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Lots of recent ups and downs for public education in Tennessee

tennessee.gov/education

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (OSBORNE)  --  It’s been something of a roller-coaster ride for Tennessee’s school children, parents, teachers and administrators in recent weeks, with a string of media reports on education successes and failures.

On the plus side, the State Department of Education recently revealed that the number of Tennessee children graduating from high school had reached an all-time high.

State Education Commissioner Candice McQueen was also happy to report another milestone for the state’s combined ACT scores.

“Of the eighteen states that require all students to take the ACT, we’re sitting in the top seven of those states at a minimum of where we sit now with our ACT scores. So we’re very proud of our students and teachers across the state.”

But the news hasn’t been all good. The latest academic test scores reveal that roughly half of Tennessee’s school children continue to perform below grade level.

The state also recently revealed that for the third year in a row Tennessee's TNReady academic testing system had suffered significant problems. The contractor who handles the testing discovered more than 9,400 incorrectly scored tests.

Commissioner McQueen says she hopes students, parents and teachers will keep that problem in perspective.

“We have over a million exams given across all of the grade levels and (unintelligible) areas in our state, and we had less than one percent of those - 9,400 tests that were impacted by a scanning programming issue.”

One final bit of bad news, within the past week the Metro School Board voted to join the eight other school systems suing the state Tennessee isn’t providing adequate funding for education.