and teachers with fewer years of experience are more likely to use AI tools for teaching. Teachers most commonly use AI to generate assignments or assessments (56 percent of teachers who reported using AI), while administrators most commonly use AI to write emails or other communications (51 percent of administrators).

Having access to this data on cellphone and AI use supports school and district leaders in creating and revising policies as well as in identifying needed areas of educator professional development.

Strengthening educator labor markets

In addition to collaborating with the Tennessee Department of Education, TERA works with education advocacy organizations. Over the past two years, Tennessee SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education) has commissioned TERA to examine trends in the teacher labor market related to teacher retention, turnover and preparation. With deep connections to school districts across Tennessee, SCORE recruited about 30 districts to share their labor market data with TERA researchers whose analyses ultimately contributed to SCORE's successful legislative advocacy for the Future Teacher Scholarship. The scholarship supports educators teaching on a temporary permit, so they can return to school to earn their teacher licensure credential.

Courtney Bell

"In the labor market reports that TERA helped to produce, we saw a lot of turnover among teachers on permits who were not converting them to full-time licensure," said Courtney Bell, vice president of research and innovation at SCORE and a member of TERA's advisory council. "This seemed like an opportunity to leverage this data into creating policy that could solve this problem and strengthen the Tennessee educator workforce."

Trey Duke

Participating districts received a report from TERA about their labor market in relation to trends in other districts. "It was really insightful for us," said Trey Duke, director of Murfreesboro City Schools. "The streamlined process allowed us to quickly see how we could improve, where we were strong, and where we were better off than we initially thought after being able to compare our district to others across the state. The report was easily readable, concise, and very beneficial to thinking about how we staff schools."

For several years, TERA has received $500,000 in grants from the Hewlett Foundation to work closely with the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) to understand teacher labor markets in the South. In their most recent study together, TERA, SREB and the Tennessee Department of Education examine new teacher entry and retention across four southern states to help policymakers target policies and programs aimed at ensuring that all students have access to highly qualified teachers.

Megan Boren. Atlanta's Event Photographers

Through their first study together, they discovered a significant rise in participation in high school-based dual-credit introductory teaching courses in Tennessee ("Teaching as a Profession" courses) and Kentucky ("Teaching and Learning" courses). "Gen Z's increased interest in these high school programs is a bright spot that suggests that early exposure to the profession could be a way of capturing interest in teaching," said Megan Boren, director of educator workforce at SREB.

Following this finding, TERA is working with the Tennessee Department of Education to investigate whether students who completed high school introductory teaching courses continue through teacher preparation programs and become certified teachers in Tennessee.

"This has been a mutually beneficial partnership for TERA, SREB, and the Tennessee Department of Education," said Boren. "We are able to exchange data, collaborate across states, and explore new ideas and trends in the educator workforce to produce research that is useful to policymakers and advocates across the South."

"We are able to exchange data, collaborate across states, and explore new ideas and trends in the educator workforce to produce research that is useful to policymakers and advocates across the South."

Brooke Amos, assistant commissioner of human capital at the Tennessee Department of Education, expressed similar sentiments. "I appreciate that we have a bi-directional symbiotic relationship with TERA. From data integrity to thinking about outcomes and policy changes-we all engage through processes together," Amos said.

Harnessing the Power of School Leadership

Jason Grissom at the TERA symposium (photo credit: Tennessee Department of Education)

Scholars like Grissom have increasingly viewed school leadership as key to strengthening schools. Former Tennessee governor Bill Haslam shares this belief. While in office, Governor Haslam's school leadership strategies were informed by Grissom's analyses of state leadership data. Now the Bill and Crissy Haslam Foundation is funding the Aspiring School Leaders Project, led by Grissom and Binsted in collaboration with the Tennessee Department of Education. The team is in their fourth year of a five-year, $1.1 million grant to discover qualities most associated with effective school leadership and how to identify potential leaders.

Jayme Simmons

"Jason is a leading thinker on school leadership," said Jayme Simmons, MPP'11, executive director of the Haslam Foundation and former policy director for Governor Haslam. "Having him in our backyard in Nashville felt like a great opportunity to marry his knowledge about school leadership with an incredible data system in Tennessee, so that we could explore ways to support principals across the state and strengthen that role."

The Aspiring School Leaders Project builds on Grissom's 2021 report, "How Principals Affect Students and Schools," published by the Wallace Foundation. The report synthesized 20 years of research and established a school leadership framework that describes the skills required to be an effective leader as well as how school systems can invest in school leadership.

The research team aims to identify and design tools that can differentiate which prospective school leaders are likely to be effective when they become principals. Study participants have taken assessments of competencies and expertise associated with leadership success. Members of the research team have also interviewed participants to develop a deeper understanding of their leadership philosophy.

Now the researchers are tracking these aspiring leaders in their careers and will examine metrics about their leadership performance in relation to previously assessed competencies and expertise if they should become principals. The goal is to understand which of those previously assessed qualities are most predictive of leadership success.

The research team also plans to explore using large language models to analyze the text files of interviews with aspiring leaders to deepen their understanding of how aspiring leaders think.

"If we can demonstrate that we can measure competencies of effective principals and that those competencies tell us how an aspiring leader will perform, then we could possibly develop tools to help school districts assess potential leaders and develop strong principal pipelines," Grissom said.

Jason Grissom with colleagues at the TERA symposium (photo credit: Tennessee Department of Education)

Supporting children's mental health

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated rates of children experiencing mental health conditions, which had been on the rise since the early 2000s. One in 5 children are diagnosed with a mental health condition each year. Since schools are often frontline observers of emerging and existing mental health issues in children, a team of researchers at Vanderbilt University and TERA, Johns Hopkins University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center began collaborating in 2023 with the Tennessee Department of Education, the Tennessee Department of Health, TennCare and the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services to investigate how school-based health interventions affect children's mental health and education outcomes as well as to understand the efficacy of school-based health centers.

Carolyn Heinrich (Photos by Joe Howell)

Carolyn Heinrich, University Distinguished Professor of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations and the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy, Education and Economics at Peabody College, and Melinda Buntin, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Economics at Johns Hopkins University, lead the research team, supported by a four-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Carolyn Heinrich (third person from left on left side of table) and her colleague in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations, Sean Corcoran (far right side on right side of table), with colleagues at the TERA symposium (photo credit: Tennessee Department of Education)

Earlier this year, the research team published two new papers related to the funding of and access to school-based health centers.

In March, the study "Efficacy of United States' federally-funded interventions in increasing school capacities to improve student mental health and education outcomes in Tennessee" appeared in SSM - Mental Health. The study found that two federally funded programs, School-based Health Centers and Project AWARE grants (Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education), helped to reduce rates of mental health diagnoses by 6 percent in Tennessee schools that implemented the programs compared to those that did not. Qualitative evidence indicates that the grants helped schools hire more health staff, which allowed schools to discover mental health conditions earlier and to get students the support they needed.

In another study, "Association of school-based health center availability with child mental health outcomes," published online in September by Health Services Research, the research team found that school districts that adopted school-based health centers saw a half a percentage point decline in the proportion of students with any mental health diagnosis, which corresponded to a 6.6 percent decline in the original percentage of students diagnosed. These results were due to significant reductions in the diagnosis of depression, anxiety and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. The researchers also found a significant increase in outpatient mental health care visits and a decrease in emergency department visits for mental health conditions after the adoption of school-based health centers.

"Our partnership with TERA and Tennessee state agencies has ensured that our research findings are…relevant to the school-based staff who are working every day to support children's health and maximize their potential to learn and succeed in school."

"Our partnership with TERA and Tennessee state agencies has ensured that our research findings are informed by and directly relevant to the school-based staff who are working every day to support children's health and maximize their potential to learn and succeed in school," Heinrich said. "We regularly engage with state leaders and school district staff as new findings emerge from our study."

The true measure of TERA

TERA's impact lies beyond its body of research; it's in how that research translates into better education policies and practices across Tennessee. The Tennessee Educator Survey has become an essential tool for understanding and responding to educator needs, while labor market research has directly influenced legislation to strengthen the teaching workforce. The Aspiring School Leaders Project aims to revolutionize how districts identify and develop effective principals, while research on school-based health programs offers actionable evidence for supporting the mental health needs of students. As TERA continues its work under new leadership, the organization's commitment to making research accessible reflects its mission as a research-practice partnership and empowers policymakers, educators and advocates to improve outcomes for all students.

This article includes content originally published on August 13 and February 7.