all right it's 3 p.m but I think we're maybe waiting for a couple other people to join so we'll just wait a minute or two and then we will get started hello um Larry is that you at the 901 number that's me all right great thanks that is
I is there anyone else that we know that we're waiting on i think Chrissy is potentially going to join um but we could probably go ahead and get started okay well um I'll turn it over
to uh Michael in a moment but first of all welcome everyone to our first ever member learning session the topic of this session is school letter grades demographic data trends and bright spots i know you all know me i'm Erica Light the director of research for the state
board and Michael is going to give a quick intro to just the concept of member learning sessions before we get started thanks Erica michael Derline deputy executive director of policy and research with the state board in a moment I'll turn it back over to Erica
but I did want to spend just a few minutes today talking about the purpose of these member learning sessions and what we hope to accomplish today as we have moved away from study committee meetings in favor of diversifying our workshop presentations we've identified a gap in our ability to share timely and
critical information on select topics in a way that allows for open discussion over the last year or so we've generated a list of topics that members have expressed interest in learning more about we surveyed members to better understand prioritization of these topics and we have begun to
develop our first sessions this session was rated highest by the most number of members and it will focus on analyses conducted related to school letter grades we'll look at trends characteristics of schools receiving B's and Fs and we will explore bright spots
or schools that are bucking the trends this conversation is especially timely as the board moves into facilitating hearings for certain schools that have received D's or FS in the future we will hear from education leaders both in Tennessee and across the nation we are
hopeful that these sessions will be engaging and help inform your policymaking okay I'll turn it back over to Erica um please know that we've built in some slides for discussion but please feel free to ask clarifying questions if need be
great um first just a quick overview of our agenda for today michael's already given our introduction to member learning sessions so um next I'm going to discuss the school letter grade calculation how the actual raw data is transformed into letter grades then
we'll look at some trends over time and the relevance of school letter grades to accountability hearings we will look at some demographic trends climate and culture trends and then finally towards the end we'll look at some bright spots which we've identified a few schools
that are performing exceptionally well despite having some potentially challenging um circumstances and we will wrap up at the end with discussion although as Michael mentioned there will also be opportunities for questions and discussion throughout first off the school letter
grade calculation um I expect that most of you are familiar with this so I'm just going to go over this briefly just as a reminder first of all the school letter grade um calculation includes several different indicators there's the achievement indicator the growth
indicator the growth 25 indicator and the college and career readiness or CCR indicator um the achievement indicator as its name suggests is a measurement of achievement levels so students who are meeting or exceeding expectations on
state assessments and it does include all four core subject areas ELA math science and social studies the growth metric is a school level T-Boss composite metric so that's measuring whether students are making
expected growth from year to year in their academic um performance or whether they are making more than expected growth or less than expected growth the growth 25 measure is similar to the growth measure except that it is specifically focused on the lowest
performing 25% of students within each school and that group of lowest 25% um lowest performing 25% is not necessarily the same group of students from school to school each school will have its unique its own unique characteristics of
that lowest 25% group finally the college and career readiness indicator measures students who are meeting um one or more of several different readiness criteria and those include those are all listed here
we have of course ACT or SAT or you can um meet this criterion by getting a qualifying score on the ASVAD getting certain industry credentials or by earning post-secary credits um one thing to note is all four of these indicators
are measured on a scale of 1 to five with five being the best this um metric or this whole um framework is established by um TDOE and TDOE has previously presented to the state board about this framework
erica I have a question um yes and please correct me if I'm wrong when David uh presented on this and so there may have been changes the last time I remember a pres a presentation from TDOE
was that um AP scores were in the achievement bucket if they were sort of replacing an EOC if you were taking the AP uh lit test because you weren't taking um the EOC for English that it was
actually in the achievement bucket is that correct um that is the case in some circumstances where you can have an early post-secary exam like an AP exam take the place of an achievement exam uh
the very the specific instances where that would occur are described in the 2023 24 school letter grade protocol so I would recommend the link that you have right there okay yes but it's my understanding it wouldn't like prevent that score from also being used in the
CCR indicator so the ACT score or the AP score could potentially be used in both places I think okay um my concern there is around dual enrollment um not being an an achievement measure
um if AP is because we would have the data um but yeah that that's one that I can follow up with uh whoever you suggest about whether and how we could have a
conversation about should um dual enrollment be in in the achievement rather than just the college and career if AP counts in achievement okay yeah we can follow up about that and try to figure out who would be the
best person to um at TDOE to discuss that with thank you you're welcome okay um also I just wanted to note before we move on from this slide the uh college and career readiness measure is similar to the ready graduate
metric but it's not exactly the same the ready graduate metric is used in federal accountability and has slightly different criteria uh they overlap a lot though so there's um a similar list of things that get you counted for the ready graduate in
indicator and for the college and career readiness indicator it's just one of them is federal and the other one is a state accountability criterion um so this next slide here shows how the different indicators are weighted and this differs a little bit depending on
whether the school is a high school or not because obviously only high schools are going to have that college college and career readiness indicator so schools that do not have the college and career readiness indicator are all evaluated using the K8 weights so the K
K8 schools include both elementary schools middle schools and any school that's not a high school and they will have 50% of their letter grade based on achievement 40% based on growth and 10% based on growth 25 which again is the growth for the 25%
of lowest performing students in in that particular school um high schools have a same weight on achievement but then uh for growth they have 30% gross 25 is still 10% and then that remaining 10% goes to the college and career readiness
indicator in order to go from the score on each indicator to the final letter grade score the calculation shown on this screen here is um applied to each indicator score um it's just applying the weights that were shown to each
indicator score and then you get the letter grade score which is on a scale of 1 to five and then that numeric score is converted to a letter based on this table that is shown here and all of this is also information
is also available in the letter grade protocol which I did have linked on uh an earlier slide and which you also all had sent to you prior to this meeting so looking at 2324 letter grades 2324 was the second school year in which letter grades were
produced and in that year we had um a total of 290 schools got an A 484 got a B 58 got a C 330 got a D 78 got an F and then a number of schools quite a few schools actually were not eligible
for a letter grade and that's usually because they have these the school is very small and doesn't have sufficient data to produce a letter grade but also if a school is for example a K2 school and has no tested grades that school would also not be eligible for a letter grades that's why we have a couple
hundred schools there that aren't eligible or schools that are brand new and don't have enough data yet would also not be eligible um so the chart on the right there shows the distribution of letter grades and as we can see um F is thankfully the least common letter
grade we're glad to see that not a large percentage of schools are getting Fs and hopefully we'll be able to see that percentage get even smaller in future years so as I mentioned we can now have two years of school letter grade data and that allows us to start looking at
trends over time overall the distribution of letter grades looked very similar between 22 23 and 23 24 you had the same percent A's and the same percent Fs and there was only a little bit of shuffling around
between B C and D looking at uh individual schools and their how their grades changed uh this chart is maybe a little bit difficult to read but the easiest way to read this chart I think is to look across each row so if you look at the row A for 2022 23
letter grades you can see that schools that got an A in 2223 most of them also got an A in 2324 that was 58.8% 8% of them also got an A in 23 24 and then 30.2% of them got a B
etc so uh the bold numbers down the diagonal indicate schools that got the same grade in both years overall about 45% of schools got the same grade in both years and another almost 45% got
either one higher or one lower than the previous year with only about 10% moving by two or more letter grades and that's generally good that we're seeing stability of letter grades um it indicates that it's capturing something
that is not just a a fleeting a one-off incident but more of an enduring characteristic of the school erica maybe you're going to show this uh but those you know 58% so there's 42% didn't get the same grade you said they got one
higher one lower do you have that that difference were there more that got higher shows were improving or was there more that got lower or statistically not a difference and it was just pretty well split um I think it was pretty evenly split but I can get that e exact percentage uh
for you after this meeting yeah that'd be helpful to know again from a trend standpoint are we are we progressing in the right direction or or not so that would be helpful yeah so of the schools that got A's of course none of them could have gotten higher the next year
so all of them got a low either the same or lower but of course in the middle there's a they could have moved either way um so this slide is just a reminder of why we're even talking about this um the school letter grades are important
on their own but they're also important in the context of accountability hearings which are triggered by school letter grades the state board will begin conducting accountability hearings in the 20 uh 2526 school year so not too long from now about a year from now um
the accountability hearings rule which is not yet uh finalized but in its in the version that you all accepted on first reading back in February um it established criteria for which LEAs and public charter schools will be called
for hearings and according to that version of the rule an LEA will be called for a hearing if it operates one or more public schools that received an F letter grade in two consecutive years or dropped from a grade of D to F in two
consecutive years this uh same these same criteria will also apply to public charter schools and in that case the charter school will be called and its authorizer will also be called um together for a hearing
so basically what we're saying is is that a school that previously was an F that went to a D since that's two consecutive years they would not be called for a hearing schools the 20% of the schools
that have a D if if they dropped to an F they would be called and then the schools that had F both years would be called correct um yes that's correct so if a school was at an F and they went up to a D we
obviously would like to see them continue to improve and not stay at a D but they would not be called um in that particular year okay so based on the two years of data we have so far which are not the same two
years of data we're going to actually be using for accountability hearings but um it's the data that we have at the available at the moment if we use the data we currently have to determine who is eligible for hearings then we would end up calling 24 LEAs and seven public
charter schools for a hearing and most of the eleas in this group 16 out of the 24 have just one school that meets the criteria for a hearing and out of those 16 only or five of them have only their virtual school as the school that is
causing them to be called for a hearing so that was just one trend that we noticed in the data that we wanted to point out so before we move into some of the demographic and other trends we just have a few um questions here to help to
frame the discussion um first of all as we're going through this presentation think about how these data affect what you're thinking about accountability hearings and based on these data what questions
would you want to ask an LEA or a public charter school that's called for a hearing and then finally what additional information or context would you want to hear about our lowest performing schools that are being called for a hearing we will circle back to these
questions at the end so we'll have an opportunity to discuss them more once we've gone through uh the remainder of the slides all right um moving on now into demographic trends we'll start with um economically
disadvantaged so um this table and chart shows the characteristics of A schools B schools C schools D schools and F schools regarding or with regard to the percentage of economically disadvantaged
students that they serve uh we can see that a schools well actually for all all of the grade levels they range broadly from having a very low percentage of economically disadvantaged students up to a very high
percentage um we do however see a trend in the median so the typical school or the average school that got an A has 17% economically disadvantaged
students or schools it would probably be better to say schools that got an A on average had 17% economically disadvantaged students although in this case I use the median rather than the mean just because there are schools that are at either less than five or greater than 95 that have their um data
suppressed and so we know that they're less than five or greater than 95 but we don't know exactly what they are which is why I calculated the median but that still allows us to see the trend um and you can see there's a clear upward trend
where as the grades get um worse the percentage of economically disadvantaged students on average goes up but you can also see from the range that this is not true for all schools there are schools at all grade levels who have both low
and high economically disadvantaged students moving into um black Hispanic and Native American students we see a similar trend to what we saw with economically disadvantaged students although in this case the the minimum to maximum range is
even more stark you can see that it runs for every single grade level the entire range is present from less than 5% to greater than 95% so we have schools with all combinations of different um racial and ethnic groups that are performing very well and also performing not as
well again we see the upward or the trend in the median where as you move from A down to F there's an increasing median percentage of students who are black Hispanic or Native American and this I know that you are
all aware of this but in our state students of color and students who are economically disadvantaged are highly correlated with each other so the fact that this shows the same trend as economic disadvantage is not very surprising moving on now to students
with disabilities we don't see as clear of a trend um with these students there is about the same percent of students with disabilities on average across all um school letter grades and the range is
pretty wide as well for each letter grade erica I've got a question about the disadvantaged slash students of color slide um Mhm the the the median and I apologies if you if you had said
this um but the the median percentage students what is that referring to like how how do we what does that data point mean so uh going back to this one um to this slide if we look at a schools so
the median a school can has 20% or had in 2324 they had 20% um black Hispanic and native American students so many A schools had more a higher percentage than that and well exactly
half of A schools had a higher percentage than that and half had a lower percentage than that so right in the middle the median median A school had 20% black Hispanic and Native American students does that make sense sorted by the percentage of of
students with those ethnicities so like yes because it could be it could be sorted by like academic performance or or where they fall on the A through F but it's if you look at all the A schools and and you say for each of them you have their percentage with those
students and you spread that you plot those out then the one in the middle is 20% black Hispanic and Native American yes that's correct so they're they're um arranged in order from fewest black
Hispanic and Native American students to most and right in the middle of of the A schools is 20% i'm sorry if that was unclear earlier no no no that's that's very helpful i mean what is our takeaway and
I apologize i I had to join late so I also are we allowed to have a discussion here and ask okay yes we can have a discussion great i wasn't sure what the the rules of open meeting everything um so you know I remember all the
discussion leading up to the formula for the AF um school determination about you know growth versus um achievement proficiency and the balance that was struck there
and you know my recollection was part of that was because we didn't want the schools I don't know if I want to say it so directly is like it essentially to be a measurement of the demographics from which the school's students would
come but it appears that's what we have um at least from this chart and so I don't know if there have been discussions about that or if um kind of what if if if this is if this is measuring appropriately
what we believe we should be measuring um with the formula for AF schools well thanks for bringing that up we will be getting in in a few minutes into like each of the separate indicators that make up the letter grades and how those
trend with demographics and then we'll be able to see which indicators are uh driving this overall trend that we're seeing here and how that's related to the way that the indicators are weighted in the model um which
uh as I mentioned previously I don't u recall if you had joined at this point or not but the actual model itself as as you know is set by TDOE so uh we are not directly in control of this model but we certainly can have uh discussions about what aspects of the model might be
leading to the trends that we're seeing can I add Erica to um Ryan i don't know if you caught this point that Erica made about this in this trend in particular and Erica please correct me if I misstate this but that it's actually
being driven more by economic disadvantage than than anything else um and that you know there are because we're seeing over on the left hand side you see on the table the min and max um we're seeing schools just across all
letter grades with high very high proportions of students of color and very low um so this this one's a little while there is a trend especially in on the higher end um it's it's more so the case that it's being driven by the previous um slide around economic
disadvantage but even there right if you look at A's B's and C's there are schools and we'll talk about this later on in this presentation there are schools that are kind of bucking those trends uh and are certainly bright spots and that's where eventually we want to dig in and figure
out what are they doing yeah the me the median data point while helpful maybe is is obscuring the fact that there are schools with a lot of e economically disadvantaged students that are A's and schools with very few economically disadvantaged
students that are D's and Fs yes that is why I uh have this table here in addition to the chart because although maybe the table's not as eye-catching as the chart it shows that we do have at every grade level a broad range of demographics
all right thank you sorry about that oh no problem um the last student sorry go back go back up one chart back to this one a no
down the you're you're disabled oh the students with disabilities okay yeah right so you the point that you made there is there's really not a large difference of court you know from A B C D or F based on students percent i think
it would be helpful though if you plotted on top of that in a different color what the overall averages are and I think you would still at that point in time you would see that there's uh a
higher percentage of F because weren't overall was like 5% F or something like that right and 20% is that correct um so the percentages on here are not referring to the percentage of schools that got Fs um
I'm sorry if that was uh confusing it's referring to the typical F school had 14% students with disabilities the typical A school also had 14% students with disabilities so um it's not
actually showing you how many schools got an F it's more showing you the characteristics of the schools that got an F we have we have schools across the state that are focused on you know uh deaf
or blindness etc so it'd be interesting to know how those would rate or do they get scored um I can tell you that the Tennessee School for the Blind and the Tennessee Schools for the Deaf are not eligible for letter grades because of
lack of sufficient data to calculate it um there may be there are other schools in the state that are not that specific but do have a high percentage of students with dis disabilities that may have may be eligible for a letter grade but those in particular those state
special schools are not eligible erica this might be a question for DOE can we disagregate any of the students with disabilities to know perhaps schools that are doing a particularly good job with different types of
disabilities or is the indicator kind of a group um so with the data that is available to me I'm not able to disagregate different types of disabilities it's possible that the um Department of Education might be able to
do that but I just have basically an indicator of what percentage of students with disabilities they don't you don't get the the pieces of it okay i was just wondering if um as we're thinking about this if there are schools that um serve particular groups um well that that
might be a place to dig in but yeah if you can't disagregate that thanks yeah that makes sense because we do have a there's a students with disabilities is a huge range of different types of students with very different needs
and I don't want to jump ahead but to Michael's point about you know there are some schools within each of these different demographics that are that are doing well and not doing well um I I wonder if if there would be an opportunity for us to
um maybe in the context of the hearings or or not to kind of pair up or identify best practices from the schools that are doing well that look like schools that are not doing well in a lot of ways um so that they could draw from what is
succeeding um in in a similar school you know it might be that a rural school in in a certain area is not like an urban school but but that you know you find urban schools are doing well and not doing well and rural schools are doing well and not doing well and all under all sorts of ways of sorting the data so
I don't know if there's any value to that but that occurred to me want to throw it out i think I think there's all kinds of value in that Ryan i totally agree is that you know the beauty of getting this data is that we can now use it and we can look at those schools that
are doing well and do lessons learned and what can we take from one school to the other i think that's maybe what Victoria was looking at too on some of her questions so what is it that the schools are doing well that have A's B's
that are like schools whether it's rural urban or whatever compared to those that are getting D's and Fs what are they doing differently so yeah thanks okay uh the last uh student group that we looked at for this um which these
were all based on what student groups were available in the data that we have so the last group we have is um English learners and we also see a we see kind of a similar trend here where the minimum and the maximum are
um pretty far apart on all different grade levels so we have a wide range at every grade level but there is overall a trend similar to what we saw with um economically disadvantaged and students of color one thing to note on this slide
is that um about 39% of schools in Tennessee have fewer than 10 students with disabil or sorry not student disabilities English learners they have fewer than 10 English learners which means we don't actually have data reported on their percentage of English
learners it's suppressed for privacy reasons so this chart and table is only including those schools that have 10 or more English learners which is about 60% of our schools at this point okay now getting to uh what Mr
holt was discussing or bringing up earlier we're going to look at some of the specific indicators or rather each of the specific indicators that are included in letter grades and demographic trends that we see for those starting with the achievement indicator
which is weighted at 50% for both high schools and um K through8 schools so this is the most heavily weighted of any indicator in the letter grade um framework on average we see that schools with lower achievement indicator scores
serve more economically disadvantaged students um a reminder that on all of these numeric indicators five is a good score and one is a bad score so we want to see more schools getting up toward five um schools with lower achievement
indicator scores also serve more students of color and English learners but this is mostly because of the correlation between those student groups and economic disadvantage on the other hand there's not a clear relationship between the
achievement indicator score and the percentage of students with disabilities so sort of like we saw with the overall letter grades there was not a clear relationship there and there's not one a clear relationship with the achievement indicator either moving on to the growth indicator we see a very different pattern here which is
that there's not a significant relationship between the growth indicator score and the percentage of economically disadvantaged students we also didn't see a significant relationship between the growth indicator and any of the other student groups it just seems that overall the
growth indicator is not um strongly related to student demographics um moving on to the growth 25 indicator we saw an interesting trend here which is that um schools with
higher growth 25 indicator scores have on average more students of color and more English learners so this is actually showing the reverse of the trend that we saw on the achievement indicator except not for economically
disadvantaged students interestingly so the scores on this indicator were not related to economic disadvantage and they were not related to students with disabilities but they were related to students of color and English learners in the opposite direction to what we saw
with the achievement indicator erica so just to ensure I understand this um I can bungle it that that schools that have a higher percentage of students of color so long as they are
not economically disadvantaged saw more growth than schools that did not is that right um I think that's approximately right where uh this is not like directly this graph is not directly controlling for
economically disadvantaged because it's looking at each of them separately but if I had made this graph for economic disadvantage it would have looked kind of like the graph we saw in the previous chart where all the bars are the same height so um really we don't exactly know what is
driving this trend we haven't been collecting this indicator for very long and therefore we've not had very much opportunity to investigate what might be causing this trend um so this was definitely something we should look into more in the future and maybe also do
more in-depth analyses where we do specifically control for multiple characteristics simultaneously which I've started to look at as well but that will be even more useful once we have more years of data available thank you
and finally we have the college and career readiness indicator um we saw an interesting trend here as well which is that um on average schools with lower college and career uh readiness indicator scores have more students of color and in this case this
was the this was true even after we controlled for economic disadvantage and that seemed to be driven largely by early post-secondary opportunities so what we seem to be seeing was that even after you account for economic
disadvantage schools that have more students of color had fewer students completing early post-secary opportunities which we um assume though we haven't directly been able to verify this is related to opportunities that are available to
those students so that's definitely something that we want to look more into in the future and something that we could be asking about in the context of hearings is what type of early postsecondary opportunities are offered to students in these schools that are coming to see us for hearings
going back to Miss Harpool's question her her question had to do with dual enrollment for the achievement score they do get credit for dual enrollment for college and career readiness syndicator is that correct yes that's counted as an early
postsecondary opportunity as long as they pass the dual enrollment class anyway so um circling back to what Mr hol brought up earlier uh regarding the demographic trends in the overall grades um we've now seen the trends in each of the individual indicators and
you can see that some of them seem to at least partially counteract each other but you also at the same time need to keep in mind uh the weight that is put on each indicator and therefore the trends that are seen in the indicators that have more weight on them are going
to be um more evident in the overall letter grades as opposed to the trends seen in the indicators that have less weight put on them okay um the next section gets into some information about uh chronic absenteeism and teacher credentials and
retention so before we move on to that were there any uh final questions or discussion about this demographic section i know you guys are thinking with a a mind to some of the hearings but um if there's any assistance we can provide
knowing that there we're a state with a fairly high investment in um dual enrollment and AP access to have such a correlation between economically disadvantaged and low EPSO participation rate we're happy to do what we can to
help you guys examine maybe what's going on or or be of assistance where needed um just because there there's a disconnect there for students and that's unfortunate all right thank you
okay moving on to some trends related to um culture and climate um starting with chronic absenteeism as a reminder chronic absenteeism measures the percentage of students who are absent for 10% or more
of instructional days and as we can see in this chart the rate of chronic absenteeism in F schools is about 2 and a half times higher than in A schools um just so you have a point of comparison the average statewide average chronic
absenteeism rate in 2324 was 18.9% so that's in between the average for B schools and the average for C schools um and then A schools have on average lower than the state average chronic absenteeism whereas DNF schools have
notably higher than the state average of chronic absenteeism chronic absenteeism is defined by a specific number of days like 10 days or something like that did you look at uh correlated with the number of days
absent in other words uh those that are absent 10 day those that are chronically absent based on 10 days versus 20 days versus 30 days i unfortunately did not have access to that level of detail just whether this
um what percentage of students were considered chronically absent or not which in most districts would be uh about 18 days you would need to be absent for the school year although that depends on how long like if a student enrolled in the middle of the school
year they could potentially be chronically absent with fewer than 18 days missed but um if they were enrolled for the whole school year it would be about 18 days and unfortunately I can't see if some students had far more than 18 days and what that trend might have
looked like for those students okay um next I have some data on teacher retention so this is looking at teacher retention in terms of teachers who stayed in the same school um not necessarily in exactly the same teaching position but in the same
school the average for all Tennessee schools in 2324 was 76.9% teacher retention so that's actually exactly equal to the average for C schools um whereas A schools and B schools had above average retention and D schools
and S schools had below average retention again on on average um I unfortunately don't have a table for all of these but I'm sure that within each one of these similar to what we saw with the demographic trends there are some A schools that
had lower than 82% retention and some F schools that had higher than 60% retention but we do see a trend overall also just a quick reminder 100% retention is not necessarily the goal that we're going for here because
sometimes a teacher is not a good fit for a particular school and needs to move to a different um school or a different district in order to really um find a position that fits them their skill set well so we don't want to have zero teacher turnover but having too
much teacher turnover can be disruptive to learning next looking at teacher experience and credentials um we have here the average percentage of inexperienced teachers uh for schools with each uh grade letter
grade uh and this is defined as teachers who have less than two years of experience so if you're in your first year of teaching or your second year of teaching you're considered an inexperienced teacher for this purpose um and we see a very clear trend here where F schools on average have far more
inexperienced teachers than A and B schools and even notably more than C and D schools in terms of uh teachers who have emergency credentials this includes both teachers who have a permit or also teachers who have an endorsement
exemption or waiver and the rate of teachers with emergency credentials in F schools is approximately seven times higher than in A schools um one notable thing here uh is that this this data um unfortunately is
not detailed enough to capture uh what positions these inexperienced or emergency credentialed teachers are in so we don't know for example if they have if a school has an emergency credential teacher teaching in a core subject or teaching an elective or if
they have their inexperienced teacher teaching in a tested grade or an untested grade we can't uh see that level of detail from the data that we have here also would like to note before we move on that not not all inexperienced teachers are necessarily ineffective we do have some very very effective
teachers who are in their very early in their career it's just that we know that on average teachers gain effectiveness rapidly during their first few years in the classroom which is why we we'd like to retain them and keep them in there for longer than just the first two years all right i guess before I pass
off to my uh colleagues to discuss some bright spots that we saw in the data um any questions or discussion regarding the teacher and absenteeism data there any correlation between inexperienced and emergency
credentials those teachers that are uh don't have the two years but are working on uh on teaching on emergency cred credential or waiver um so I can't look at that directly in
the data that I have but I assume that most of the teachers who are on emergency credentials are also inexperienced because if they we we have like a limit on how long you can be on an emergency credential so it someone could that limit is the three years so
technically someone could be in their third year teaching on a permit they would no longer be considered an inexperienced teacher but they would still be considered as a teacher on an emergency credential but for most of those teachers who are on their first or second year on a permit unless they had
previous teaching experience somewhere else that for some reason did not allow them to get a license in Tennessee they would also be an inexperienced teacher right so maybe I maybe I missed something because I was thinking that we if teachers aren't you know say if
they're a math teacher you know certified in K through six but we uh go ahead because we're short of math teachers we let them teach seventh and eighth grade is that not under emergency credential or something
or am I missing Sorry yes that would be included under a waiver or endorsement exemption i can pull uh that data separately from the permits and get that to you but I I can tell you from overall trends that the vast majority of the emergency credential teachers were
teaching on permits which means they didn't have a license in any subject area a relatively small percentage of them were on waiverss which means they do have a license but it's not in the area that they're currently teaching that might be helpful to have the
information so we know the impact of waivers you know uh is is there a correlation there between waivers versus performance okay yes thank you
hey Erica while discussing um teacher data here is there are there any numbers to suggest like the teacher effectiveness in each of these schools i mean do we have a school that has a
letter grade of A and the teachers that are teaching in those grade bands that help generate that data you know are they a level three four or five teacher or do we I mean do we have a a school that has
earned a letter F grade but yet maybe the majority of their teachers have an effective effectiveness of a three four or five and and then you know try to figure out there's a obviously then a disconnect that maybe we could dig deeper into i don't know that's just a
thought yeah that makes a lot of sense um unfortunately that type of teacher evaluation data is not publicly available um it does uh exist in some
databases that the Tennessee Department of Education has although how closely it can be matched to like specifically what classes teachers are teaching I'm I'm unsure about that but we certainly they certainly would know what school the teacher is teaching in so we could
potentially talk to TDOE about that question okay um moving into some bright spots these are a few schools or three schools that we had found are performing very well despite having some of demographic
characteristics and other characteristics that are you might make would think would make it difficult for them to perform well but they're performing well regardless and so we wanted to uh highlight these schools and try to learn more about what they're
doing in order to get the outstanding results that they have seen um for this section I'm going to uh pass off the presentation to my colleagues Michael Derline and Ally Reid thanks Erica so the first uh school we looked at was Burks Elementary in
Putnham County um in 2023 24 they received an A um and I'll give you all a minute just to look at their indicator scores demographics culture and climate um but essentially they are um indicator scores are all pretty
high their demographics uh they're much higher than the state average economic disadvantage uh students of color is around the state average el's is a little bit above and students with disabilities is right on the state
average chronic absenteeism rate um is a little bit lower teacher retention rate is um a little bit higher inexperienced teachers is a little bit lower than the state average and they have no teachers on emergency credentials so we had a a
brief conversation with them to try and learn a little bit more about what it is they believe is helping drive their their outcomes and about four years ago they had a leadership change and that prompted the development of a five-year climate and academics plan for moving
from a lower performing school to an A and a reward school they track progress make adjustments each year and work with the school and community members to develop define communicate and hold everyone accountable to that plan they have some non-negotiables for educators
student centered decision-making professionalism and using high quality and standards aligned curriculum and instruction they also have some non-negotiables for their leadership team being in classrooms with curriculum and instruction focus regular educator
collaboration opportunities a strong belief in all students and a culture of learning and leveraging different strengths as a leadership team and they invest in their growth to serve better so we've learned a little bit about this is just a kind of a snapshot into these
schools and how we're seeing that there are certainly schools that are bucking the trend um and we're learning a little bit more about what they're doing the next uh school is White Haven High School it's in Memphis Shelby County Schools in 23 24 they received an
A um you'll see that they have the highest indicator scores across the board their demographics are um interesting as well they are pretty high economically disadvantaged over 95% students of color a pretty small
percentage of English learners and a smaller than state average percentage of students with disabilities their chronic absenteeism rate is a little bit higher than the state average their teacher retention rate is about on par with the state average uh they have um slightly
lower than state average inexperienced teachers and higher use of emergency credentials unfortunately we could not reach the administrators at White Haven but I did pull some information from their website which has a lot uh a lot
of videos sharing some of the work that they're doing especially around integrating ELA and literacy skills across the school they have a common planning period for ELA teachers they have an annotation guide focused on literacy across all
classes there's a there's a a desire to take challenging texts some of the more older texts that they're using and apply them to real real world contexts and careers and they have a strong connection between high school and college and career readiness so they
have a business finance program an ACT and PSAT curriculum and a lot of opportunity for honors dual enrollment AP courses and dozens of industry certifications i pass it over to Ally thank you uh this third school that we
wanted to highlight is also a school that received a letter grade of an A last school year this is Kip Annioch College Prep Middle School they are currently authorized by the Tennessee public charter school commission but some of you may remember they were previously authorized by the state board
and uh that switched over in 2021 to the newly formed at the time charter commission uh so their indicator scores they have a four in achievement and five in growth and growth of the lowest 25% you can see their demographics here uh
large English learner population uh higher students of color percentage here and then in their culture and climate uh low chronic absenteeism uh teacher retention rate sitting at 60% so that's one of those that um Erica pointed out
that sometimes we have uh you know we saw that as the average for F schools and the school had an A with 60% um and so just with the data that we see here and their outcome did not have an opportunity to connect with the
leadership but did have an opportunity to speak with the staff at the charter commission their authorizer and just to learn a little bit more about what they believe is leading to or driving the successes that they're seeing first and foremost they mentioned the consistency and strong culture that the school has
established and that is through intentional vertical alignment and collaboration with their feeder elementary school they work really closely together they're regularly meeting and ensuring that students have a really seamless um transition between
the two schools they also have spent a really intentional focus on talent recruitment in the last few years and they have a team that uh is a pretty robust team that's establishing relationships bloke universities and community organizations they've also uh
established a leadership development program for rising leaders that's focused on uh professional development for leadership as well as coaching supports they even offer teacher and leader residency programs and so they are directly um working with their
incoming leaders their upandcoming leaders their rising leaders um to get them to be familiar with the school to be familiar with the work before they actually take on those leadership positions and then last but not least just wanted to highlight that they're prioritizing uh EL certifications even
going as far as paying for those endorsements and hiring associate teachers with the expectation that those individuals will be pursuing dual lensure in EL and 58 education okay thank you Michael and Ally
um so now um you're welcome to ask any questions you have about these bright spots although u we may not have the answers and may need to further circle back with the school but I also want to uh circle back to the discussion
questions that we had uh earlier regarding how this data affects how you're thinking about accountability hearings what questions you would like to ask an ELA or public charter school that's called for a hearing and what additional data or context you would
like to see for schools that are called for hearings erica before we do that could you go back up one slide ally uh it was interesting you talked about what they were doing in
leadership development and uh hiring teachers when you look at teacher retention rate of 60% if a person is a teacher and then they become u a support person you know
um I don't know what can't remember what you call the the next level where they're not in the classroom teaching but they're you know they may be an administrative person or they may be a a coach or something like that do they still count as the teacher as a teacher
in your teacher retention or do is that a factor where that teacher is no longer considered a teacher and that may be uh skewing that 60% number yeah that's a good question um Erica you might have to help me out i don't remember if the
retention rate accounts for those shifts erica do you know um I it wasn't entirely clear in the file that I pulled this data from but I my assumption and I can follow up with CDOE on this because it's their
data file is that if their employee classification was not was no longer teacher they would probably count as having not been retained because this file was looking specifically at teacher retention so
that would be something that we would be interested in knowing is if the teacher says it says they're not retained but they're actually still there and they're now in a leadership position that would be useful to know go back to your questions now sorry
so I think at this point we'll just open it up to you all feel free to go in any order but really just wanted to have a conversation um related to these topics or any other discussion points that you all want to bring up um but we are thinking ahead to our accountability
hearings and if if you are going to be receiving uh data similar to this what questions might come to mind what might we want to dig in more on what additional information might we want to receive um in preparation for these hearings
while the other board members are thinking of their questions let me I'm sorry Sarah were you gonna say I was going to do the same thing go ahead i had something while people were thinking but you go i'll follow you i I was first going to say this is outstanding i mean really really obviously you've spent a
lot of time looking at the data and uh uh that is so important as we determine where we are where we want to go and how we want to get there and so uh thank you for everything you've done obviously we've we've we've seen some things that
you know you might want to look at to uh increase that data data knowledge but just uh thank you for what you've done i mean this is really really good start and and I think having that data will help us develop the questions that we want to develop and we want to ask as we
look for where's we want these hearings to be positive we want we want to uh use them to improve those letter grades uh for for the school so as we see the data and we compare it to the schools that
are doing so well we can ask the questions what are they doing differently and and I think the the information that Ally presented and Michael presented on those three schools that are doing things differently how do we take that and move that into the
schools that aren't doing so well so u thank you for everything you're doing i will sit back and and think about some questions i'll turn it back over to to Sarah and then to to others no thank you for that Bob i could not agree more erica is such an asset to our team and
presentations like this get give her the chance to showcase all that she can do but she's just always behind the scenes crunching data for us on you name it issues and so it goes without saying but members if you have questions about things that you're wondering about data and anything related to K12 Erica is a
huge asset and um always really welcomes those uh requests and conversations so yeah she's been really working hard helping us think about this i also just wanted to some of the comments before to flag you know we heard in November from Shelby County in partnership with Cognia some work that they're doing to you know
see some positive results in schools that have been historically failing you know looking at that third party partner and sort of those short um kind of cycles of uh data study and improvement and looking you know closely at data regularly um seem to be one thing that jumped out and then you know we're going to be looking in May at a couple
additional presentations and just trying to think about you know feeding these learning opportunities to our staff and board ahead of the hearing so that we can hone in on what is happening what are the sort of playbooks as they uh come together in schools that are bucking the trend uh in terms of some of these data points and so I think that'll
be important to help us think about the kinds of questions and the things that we want to uncover as part of the hearings but Ally and Michael do you want to spend any time just briefly highlighting what who we're going to hear from in May as people are kind of thinking about other questions yeah I'm happy to uh we have Metro
Nashville Public Schools joining us they have um really upped their leadership development and have a leadership framework that they're going to be sharing with us and they as a district have received a TAS level five three
years in a row um and are really excited uh and proud of the work that they're doing and so they will be joining us uh at the workshop in May and we also have invited uh TNTP they recently released a report they're a national education organization and they recently uh
released a report called the opportunity makers and uh they took a look at several schools around the country that are all very different from each other but who are changing the trajectory for students and what do they have in common um and so that is what that report
covers are going to be sharing the outcomes that uh came from it and I hope that you will see a lot of what we're thinking about and working on regarding our hearings aligns to some of the outcomes that they were finding um and then we also related to that one of the schools that was part of this year-long
research project that they conducted um is one of our very own from Trousell County uh so director Clint Satderfield will also be joining to share about his experience um and what's happening in just a Tennessee context so really excited for both of those presentations in
May okay so I do have a couple of thoughts questions if if we're to that part uh thank you Erica and Michael and Ally this was really really great um information so just a I mean just some things that randomly floated through my
mind as you were presenting especially um with the demographic trends so I'm wondering with TISA and the outcomes money that's generated when certain demographic groups perform
well i'm wondering you know I don't know how deep we want to get into something like that but you know if we have obviously a school that's not performing well and they are generating outcomes money are
they investing that outcomes money back into that demographic group or is it because they have such a great need somewhere else you know is there a I don't know i just would find
that very interesting you know if if you're generating outcomes money for uh students of color or students with disabilities or English learners and you still have a great need there but then
that outcomes money you know it's going somewhere else and I and I know we can't and I'm not trying to say that I even want to tell people what to do i'm just saying that would be very interesting um also I wonder with
like the A schools well all of the letter grade schools what are their grade band breakdowns you know are 50% of all letter A schools
uh K5s or are they traditional K8s or are they I I I would find it interesting the grade bands of of those schools um and also you know going back to the demographics you know what types of
opportunities are available and and you all said this for those students that are not reaching um those career and co college and career readiness indicators you know do they have plans
to offer more things who which students are enrolled in those classes that carry uh credentiing uh just some general questions like that and after I've slept on this I'm sure I will have more
well thank you for those questions i know I can say regarding your your second question i did look for um with the uh grade bands if the high schools had a different letter grade distribution compared to the K through8
schools since they do have a different slightly different formula and I saw there was not any significant difference the distribution of letter grades was almost the same for high schools that it was for K through8 schools i did not look more specifically within K through8
schools to see if like elementary schools were doing better than middle schools or if schools that have all the grades K through8 were doing differently than um other schools etc i could potentially look into that though because we do have data in um in the
letter grade file about what grade bands not necessarily every single specific grade level but what grade bands each school has i've got a couple other comments if uh unless Ryan or Larry want to go first all right I'll I'll I'll make a
couple comments um I think this is again great data and and this is data across the state for several schools what I'm going to be interested in uh is that specific school
that we're looking at what is the data for the school that resulted in the D or F rating and then I think you got to break it down even more and say okay is it because of achievement i mean if you look at your your calculation you know
achievement is 50% blah blah blah blah is is achievement a low score and career and college readiness is a high score and so I'm going to be asking or or looking at where are the weak areas
within the school and then asking them going back to uh AA's comment with regard to how the money is being spent is there a focus to bring that area up within the funds that are being spent or
within you know what are your focus areas in your particular school to bring up the areas that are obviously bringing you down keeping you at a DRF rating that so it's going to the next level or two down in the data
um you know is it is it English scores is it mass scores is it uh episodes what what is it and and what are you doing about that to bring that up those are kind some of the questions and what then and if it is uh reading scores or
something then you go to this okay this school over here is doing outstanding in reading it's not just the school is doing outstanding find a school that's doing really really well in reading and what are they doing differently than what I'm doing yeah thanks Mr eie that a lot of what
you were just uh discussing is the type of data that we're going to have in our pre-hering paperwork that the state board members will be able to see prior to a school or a or an LEA rather being brought for a hearing and it will be
down at that individual school level um unlike the data in this presentation which was obviously much more summarized uh although one thing I can say from looking at the summarized data is we saw generally in order to get an A you pretty much had to have high scores on
all of the indicators and similarly in order to get an F you needed to have low scores on pretty much all the indicators schools that had a mixture of high and low indicator scores were usually in the B C or D range that makes some
sense the other thing is you know we're going to have the hearings for the Fs and D and Fs etc hopefully the other schools that are in the D or you know don't qualify for the hearing range that are in the D range or in the C range are
working using the data and looking at the data to see what they can do to get up to the B and the A range okay any other questions or comments of course if you think of questions or comments later you can always send those to us and just buying you a couple more minutes to think if there's anything
else people want to share you know Ally mentioned the workshop presentations that are upcoming but we would love your continued thoughts about what other presentations or data points or practice sharings that we could um kind of facilitate ahead of next spring that would help inform people's thinking so
if there are things that you'd like us to be thinking about for August I know Ally and Michael are always like forward mapping a lot of that um by a number of months so whenever you have thoughts like that it's helpful to us as we're thinking about how to use our time at upcoming workshops and other future
learning sessions like this yeah I was going to say that this learning session certainly exceeded my expectations and uh I look forward to similar learning sessions on other topics because it really does I think it's serving its
purpose allowing us to drill down and and get information that we don't get can't get in uh a board meeting or even a workshop or whatever and and so well done and keep them coming and I look
forward to the Next one thank you Mr holt dr maxwell any final comments this was wonderful yeah I would echo uh Bob and I this is this is really well done thank you Erica um for your great work on this and
everyone on the team it's it's really helpful um to to get this data and have it analyzed in in so many ways and presented um in easy to understand manner like this um I I think just to to Sarah's point of other information um
and we touched on some of it today but just continuing to think about like what are the the themes of of best practices that run through the A schools that we are seeing
you know how do we distill that down so that we can try to use it at the hearings um so it's not just hey we're hauling you know these DNF schools in front but you know we've got some real like
databacked realworld contemporary examples of things that are showing proving to be successful with like populations and like schools um I I think it's hard to like what's what's the secret sauce that makes makes
for a good school i don't there's not like this is the answer but um I guess that's my push is for continuing to kind of refine that distill that into like what are what are the key the key items that we want to be able to share out that
this is what we're seeing um in schools like yours that are performing at the highest level that was very well said Ryan and I think if we keep student success as our focus at the center of everything that
we do it will be a positive outcome for everyone and I just really look forward to those best practices that are going to come to light that we you know everyone sometimes works you get so
busy doing the work that you don't have time to step back and reflect and and look at what others are doing so hopefully this will be a growth opportunity for everyone um not just the schools called before us but even our
other letter letter grade schools okay thank you everyone um I think we can declare this member learning session completed hope you all have a rest of your afternoon michael Ally and Aina Victoria
Ryan Larry for a little while for joining um really appreciate all the engagement so look forward to some continued conversations on these topics