Roy Exum
At the start of the school year in September, Tennessee’s Commissioner of Education Dr. Candice McQueen held an “educational summit” with state legislators from embattled Hamilton County. The entire “summit” took a prescribed 90 minutes and was such a dog-and-pony show her strongest statement was, "Create your plan around the right vision, have some metrics and align to the right goals and make sure your human capital is attached to that.”
On Tuesday in Nashville, on what was billed as “School Board Day on Capitol Hill," her words were far more meaningful. She told the same legislators she was “embarrassed” that Tennessee’s turn-around efforts have turned out to be a colossal flop. It seems the “right goals” and “human capital” at the state level have failed to produce the yellow brick road that would lead the state’s worst schools from the bottom 5 percent to the top 25 percent in five short years.
Veteran educators across the state called the claim “absurd” so McQueen’s view of reality was the most refreshing stance the commissioner has presented in the two years since she was empowered by Governor Bill Haslam. She acknowledged only 10 schools on a “priority list” of 83 that were named five years ago have noticeably improved. “We can’t keep throwing $10 million, $11 million, $12 million, $15 million at solutions that are not solutions,” she said and her honesty was far from the porcelain-china image most politicians think we ought to hear.
“This is probably going to come across as a little preachy, but it is preachy,” said McQueen candidly. “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.”
In Hamilton County, somewhere between five and eleven schools have been eyed by the state’s answer to the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. Under that plan, the state would take over the worst schools in local districts with outside operators. Local teachers would be fired, administrators would be replaced and monies would be taken from local districts. Now McQueen is ready to admit the Achievement School District (ASD,) which takes over schools from counties, has produced terrible numbers. She says it will be reined in.
HCDE officials strongly believe Hamilton County can improve our iZone schools far better than the state, where ACD school are run by charter operators and have a rumored turnover rate of almost half their teachers every year.
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Dorsey Hopson, the school superintendent in Memphis, told state legislators that 40,000 of the students in Memphis public schools live in households where the income is less than $10,000 a year. “That has an enormous effect on our system.
“Our district is so unique because we have suffocating poverty that many of our kids live in. And if you just think about that for a minute — what that would be like to live in a house with five, six, seven people on 200 bucks a week — … I mean, it just creates really significant challenges because kids are not always prepared to show up to school ready to learn.”
Hopson doesn’t believe poverty is an excuse, “But I think it is important when you think about our school district and some of the challenges we have to just take a moment and think about the population that we serve,” he told the legislature.
He also called on the faith community. “When you think about faith, the word compassion comes to mind,” Hopson said. “In my mind, compassion is: You see a need, you’re moved by that need, and then you act on that need.”
While Hopson’s message to the state lawmakers was from Memphis, he might as well have addressed the poverty in education for the entire state. “We’ve got kids with severe, severe social-emotional needs,” he told reporters. “And absent a strategic attempt to address those needs, we’re not going to ever see the progress in accelerated fashion we want to see. It is what it is.”
That, too, is the honest truth.
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