Knox County Schools

A study by Knox County Schools in Tennessee found that aligning intervention tutoring with classroom instructional materials improved literacy growth in struggling students. Students receiving aligned tutoring showed gains of 0.12 standard deviations, with those in the lower half of the group seeing 0.18 standard deviations in growth. Trained paraprofessionals delivering aligned interventions were as effective as licensed teachers, according to the research.

Tennessee Republican Sen. Richard Briggs plans to sponsor a bill to revise the Age Appropriate Materials Act after the Pulitzer Prize-winning book 'Roots' was removed from Knox County school libraries. The book was taken off shelves due to a scene depicting the rape of an enslaved woman, and the law currently allows removals based on district committee decisions without public records of complaints. The Knox County School Board urged legislative changes to include elected officials in the review process.

Knox County school board banned Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'Roots' under Tennessee’s Age Appropriate Materials Act due to a passage depicting a rape, but the superintendent later reversed the ban. The board voted 5-4 to urge the Tennessee General Assembly to revise the law, which mandates book removals based on specific content criteria without exceptions for literary merit or historical context.