Dr. Sally Parish: "Same Kids, Same City, Almost Four Times the Results"

Welcome back to the Driven By podcast. Today I'm sitting down with Dr. Sally Gates Parish, Vice Provost and Director of Schools at the University of Memphis. Sally runs University Schools — Tennessee's first Innovative School District. No entrance exam. Lottery-based admission. Kids from all 36 zip codes in Memphis. And the results are four times better than the district average — 87% reading proficiency versus 24% across Memphis Shelby County Schools. Same city, same population, different outcomes. Sally is a first-generation college graduate who grew up country poor in a log cabin in middle Tennessee with well water and a single parent household. She came to the University of Memphis on an academic scholarship, waited tables to pay for everything else, and now runs a school district serving 1,300 kids with 1,500 more on the waiting list. We cover how she accidentally became a superintendent, what it took to build a school district from scratch inside a university, and why the results keep speaking for themselves. Thanks for listening. Let's get to it.