Shelby County Districts
Six municipal districts split off from Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) in 2014 — Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville, Germantown, Lakeland, and Millington — and now operate as their own LEAs within the county. This compares all seven on the same TDOE files, at district grain. It answers a different question than the Tennessee-peer comparison elsewhere on this dashboard (Nashville, Hamilton, and Knox County, MSCS’s size peers statewide): this is about MSCS’s own county neighbors, not similarly sized districts elsewhere in Tennessee. The two comparisons are never combined into one table.
MSCS enrolls roughly three-quarters of the county’s public-LEA students, and its population differs sharply from its six neighbors’: 59% economically disadvantaged and 74% Black, against a 3%–32% and 13%–45% range across the other six. The district-total comparison below is real, but reading it without that context risks the wrong story — that MSCS is simply underperforming, rather than that it serves a very different population under very different conditions. The subgroup table further down is closer to an apples-to-apples read: it compares MSCS’s Black students to each other district’s Black students, its economically disadvantaged students to each other district’s, and so on — and even there, MSCS’s subgroups score below the same subgroups everywhere else in the county, including Millington, the demographically closest of the six. Both tables are worth reading together, not either alone.
| District | ELA proficiency (grades 3-8, All Students) | Math proficiency (grades 3-8, All Students) | Total enrollment | Economically disadvantaged students | Black share of enrollment | Chronic absenteeism (All Grades, All Students) | Four-year graduation rate (federal cohort) | Teacher retention rate | Per-pupil expenditure | TVAAS literacy & numeracy growth composite (1-5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) | 24.6% | 22.1% | 105,856 | 59% | 74% | 30.2% | 84.1% | 81.7% | $14,595 | Level 5 of 5 |
| Arlington Community Schools | 67.1% | 72.7% | 4,341 | 5% | 16% | 6.5% | 94.9% | 89.7% | $13,695 | Level 3 of 5 |
| Bartlett City Schools | 47.7% | 56.6% | 8,635 | 14% | 32% | 12.1% | 94.8% | 87.4% | $13,146 | Level 4 of 5 |
| Collierville Schools | 70.8% | 74.6% | 9,119 | 6% | 17% | 9.8% | 94.1% | 88.3% | $13,256 | Level 5 of 5 |
| Germantown Municipal School District | 70.4% | 75.8% | 5,932 | 3% | 13% | 6.6% | 97.4% | 89.3% | $13,282 | Level 4 of 5 |
| Lakeland School System | 63.8% | 62.5% | 2,478 | 5% | 15% | 7.4% | N/A | 89.8% | $12,437 | Level 1 of 5 |
| Millington Municipal Schools | 33.9% | 33.2% | 2,461 | 32% | 45% | 16.6% | 92.2% | 85.0% | $14,197 | Level 1 of 5 |
| Shelby County (7 public LEAs, enrollment-weighted) | 33.5% | 32.6% | 138,822 | 47.2% | 61.7% | 25.3% | 86.8%6 of 7 districts reporting | 83.3% | $14,286 | — |
Subgroup Comparison
ELA and Math proficiency for the same student subgroup, across all seven districts — closer to an apples-to-apples read than the district totals above, since it holds race or economic status constant and varies only the district. TDOE reports all five of these subgroups for all seven districts with no suppressed cells, including for Lakeland and Millington, the county’s two smallest systems.
One limit worth naming: TDOE does not publish a race-by-economic-disadvantage breakdown at any grain, in this file or any other TDOE file this dashboard uses. So a district’s Black subgroup, for example, still mixes economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students in whatever proportion that district actually has — a proportion that differs by district and isn’t shown here. If a wealthier district’s Black students score higher than MSCS’s, part of that gap could reflect a lower economically-disadvantaged share within that subgroup rather than race alone, and this table can’t separate the two. That is a real limit of the underlying TDOE data, not something this page can compute around.
| District | Black or African American | Economically Disadvantaged | White | Hispanic | Students with Disabilities | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ELA | Math | ELA | Math | ELA | Math | ELA | Math | ELA | Math | |
| Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) | 22.3% | 18.8% | 18.6% | 15.9% | 53.0% | 48.2% | 25.5% | 27.5% | 6.0% | 6.9% |
| Arlington Community Schools | 61.0% | 67.1% | 50.0% | 51.9% | 68.9% | 73.6% | 62.7% | 70.6% | 26.5% | 36.6% |
| Bartlett City Schools | 40.7% | 47.7% | 27.4% | 35.0% | 52.5% | 61.8% | 41.7% | 52.4% | 10.9% | 16.4% |
| Collierville Schools | 48.1% | 51.9% | 37.3% | 35.7% | 74.5% | 77.7% | 58.5% | 60.1% | 26.5% | 32.5% |
| Germantown Municipal School District | 44.6% | 49.8% | 38.5% | 40.0% | 73.7% | 79.3% | 65.9% | 68.5% | 25.1% | 35.5% |
| Lakeland School System | 50.7% | 50.3% | 33.8% | 39.1% | 68.0% | 66.6% | 54.1% | 49.7% | 21.1% | 29.9% |
| Millington Municipal Schools | 27.8% | 26.6% | 22.3% | 21.8% | 40.8% | 40.2% | 30.6% | 32.0% | 9.3% | 8.7% |
| Shelby County (7 public LEAs, enrollment-weighted) | 24.1% | 21.3% | 19.2% | 16.8% | 63.6% | 66.5% | 28.8% | 31.2% | 9.4% | 11.7% |
Lakeland has no four-year graduation rate
Lakeland School System operates no high school — TDOE’s own Report Card finance file lists exactly two Lakeland schools (Lakeland Elementary School, Lakeland Preparatory School) and no high school, so it has no graduating cohort to report. That is a structural absence from TDOE’s cohort file, not a suppressed value — shown as N/A rather than “Suppressed”. The county aggregate for this one metric is computed on the other six districts and discloses that explicitly (“6 of 7 districts reporting”).
Data gap: school-level detail
This page is district-level only. School-level detail for the six municipal districts isn’t available yet — their schools aren’t in this dashboard’s school directory, which needs its own address and coordinate data before a school-level table or map layer can be built.
Source: TDOE district assessment (2025-26), District Profile, TVAAS district composite, chronic absenteeism, four-year graduation cohort, teacher retention, and Report Card finance files (2024-25 for the latter six — TDOE releases these on different cadences). Rates and dollar figures are enrollment- (or, for graduation rate, cohort-) weighted across the seven districts to compute the Shelby County aggregate row — never a flat average, which would let Lakeland’s roughly 2,500 students count as much as MSCS’s roughly 106,000. The subgroup table’s per-subgroup county aggregate is weighted the same way, using that subgroup’s own tested-student count in each district. The TVAAS growth composite (1–5) is shown per district only, with no county aggregate: averaging an ordinal growth level across seven very differently sized districts the way a percentage is enrollment-weighted would assert a precision this dashboard has no basis for. Suppressed cells are never estimated, excluded, or shown as zero.