Times Editorial

July 17, 2005
Chattanooga Times Free Press

If anything should disprove the criticism heaped so relentlessly, recklessly and unjustifiably on the county school system by County Commissioners Curtis Adams and Fred Skillern, it is the steady, dramatic improvement of the system’s students across the board in the state’s TCAP achievement scores. So guess what. The school system’s TCAP scores this year, released just three days ago, confirm significant progress among all students, of all backgrounds, and in all schools in the TCAP tests for at least the third straight year.

Specifically, the break-out scores for all categories of students — white, black, Asian, Hispanic, below poverty level and above poverty level, with and without learning disabilities — improved significantly in uniformly rising trends in all schools, from affluent suburban schools to urban schools, magnet to non-magnet schools, Title I to non-Title I schools, Benwood to non-Benwood schools.

Suburban school students — largely white and above poverty level, and more often from two-parent households with higher educational background and income levels — continued to make the highest TCAP achievement scores.

Success beyond the suburbs
But students from all other backgrounds showed a better rate of increase in scoring. In fact, they are closing the achievement gap at an accelerating rate.

The scores, covering literacy and math for grades 3, 5 and 8, also documented that students are not just making significant gains, but that most students — again, from all backgrounds at all tested grade levels and in all schools — are largely achieving scores of "proficient or advanced," meaning scores at or above grade level.

In fact, the percentage of all students scoring at or above grade level has risen a sharp 10.3 percent in reading and language arts from 2003 through 2005. In 2003, 78.3 percent were at or above grade level; in 2004, 82 percent, and this year, 88.6 percent. The percentages for all students are similar in math scores: 77.7 percent were at or above grade level in 2003, 81.7 percent in 2004, and 86.2 percent in 2005.

More students at grade level
When those figures are broken down between suburban and urban students, the gains are equally significant, and track similar 3-year trends. The percentage of suburban students scoring at or above grade level this year was 91.9 percent in reading and language arts, and 90 percent in math. The percentages of students from Title I schools, in which half or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, were 82.1 percent at or above grade level in reading and language arts, and 78.2 percent in math. While still lower than in suburban schools, those scores reflect substantially larger gains — nearly double the rates of gain — than in suburban schools since 2003.

All these trends are welcome confirmation of a strong and improving school system, one about which employers here can brag to new business prospects. But perhaps the most significant and meaningful score is the 89.1 percent of all third grade students who were found by TCAP scores to be reading at grade level this year. That is just nine-tenths of one percent short of the 90 percent goal for early reading success fixed last year by the county’s citizens as the chief Education Summit goal.

Third-grade reading measures are so vital because educators, researchers and lawmakers across the nation have finally grasped the importance of research which shows that students who are notreading at grade level by the third grade are most likely to lag educationally behind throughout their lives, to drop out of school, to end up unemployed or underemployed, and to create a disproportionate share of social burdens and problems.

The critical third-grade reading proficiency score of 89.1 percent this year reflects a sharp rise from the 2003 and 2004 scores (76.3 percent and 83.9 percent, respectively). Comparable scores in the so-called Benwood schools, the eight previously lowperforming schools where scores have soared under foundation and city-sponsored reforms and teacher incentives, are equally impressive. Their third-grade reading achievement score has shot up from 57.3 percent in 2003 to 77.1 percent at grade level this year.

Equally remarkable are the cumulative reading gains for "exceptional education" students, those whose learning disabilities vary from learning disorders to mental retardation. Those scores more than doubled, going from 33.4 percent at or above grade level in 2003 to 70.7 percent at or above grade level in 2005.

Disproving critics’ charges
The system’s remarkable scores easily disprove Mr. Adams’ condescending claim that rising scores in urban schools do not correlate to grade-level proficiency. They also disprove Mr. Skillern’s divisive charge that school officials’ intense focus on bringing urban schools, at last, up to par has come at the expense of suburban schools — a charge by which Mr. Skillern has egregiously promoted an ugly, lingering racial divide between the old city and county school systems to stoke his north county power base.

In fact, the schools in Mr. Skillern’s suburban district increased just as sharply overall in reading and math scores (from 84 percent to 92 percent at or above grade level in reading and language arts from 2003 to 2005, and from 86 to 92 percent at or above grade level in the same period in math). Students in Commissioner Bill Hullander’s Ooltewah area schools and Commissioner Adams’ East Ridge schools showed similar gains.

"The best scores ever"
Indeed, the new scores — Superintendent Jesse Register calls them "the best scores ever" — confirm what he and other school advocates have been saying all along: That the Hamilton County school system has made remarkable progress since the 1997 merger and has become a national model and leader in school reform by focusing on quality of instruction and improved student outcomes.

County commissioners cannot dismiss the need for improved funding for schools on the basis of its indisputable successes, however. As school system leaders told this newspaper Thursday, the five-year drought in new funding has set the system well behind the cost of inflation in that period, causing deep cuts that now jeopardize the system’s ability to track individual students’ learning curves, to tailor instruction, and to keep enhancing teaching skills and student achievement. If county commissioners continue to ignore the system’s incontestable needs, continued improvement gradually will be squeezed out. Commissioners would do us all grievous harm if they let that happen.