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Tennessee’s plan clearly values both growth and proficiency.
Every school, even high-achieving ones, have growth and proficiency targets, and even the growth measure tracks student progress toward grade-level standards. The state’s achievement measure is a hybrid where schools will get credit for either the absolute performance of their students or the percentage of students meeting annual proficiency targets, whichever is higher. However, the flipside of setting different annual targets for each school and subgroup is that it could be confusing to educators and parents.
Still, the state places such a strong value on these two indicators that they are the only measures used to identify the 5 percent of the lowest-achieving schools in the state. This strong focus on proficiency and growth will ensure schools focus on helping all students improve across the performance spectrum.