More MNPS students are graduating, but are they future ready? Data says 'No'
Well, it depends on who you ask.
For Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell, the 85.7% rate—the highest since the district has been keeping track of how many students end their careers with a diploma — was so good he felt the need to mention it several times during his State of Metro Address on May 1.
And there's the MNPS administration — masters as they are at cherry picking data to support a narrative focusing on 'improvements' and 'level 5 status' and 'every child being known.'
But if you ask anyone who's paying attention — who knows, perhaps, how to navigate the dashboard for the Tennessee Department of Education's State Report Card — they know that, while MNPS's graduation rate certainly isn't bad, it isn't exactly good either.
If nothing else, it's misleading.
Understand: Tennessee doesn't just track graduation rates. The Department of Education also tracks a statistic called 'ready graduate,' which 'reflects the percentage of graduating students who demonstrated readiness for postsecondary education and/or a career after high school.'
The graduation rate cited by O'Connell during his address is from the 2023-24 school year, but because the State Report Card's data lags a year, the 'ready graduate' rates from 2023-24 are not yet available.
But we do have data from the year before. And even if we assume a slight bump in 'ready graduate' rates to account for the 4.5-percentage point increase in graduation rate over the same period, the numbers would still be abysmal.
That's because the "ready graduate" rate for the 2022-23 school year is 34.2%, meaning barely a third of graduating students were adequately prepared for the future.
For Black, Hispanic and Native American students, the rate drops to 23.8%. For the economically disadvantaged, it's 20.6%.
'I want all of us to have more of the things we need,' O'Connell said during the address, including 'schools we're proud of.'
As a Nashvillian who cares about all children in the city, including those who are not my own, I can appreciate O'Connell's sentiment. I also understand that the kind of progress MNPS needs to make can't happen overnight, and that O'Connell's 2025-26 proposed budget includes an increase in MNPS funding meant to directly address issues like student achievement.
But to paint MNPS as an overall success for graduating 85.7% of students in the interim, or to even tout the district's record-high graduation rate without acknowledging how few of those students are on track to become economically independent adults, is to engage in the dissemination of propaganda and willful manipulation.
That wasn't the approach O'Connell took when he addressed the hike in Nashville property values (an average increase of 45%), which will naturally result in higher property taxes. For the blessed residents who own their homes in this booming market, he still managed to addressed the pro and the con, speaking directly to homeowners' greatest concerns.
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Yet the same cannot be said for the people for whom Nashville, and MNPS, are less effective. These are the people who need the schools to work for them — and, perhaps more importantly, need to know when they're not.
After all, the trouble with the Tuskegee Experiment wasn't just that doctors denied treatment to the men suffering with syphilis. It was that those doctors led those poor Black men to believe they were, in fact, being treated.
During his address, O'Connell mentioned that Nashville has been called a beacon by other cities because thousands of us came together to pass the transit bill last November.
It's a moment O'Connell is clearly proud of, and one that will likely define his legacy for years to come.
But for the sake of students across the city, my prayer is that Nashville will one day become a beacon because our city chose to buck the status quo that large, urban school districts will disproportionately fail the Black, Brown, and poor among them.
I pray that thousands of us can come together to ensure the educational and vocational futures of the students who don't attend Nashville's excellent academic magnet schools, who don't have access to after-school tutors, and who don't have white collar parents with college degrees who can easily assist their children with their homework in the evenings.
But that's only possible if we demand, collectively, that all 85.7% of our graduating high schoolers be prepared to attend college or pursue a post-secondary certification that will position them for well-paying careers and financial stability.
And that's only possible when we know that, right now, only a third of them are.
Andrea Williams is an opinion columnist for The Tennessean and curator of the Black Tennessee Voices initiative. She has an extensive background covering country music, sports, race and society. Email her at adwilliams@tennessean.com or follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AndreaWillWrite and BlueSky at @andreawillwrite.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: MNPS graduation rates hide truth of student unpreparedness | Opinion
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