Class Struggle

It’s 7:15 a.m. on a cold, rainy Friday morning and the first bell has sounded at Maplewood Comprehensive High School. Tyra Washington, an 18-year-old senior, walks the halls as the bodies of students funneling through the low-ceilinged corridor crowd against each other.

Tyra says little except for a few intermittent hellos. She’s tired. It’s the end of the week and she is already well on her way to having clocked in a couple dozen hours at the Kroger a half-mile down the trash-lined street that leads to Dickerson Pike.

She calls it the “bad Kroger,” largely because it sits in her East Nashville neighborhood, which, given its patchwork of liquor stores, fast food joints and the like, is a typical low-income neighborhood.

As she makes her way through the maze to her first-period advanced placement class, she could very well be walking through just about any Metro high school. From the uniform-laden students to the rows of lockers and motivational signs that mark the good-enough-for-now facilities, Maplewood has all the trappings of any all-American high school. If it weren’t for its test scores and a ghastly graduation rate, Maplewood probably wouldn’t be on anyone’s radar.

But that’s not the case. When the state took control of the school two years ago, everyone took notice. And all that negative attention has weighed heavily on the Maplewood student psyche—so much so that students have come to dread the look of concern on strangers’ faces when they utter the words “Maplewood” and “my school” conjunctively.

All that considered, Tyra chose to come here. When given not one, but two, opportunities to attend a magnet school, she declined. Despite dire media reports and nearly half a decade’s worth of failing No Child Left Behind report cards from the state, she proudly calls Maplewood her school. And, like many of her khaki-clad counterparts, many of whom come from single-parent homes and abject poverty, she is ever rising from the quicksand.

But her story of success and triumph isn’t so unusual. Inside Maplewood’s dingy halls, tucked away in classrooms that are a bit worse for the wear, they’re everywhere: students who emerge from the setbacks of the socio-economic muck and mire to make something of themselves. These are kids with the simple desire to do better.

Maplewood administrators and teachers will tell you that No Child Left Behind (NCLB), designed to measure and improve school performance by increasing state accountability, is an unfair barometer of the school’s performance.

But Maplewood has never demonstrated the kind of numbers to show that its students are progressing in three key categories: graduation rate and scores on the math and reading/language arts portions of the state’s Gateway exams, which are end-of-course tests that measure the most basic of skills.

Even before the school fared poorly by NCLB standards, it was not meeting the state’s own benchmarks for progress. When NCLB began in 2001, the state had two options for schools such as Maplewood: Let them start anew and free of state sanctions, or hold them accountable for past failings. The state chose the latter. Before NCLB was in full swing, Maplewood had already moved a few steps closer to state takeover.

Every year since, Maplewood has failed to make adequate yearly progress. Last school year, for instance, Tennessee’s target graduation rate was 90 percent, and its actual rate was almost 69 percent. Maplewood’s rate, however, was less than 43 percent. The state requires 75 percent of high school students to pass the Algebra I Gateway exam. Only 52 percent of Maplewood test-takers made the mark last school year.

Reading/language arts scores were encouraging but still not up to par. The state benchmark is set at 90 percent, but only 78 percent of Maplewood students passed the test in 2006. Because of these scores, Maplewood is the worst-rated public school in Nashville. Or as Connie Smith, the director of accountability for the state Department of Education, puts it, Maplewood has been “in the loop” of her department’s watchful eye for six years.

The thing is, the state’s accountability chart doesn’t work as a loop at all. The chart, which outlines sanctions ranging from allowing student transfer to complete state takeover, is linear. And Maplewood is at the very end of the line in terms of sanctions. It simply can’t fail any more NCLB benchmarks. And if it does, it’d fall right off the edge of the chart, which fittingly reads a bit like Homeland Security’s terror advisory alert. If Maplewood were held to the terror alert test, the school would be sitting in the blazingly red “severe” zone. So administrators, teachers and students have panicked accordingly.

Judging from the state’s chart alone, Maplewood can’t get any worse—there’s simply nothing left after “reconstitution.” Some in the education field speculate that without improvement, Maplewood would shut down and reopen as a new school under a different name—perhaps as a vocational school. That status certainly isn’t lost on Mayor Karl Dean. Of the 30 or so schools the mayor has toured, Maplewood is the only where he has guest taught. During an interview with the Scene about that experience—on his six-month anniversary in office, no less—Dean openly admits that, of all the schools in Metro, Maplewood is foremost on his mind.