Gary Rubenstein has been following the evolution of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, one of the biggest corporate reform programs in the nation. It started with great fanfare in 2011, using Race to the Top funding. The plan was to take control of the state’s lowest performing schools and turn them over to charters. The founders promised to vault these schools from the bottom 5% in the state to the Top 20% in five years. It hasn’t happened. Now big-name charter chains are bailing out.
“By making such a grand proclamation of what they were going to accomplish, the ASD invited a lot of scrutiny. After a few years there was a Vanderbilt analysis that said that students in the ASD were not making very much progress. In November 2014, Green Dot abandoned their plans to take over a high school. This started a parade of high profile charter operators leaving or reducing their stake in the ASD. In March 2015 a bizarre thing happened. YES prep, the charter chain that Chris Barbic started, at the last minute abandoned their plans to open a school in the ASD. In October 2016 Gestalt Charter Schools announced that they will stop running their two schools which included Humes, one of the original six ASD schools. Their other school, Klondike Elementary School, will actually close next year because of this, the first ASD school to be shut down. And most recently, just a few weeks ago, the gold standard of charter schools, KIPP Charter Schools, announced that they will pull out of KIPP Memphis Collegiate Schools. Watching the ASD unravel does make me look quite prophetic when I predicted this in my open letter to Chris Barbic back in 2012.
“One thing that was good about the ASD experiment was that these charter schools were taking over existing schools so that they would truly have the ‘same kids’ that they always claim to have when they compare themselves to the nearby ‘failing’ schools. In this way the ASD made it more difficult for these charter schools to do as many of the tricks they do elsewhere to choose the students who will raise their test scores. The fact that all these high profile charters are turning around and fleeing the ASD just shows what a fraud these charter chains are when they are stripped of the smoke and mirrors that they have used to build their influence and fame.”
This opens the window of opportunity for vouchers. Get those private schools ready!
Like!
Except “get those public private schools ready, or is it private public schools”, eh!
In 2011, fueled by winning a Race To The Top grant, then education commissioner and former TFA vice president and former husband of Michelle Rhee, Kevin Huffman hired TFA alum and founder of Houston’s YES Prep charter schools Chris Barbic to be the ASD’s first superintendent.”
I just love that sentence.
Ed reform is a club, basically. Duncan to Rhee to Huffman to Barbic.
Will anyone ever go back and document the results of this experiment, or will it be like the Detroit EAA, where it was “reformed” in 2012 with great fanfare and celebrity sightings and then never mentioned again?
There was reams written about the launch of this experiment. They’re not going to just bury the failures, are they?
Let’s see, there was the Texas miracle, the New Orleans miracle, the Florida miracle… An admission of failure would be a real miracle.
LeftCoastTeacher:
What you said.
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What they need is an actual authentic researcher to conduct a study on the results of all this “reform.” We need lots evidence to prove that “reform” is more about shifting funding than improved academic outcomes. We need some policymakers that want to save public education. I agree with LeftCoastTeacher that an admission of failure would be a real miracle. It is all about robbing public schools under the veil of “choice.”
retired teacher:
You wrote, in part, that corporate education reform is “more about shifting funding than improved academic outcomes.”
Thank you for saying so much in so few words.
😎
Re previous postings on this blog about snappy slogans and memorable catchphrases.
Gary R’s blog posting literally suggested the following to me: when corporate charter schools and their enablers fail to live up to THEIR OWN promises and hype, they protect their business bottom line by resorting to that old standby:
Fail & Flee.
Because the need to protect all that $tudent $ucce$$ Trumps the needs of students, parents and communities.
Based on past events, predictable. Just one example. This blog, 5-7-2015, “New Orleans: Collusion, Conflicts of Interest, Money, and Power”—
[startexcerptofposting]
This is the story of the destruction of John McDonogh High School in New Orleans. Once a community hub, it was taken over in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Students, alumni, and community members have repeatedly appealed, demonstrated, and gone to the state board to seek the return of the school as a public school. They have been stymied and rebuffed again and again by State Superintendent John White and the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. This post is a chronology of the events at John McDonogh, from 2005 to the present. Those in the local community who remember what the school was continue to fight for its revival.
At one point, John White promised to consider a plan but then abruptly turned the school over to Steve Barr, who long ago created the Green Dot charter chain and then started a new charter chain called the Future is Now (FIN). Oprah filmed a show about Barr’s new charter school in New Orleans and promised to follow what she was sure would be the miraculous transformation of a “failing school” into a great charter school. Scores plummeted at John McDonogh under FIN, and the charter left town.
[endexcerptofposting]
[typo fixed in original]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2015/05/07/new-orleans-collusion-conflicts-of-interest-money-and-power/
Steve Barr. Green Dot. FIN. Oprah. Promises. Charter left town.
Fail & Flee.
Because when it comes to rheephorm, well, it sounds better in French: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” [Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr]. The thrust is “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
😎
The question KTA is: Is Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr alive or dead?
This is so important. Charters almost got a big win in Nashville and I can feel the tension here in Tennessee. Thank you for following and reporting on yet another charter failure.