Frogge Takes on Chamber Report Card

Yesterday, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce released its annual Report Card on Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS).

Here are the 5 recommendations the Report Card Committee made:

This year’s recommendations focus on the district’s use of data to improve student and school outcomes. They are:

  1. Metro Nashville Public Schools should expand the number of data coaches to provide more access in schools.

  2. The district should expand planning time for teachers in elementary and middle school grades to further collaboration around student data.

  3. Metro Schools should expand opt-in data-sharing agreements with the city’s nonprofit community to help inform decisions inside and outside of schools.

  4. Nashville public schools should create a program that highlights best practices across all school types in using student data.

  5. Nashville schools should create a plan to help families access and understand their student’s data, as well as set goals for its student data portal.

And here’s Frogge’s response:

If you walk into one of Nashville’s public schools and think, “Hey, what this school really needs is more data coaches!”- you have hit your head. This article illustrates PRECISELY why we don’t need business execs (with kids in private schools) to provide education policy advice to school systems. It’s also why the majority of our elected school board no longer attends the Chamber’s annual Report Card event. The business community has given us school privatization (which strips public schools of desperately needed funding and increases systemwide inequity) and ridiculous amounts of high-stakes standardized testing “accountability” (up to eight weeks of testing per school each year!). As one school operator recently said to me, “In many ways, MNPS is a victim of the Nashville Chamber.”

In a rather tone-deaf comment, the Chamber also throws in an insult to teachers: “Teachers have plenty of data. But they don’t always have the expertise to determine how best to use it, said Meg Harris, chamber report card co-chair and the human resources business partner for Nashville Business Solutions Center, UBS.”

If just ONE employee of the Nashville Chamber, CEO Ralph Schulz, were to cut is his personal yearly salary of $442,127, the Chamber would no longer need to request an annual subsidy from taxpayers of $375,000. That money could be used to implement the Chamber’s recommendations in this year’s “Report Card.” Or better yet, we could use this money to pay for more school nurses.

 

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

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