BusinessTN

Education Week recently reported that nearly four in 10 Tennessee students don’t graduate high school on time. That’s 7.4% below an already paltry national average earning Tennessee yet another 40 rank among the 50 states.

Clearly, Tennessee needs to focus its attention on students not achieving at basic levels. But in doing so, Tennessee cannot turn its back on its high achievers either. After all, it’s their public school system, too.

Gov. Phil Bredesen’s recent creation of an elite residential high school for exceptional math and science students, a $1 million program fully funded in the adopted 2006 state budget, is one way the state has chosen to address that need. But is it the right use of state funds? Or, conversely, is it enough?

The year-round program for juniors and seniors, eventually to be housed at the University of Tennessee Space Institute in Tullahoma, begins operation next year with its first class of 25 students at the Tennessee School for the Deaf in Knoxville. UT and the Oak Ridge National Lab will help develop standards for admission and a curriculum of study. Bredesen says his hopes for the school are three-fold. First, he says the school will help Tennessee’s top students achieve first-class scholarships to first-class schools where they will lay the foundation for first-class careers, preferably right here in Tennessee. The school will also serve as a teacher incubator, enhancing the capabilities of all math and science teachers in Tennessee through summer observation exercises. And it will serve as a laboratory where new materials and best practices can be developed, tested and eventually rolled out for the benefit of high school students across Tennessee.

The school also addresses another problem in Tennessee, a problem national in scope, where too few American students are entering the fields of math and science. From Eastman Chemical in Kingsport to the federal lab in Oak Ridge to the health care industry in Nashville to the medical device manufacturing and biotech sectors in Memphis, technical jobs are not getting filled at a sustainable rate. A workforce crisis looms.

Bredesen draws a personal comparison when arguing in favor of the establishment of the school, saying he graduated from a high school in upstate New York where the graduating class had 39 students and therefore didn’t offer him the “depth of resources” that other schools could. As a result, Bredesen says he was less prepared for academic life at Harvard University, where he attended college and studied physics.

“Big schools, in particular big private schools, have very talented physics teachers,” Bredesen says. “My physics teacher was also the football coach and freshman algebra teacher. The difference in preparation between me and some of the other students at Harvard was just night and day.”

The idea for an elite high school is hardly a novel concept. In fact, its creation amounts to Tennessee playing catchup with other public education systems nationally dating back to the early 1980s. Consider the long-established Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a residential school near Chicago that enrolls 10th through 12th graders. Or the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts in Natchitoches, La. Or the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. Or the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics in Oklahoma City. On and on it goes.

Despite Tennessee’s apparent late arrival to the elite high school universe, not all Ten- nesseans agree that spending $1 million on such a program is the highest and best use of state funds. Kay Brooks, a former member of the Metro Davidson County board of education, is the founder of Nashville-based TnHomeEd, a clearinghouse of home schooling information specifically for Tennes- see. Brooks offers an alternative view, going so far as to question if the intent of the framers of Tennessee’s constitution was to create an elite math and science school or rather to ensure that all children in Tennessee got a good foundational education that would enable them to move on to the additional training they would need for their chosen career.

Brooks argues that while all Tennes- seans would like to provide more to the state’s student population, the reality is that resources are finite and the state doesn’t have an unending supply of money with which to do more.

“With these finite resources, do we raise the top end or the bottom end?” Brooks asks. “When so many of this state’s students are not even passing math fundamentals, let alone algebra, how do we justify providing even more for outstanding students?”

Brooks proposes spending the $1 million instead to incentivize real scientists and mathematicians to join the teaching ranks in Tennessee’s existing public schools. (Bredesen has a version of such a plan already under design that would achieve just that.) Doing so, Brooks says, would also alleviate the potential downsides of cherry-picking high achieving students from individual school systems across the state—removing both their positive peer influence and quality test scores.

What to do about those “elite” students who would lose out on this opportunity? Brooks says such students should be granted the freedom to “move on to college where their needs can be better met,” adding “that would allow the public system to then focus on the remaining children who really do need help.”

Brooks makes some valid points. Ultimately, though, deciding whether or not to support Bredesen’s elite high school concept may come down to the question of how competitive we are against other states. The answer is clear. Not only is Tennessee playing catchup with its peers when it comes to offering an elite high school setting, but other states, meanwhile, are shifting into overdrive.

To the east, North Carolina is opening eight health and life sciences-themed high schools using grants totaling $2.3 million. To the west, Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently steered a $71 million public-private initiative, in part using grant money from the Gates Founda- tion, that will result in the establishment of 35 special math and science academies across the Lone Star state. Each year, that program intends to provide 25,000 Texas students with the tools necessary to maintain the state’s reputation for technology innovation. And there are other examples of similar program growth nationally.

If granted a second term in office this November election, Bredesen says he’d like to expand the elite high school concept in Tennessee to include other specialties such as international languages like Chinese. Competitively speaking, it appears he can’t move fast enough on that initiative.

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