Grace Tatter

Reporter, Editor, Historian

Nashville, TN

Legislative reporter at Chalkbeat Tennessee/bylines throughout the Southeast. History B.A., UNC-Chapel Hill. Former editor-in-chief of Campus BluePrint. Former intern at Chalkbeat NY, The American Lawyer, and the Southern Oral History Project. Lover of stories and solutions.

Grace Tatter

Reporter, Editor, Historian

Nashville, TN

Featured
Amid anti-refugee political rhetoric, Nashville schools welcome displaced students
Wearing a colorful Native American headdress made of construction paper, Aziz joins his classmates in a Thanksgiving lesson about pilgrims who fled England in search of freedom. It’s a story that resonates with the fourth-grader at Tusculum Elementary School, which has a sizeable and growing refugee population.
Featured
Meet the charter leader signing up to teach kids with no English skills — and the student who inspired her
Edgardo showed up in the office of a Nashville charter school in 2014, unable to speak a word of English. He was 12, and he was terrified. Without telling any adults and without any money, Edgardo had run away from his home in Honduras, frightened at the prospect of becoming embroiled in the violence rocking the Central American country.
Featured
Best of 2014: Expanding program links students to social services
Although the school sits on an East Nashville street lined with Victorian houses of ever-increasing value, more than half of Warner’s students come from the James A. Cayce public housing complex, half a mile away. Many Warner students are frequently witness violence, on the street or within their own homes.
Featured
Talk it out: Restorative justice techniques help school communities rethink approaches to discipline
Silent with arms crossed, two girls face each other across a table at Nashville’s Pearl-Cohn Entertainment Magnet High School, their first day back to school after being suspended for fighting each other the week before. The students had been avoiding each other since their classroom altercation in January.
Lifetime Achiever: Floyd Abrams
The Cahill partner didn't set out to become the nation's preeminent First Amendment lawyer, but then the Pentagon Papers case came along. This article has been archived, and is no longer available on this website. LexisNexis® is now the exclusive third party online distributor of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications.
AmericanLawyer.com
When You Can’t Go Home Again: Domestic violence victims in Orange County have no battered women’s shelter
From the outside, the Wilson Street location of the Compass Center for Women and Families exudes home: patioed and nestled by a community garden on a leafy street by campus. But people who come to the Compass Center, which is the result of a recent merger between The Women’s Center and Family Violence Prevention Center, know that home is about far more than appearances.
Détente at Park Slope’s John Jay Campus, but no sea change
Students from Park Slope Collegiate and the Secondary School for Law, which are both housed at John Jay, teamed up to paint this mural at Park Slope Collegiate. Wesley Weissberg has poured hours into Park Slope’s public schools, even serving as PTA president at the neighborhood’s popular elementary school, P.S. 321.
Court rules NY human rights law doesn’t cover public schools
New York public school students have fewer options for recourse against discrimination today than they did a week ago. The state’s highest court ruled last week that public school students cannot use New York’s human rights law to seek recognition of discrimination — or get financial compensation when discrimination has taken place.
The Daily Tar Heel :: Q&A with Chris Hedges
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges has reported on war from more than 50 countries. But at a PlayMakers Repertory Company community forum tonight, his focus will be the battlefields of 15th-century England. The forum will focus on society’s “cultural addiction to war,” which Hedges explores in his best-selling book, “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.”.
Daily Tar Heel
10 years of No Child Left Behind seen as impediment by many local educators
Ten years ago Sunday, the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted, mandating the use of standardized tests to assess the academic performance of K-12 students to ensure that they performed on grade level. But local educators say the act has largely been an impediment because North Carolina and Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools already had measures in place to ensure student achievement.
Daily Tar Heel
School discipline shows racial inequality
Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools might be among the strongest in the state when it comes to racial equity, but community members stressed that there is still a lot of room for improvement at a forum Saturday. The school discipline forum was organized by Chapel Hill-Carrboro Citizens Advocating for Racial Equity and co-sponsored by the Chapel Hill Town Council’s Justice in Action Committee.
Daily Tar Heel
Students will take leading role at new District 13 middle school
In September, sixth graders at a new middle school in Clinton Hill will regularly stand at the front of the class to share a vocabulary word, or how to solve a math problem. And feedback from fellow students will be valued as much as feedback from their teachers. In more than a dozen city schools, teachers are taking a literal backseat in their classroom as they adopt a student-driven teaching method called Learning Cultures.
‘The Making of a King’ an epic journey for PlayMakers
The 24 cast members of PlayMakers Repertory Company’s production of “Henry IV” and “Henry V” will more or less live in Paul Green Theatre until March. In the final week before “The Making of a King” opens, some rehearsals call for 14 hours in the theater, keeping the cast and crew in the Center for Dramatic Art for most of the day.
Daily Tar Heel
Son House, legendary blues musician, honored by Southern Folklife Collection
In 1964, Dick Waterman knocked on blues musician Son House’s door with good news — the music House had recorded 30 years ago had finally made him famous. Long before the age of the Internet, Waterman had driven around the country to find House. “He’s old and black and suddenly three young white guys — myself and two others — knock on his door, and we say to him, ‘Your music is pop again.
Daily Tar Heel
Achievement gap revisited by Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools educators
Howard Lee said he has been having the same conversation about the achievement gap since 1966. That’s the year Chapel Hill High School opened, merging the student bodies of the all-black Lincoln High School and the old Chapel Hill High School. Lee, Chapel Hill’s first black mayor and a long time education leader, spoke Wednesday on a panel about the achievement gap held by UNC’s Students for Education Reform.
Daily Tar Heel
Schools without Regents exams cite success amid shifting tides
City high schools that don’t require students to take Regents exams beat city averages on most metrics, even though they serve high-need students at the same rate as other schools, according to a new report. The report, released this week, was produced by a group of the schools, the New York Performance Standards Consortium.

About

Grace Tatter

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I’m Grace Tatter, a journalist in Nashville, Tennessee.

I write about statewide policy and how it's impacting students and teachers for Chalkbeat Tennessee, part of a non-profit news organization covering educational change across the country. In the past, I've reported for GothamSchools (now Chalkbeat NY), the American Lawyer, the Daily Tar Heel, WCHL and CampusProgress. Beats have included K-12 education in Chapel Hill and New York City, sexual assault at UNC, race and justice, and arts and culture.