McQueen criticizes school turnaround work
Education commissioner calls Tennessee’s improvement efforts ‘a little embarrassing’
Education Commissioner Candice McQueen gave a stinging assessment of Tennessee’s school turnaround work, even calling the outcomes “a little embarrassing” in a fiery speech to state lawmakers.
McQueen, speaking to legislators Tuesday, noted the state has only moved 10 schools off its “priority” list since it first ran in 2012, beginning with 83 low performing schools.
“We can’t keep throwing $10 million, $11 million, $12 million, $15 million at solutions that are not solutions,” she told House members during a committee meeting.
The remarks were a departure from McQueen’s usual placating tone, and her most direct condemnation of school turnaround work to date in Tennessee. That work includes programs spearheaded both by local districts and the state’s Achievement School District, which has authority to take over schools in the state’s bottom 5 percent, generally assigning them to charter operators.
But her indictment stretched far beyond the state’s role in those programs, which serve mostly poor communities. She took aim at efforts that began with the 2002 federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, which prescribed how states must deal with struggling schools.
“This is probably going to come across as a little preachy, but it is preachy,” said McQueen, who became commissioner in 2014. “We’ve got kids who were sitting in schools that we knew — we knew — and I want you to listen to the years, back in 2002, 2003, 2004, that they were in a low-performing school that needed to turn around fast. (Those students have) now graduated, and we did not have the increases we needed at those schools to set them up for success.”
While McQueen didn’t single out specific turnaround initiatives, she stressed Tennessee needs to focus on what has worked — specifically, at the 10 schools that have moved off the state’s priority list. McQueen named common themes: strong leaders, quality instruction, and community and wraparound supports, such as mental health care services.
Those successes helped to inform the school improvement component of Tennessee’s proposed new education plan under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. Under that plan, the state would work with local districts to improve their lowest-performing schools through academic and wraparound services.