Gary Rubinstein has chronicled the creation, the hype, the premature claims of success, and the utter collapse of the Tennessee Achievement School District.
It was created with Race to the Top funding. It promised to take the schools ranked in the bottom 5% of the state and “catapult” them to the top 25%. This would take only five years. It would be done by turning them into charter schools.
But, five years later, Rubinstein finds, 5 of the six original schools are still in the bottom 5%, and the sixth is in the bottom 9%.
Tennessee ‘Cusp List’ 2017: 5 of 6 Of Original ASD Schools Still In Bottom 5%
This outcome could be fairly characterized as abject failure.
Unfortunately, reformers are never deterred by failure. Several other states, including Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina have started a similar program, modeled on the Tennessee ASD.
Worse, the ASD concept is embedded in the federal Every Student Succeeds act, which directs states to develop a plan to intervene in the schools in the lowest performing 5%.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
ASD was all empty promises. But there’s plenty of empty promise-making amongst us regular teachers as well. Common Core: empty promise of making smarter students, yet millions of teachers earnestly endorse it. I fear NGSS is another empty promise. I recently attended a NGSS workshop even though science is not my field and what I saw looked like a nightmare. The model lesson we were given was a plunge into the fog. The teachers were confused; the kids are going to be even more confused. Instead of systematically acquiring a foundation of science knowledge, let kids generate questions and go research them and design experiments. Instead of talking about concrete topics like volcanoes, talk about airy, general concepts like “patterns”. The basic idea seems to be that acquiring basic science facts doesn’t matter than much in the production of scientists; just get little kids to ape PhD scientists and eventually they’ll all become great scientists. This is an unfolding fiasco, most catastrophic for the low-income kids; least catastrophic (possibly even semi-beneficial) for kids whose parents are scientists. In the hands of a genius teacher teaching HS GATE kids, this might be appropriate. Another example of out-of-touch ed school professors steering us into the ditch. A perfect example of making the perfect (let’s go way beyond basic facts!) the enemy of the good (teaching basic facts well).
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Since it is a total “failure” the edudeformers must be licking their jobs at trying to “bring it to scale.”
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I dunno what it means, but ASD and TFA are in the same building (and I think, floor) in Memphis, and Relay is even in the same suite as ASD.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Teach+For+America+-+Memphis/@35.1522153,-90.0148512,18.99z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x87d57e942e6c6e1b:0xdff74043608e5f0e!8m2!3d35.15222!4d-90.0147326
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It means it is a luvfest!
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Rocketship becomes latest charter network to pull the plug on Tennessee’s Achievement School District
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2018/02/01/rocketship-becomes-latest-charter-network-to-pull-the-plug-on-tennessees-achievement-school-district/
And yet, still, North Carolina doubles down and copies this miserable failure! facepalm
And apparently, finding an operator that meets the minimum standards to run the ISD’s first takeover school (Soiuthside-Ashpole) is not going well so far…
Charter School Operators Vying For Innovative School District Haven’t “Met Expectations”
http://wunc.org/post/charter-school-operators-vying-innovative-school-district-havent-met-expectations#stream/0
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