With each revision of the report card put out by the Tennessee Department of Education, the public receives less and less information relating to the performance of the system. We no longer get results from national achievement tests, or the percentage of teacher absents per school.
What we are getting now is a grade of 0-4 on various measuring sticks of school performance. But they don't make sense. For example:
Red Bank High School has a TCAP student academic growth score of 3.6 out of 4, yet a score of 0 on academic achievement. RBHS has a graduation rate of 76.1 percent and a dropout rate of 6.6 percent.
The success rate, that is students who understand the information, is 24.7 percent which is down by 2.7 percent from 2016 to 2017. In short the report card makes very little sense.
One very telling factor is that for RBHS chronic absenteeism is out of control. Twenty seven point seven percent of the students miss 10 percent or more school days per year.
It could be worse, The Howard School has a chronic absentee rate of 52 percent.
Is anybody accountable for the $400,000,000 we send to the Hamilton County School system?
Harry Presley