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


 

The Nashville Chamber’s Education Report Card

The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce today released its annual Education Report Card for MNPS today.

Here are some highlights:

The graduation rate, which measures the percentage of all students who graduate from high school within four years, plus a summer period, fell from 81.6 percent in 2015 to 81 percent in 2016. The number of MNPS students taking the ACT increased by 586 students in 2016, while the percentage of those scoring at least a 21 dropped from 30 percent in 2015 to 28 percent in 2016. Based on these limited results, we must conclude that MNPS did not record overall improvement during 2015- 2016 – for the second year in a row. With a new director of schools and executive team in place for the 2016-2017 school year, there is an expectation in the community for MNPS to resume a faster pace of improvement.

And the recommendations:

1. Metro Schools should expand its commitment to school-based budgeting to ensure equitable access to resources across all schools.

2. The State of Tennessee should incorporate measures of both career and college readiness into the new school and district accountability system.

3. Metro Schools should ensure that its early-grade teachers have demonstrated expertise in literacy instruction.

4. Metro Schools should measure each school’s implementation of the district’s literacy initiatives to ensure fidelity.

5. Metro Schools should engage community partners in developing a citywide plan and timeline to ensure early-grade (K-2) literacy by May 2017.

For more details on the findings used to reach the recommendations, read the full report.

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