On Monday this week the state of Tennessee released their system-specific achievement data from this past year. ChalkbeatTN has already done some excellent infographics over on their site comparing SCS to Tennessee and legacy-MCS/SCS.  I wanted to get more specific than they do when it comes to Shelby County Schools and the Achievement School District (ASD) and see if we can answer the following question;

Who’s doing better in the race to close the achievement gap here in Shelby County?

The Background: Both the ASD and SCS have been striving to improve student outcomes in our lowest performing student populations as measured by test scores. The ASD does this by taking over the bottom 5 percent of schools and committing to leave them in the top 25 percent at the end of five years by running the schools themselves or chartering them through organizations such as green dot. Shelby County strives to achieve this through a number of initiatives, most notably through iZone, a tool similar to the ASD that provides SCS schools with more autonomy.

Given that both of their commitments to improvement are heavily tied to improving test scores, it seems fair to evaluate them side by side on how they are doing in this area to see if they are not only improving, but actually closing the gap between the lowest performing students and the highest. Improvement isn’t enough; the gap needs to be closed.

The Comparison Tool: I crunched the data using infogr.am and the data from the TN Department of Education. Unfortunately wordpress doesn’t allow these types of infographic to be embedded in wordpress.com sites. If you want to play around with the infographic yourself you can access it at this link. Otherwise we’ll have to settle for screenshots, which you can find at the end of this article.

The Comparisons: The Department of Education allows us to make comparisons between the two on their impact closing the achievement gap using four measures. Each was derived by comparing data from 2012-2013 to data from 2013-2014.

First, who is growing their kids the most from year to year? Positive numbers are good here.

Second, who is closing the gap between minority kids and all students more effectively? negative numbers are GOOD here!

Third, who is closing the gap between economically disadvantaged students (185% of FPL and below) and all students more effectively? Again, negative numbers are GOOD!

And fourth, who is closing the gap between students with disabilities and all students more effectively? One more time, negative = good.

The desired outcome: What we want to see, of course, is both districts growing their students and making positive progress towards closing the gap for all groups of students. If this is truly the case, we should see positive numbers in the top graph (growth) and negative numbers in the other three (the gap graphs)

The Comparison Results: how do both districts stack up when compared to each other?

1. Growth: tie. The ASD does better growing kids in math and RLA, but SCS does better in science and social studies. No clear winner.

2. Minority Gap: SCS. The ASD’s achievement gap actually widened this year for minority students, albeit by a very small margin of less than 1 percent, while the gap in SCS shrunk by a similarly small margin in math and RLA. SCS wins this one by the smallest of margins, again about 1 percent. SCS is doing better by a hair.

3. Economically Disadvantaged Gap: SCS (sort of). The gap grew here for both districts in math and RLA, but more so in the ASD. In fact, the gap grew by more than twice as much in both subjects measured for this subgroup in the ASD. That said, I don’t think we can call it a true victory given that the gap did widen for SCS. Let’s call this a hollow victory at best.

4. Students with Disabilities: ASD. The ASD wins hands down here, closing the gap by double digits and beating SCS by a wide margin. In summary, the score (wins-losses-ties) is 2-1-1 in favor of Shelby County Schools, who notches 2 comparison wins. That said, both wins for SCS should probably be marked with asterisks given that the minority gap difference is about 1 percentage point and the economically disadvantage gap win is really not a win since we actually saw the gap increase for both districts.

A Final Caution:  If you read this as an indictment of the ASD you’re missing the point. The big thing we should take away from this data is that there is a lot of work to be done here in Shelby County regardless of who is running our schools. The ASD has been touting that actual proficiency rates did go up from last year to this year, which you can read more about in the Memphis Daily News. This is positive, but given that the rest of Tennessee also saw growth this year it did not actually make progress towards closing the gap, as we can see from the data below. And SCS has the same problem. It’s students are growing, but not enough to overcome the existing achievement gap.

Progress is being made, but there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done if we are going to create a world class education system here in Shelby County, Tennessee. Closing the achievement gap doesn’t have an easy fix – it will take considerable time and resources, and there will probably be some bumps in the road along the way. Hopefully our leaders can take this data and use it to adjust course so we can see the gap lower next year across all content areas, because that’s what we should want to see for our kids.

By Jon Alfuth

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