The Tennessee Department of Education’s 2018 State Report Card is awash with information for administrators, teachers, parents and students to digest.
As is done with public opinion polls, the information can be read in ways that reveal positives and negatives about nearly every district and school.
In Hamilton County, much rhetoric has been spilled by some in the community over the past year about equity and supposed disparities between economically disadvantaged and economically advantaged schools.
Using information from the Report Card, we wanted to see how students characterized as “black or African-American” performed – regardless of high school – compared to students characterized as “white”. The report card allows comparisons for the largest number of high schools in the specific indicators of academic achievement (“whether students are performing on grade level or above, based on state tests”) and student academic growth (“whether students are making progress from year to year, regardless of whether they are on grade level yet”).
The expectation, based on the rhetoric, would be that only in economically advantaged high schools – where there are enough students in each racial category to measure – could blacks be on the same academic achievement plane as whites. Likewise, based on the rhetoric, one might expect to see academic growth by blacks only in the top economically advantaged high schools.