After generations of failure, Nashville should focus on District 1 schools improvements

Teaira King never knew anything was wrong, not until she enrolled at Bethel University in McKenzie, Tennessee. That was when it became obvious. Her inability to comprehend her classroom lectures compounded with her inability to study the material on her own and made learning all but impossible.

King had landed at Bethel by way of a full scholarship to join the school’s Renaissance choir. Administrators weren’t too worried about her ACT score of 15. She’d gotten her diploma, graduating in 2005 from White’s Creek High School in Nashville. That was all that mattered. To fill in the gaps, King took remedial courses her first two years at Bethel. She wasn’t near the top of her classes, but she was able to get by — much as she had during her time in Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS).

Later, King’s core classes changed everything: “I got that big book, and I said, ‘Lord?’ Then we got to college algebra, and I said, ‘Wait a minute.’”

A few weeks into her third year, King gassed up her car and loaded it up with as much of her belongings as she could. She never went back to Bethel. When her friends called to check on her, asking why she’d disappeared so suddenly — why she abandoned the Renaissance Choir when she loved to travel and sing and was so, so good at it—she lied. She told them she just didn’t like Bethel anymore. She told them she was transferring to another school, that she wanted to be closer to home.

She didn’t want to tell them that she couldn’t read.

In the years since she returned to Nashville, King has come to realize that her issues started well before college. She now remembers being “passed along,” despite getting Ds and Fs as early as middle school. Elementary is when she thinks the problems actually began; that was when she started falling behind grade-level benchmarks and failed to catch back up.

King’s mother was killed in a car accident when she was just 6, playing a likely factor in her struggles. But King also notes that her grandfather, with whom she’d gone to live, “did his part.” He stayed on her about her grades, punishing her if she did poorly and using the Hooked on Phonics literacy program to reinforce reading skills at home. It wasn’t enough.

It was a system failure, King says.

MNPS student achievement falls short especially in District 1

I learned about King’s story on Feb. 26, at a forum hosted by the education advocacy group Nashville PROPEL.

The acronym stands for “Parents Requiring Our Public Education System to Lead,” and for PROPEL founder and president Sonya Thomas, that included inviting candidates for the MNPS District 1 school board seat — the only contested seat in this year’s election — to share their vision for the future of the district.

(In the March 5 primary, Robert Taylor won the Democratic nomination against two opponents and Demytris Savage-Short won the Republican nomination unopposed. They will face off on Aug. 1.)

On the whole, MNPS is performing far below reasonable achievement standards. Currently, only 28.5% of students are meeting grade-level benchmarks in both math and English/language arts. That includes data from across the district, from even high-performing schools like Julia Green Elementary, Meigs Middle Magnet School, and Hume Fogg High School. Separate the data of District 1 from all others in MNPS, and the stats are even more dire. (Note: Meigs is located in District 1.)

It's been said in America that if white folks catch a cold, Black people get pneumonia. We are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, the group for which the margins of error — regarding education, employment, health, education, and virtually any other statistical category — are razor thin. The converse of this metaphor is that, if effective solutions are implemented for the most disadvantaged groups, the outcomes of other groups are sure to improve as well.

It's the idea of lifting from the bottom, a concept that should certainly apply to District 1, which primarily covers the northwest quadrant of Davidson County. In addition to historically having the highest percentage of economically disadvantaged students, the predominantly Black District 1 also has the lowest literacy and math rates in all of MNPS.

This school year, MNPS and Director of Schools Dr. Adrienne Battle have been celebrating the district’s Level 5 Value-Added Growth Score, its second distinction in as many years. What goes unsaid is that positive growth, though always good, is sometimes not enough.

For the 2021-22 school year (the data for which is the most recent available), White’s Creek, King’s alma mater and one of three District 1 high schools, received an individual growth score of 5. It’s the highest score given by the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, which speaks to Battle’s celebratory stance. But, again, this is a marker of year-over-year improvement, not actual proficiency. Regarding the latter metric, there is far less to applaud: Only 5.4% of White’s Creek students met or exceeded grade-level benchmarks in math and ELA.

Parents feel the schools that failed them have failed their children

After the forum, which included the school board candidate panel I’d been invited to moderate, I met some of the parents in attendance.

According to the typical narrative, these are the parents who don’t value education. They buy Jordans instead of books. They let their kids watch hours of TV instead of making them do homework. They applaud while their children learn TikTok dances and rap lyrics instead of fundamental reading skills.

But these weren’t the parents I met. They’d come out on a chilly Monday, taking time away from the myriad responsibilities parents have on a typical weeknight, all to ensure their children were no longer left behind in a system that clearly wasn’t built with them in mind.

Like all parents, District 1 parents want their children to exceed. They want their children to get a high-quality education, to go farther and achieve more than they ever did. It’s why King first began working with PROPEL. Her son, the oldest of her two children, was then attending Meigs. Periodically, he’d ask King for help with his homework, with understanding certain words or completing assignments. She wanted to help him, but she couldn’t.

There are other parents like King in District 1, parents who are, themselves, products of Metro Nashville Public Schools. They understand that the same system that failed them is now failing their children, is failing their nieces and nephews, is failing most of their children’s friends. They need only to look at their own lives to know how the rest of that narrative plays out, to see the long-term effects of a substandard education.

It's why Thomas decided to host the forum; it's, in fact, why she started PROPEL. As a mother who learned that her sixth grade son was reading at a second-grade level—despite the time she spent reading with him at night and engaging with his teachers during the day—she wanted to put some of the power back in the hands of parents who’ve long felt that they had none.

Democratic candidate profile: Meet Robert Taylor, Nashville School Board, District 1

Republican candidate profile: Meet Demytris Savage-Short, Nashville School Board, District 1

'I’m going to continue to fight for the other parents'

Even King’s testimony is a reclamation of lost control. She remembers crying when she first connected with Thomas and realized not only that she wasn’t “dumb,” but that her struggles were to be expected after generations of neglect in a majority-Black school district.

King used to be embarrassed by her story. Today she tells it often because she wants other parents — former MNPS kids raising current MNPS kids — to know they’re not “dumb” either. Neither are their kids. “I’m going to continue to fight for the other parents and empower them to let their voices be heard,” King says. “But if not, I’ll be their voice.”

More significantly, King wants other parents around the city, the region, and the entire state to understand what’s happening in northwest Nashville. She wants them to know that, even if their children currently attend “good” public schools, the experiences of District 1 MNPS kids are a bellwether for all Tennessee students. And it will take a collective effort — from parents and non-parents, both in- and outside the district — to ensure an equitable education system.

She wants everyone to know that none of our students succeed until all of them do.

Andrea Williams is an opinion columnist for The Tennessean and curator of the Black Tennessee Voices initiative. She has an extensive background covering country music, sports, race and society. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AndreaWillWrite.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: MNPS: Nashville District 1 still struggles, it's everyone's problem