Hopson: SCS test results show need for investment

Another round of dismal test results is highlighting the struggles of Shelby County Schools students, particularly compared to their peers across the state and the nation.

Those struggles emphasize the need for significant investments, particularly around early literacy, Superintendent Dorsey Hopson said Tuesday, a day before he presents his final budget to the school board.

Two years ago, he noted, the district was trying to cut $80 million just to balance the budget. The district also has a pending lawsuit against the state, arguing the district is underfunded by up to $100 million every year.

But now that the district’s enrollment has stabilized, a healthier financial picture means a second year in a row of making investments instead of cuts. And newly implemented curriculums for math and reading, which are designed to challenge students at the level that state and national tests require, need time and support to be successful, Hopson said.

“When you’re consistently cutting, and you are asked to educate arguably the neediest kids in the country on a shoestring budget, you do the best that you can,” he said.

SCS this week received its first district-level results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card.” It’s the only test students take in all 50 states. Previously, Tennessee schools received only statewide results, but SCS opted this year to receive data specific to the district.

“I think that the best way to get better obviously is to have more data,” Hopson said.

Just 16 percent of SCS fourth-grade students were proficient in reading. That ranks the district 22nd of 27 major urban districts across the country.

Those results are below the same students’ performance on state tests last year. On TNReady, 23 percent of fourth-graders were proficient in English language arts.

Hopson said his team is “digesting” the results, but believes the district is on the right track with a new focus on exposing students to grade-level material, no matter how far behind they are.

“These results just show how important that is,” Hopson said.

His budget proposal, he said, includes funding for every elementary school to have a reading specialist, and for every teacher in kindergarten through third grade to have additional training on teaching foundational literacy skills.

Across the state, 31 percent of fourthgraders were proficient on the same test. But a large gap between black and white students persists.

White students were proficient at a rate of 51 percent. Black students: just 16 percent.

“It’s unbearable,” Mendell Grinter, executive director of the Campaign for School Equity, said. Interventions for struggling students are a focus of his organization.

“We are constantly thinking, we need to be doing more for the most underserved students,” Grinter said.

This data, he said, highlights that continued need.

In a statement responding to the results, the district noted poverty is a big barrier, and that when looking at the data as it relates to schools dealing with the same high level of poverty as SCS, the local numbers rank better.

“Looking at the progress of our 4th grade students, for example, you’ll see they surpassed their peers in cities like ours with 30 percent or more of schoolaged children living in poverty,” the SCS statement said. “And with the exception of Atlanta, the cities our students are lagging behind have less than 30 percent of their school-aged children living in poverty, which makes the correlation clear.”

Board member Chris Caldwell said while poverty is a major factor, no one is satisfied with the results.

“I don’t believe that anybody on the school board and the district would think this is acceptable, and we just have to work harder to make sure that students get everything they need to get where they need to be,” Caldwell said.

NAEP is administered every other year for fourth- and eighth-graders in both math and reading.

Nationally, scores dropped slightly in fourth-grade reading and remained the same in fourth-grade math. Eighthgrade students made small increases in math and reading.

Tennessee students took a step back in fourth-grade math, as the state was one of 10 to see a drop on the scores on the NAEP test. It’s a dip that cuts into a part of Tennessee’s historic gains on the test in recent years.

Tennessee held the line in eighthgrade math and fourth- and eighthgrade reading scores.

Across SCS, 20 percent fourth-grade students scored proficient in math, compared to 31 percent of students in the other 26 urban districts.

In the eighth grade, 17 percent of SCS students scored proficient in reading and just 12 percent did so in math.

Hopson said the state and national tests results correlate enough to show a clear picture. The tests also came during the district’s first year of teaching for the more rigorous tests, which require students to think critically and not just get the right answer. As a result, it’s not surprising the results would be low, Hopson said.

“We’ve got some very hard-working teachers and school leaders out there, and I think we’re doing the right work,” he said. “It’s just going to take time to truly implement all the things we need to implement and to see the results that we’d like to see.”