Gary Rubinstein has been following the progress—or lack thereof—of Tennessee’s Achievement School District. Funded with $100 million from Race to the Top money, led by a top-drawer charter school operator from YES Prep, it was supposed to take the lowest-performing schools in the state and catapult them into the top performing, in only five years. The secret ingredient for their promised success wasturning them over to charters operators.
Sadly, it didn’t work.
Gary Rubinstein writes here about the latest gambit. Rebrand the failed ASD!
Legerdemain!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Rebranding is a marketing term, and this term is useless in meaningful educational outcomes. Rebranding is like putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig. You can create awesome marketing materials with a lofty mission and vision statement. If you do not actually build a community of learners, you are not going to have one. Changing the culture of a school district is a laborious task that requires trained educators that can work with the community over time. If your community is poor and you ignore the impact of poverty, you are going to fail regardless of how many marketeers you hire to state “lofty goals.”
Here’s the really important question.
If you put lipstick on Arne Duncan, is he still Arne Duncan?
How about Betsy DeVos? Is she still Arne Duncan if you put lipstick on her?
LMAO! Arne and Ditzy, indistinguishable, lipstick or not
Arne is greedy and stupid….a wannabe….a hyena
Betsy is greedy, sly and mean. Top of the food chain….a lion
Betsy can eat the likes of the “Arne’s” for breakfast and still hunger for more
Putting lipstick on either can’t hide anything once they open their pie holes to speak.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
A coach I worked for during my first couple of years as a teacher/coach had a saying.
You can add all the sugar and spice and perfumes you want to a bucket of cow manure and all you will end up with is a cut of cow manure with a different smell.
bucket not cut
An apt analogy
Thank you. A little country witticism is appropriate at times.
As an authority on cow manure (I grew up on a dairy farm), I would like to defend this substance from its place in infamy. My father used cow manure to add fertility to the soil on out Tennessee hill farm, rutted and gullied by years of bad soil management. Even the smell is superior to those urban locations where our own excrement is processed. Worst of all, of course, is the manure from the male bovine, commonly discovered in the halls of politicics.
Roy, I also come from a dairy farm background in Kansas. Yes, manure has many positive virtues but this was a fair analogy to describe how they keep repacking crap and thinking we are going to buy it.
One of my closest friends grew up in Burns. On a dairy.
Question: Is utter failure in an education post a requirement for membership in Chiefs for Change, or does this just happen to be the case with those inducted into the coven?
Be still my heart! Oh, woe is me!
Wherefore art thou ASD?
If called by any other name,
Woulds’t thou not soon transforméd be?
Deformy magic’s not to blame
For this, the nadir of thy fame.
Surely it is put the name
That so bedevils thee!
cx: but the name, ofc
It is inconceivable that anything can be done for these schools without dramatically changing the way Federal Government relates to schools in places like Memphis. Poverty is exacerbated by the phenomena associated with the agricultural revolution up and down the Mississippi river during the last generation. I used to barely joke that Memphis was the Capitol city of four states. Unless the federal government intervenes to do something about the entrenched poverty there, countless children will continue to grow up without guidance. Even successful people from some of these places attribute their success to the escape they made from some high school and into some other place. That said,I met agroup of bright and dedicated members of those teachers who had come to lobby in Nashville for their schools. Pity they have to watch money poured down the throat of failing charters.
But you don’t understand, Roy. Deformy data-based numerology will fix everything without having to deal with the underlying poverty. It’s magic!
Considering the tales I have heard from present and former teachers there, I do not know what will answer. Suffice it to say that folks with a lot more sense about their needs than Huffman or anyone else who has existed at the state level have been unable to do anything.
I think the latest trick of the reformers is to hire African Americans to sell the choice/charter/personalized learning agenda. See the newest leader of ASD, or the group called Campaign for School Equity (this organizes high school kids to promote school choice)
http://www.campaignforschoolequity.org/about/
or Memphis Lift
which helpfully does “School choice counseling” for parents
or the Federation for Children
https://www.federationforchildren.org/blog/
(which even promotes model legislations
https://www.federationforchildren.org/school-choice-america/model-legislation/
)
And of course, TFA has a “diversity initiative” which is paradoxial, to say the least
https://scholar.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=educ_facpapers
I wonder if anybody did a useful, general overview on these diversity initiatives of reform groups which, as far as I can tell, pretty successfully muddy the waters around school choice.