Most of the charter schools in the failing “Achievement School District” are in Memphis. The bloom is definitely off the rose for charters in Memphis.
The State is compelling districts to turn student data over to charter schools. The Metro Nashville School Board said no. So did the school board in Memphis.
The state is suing the Metro Nashville School Board because it refuses to give its student data to charter recruiters. It will probably sue Memphis too. The state is more concerned about the tiny proportion of students enrolled in charters than about the 90+% enrolled in public schools. This is madness.
The charters say they need the data for their marketing.
What happened to those mythical waiting lists for charters?
If the charters want to compete and take students and resources from the public schools, why should the public schools help them?
PS: Sorry for the typo in the original title; I wrote it on my cell phone last night as I was walking the dog and could not see full title.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Shelby County Schools has an enrollment of 111,500 students. So only about 7% of them chose to opt out of sharing their data with charters? That means 93% didn’t. Meanwhile, 10% of students in the district are white. I’d love to see the ethnic breakdown of those who opted out. I bet it corresponds nicely, since those kids aren’t typically desperate for other options because their schools are meeting their needs adequately.
But then again, I guess 7% is a substantial number … it’s about 7 times Will Pinkston’s margin of victory in the last school board election.
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Jason, why is the state of Tennessee coercing districts to give student data to charter operators? Where are those long waiting lists? If charters are awesome, why is the Achievement School District a complete flip?
Do you really believe that after seven years of marketing, parents in Memphis never heard of charters? Where is the line to get in?
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Madness indeed! Since when do schools turn over students’ personal information to third parties?
And Diane, yes, so much for the waiting lists.
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This reads like a bad Onion article. Who would have believed that a state would have the chutzpah to try to force local school districts to hand over their students’ personal information to charters for marketing purposes. Do you suppose they want grades and testing data included, so they can pick and choose families they want to target?
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Well, the same state closed schools, fired all their experienced teachers, then gave the schools to ASD, hired 20 year olds to teach, promised that these schools will be in top 25% in 5 years, but 6 years and a few hundred million $ later, the schools are exactly where they were, in the bottom 5%. All this against massive parents’ and students’ protests.
The state also wastes hundred million+ of our money on computerized state tests which are buggy and don’t get delivered on time, hastily fires the company, then wastes another $20 million of our money on hiring Pearson graders.
So nothing is surprising here; it’s all an Onion piece.
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Doesn’t the state’s requirement to disclose student information violate FERPA?
Not to mention how disgusting it is that the state government is FORCING our public schools to turn over student information to private, for-profit vendors.
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“Not to mention how disgusting it is that the state government is FORCING our public schools to turn over student information to private, for-profit vendors.”
They also force our kids to take meaningless year-end exams which are designed, implemented and graded by private companies for insane amount of money, and parents, students, teachers are never allowed to see how the kids did on the exams, and kids cannot discuss the exam questions after taking the exams.
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DATA MINING … SCARY, SCARY.
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