PLEASE ABOLISH THE TERM “TURN AROUND”
Here we go again. Last year Metro Nashville Public Schools(MNPS) found out that they had fifteen schools that were classified as priority schools by the state of Tennessee. A priority school is a school ranked in the bottom 5% of the state based on TCAP scores. Of course, nobody had any idea that this was coming, which is a story for another day, so now everybody is in reactive mode. There is a cry to get rolling on a “turnaround” strategy. In response MNPS has created a “Turnaround Corps,” a highly recruited, both in district and out, group of teachers specializing in “turnarounds.” Meetings have been held with parents, teachers and community members at the named schools, and a freshly-created citizen’s advisory board has begun meeting. MNPS has even hired an outside “turnaround” consultant group. You can read more about them here. The only thing missing is a clear definition of what a “turnaround” means.Dr. Register, Nashville’s superintendent of school, has made a decree that MNPS shall have no priority schools in three years, so I’m assuming that’s the definition we are working off of. But what happens a year after that if those schools, no longer in the spotlight and still facing a multitude of challenges, slip back on the priority list? What about if it happens in four years? Ten years. My question is, when is a school considered turned around?
What if, in our mad dash to meet this lofty goal, we deprive other borderline schools of much needed resources, and they slip onto the “priority” list. Mathematically, there will always be a bottom 5%, so its a very real possibility. I recently posed that question to the driving force behind MNPS’ newly created “Turnaround Corps,” the Executive Director of Talent Strategy. I’d heard that several teachers from not-quite-priority schools have applied to be member’s of the Corps, , since membership Dad Gone Wild | Please abolish the term “turn around”:
