Last spring, a television station in Nashville reviewed state data and discovered that 80% of the state’s charter schools are “less successful” than the districts they allegedly serve. In other sectors, when a new idea is tried and fails, it is abandoned. But this is not likely in education, because someone is making money from failure. Among the state’s lowest performing charter schools were those in the “Achievement School District,” which was created with $100 million on Race to the Top funding, promising to taise the state’s lowest performing schools into the top 25% in the state.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — About 80% of the taxpayer-financed, privately operated charter schools in Tennessee have a lower success rate than the districts where they are located, according to a NewsChannel 5 analysis of state data.

Out of 109 charter schools for which data was available for the 2021-2022 school year, 87 had success rates below the rates reported for other schools in the same geographic district — in many cases, much lower. More than a third of the charter schools, a total of 38, reported success rates of 10% or less; 10 of those had success rates below 5%.

Only 21 charter schools reported higher success rates, while comparisons were difficult for one school because of the way that the state reports the data.

The data also raises questions about how well the privately operated charter schools are meeting the needs of children with disabilities, with two-thirds reporting that they had so few students that they were not required to report success rates for those children.

Tennessee’s Department of Education calculates the one-year success rate based on the percentage of students in grades 3-5 whose scores on state assessments “met expectations or exceeded expectations” for math and English Language Arts.

Success rates are now at the center of Tennessee’s education policy under a new law set to require the retention of third graders who don’t meet ELA expectations.

In the larger debate, the data appears to run counter to some ideological arguments — mainly from the right, but sometimes from the left —that taxpayer-funded charter schools are a critical response to low-performing traditional public schools, with much of the focus often directed at the potential of charter schools to meet the needs of children of color.

Charter school advocates largely focus on metrics regarding “student growth,” a complex calculation used to argue that students in those schools statistically tend to learn more statistically than their peers in traditional public schools.

At the lower end of the scale, the LEAD Brick Church charter school had a success rate of just 5.7% for grades 5-8, compared to Metro Nashville Public Schools’ 26.2% for grades 3-5 and 22.5% for grades 6-8.

Brick Church is 70% economically disadvantaged, and more than 95% of students are children of color.

The traditional public school was taken over by the state and converted to a charter school under the Achievement School District in 2012 as part of an ambitious notion that the state could take schools in the bottom 5% and turn them into top performers within five years.

In fact, data shows that Tennessee’s Achievement School District has largely failed in that goal, producing some of the worst results of any district.

The ASD success rate was 10.6% for grades 3-5, compared to Metro Nashville’s 26.2% and Memphis-Shelby County’s 20.9%.

The relatively new Tennessee Public Charter School Commission District, by comparison, had a 37.4% success rate — a figure driven largely by just one school, KIPP Antioch College Prep Elementary. The commission’s Nashville Collegiate Prep reported a success rate of 23.4% for grades 3-5, compared to MNPS’ 26.2%.

On the other hand, the commission’s Bluff City High School in Memphis reported a success rate of just 6.7%, compared to Memphis-Shelby County’s 6.8% for grades 9-12.