Gary Rubinstein has followed the evolution of the Tennessee Achievement School District closely since it was launched in 2011.
In this post, he warns reformers and others to beware of copying the concept. It failed. Do not replicate failure might be the message. Although states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada seem determined to replicate the ASD, regardless of its failure.
The ASD, you may recall, pledged to take the bottom-scoring 5% of schools in the state and vault them to the top 25% in five years. It hasn’t happened. As Gary shows, achievement gains have been negligible at best.
Despite the failure of the ASD to meet its goals, the new Every Student Succeeds Act endorses the idea that the state should take over the bottom 5% of schools and fix them. ASD have proved that this is no simple matter.
Gary writes:
Each time the idea of creating an ASD is introduced by a state legislator, testimony from people whose own professional futures depend on the perception of success in the Tennessee ASD are used to get the required votes. Various education reform lobbyist groups produce reports and blogs about how successful these ASDs have been.
I think that education is a true science and one that deserves to evolve according to the scientific method. In the case of these ASDs, the initial conjecture would be that tenured teachers cause low test scores. The experiment to verify this conjecture is to create an ASD somewhere like Tennessee, fire the tenured teachers, and let the charter schools take over and teach the students. Education reformers seem to have no problem with these first steps. But the power of the scientific method is completely nullified when the results of the experiment are ignored when they contradict the working conjecture. That is what has happened in this case and why ASDs are gaining momentum around the country.
Any state considering making an ASD would be wise to listen to the words of the pioneer of the Tennessee ASD, former superintendent, Chris Barbic. A few months ago on a panel discussion Barbic was asked if he thought it was good that various states were considering replicating his program. Even he had his doubts. He said that there is a very limited supply of charters capable of executing these difficult turnaround efforts. If twelve states, he said, are all trying to get the same four or five charter operators, “it’s gonna create an issue.” Considering his dream team of charter operators could not move the original ASD schools out of the bottom 5%, this is a sobering assessment of the viability of creating franchises of these turnaround districts around the country.
Education reform is full of false promises and magic beans. Whether it is charter schools, test-based teacher evaluations, school closures, merit pay, making a more difficult curriculum, common core standardized tests, computerized learning, these strategies should not proliferate based on skewed PR, but on actual merit. How can we expect kids to become critical thinkers when decisions about their future are made by people who refuse to be critical thinkers themselves?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All experiments in education should be small in scale but USDE and the franchise thinkers and billionaires all want everything “at scale” and ASAP.
The fact that the experiments are done of children and young people not yet of age, and almost always without the informed consent of parents–no sign off for “human subjects” research–makes all of these “experiments” really unethical in addition to some prospect of being illegal.
The administrative and managerial policies now marketed as if grounded in scientific reasoning are too often nothing more than theories of action imported into education from economics and business management. Policies are sharply focussed on getting the most bang for the buck with predictions of outcomes based on tinkering with school management and various resets of quotas for student and teacher productivity.
Increments in test scores are among the most important measures of performance, but others are coming into view as predictors of so-called “college and career readiness” and life chances. Among these are “proper” mindset and grit; records of absentees, suspensions, expulsions; variants of customer satisfaction surveys extracted from students and parents; measures of school “culture” gleaned from teachers, administrators, custodial workers; records of on-and off-campus incidents reported to “school resource officers” and police; records of issues in building maintenance, including broken glass, bathroom fixtures not working.
School improvement will happen If you just do the stack up and summarize the ratings and dump the lower 10% percent of underperforming units every year, while raising the bar by 10% for everyone still in school, including employees.
That is the theory behind the achievement districts and the not so new management scheme reported Wall Street Journal today. Just make sure there is “Nowhere to hide for ‘deadwood’ workers.” Become more like Kimberly-Clark where management “throws out paternalism to focus on employee performance” and is using performance software with data dashboards for “talent management.” The proprietary software, called Workday, identifies employees whose performance is unacceptable or inconsistent relative to productivity/sales targets. Workday also produces ratings of the econbomic risk to the company if a given employee stays or leaves.
Achievement districts will never “meet expectations” without sending their lowest performing students and teachers somewhere else. That is required if you think education is a business, and that management is the key to better matrices…not much need for science or experiments, just do it.
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metrics, not matrices
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