Kudos and Warnings for Tennessee Schools

Tennessee education officials are praising twenty-one school systems for “exemplary” results in the last academic year. That means the districts met most of their goals and saw improvement in every demographic group of students. The list includes Fayetteville and Franklin City Schools and the districts in Rutherford, Marshall, Smith and Trousdale Counties.

At the same time, they’re sending warnings to more than a third of the state’s school districts. The message: standardized test scores aren’t improving fast enough for at least some of your students.

In most cases, districts failed to meet their goals for one or two specific demographic groups. The most common trouble is with disabled students’ test scores-that’s the case in thirty-six districts. Minorities are performing poorly in eighteen.

Lebanon City Schools was called out for having three groups with lagging scores: Asians, Black students, and those whose English is limited. The longest list of struggling groups belonged to Memphis City Schools, where officials also said not enough students took some of the standardized tests.