The end of the school year — typically days of celebrations and send-offs — will be filled instead with more high-stakes testing and weighty decisions about summer school for thousands of third-grade students under Tennessee’s new learning and retention law.
On Friday, school districts are scheduled to receive preliminary scores from state tests given this spring, kicking off a busy few days of analysis and communication with parents about what those results mean.
Most families should have information by Monday or Tuesday about how their third grader performed.
Students scoring as proficient readers will advance to the fourth grade, as expected. And third graders who scored below proficiency can retake a reading test next week to try for a better result. Students who still score below proficiency on the retest must enter learning intervention programs as soon as this summer or fall to help them catch up, or they can present their case to the state on why they should be exempted.
The dizzying pace was set in motion by a 2021 law that drew a line in the sand on reading proficiency beginning with this year’s class of third graders. Those students were kindergarteners when the pandemic hit and ushered in unprecedented disruptions to learning.
Memphis mom Charmeal Neely-Alexander says the state’s new third-grade policy is the latest example of how school has been tough from the start for her daughter, now 9, especially since she is not a strong test-taker.
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