Four questions to ask before you choose a school

The four questions

Most schools will show you a tour. Ask for the answers.

Websites and open houses are designed to impress. These four questions cut through that. Ask them of the principal, of a teacher, and of a student if you can — and notice whether the answers match.

What is the school’s vision and mission?

A mission is not a slogan on the wall. It is the answer to a simple question: what does this school believe a child needs to become, and what does it do every day because of that belief? When a school knows its answer, you can feel it in the hallways. When it doesn’t, every decision is improvised.

What to ask

Can you describe the school’s mission in one sentence? Would a teacher here say the same thing?
What kind of person is this school trying to help my child become — not just what scores, but what character and skills?
What is one thing you do here because of your mission that most schools don’t?
How will the adults here get to know my child — and how will I know they do?
What happens when a student falls behind, or when a student is bored?

What is the school’s performance?

Two numbers give you a starting point. Proficiency is the share of students who read and do math on grade level. Growth is whether students learned more this year than students like them typically do — Tennessee calls this TVAAS, and scores it from 1 to 5. A school can be high on one and low on the other. You want to see both, and you want to see them for students like yours.

What to ask

What share of your students are on grade level in reading and in math? How has that changed over three years?
How are students from families like mine doing — by income, by language, by learning needs?
What is your growth (TVAAS) score, and what are you doing to raise it?
How many teachers came back this year? How many students?
If I asked your eighth graders whether they feel challenged and known here, what would they say?

The chart below shows these numbers for every public middle school in Nashville. Jump to the data ↓

How does the school build character and the skills that last?

Every school says it cares about the whole child. Few can show you how. The habits that matter most in a life — managing your attention and your time, working with people different from you, taking a worthy risk, finishing something hard, knowing what you stand for — are learnable. But they only grow when they are taught, practiced, and expected across the whole school, by adults who model them. Left to chance, they become a poster in the hallway and a discipline policy.

What to ask

Which human skills do you deliberately teach — and where in the week does that actually happen?
Will one adult know my child well, across years? How many students is that adult responsible for?
Where do students get real responsibility — a team, a project with a real audience, a role in the community — and not just a worksheet about responsibility?
When a student struggles with focus, organization, or motivation, what do you teach them to do about it?
When a student breaks a rule or breaks trust, what happens? Is the goal to punish, or to repair and learn?
How will I see my child’s growth in these things — beyond a behavior grade?

What is the school’s plan for educational technology and AI?

This is bigger than chatbots like ChatGPT. It includes the learning apps, online practice, and tutoring programs your child may spend hours on each week — more and more of them powered by AI. Your child will graduate into a world where this technology is everywhere. That makes two things true at once: students need to learn to use powerful tools with judgment, and they need to be protected from using them in ways that quietly hollow out their own thinking. A school with no plan will end up with one by accident. Ask what the plan is.

What to ask

Safety and judgment
When is my child expected not to use AI — and how do you teach the difference between help and a shortcut?
How do you protect student privacy across the apps and programs you use, and teach students to spot bias and error in what a machine tells them?
Learning
Which apps and programs will my child use, and for how much of the day? What do they do that a teacher wouldn’t?
Does all that technology give my child more time with teachers, or less?
Teachers and policy
Have your teachers been trained on the tools they use? Is there a written policy I can read?
What my child walks away with
By eighth grade, what will my child be able to do with AI — and what will they be able to do without it?

Taking a tour? and bring them with you.

Question 2, answered

Nashville’s middle schools at a glance

Each dot is a public middle school. Further right means more students reading on grade level; higher means more students doing math on grade level. The color shows growth — how much students learned in the most recent year with published growth scores (2025), compared with what was expected.

Where to look first

The dashed lines mark the Nashville median. Schools above and to the right of both lines are ahead of most of the city in reading and math. Distance from the lines matters more than which side.

Why color matters

A dark green dot low on the chart is a school whose students are catching up fast. A red dot high on the chart may be coasting on students who arrived ahead. Position is where students are; color is where they’re headed.

Switch the view

The second button shows only students from economically disadvantaged families. Watch which dots move a little and which move a lot — it tells you whether a school serves every student, or mainly some.

Show academic magnets (entrance by test)

Tap a dot to see the school. Turn your phone sideways for labels.

Growth (2025 TVAAS): 1 Well below 2 Below 3 As expected 4 Above 5 Well above

Exact figure not published (under 5% or over 95%)

See the numbers as a table

School	Grades	Reading 2026 All	Reading Econ. disadv.	Math 2026 All	Math Econ. disadv.	Growth 2025

Source: Tennessee Department of Education. Reading and math figures are spring 2026 TCAP results (2025–26 school year), from the Tennessee State Report Card’s 2026 TCAP results dashboard. Growth is the 2025 TVAAS school composite from the 2025 Report Card, the latest growth data the state has published; 2026 growth scores are expected later in the school year. The composite reflects growth across all four tested subjects — English language arts, math, science, and social studies — not reading and math alone, so a school’s color and its position on the chart draw on different sets of tests. “On grade level” means the share of students scoring Met or Exceeded Expectations. Several schools also serve grades outside middle school, and only their middle school grades are shown. For Martin Luther King Jr. (grades 7–12) and Stratford STEM (5–12), the state’s grades 3–8 TCAP figures already exclude high school courses, so they are used as reported. For East End Prep, Explore, Nashville Classical East, and Nashville Collegiate Prep, which also serve elementary grades (and, for Nashville Collegiate, high school), the grades 6–8 figures were calculated from the state’s grade-level results; a few are approximate where the state withheld a grade. The Johnson Alternative Learning Center is not shown because families do not choose it. Middle schools shown are those with 2026 results; new schools without results yet are not included.

Go deeper

This is a starting point, not the whole picture.

Test scores and growth are two of many things that matter. Before you decide, look at the fuller record — and visit.

Nashville School Choice Guide

An independent guide to more than 240 Nashville schools — zoned, magnet, charter and private, from pre-K through high school — with a zoned-school finder, neighborhood filters, side-by-side comparison, and a Spanish version. A project of Ezell Consulting.

Open the guide →

schoolschoiceguide.com

Tennessee State Report Card

The state’s official page for every public school. It now has spring 2026 TCAP results by school and student group, alongside the 2025 Report Card for growth, attendance, discipline, and teacher information.

Look up a school →

reportcard.tnedu.gov

A note from Horizon

Horizon Academies is a public school in development, opening in Nashville in 2028. We wrote this guide because we believe every family deserves clear, honest information about their options — wherever their child ends up enrolling.

When Horizon opens, we will answer these same four questions in public, in plain language, and we would encourage every school to do the same. If you want to know how we’re thinking about them now, read about the model or write to us.