Heidi Hall - The Tennessean -

Tennessee’s education leaders are taking another run at being released from No Child Left Behind’s accountability system, revising an application that the U.S. Department of Education will get its first look at Tuesday.

On Monday, State Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman said the original, seven-page letter asking for a waiver from NCLB has grown into a 70-page formal application with hundreds of pages of supporting documents. But the spirit remains the same: Tennessee wants its own way of measuring high-performing schools and a way out from under the federal measurement. It imposes sanctions on schools for anything less than 20 percent year-over-year performance gains in math and reading.

Huffman said lawmakers who passed NCLB probably thought there would be a reauthorization that addressed the huge jumps required to save schools from sanctions, but that didn’t happen.

“Nobody believes they can hit them, and they’re right,” he said. “No state or district in the country has ever done (that).”

Tennessee’s system would eliminate the existing Adequate Yearly Progress labels under NCLB and group schools into new categories:

• The top 5 percent highest performing based on scores.

• The top 5 percent highest performing based on learning gains. Both of the top groups are in the “reward” category.

• The 75 percent of schools in the middle are in the “other” category.

• The bottom 15 percent, with the lowest 5 percent in proficiency and graduation rates named “priority” and the 10 percent above that – with either a large racial, economic and ethnic achievement gap but not a “priority” level problem on graduation rates – named “focus.”

A preliminary list will be released Tuesday, but Huffman says that will change based on spring testing.

He doesn’t anticipate a congressional rewrite of NCLB to happen before the U.S. Department of Education decides on Tennessee’s application, which should be by the end of the school year. Federal officials have lauded Tennessee for dramatically raising standards of student performance, awarding the state a $500 million grant in 2009 for school reform.

Districts with priority schools would have to send improvement plans to the state under the waiver request, and the bottom 5 percent would be in the state’s Achievement School District and handed off to charter school or other organizations to run.