{"id":788,"date":"2020-10-19T12:45:27","date_gmt":"2020-10-19T16:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/magazine\/?p=788"},"modified":"2020-10-28T16:24:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-28T20:24:12","slug":"advancing-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/magazine\/advancing-career\/","title":{"rendered":"Advancing Career"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Honors College grad Robert Fisher has a new, important position on Mayor John Cooper\u2019s staff in Nashville.<\/em> <\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDrinking from a firehose.\u201d \u201cA whirlwind.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those powerhouse phrases are among the ways Robert Fisher describes his first few weeks after being hired in July as senior advisor of education for Mayor John Cooper of Nashville. \u201cIt’s a sobering moment to be in a position like this because of the scale of the challenge, because of the difficulty of what people have had to experience, whether they were impacted directly by COVID, because they were sick or they lost their job or lost a family member. That weight is not lost on me.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fisher, who graduated in 2015 from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with\u00a0a\u00a0bachelor\u2019s degree in political science and a concentration in legal studies,\u00a0is a go-between linking\u00a0the mayor\u2019s office,\u00a0business, nonprofit and community groups\u00a0and the school\u00a0system. Its\u00a0167 schools returned to in-class\u00a0teaching after Labor Day.\u00a0These days, the\u00a0pandemic response\u00a0is interwoven\u00a0with the ever-present issues of finances, test scores, teacher pay and others. In that chaotic puzzle,\u00a0Fisher is trying to figure out how\u00a0all\u00a0the pieces\u00a0fit together. And yes, he sometimes\u00a0thinks, \u201cWhat did I do? What did I get myself into?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOh yeah, there are definitely days like that,\u201d he laughs. \u201cI think that’s true for any job. You know, every day you can encounter something that makes you scratch your head and think \u2018Well, how do I solve this puzzle?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think that’s true for any job. You know, every day you can encounter something that makes you scratch your head and think \u2018Well, how do I solve this puzzle?\u2019\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The new job doesn\u2019t seem to be outside the skills of Fisher, a native of Nashville who was a student in Honors College at UTC. His resume tends to make you feel like you\u2019ve been slouching along for years. Honors College Dean Linda Frost calls Fisher \u201cone of the most charismatic, smart, funny, committed and politically savvy people\u202f<\/em>I have ever met. I love watching his career unfold, count myself greatly fortunate to have known him when and will wait as long as it takes to cast my vote for him in some election in the future,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Considering his background, politics seems a near-unavoidable destiny. At UTC, Fisher was appointed by former Gov. Bill Haslam to represent students on the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. While at the University, he also had a summer internship in Washington, D.C., at the Center for American Progress, a national organization that advocates liberal solutions on social and economic issues. \u201cI worked for their Generation Progress division and, at the time, there was just a ton of discussion around higher-education affordability and mitigating student loan debt,\u201d Fisher says. \u201cThat also just gave me more exposure to the policy world.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After graduating from UTC, he was awarded a Truman Scholarship, landing him another internship in Washington, D.C., this time at the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mentors in the Honors College convinced him to later apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, which means two years studying at Oxford University in England. Of course, he won that scholarship, too, and earned master\u2019s degrees in education and public policy at the university. \u201cThe graduate school is incredibly international, so I developed close friendships with people from \u2026 well, name a country and I may know somebody,\u201d he says. \u201cIt expanded my sense of all the things that are important to explore in education.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The beat goes on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After graduate school, he took a fellowship with the Harvard Kennedy School\u2019s Government Performance Lab, which takes recent graduates and places them in state and local governments across the U.S. to provide technical assistance for no charge. Fisher was assigned to the Shelby County School system in Memphis, the largest system in the state with more than 100,000 students. He spent two years there for his fellowship, and when that was complete, the system hired him full-time as director for strategic operations and innovation in the system and also as adviser to the deputy superintendent for finance and operations. \u201cThey basically said, \u2018Well, we really enjoyed having you here as a fellow. If you just want to stay for a little bit longer …\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Memphis school system, he dealt daily with the inner workings of an urban school system, from personnel to policy.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe experience of being on the ground doing that work offered me so much insight into how to lead, manage and support educational institutions, to be as responsive as possible to the young people they’re serving,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was a chance to learn by doing.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking his lessons from Memphis to Nashville, he understands the separate worlds of education and policy making and can communicate clearly with either side of the equation, he says. \u201cI have experience and context and a shared understanding of what it takes to do this work,\u201d he explains. \u201cIn policy there’s always this difficult tension between what theoretically makes sense and what happens in practice or what it takes to turn theory into action. Having done work on the ground in Memphis with principals, talking to teachers and support staff in schools, knowing the practical challenges they’re up against, I think helps inform the types of policy recommendations I offer to the mayor or the type of feedback or advice I offer to the director of schools.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fire in his belly is stoked by the tightrope walk between policy and reality, between listening to school workers in the trenches, translating their concerns to policy makers in government and seeing how the two can meet in the middle. \u201cIt\u2019s nerdy, but I love it.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Honors College grad Robert Fisher has a new, important position on Mayor John Cooper\u2019s staff in Nashville.  \u201cDrinking from a…\n","protected":false},"author":1105,"featured_media":1152,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[101011,115505],"tags":[101022],"coauthors":[100988],"class_list":{"0":"post-788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cover","8":"category-fall-2020-edition","9":"tag-left-column","10":"cs-entry","11":"cs-video-wrap"},"yoast_head":"\nAdvancing Career - 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