With the arrival in Hamilton County last week of 2015-2016 TNReady assessment scores, teachers and parents of state high school students can know exactly where every student stands in each tested subject, the areas within that subject where the student is weakest and strongest, and remedies the student might take to improve.
If principals, teachers and parents take the easily understood reports to heart, they can understand how to help put students on the road to improvement.
They’ll know at a glance, for instance, how an individual student measures against the school average, the district average and the state average. And they’ll know whether the student is below expectations, meets them or exceeds them in sub-categories of the various subject areas.
Such individualized data should suggest to teachers where they can work to strengthen students and to parents how any home or extracurricular help may be focused.
Though there are no panaceas, the assessments potentially could be a game-changer for educational improvement within Hamilton County, where academic progress had more or less stagnated.