DISTRICT SCHOOLS FLAGGING
It’s hard to find a way to sugarcoat the news about Hamilton County’s public schools.
The schools that have consistently performed poorly on standardized tests in years past are not improving, according to accountability data released Monday by the Tennessee Department of Education.
Hamilton County slipped from the second highest district rating of “achieving” or “advancing” in 2017 and 2019, respectively, to “satisfactory,” the third of five ratings, for 2022.
The district also went from having 32 “reward” schools — meaning schools that demonstrate high levels of performance and/or improvement in performance from the previous year — in 2019 to 13 in 2022. Worse, it went from having seven “priority” schools in 2021, meaning those schools in the bottom 5% of schools across the state, to eight in 2022.
Most incredibly, Brainerd High School moved off the state’s priority schools list despite its 2022 Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program test scores declining or remaining the same from 2021 in every academic category in which a comparison could be made.
A release from the Hamilton County Schools, nevertheless, made it sound as though Brainerd had made a breakthrough after many years of performing poorly.
“Brainerd High School exiting the Priority List is an example of how connecting with our students and a focus on academic press and personalization can impact the outcomes of our students,” Deputy Superintendent Dr. Sonia Stewart said in a news release.
In categories in which comparisons were available, Brainerd students scoring at or above grade level in English II fell from 8.9% in 2021 to 5.9% in 2022. Students at or above grade level in biology fell dramatically from 11.5% to 5.2%. And those enrolled in geometry remained the same at 5.1%.
The other comparisons available were 10th-grade English II students, who fell from 9.9% in 2021 to 7.2% in 2022, 10th-grade geometry students, who dropped from 7.4% to 5.2%, and 11th-grade biology students, who fell from 22.7% to 17.4%.
What has apparently happened is that other school scores have declined so much that Brainerd’s scores no longer put it in the bottom 5%. Others performed worse, Brainerd not as badly, so it moves off the priority list.
The reality of Brainerd’s situation, flipping the state numbers, is that 94.9% of its geometry students, 94.8% of its biology students and 94.1% of its English II students are scoring at or below grade level.
In academic subjects where data before 2021 is available, fewer Brainerd students scored at or above grade level in 2022 than they did in 2018 in English I, than they did in 2017 in English II and than they did in biology in 2017.
However, the school’s 10th-graders showed improvement from 2017 to 2022 in English II and its 11th-graders in biology over the same period.
Although Brainerd High is not on the 2022 priority schools list, Calvin Donaldson Environmental Science Academy, Dalewood Middle (a Brainerd High feeder school), Hardy Elementary, Orchard Knob Elementary, Orchard Knob Middle and The Howard School are and have been on the list since 2018.
The priority schools category this year also incorporates those schools designated for comprehensive support and improvement, which was a separate category in 2021. East Lake Academy and Hamilton County Virtual School joined the list of schools in the bottom 5% this year.
Only two Hamilton County schools, Lookout Mountain Elementary and the STEM School, have been designated reward schools in each of the five years for which the state department website lists information. Thrasher Elementary has been a reward school in four of the five years and Nolan Elementary in three of the five years.
Most of the information above is negative because that’s what the scores indicate. What’s worst, to us, is the state does not make all of the breakdown information on Hamilton County’s struggling schools and many of those elsewhere available.
The information released by the state on individual districts and schools is inscrutable, incomplete and difficult to compare from year to year, seemingly almost intentionally.
Whether that is a way of shielding parents and students from reality is uncertain, but it doesn’t allow the public to have all the information it needs to make the best judgment on where to send a child to school, how that school improves year over year, and how much improvement has been made over, say, five years.
It also makes the case both easy and difficult for new Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp to push for the improvement of schools. The lack of academic success in the priority schools makes it easy to point out the problem, but the lack of transparency over scores and improvement certainly makes the public wonder whether the extra millions of dollars already allocated to such schools is making any difference at all.