One of the celebrated feats of the corporate reform movement is Tennessee’s Achievement School District. It was launched by then-State Commissioner Kevin Huffman as the way to increase the performance of the state’s lowest performing schools. Huffman recruited Chris Barbic, founder of the Yes Prep charter chain to run ASD. Barbic said that ASD would take the 5% of the state’s lowest performing schools, and in five years, these schools would be in the state’s top 25%.
It didn’t happen. Barbic resigned. Gary Rubinstein reviewed state data and learned that the six original schools in the ASD made no improvement. A Vanderbilt study said the same.
Now state legislators are introducing legislation to close the ASD.
A number of other states, such as Georgia, are opening their own ASD. What sensible person would use failure as a model?
ASD is another setback for corporate reform. None of the reform ideas has succeeded. Their only “achievement ” is to introduce disruption. Nothing good comes of it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Too bad Barbic didn’t say, I’m going to take the 5% lowest performing schools and double the state’s funding that goes to them.
As basic and predictable as gravity, improvement takes more resources.
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It wouldn’t be so scary to people if the ed reform “rock stars” weren’t immediately promoted to National Policy Makers after they run one of these experiments.
“The below transcript is an e-mail exchange between New America Foundation fellow and former Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman and The Seventy Four’s Matt Barnum, discussing the resignation of Arne Duncan, the backlash to testing and the education legacy of President Obama. What, if anything, should the Obama administration have done differently? Was reform too fast — or too slow? What are the lessons for reformers going forward? ”
It’s not an “experiment” if they start it in one state and them immediately lobby to expand it to all states, before they have the “results” of the “experiment”.
That’s an ideology- a belief system.
https://www.the74million.org/article/the-74-debate-huffman-vs-barnum-on-duncans-legacy-testing-backlash-and-the-future-of-reform
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The reformers’ problem is their arrogance. They don’t need trials, they plunge ahead with religious faith in their solutions, without evidence. Children and communities are collateral damage
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“Reform: is rife with bad ideas. Backed by billionaires, they’re like the terminator. Just when you think one of them has fallen, there’s a rebirth of a bad idea in another state. They continue to ignore poverty, and endorse non-evidence based schemes: VAM, standardized testing, merit pay, high SAT pay differential, charters, etc. They make politicized judgments based on bias rather than facts. Maybe they should open their eyes to some other initiatives. http://www.boldapproach.org/
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The so-called reformers are certainly arrogant, but they are also willfully ignorant, deceptive, disingenuous, vapid, power hungry and greedy.
Did I leave anything out?
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“That’s an ideology- a belief system.”
NO!, it’s not an ideology, it’s an idiology*.
*From OYE’s Devil’s Dictionary:
idiology (n.)
a. Any ideology or belief system based on falsehoods and errors.
b. The belief system of idiots.
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“What sensible person would use failure as a model?”
Always glad to find another Ionesco fan:
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
😎
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What sensible person would use failure as a model?
Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of Texas….he is hell-bent on instituting a A-F system for each campus…..while at the same time many states have abandoned the idea.
https://davidrtayloreducation.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/the-scarlet-letter-again/
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Let’s add Bill Gates, the Walton family, the Koch bothers, Eli Broad, etc. and a flock of greedy hedge funds to that list of fraudulent fools.
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I’m sure there are more politicians. Lt. Dan(in my best Forest Gump voice) is leading the insanity in Texas closely followed by our Governor Abbott who just named a non-educator the new State Commissioner of Education.
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The governor of Texas wants to lead ALEC’s charge to rewrite the Constitution. http://www.texastribune.org/2016/01/12/gop-leaders-mostly-silent-abbotts-constitution-pla/
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Retired Teacher…that was a frightening article. So if Abbot can’t get amendments passed, does that mean he will recommend that Texas secede from the US.
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I don’t know, but I know he is leading the charge from ALEC.
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Sorry, off-topic, but had to share. Chris Christie – the well-known education expert, of course – says that recess is “stupid”: http://danielskatz.net/2016/01/21/chris-christie-calls-mandatory-recess-bill-stupid/
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Christie doesn’t consider physical exercise important?
What a surprise.
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Because he’s overweight!
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He only considers one exercise important…..fork to mouth
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The only thing ASD did was give a little competition to Shelby County Schools to begin the iZone program, a similar concept run by the local district whose schools have outperformed ASD.
ASD should now go away and let those resources go into improving the iZone program with local leadership.
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The reason none of these money making schemes has worked is because they all ignore the root cause of children who are not learning, and that is the environment the children live in outside of school with poverty being the largest factor.
The evidence is overwhelming what the real cause is. For instance, a 2013 Stanford report revealed: “There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in EVERY country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.”
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
And until the corporate public education demolition derby figures a way to improve the education of most of these at risk children and profit off people who live in poverty at the same time, the autocratic, for-profit, private-sector, opaque and often fraudulent and/or inferior corporate charters and online education schemes are not going to go away as long as they have support from enough ignorant and/or corrupt elected officials from the White House on down that allows them to legally keep stealing from taxpayers.
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I think they also ignore the root meaning and placement of public schools in participatory democracy.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to the true heart of the matter (democracy) being eclipsed by market mindsets.
A market economy, fine. But is has to be situated within a democratic culture when towns and cities are structured based on people’s needs, which includes schools for all children. We seem so confused about the lines and boundaries of where markets leave off and human needs pick up. I guess it’s true in other areas too, like medicine and housing and food. But it seems like we are moving backward.
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I agree but I’m not okay with a market based education system that MUST make a profit because to generate that profit means cutting services that the non-profit, community based, transparent, democratic public schools provide for children. And we already see this happening with the parent lawsuit against Success Academy for nying or cutting mandated services and support for special ed children.
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Yeah NC still discusses this idea and I don’t get why.
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Georgia too
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Memphis teacher here.
The ASD is a pack of lying liars. Watch this 22 minute video for proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktRkk_QDpuw
The original schools of the ASD were directly run by the state and they are now making good gains. That arm of the ASD, the one that directly runs schools, is essentially shutting its doors and instead the schools are being sold off to charter management organizations that have zero accountability. One such CMO, Scholar Academies, was offered 12 schools by the ASD.
The new Superintendent of the ASD, Malika Anderson, has done away with the audacious goal of elevating the bottom 5% of schools to the top 25%. Rather, she hides under her legal mantle and says that the law only requires the ASD to put interventions in place.
Barbic’s own charter chain, Yes Prep, pulled out of the ASD because the situation was so dire and community support was so low.
This year, the ASD tried to engage the community by forming Neighborhood Advisory Councils to vote on whether charter operators should be matched with local schools. The whole process was a sham. Please watch the above linked video for an explanation of that fact.
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Are you encouraged though, that the bill is bipartisan? That seems to indicate the state lawmakers aren’t afraid to buck the ed reform crew, that they see (some) support for public schools in both Parties.
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Moderately encouraged.
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And the university of Washington ‘s center for reinventing public education (CRPE) ranked ASD 2nd overall for implementing education “reforms” only surpassed by New Orleans. Number 3? Denver where the turnaround zone is about to start another turnaround because round one was such a disaster. But we will continue doing the same things the same ways. And Denver has no one pushing back. Sad. Good for Tennessee for recognizing failure and stopping the waste of money and the ensuing chaos
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It is only a small contingent of legislators in TN who are in support of this bill, I’m afraid.
The ASD has a TVAAS level of 1. That’s Tennessee’s way of saying that students’ scores, on average, were lower than they were the year before.
Shelby County Schools, on the other hand, has a TVAAS score of 5.
The New Orleans Recovery district lost ground last academic year, but just by a little. Half of the schools are F’s and D’s, half are C’s and B’s. No A’s.
So you can figure out with how much salt to take CRPE stuff.
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There are two pieces of damning evidence of systematic silencing of community dissent with neighborhood advisory councils. To make matters worse, they tried to make it look like acceptance. It was out and out fraud really. It’s no different than in years past, they were just really bad about covering it up.
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The Obama Administration promoted Huffman constantly, for years.
“Duncan was joined by Kevin Huffman, Tennessee’s education commissioner.
Huffman challenged the prevailing view that most special education students lag behind because of their disabilities. He said most lag behind because they’re not expected to succeed if they’re given more demanding schoolwork and because they’re seldom tested
“In Tennessee, we’ve seen over time that our students with disabilities did not have access to strong assessments. So the results were not providing an honest picture of how those students were doing.”
It’s amazing how influential this small group of ed reformers became – they weren’t just running these “reform” cities and states- they were given a national platform and access to “reform” every public school in the country.
To call these ideas or theories “experiments” is ridiculous. They immediately scaled anything and everything these people proposed and applied it to the whole country.
Look back thru Duncan’s speeches, appearances and public statements. You find three places the Obama Administration promoted as models for the whole country over and over and over- New Orleans, DC and Tennessee.
50 states and tens of thousands of public schools and Duncan promoted the same small group of people and narrow set of ideas. It wasn’t an accident they became so influential. Everyone else was either ignored or never consulted.
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