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January 25, 2008
Catholic schools offer Grade A education
 Andy Telli, Tennessee Register
One of the pillars of Catholic education is academic achievement. And schools across the Diocese of Nashville are achieving standardized test scores above the national average.
The results of the 2007 Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the standardized test administered in elementary schools in the diocese each spring, show students averaging scores above their grade level in every subject.
For example, kindergarten students average reading at the level expected of students four months into their first grade year. In science, sixth grade students in Catholic schools in the diocese scored on average at the level expected of high school sophomores. The composite scores for eighth graders in diocesan schools averaged at a level expected of students in the third month of their senior year.
“We have high expectations for our students, not just to do the average, but to go beyond the average,” said Sister Martha Ann, O.P., principal of St. John Vianney School in Gallatin.
And those high expectations start in the kindergarten classrooms and are consistent at every grade level through eighth grade, said Tim Keogh, who is in his first year as the principal at Holy Rosary Academy in Donelson. “And all the research indicates that high expectations yield high results.”
During Catholic Schools Week this year, Jan. 27-Feb. 2, schools across the diocese will be celebrating their accomplishments in academics and other areas.
“We’re about educating the whole child … the spiritual side of the child, the academic, the social,” said Therese Williams, superintendent of schools for the diocese. “My priority is the Catholic identity of the school, but we can certainly do more to promote our academic strengths to the public.”
The academic strengths of Catholic schools in the diocese begin with their teachers, according to several principals.
When Barby Magness was putting together a faculty to help her open St. Matthew School in Franklin in the fall of 2001, she looked for teachers with more than classroom experience.
“I knew with a brand new school I had to do something a little bit different because you’re setting up everything,” said Magness, St. Matthew’s first and only principal. So she looked for teachers who had demonstrated leadership and had experience developing programs.
That investment in a quality staff has helped St. Matthew students achieve some of the highest standardized test scores in the diocese. Compared nationally, the school’s test scores are in the 99th percentile in nearly every grade, Magness said, and the lowest is the 97th percentile. All eighth grade students in the diocese take the ACT Explorer test. Last year at St. Matthew’, “I had six perfect scores in science,” Magness said.
When teachers take ownership of the school’s curriculum and programs, she said, “what you get then is the very best out of the teacher, which in turn affects my children.”
John Foreman, principal of St. Ann School in Nashville, pushes his staff to be “innovative in the way they teach, innovative in the way they meet the needs of individual students.”
“Teachers need to be in a culture in a school where they can fail … to say ‘this was a dumb idea and it didn’t work,’” Foreman said. “That leads to innovation. Nobody learns to ride a bike by watching a video. You’ve got to do it.”
The goal of all that innovation is to challenge the students, both in areas where they are weak and where they are strong, Foreman said.
Catholic schools are attractive to quality teachers, Williams said. “We can’t always match the salary of the local county system,” Williams said, “but we can give them an environment that is supportive, that they want to stay in.”
“We forget these teachers … have an incredibly powerful ministry,” Foreman said. “It is absolutely a ministry, it’s not a job.”
Basic skills
In building their curriculum, the elementary schools in the diocese focus on certain basic skills.
“Reading and writing go across all discipline areas,” Sister Martha Ann said. “If you can read well and write well, you’re going to be able to communicate what you’ve learned.”
Foreman agreed. “I think the whole language arts … are just core to everything we do. If you don’t have good reading skills, you’re not going to be good in other subjects.”
At St. John Vianney, teachers start emphasizing reading as early as the pre-kindergarten classes, Sister Martha Ann said. “They don’t have to read yet, you can read to them,” she said. “We find our kids really like to be read too. They get enticed into reading by reading to them.”
For the older grades, Sister Martha Ann has been encouraging her teachers to have the students do more reading beyond the text book as a way for the students to deepen what they’re learning.
Another goal of the emphasis on reading is to create in students a sense of the “wonder and awe about the world God created,” Sister Martha Ann said. “If you can help them grasp that and have the curiosity to know all that God created and why things are the way they are, you’ll have a child that does pretty well in school.”
At St. Matthew, students are asked to write a lot, Magness said. The state mandates all students take a writing assessment in the fifth and eighth grades, she said. “We decided to emphasize writing from kindergarten on in.”
The middle school aged students at St. Matthew write something in every subject every week, Magness said. The result was that more than half of last year’s eighth grade class earned a perfect score on the state writing assessment, she added.
Preparing for the future
Before Tim Keogh returned to Holy Rosary, the school he attended as a child, he was the principal at St. Francis DeSales High School in Louisville, Ky. The task of an elementary school, he said, is to prepare the students for high school.
“It’s our responsibility to develop the skills they will need in high school,” Keogh said. “Where you want to get them should be driving everything.”
To help make sure that all students in diocesan schools are building the appropriate skills as they advance through elementary school, the diocesan schools office has led curriculum mapping efforts the last six years.
The mapping aligns the curriculum vertically, Williams explained, so that what students are learning in their current grade will prepare them for what they will be learning in the next grade.
Working with teachers in the diocese, the curriculum is then updated every year “because the needs of the children change,” Williams said.
The diocese and individual schools also use the results of the standardized tests to determine if there are gaps in the curriculum that need to be addressed.
The Iowa Test of Basic Skills provides schools an item analysis breaking down the results of the tests by close to 100 categories, Foreman said. The results can also be examined by grade or by individual student.
“From kindergarten on, we chart their standardized test results,” Foreman said. “What we’re looking for is a certain growth each year they’re at St. Ann. At St. Ann the average growth is a year and a half, every year.”
If a student is not progressing at that rate, the teachers can give them individual attention, Foreman said.
If the whole grade is not progressing in a particular subject, the teaching strategies or the curriculum can be adjusted, he added.
When St. Ann teachers saw that their students’ computation scores were weaker, they implemented a short daily math test to improve that area, Foreman said.
“The mission of Catholic schools is not to take the best and brightest and educate those,” Foreman said. “It’s our job is to take all the kids that we can get and teach them, no matter where they start. At St Ann we have students in the 20th percentile and the 99 percentile. It’s our job to take students wherever they lie and teach them.”
Parents’ expectations
When parents are trying to decide where their children will attend school, they want to know the academics are strong. And more parents have the knowledge to scrutinize a school’s academic program, Keogh said.
“Clearly, today it’s a group of parents who expect their children will go to college,” Keogh said. And parents who are college educated themselves often have different questions and expectations for their children’s teachers, he added.
“Parents aren’t bashful about asking about pedagogy and teaching strategies,” Keogh said. “I find it very refreshing to see how much the parents do know and are holding us accountable for what we’re doing in light of their own knowledge.”
Schools in the diocese have not only strong academics to offer families but work to develop their students in other ways as well.
St. Matthew uses its motto – “Seeking Knowledge, Modeling Christ, Serving Others” – to guide everything it does, Magness said.
“True happiness with yourself comes from living as you should live,” Magness said. “And all the other stuff just sort of falls into place.”
Surrounding the academics with a commitment to faith and service makes a Catholic education unique, Magness said. “There’s no education like the Catholic education.”
Photos by Rick Musacchio
Annika Pinell works on an art project at St. Matthew School. The 4th graders were drawing pictures of a face in a symmetry art exercise and were using their thumb and forefinger to measure their features.
Zach Engel and other eighth grades students at St. Matthew School talk with their teacher after taking a science test.
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