Effective Schools and College/Workforce Preparedness in Tennessee

Tennessee has many excellent schools, but improvement is needed: Only 58% of Tennessee high school graduates are fully prepared for college and only 55% are fully prepared for the workforce.

If Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen and the State Board of Education are successful, these statistics will change. In 2007, the Tennessee Business Roundtable led regional discussion groups to survey local employers about the problem. The results indicated a need for improvement in a number of areas, especially in basic skills, and can be found in a summary report titled Taking Inventory: Job Skills in the Tennessee Workforce.

The Business Roundtable’s survey led to an educational improvement initiative headed by Governor Bredesen called the Tennessee Diploma Project. Following the recommendations of the Tennessee Diploma Project, the Tennessee State Board of Education adopted a more rigorous high school curriculum in January of 2008: New High School Core Curriculum.

The Need for Effective Elementary and Middle Schools

The Education Consumers Foundation’s Effective Schools Recognition Program is designed to support the goal of better college and workforce readiness by focusing on the preparedness of elementary and middle school students for high school.

• Fact: According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress only 24% of Tennessee’s eight graders are proficient or above in math and reading—5 points below the national average.
• Fact: According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress only 28% of Tennessee’s fourth graders are proficient or above in math and reading—again 5 points below the national average.
• Fact: Tennessee’s recent reforms have very ambitious goals (see p. 5): A substantial reduction in the number of high school graduates requiring developmental studies in college and an increase of students who meet ACT’s college preparedness benchmarks from 17% to 50%, both by 2012.

These facts confront a hard reality: Tennessee high schools have significant numbers of entering students with academic deficiencies carried over from their elementary and middle school experiences. Without significant improvement in these percentages, high schools are not going to be able to meet the new curricular standards by 2012 or anytime in the foreseeable future.

ECF’s Effective Schools Program is designed to address this problem by highlighting the schools that are making the greatest impact on student achievement and encouraging the others to imitate their success.

High Schools Cannot Do It Alone

In reality, a high school cannot in the course of 4 years overcome educational deficiencies that have cumulated over previous 8 or 10 years of preschool, kindergarten, elementary, and middle school.

By the time students reach the 9th grade, their most teachable years have passed. If they come to high school with significant gaps in basic skills and knowledge, if they have failed to gain an adequate academic work ethic, if they are discouraged by a history of educational failure, only an extraordinarily intensive educational experience can bring them up to Tennessee’s 12th grade benchmarks.

Tthe only way these goals will ever be reached is for a much higher percentage of Tennessee’s 8th grade students to be ready for high school and, by implication, for more elementary and middle school students to experience greater academic growth beginning with their earliest school experiences.

Role of the Effective Schools Recognition Program

The Education Consumers Foundation’s Effective Schools Recognition Program compares schools on a level playing field—without regard to student advantages or disadvantages—and what they show is that some schools are much more effective than others in producing academic growth. ECF’s goal is to highlight these exceptionally effective schools, study and disseminate the practices that make them successful, and encourage the others to imitate their efforts.

Click here for our report on the practices used by six of the most effective schools in the state.