Barret's Chapel Elementary/Middle School

Barret's Chapel Elementary/Middle School is a small PK-8 school in Arlington, TN, enrolling roughly 300 students and operating under Memphis-Shelby County Schools, a district ranked near the bottom of Tennessee. Despite its location, the school is physically surrounded by some of the state's highest-performing districts, including Arlington Community Schools, Lakeland School System, Bartlett City Schools, and Tipton County Schools. This creates a stark divide: Barret's Chapel outperforms its own district by roughly 10 percentage points in most subjects, yet it significantly underperforms the high-achieving schools just a few miles away.

Statewide, Barret's Chapel ranks 573rd out of 1,019 schools (44th percentile), placing it just below the state median. Proficiency rates trail state averages by 7 to 20 points, and the school is the lowest-performing among all nearby schools with available data in both math (32.1%) and ELA (34.2%). One of the most telling trends is a sharp grade-level drop-off. Early elementary grades show promise—3rd grade math proficiency is 48.1% and 5th grade ELA is 56.3%—but middle school performance falls dramatically, with 8th grade math collapsing to just 6.1% proficiency compared to the 38.3% state average. This struggle is compounded by a resource paradox: the school spends over $22,000 per student, nearly double the per-pupil spending of nearby Atoka Elementary School and far more than high-performing neighbors like Bon Lin Elementary School or Donelson Elementary School, without yielding comparable academic results.

Attendance is a relative strength, with a chronic absenteeism rate of 14.3%—far better than the Memphis-Shelby district average of 30.2% and an improvement from 21.9% two years ago. However, it still lags behind neighboring districts like Lakeland Elementary School (6.9%) and Atoka (8.2%). On a positive note, the school is recovering from pandemic-era lows, climbing from the 18th percentile in 2021-2022 to the 44th percentile in 2025-2026, though it remains below its pre-pandemic 52nd percentile and holds a 2-star rating. Because of its small enrollment, test scores and subgroup rankings can swing significantly year to year, but the overall picture is clear: promising early elementary instruction is being undermined by a concerning middle school experience, particularly in math.