We keep hearing that Tennessee students are doing so much better - posting the fastest improving scores in the country.
Is it true?
Apparently that repeated assertion is based on one number. One test. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP - considered by some educators as the gold standard of student assessment because it's the one identical test taken by random students in every state across the country.
About this time last year, Kevin Huffman, the state's former education commissioner, tweeted out Stanford researcher Sean Reardon's map made from his analysis of NAEP math and reading growth scores. The map shows high growth areas in green and low growth areas in purple. Beneath the map, Huffman wrote: "If you are looking for Tennessee on a student growth map, just look for the bright green rectangle in the mid South. That's us."
Mother Jones magazine editors saw the analysis and map, too. They wrote: "Tennessee is a green oasis in the middle of a desert of purple. Someone should figure out what they're doing right."
But then this week, Tennessee's 2017-18 education Report Card came out.
Here's just a tiny snapshot:
» The state's jobs-ready number (connoted as its "ready graduate" indicator measuring readiness for postsecondary and/or career) is 35.8 percent of all graduates - a 2.5 percent increase from 2016. A ready graduate, by the way, is a student who graduated on time and earned an ACT composite of 21 or higher. The state's overall graduation rate was 89.1 percent.
In Hamilton County, the "ready graduate" measure is 33.7 percent - a 2.3 percent increase over the previous year. Our overall graduation rate was 84.6 percent.
» The state's overall academic achievement success rate was 39.1 percent.
In Hamilton County, the overall academic achievement success rate was two and a half points lower at 36.6 percent.
Two percentage points is progress. But not enough.
Make no mistake: We don't mean to rain on any improvement in Tennessee or Hamilton County. After all, as Chalkbeat put it in an article last year, Tennessee in 2009 was "a cellar dweller" when it came to student performance on national tests known as the Nation's Report Card."
So showing up as a "green oasis" of growth scores in 2017 was, and is, significant. We'll take it.
But no one in Tennessee should be beating our chest just yet.
We still have a long, long, long way to go. We may have climbed out of the cellar, but the mountaintop still towers far above us.