It’s hard to find a way to sugarcoat the news about Hamilton County’s public schools.
The schools that have consistently performed poorly on standardized tests in years past are not improving, according to accountability data released Monday by the Tennessee Department of Education.
Hamilton County slipped from the second highest district rating of “achieving” or “advancing” in 2017 and 2019, respectively, to “satisfactory,” the third of five ratings, for 2022.
The district also went from having 32 “reward” schools — meaning schools that demonstrate high levels of performance and/or improvement in performance from the previous year — in 2019 to 13 in 2022. Worse, it went from having seven “priority” schools in 2021, meaning those schools in the bottom 5% of schools across the state, to eight in 2022.