Nashville's leaders need to focus on improving its priority public schools | Opinion

Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools have been on the receiving end of good news from the state of Tennessee regarding outcomes in student growth and performance. Tennessee designated the school district as Level 5 — in terms of growth and advancing for overall performance.

These designations — the highest and second highest — respectively indicate movement in the right direction and hard work on the parts of students, educators, their families and administrators. As parents of students in Nashville’s persistently low-performing schools, Nashville PROPEL applauds the district for emerging from the shadows of the pandemic.

However, we would be remiss if we joined in the city’s blatant disregard for the thousands of students enrolled in schools that perform in the bottom 5% of the state. The director of schools, the new school board and Mayor Cooper jubilantly celebrated the return to pre-pandemic performance — which for thousands of students is nothing to celebrate.

According to the state of Tennessee, priority schools “are the consistently low-performing schools based on multiple years of TCAP assessment data —bottom 5%— or have less than 67% graduation rate during the most recent school year.”

Nashville’s priority list has 18 traditional public schools and one public charter school. A decrease of two schools from the prior year. That's good, depending on who you ask.

Nashville PROPEL advocates for parents and children attending the city’s lowest performing schools. Instead of community leaders joining the fight to change the trajectory for Nashville’s most vulnerable students, we encounter very smart people who make inane excuses like, “There will always be a bottom 5%.”

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This sedates the urgency and neutralizes the sting of perennial underperformance in the city’s historically Black communities. The tragedy of Nashville’s priority school list is that it is both a prophecy and legacy; hundreds of children in priority elementary schools that feed into a priority middle school and a priority high school.

These children will never get an opportunity to attend a well-resourced, high performing school in their entire educational careers; victims of the same fate as many of their parents and grandparents.

MNPS' priority schools need more attention

Upon further study of the list, we found that 11 schools have been consistently low-performing since 2015. A total of 10 out of 12 traditional public high schools can be found on the priority list or in one of the targeted support categories.

Targeted support and school improvement means that schools like East Nashville Magnet, Hillsboro and McGavock high schools have subgroups that score in the bottom 5% of the state. This simply means certain groups of students are not performing as they should.

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How long will the leaders of this city sit comfortably and unbothered while generations of low-income Black and Brown Nashvillians remain chained to the city’s worst performing schools? Mahatma Gandhi said, "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”

Nashville’s soul is on trial.

The parents of Nashville PROPEL propose an exit ramp for families zoned to the lowest performing schools in the state. The district should provide these students an opportunity to attend a high-performing school with transportation provided by the district.

Currently, over 1,500 children are in elementary schools with over 90% performing below standards in math and reading. Tragically, at the current rate of growth, these children will never meet grade level goals. These children and their families deserve a lifeboat.

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The good news is there are several schools across the city that have shown success with low-income, Black and brown children. We know it’s possible.

Metro Schools and community leadership must leave the comfort of ignoring perennial low performance of low-income, and Black and brown children and work to meet the genius of every child.

Sonya Thomas is president of Nashville PROPEL. 

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville's leaders need to focus on improving MNPS' priority schools