November 2, 2007

Tennessee Schools Report Card Released

Is our children learning? You can find out by sifting through the Tennessee Department of Education's Statewide Report Card for 2007, online here.

From the TDOE's explanation of the report comes this:

The Tennessee Education Improvement Act of 1992 established accountability standards for all public schools in the state and required the Department of Education to produce a Report Card for the public to assess each year.

Tennessee state law (Tennessee Code Annotated 49-1-601) has since been amended to match regulations in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for meeting required federal benchmarks for all schools, school systems, and the state. Additionally, the State Board of Education has revised its performance standards and requirements to meet performance criteria in the new federal law.

The goal of NCLB is to ensure that all students in all schools are academically proficient in math, reading and language arts by 2014. Until that time, schools, school systems and the state will be measured on their ability to move toward that goal. In other words, schools, school systems, and the state must show that a greater percentage of its students are meeting required proficiency standards.

And at the other end of the scale, many of today's students will have dropped out before 2014.

I'm at a loss to understand why the goal is to not have our schools up to snuff for another seven years. I mean, we're told endlessly by the public education system's teachers' union that they are hard-working professionals who are all so uniformly good at their jobs that the notion of merit-based or performance-based pay is an affront to the profession.

If they're that good, then why aren't their students academically proficient in math, reading and language arts now? After all, isn't teaching students math, reading and language arts the core of the teachers' job?

It isn't Gov. Phil Bredesen's fault that the federal No Child Left Behind law settled for a slow timetable for improving public schools. But a truly visionary governor would have asked the Tennessee legislature to demand a more rapid pace of improvement.