It's time for Hamilton County Schools to look into the possibility of putting its lowest performing schools in the state-controlled Achievement School District.
Though slight progress was made on the 2014-2015 Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program by the county's five Innovation Zone Schools, these schools lost ground compared to 2014 in many of the tested categories.
In the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS), which measures the impact schools and teachers have on their students' progress by calculating individual student academic growth, four of the five schools received a level-one ranking. In that system, level one indicates the schools are "least effective," and there is "significant evidence that the school's students made less progress than the growth standard."
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The five schools, Brainerd High, Dalewood Middle and Orchard Knob Middle, and Orchard Knob Elementary and Woodmore Elementary, were listed as priority schools by the state to begin with because they tested in the lowest 5 percent of scores statewide.
Twenty-nine schools in Memphis and Nashville are now part of the Achievement School District in which the state takes over control of the schools in an attempt to turn them around. Of those schools, the 11 which began receiving additional funding help in the fall of 2013 - the same time as Chattanooga's i-Zone schools - have made consistent test score progress. A majority of the schools even received the highest possible TVAAS ranking this year, and four of the schools in the district were placed on the list of priority improving schools due to their test score gains.
When schools become part of the Achievement School District, they operate like charter schools - separate from their district - and seek to adhere to a goal of moving from the bottom 5 percent to the top 25 percent in five years.
The three-year federal grant funding of the local i-Zone schools concludes with the end of the the current school year. More money is possible with significantly improved scores. But this is the time to be looking to the future to see whether incremental improvement or no improvement aren't worth the risk of trying something new.
The Achievement School District is not a panacea, but it's a change, and how could change to a model in which scores are consistently improving be a bad thing? It's only the next generation of adults we're talking about.