Gary Rubinstein reports that the latest Tennessee school rankings were just released. Now we know. The Tennessee Achievement School District was a complete and total failure. $100 million down the drain, which came from Race to the Top funding. The same money might have been used to reduce class sizes in these schools. Instead, it was used to induce charter operators to come to Tennessee and work their magic. It failed.
Would someone tell Bill Gates, John Arnold, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and the other billionaires who are still spreading the phony claim of charter miracles?
Spread the word to states like Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, which created their own “achievement school districts” based on the Tennessee model.
Seven years ago, as part of Tennessee’s Race To The Top plan, they launched The Achievement School District (ASD). With a price tag of over $100 million, their mission was to take schools that were in the bottom 5% of schools and, within five years, raise them into the top 25%.
They started with six schools and three years into the experiment, Chris Barbic, the superintendent of the ASD had a ‘mission accomplished’ moment where he declared in an interview that three of those six schools were on track to meet that goal.
But a year later, the gains that led to that prediction had disappeared and it wasn’t looking good for any of those six schools. By the time the five year mark had been reached, in the Fall of 2016, Chris Barbic had already resigned and taken a job with the John Arnold Foundation.
The thing about 2016, though, is that whether or not the ASD schools met the lofty goal could not be determined, officially. Tennessee releases their official ‘priority’ list of the bottom 5% schools every three years. And, conveniently enough, the last one was in 2015. So even though it was clear in 2016 that the original 6 ASD schools would not be in the top 25%, an even more important question — how many of those schools remained in the bottom 5%? — would not be known officially for two more years, in the Fall of 2018.
A few days ago, Tennessee finally released the long-awaited 2018 priority schools list, and for the ASD, the results were decisive and devastating.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s not really a failure if politically connected people got richer from it and politicians got generous donations from people getting rich from it. Wasn’t that their goal all along?
for those padding their bank accounts, no lucrative school “reform” — no matter how short lived — is a problem
Bingo! And if things don’t improve, you can always change the definition of “success”… after all, the definition of “failure” was developed by the “reformers”. The bar can always be conveniently changed as long as shareholders are rewarded and taxpayers aren’t asked to pay any more money…
But the stupidity of this whole scheme is that if you raise the bottom 5% up into the top 25%, it still leaves a bottom 5%. It creates failure as it claims to decrease failure….and all based on test scores from a test that is worthless. I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged by this?
We will not sleep until all the children are above average!
Boy, then we are going to lose a lot of sleep and die because without sleep that’s what happens. We die.
YES.
I’m sure Reformers are saying it was a problem not of ideas but of implementation.
No, the failures just disappear. It’s very scientific and rigorous. They conduct experiments and if the experiments fail they just never mention that experiment again and they conduct the same experiment somewhere else.
It used to be downright amusing how predictable Duncan was- DC, Tennessee and New Orleans. Over and over and over. Then Tennessee quietly dropped off the list.
Indianapolis is hot right now. They don’t have any “data” or any real reason to promote it, so if it turns out to be unsuccessful they’ll bury it and move on to some other city.
Evidence means little to many supporters of “reform,” particularly the billionaires. For them it was never about elevating the poor. It is about getting the poor to pay them to provide a cheap, sub-par education to the “unworthy” offspring of the poor. It is about a hostile takeover of a public service and asset and removing that asset from the working class and poor and transferring its value to the portfolios of the already wealthy. “Reform” is one of the biggest scams ever.
It’s really hard to overstate how much ed reformers promoted this. I find it useful to go back and read the marketing materials because if one doesn’t do that one is likely to forget:
“At multiple stops in Nashville Tuesday, President Barack Obama’s top education official showered Tennessee with praise for “controversial but common-sense decisions” he contends are having a profound effect on achievement.
In doing so, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan lauded state officials for taking on what he coined a “courage gap” prevalent in public education today, pointing to reforms this state embraced despite fierce pushback.”
That’s the mindset. Any dissent is bad faith – it’s not possible that they’re wrong, instead it HAS to be, IS, that anyone who dissents lacks “courage”.
That’s a recipe for an echo chamber. They have made any criticism presumptively bad faith. It’s crazy too because under this mindset the more people oppose them the BETTER they think they’re doing. In fact, opposition doesn’t mean they might be mistaken, it means they are definitely, 100% right.
Chiara:
Self-correction is extremely difficult in any case if you are dead set against being self-critical. Impossible when any criticism is simply confirmation that you’re doing the right thing. Failure and wasted opportunities on a colossal scale are inevitable.
You nailed it.
😎
They’re doing this same thing again with “blended learning”:
“Parents across the state have questions about an online test preparation software program that nearly every school district in Florida is using.”
All the dissenters will be ignored and rolled over and there will have to be actual protests – people in the streets- before they will listen.
I’ll make this simple for them- public school parents suspect that the huge marketing push for “blended learning” is an attempt by ed reformers to push up test scores on the cheap. They are (rightfully and rationally) afraid that they will LOSE teachers in favor of garbage test prep programs and video instructors. They fear this because they’re watching it happen, despite vehement denials by all the tens of thousands of paid salespeople promoting these products.
They know trading a teacher for a program is a rip off. They’re not stupid.
If you live in Florida, vote for Andrew Gillum who intends to invest in public education and protect the ecosystem and environment with a return to accepting the findings of science.
Need to start referring to Chris Barbic, and other reformers, as “clowns.” Derision eventually percolates through and is taken up by the populace.
posted at Oped News https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/CONFIRMED-The-Failure-of-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Billionaires_Diane-Ravitch_Education_Education-Costs-180924-987.html
with this comment which has embedded links at the above address
While we watch the Trump circus the very foundation of our democracy is being stolen.
My series 15,880 Districts in 50 States : already divided for conquering offers the TRUTH.
Read the series on privitization Read the many links to how legislatures took down public schools even as the media blamed teachers.
Most of my links are from the blog of historian, and former asst Sec’y of Education Diane Ravitch. who wrote * Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
“Now we know.”
Now?? We know??
I know we knew when they started blowing things up (that’s metaphorically speaking, eh) that it wouldn’t end well. So did they. Why do you think Barbic and Huffman jumped ship when they did? They got some jack out of the process, moved on to other venues to get more jack, to hell with the havoc they reaped in the TASD.
Meanwhile, back in the impoverished neighborhoods, most of the kids are being ignored because it takes a lot of money to educate poor folks.
According to Gary’s article, the full amount TN received from Race to the Top was $700 million. Was that amount well spent or was also a total failure?
Here is another question: how come TN got $700 million of the total $4.35 billion Race to the Top money?
This article gives further info (surprisingly detailed for Chalkbeat).
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2015/12/15/as-tennessee-finishes-its-race-to-the-top-teachers-caught-in-the-middle-of-competing-changes/
What I didn’t know was that the private Vanderbilt univ also received Race to the top money. Another interesting remark about Vanderbilt is
“On one hand, teachers are told to embrace the standards and a different way of teaching,” said Marcy Singer-Gabella, a researcher at Vanderbilt University who helps run a charter school in Memphis.
So Singer-Gabella is one of those 21st century profs who are not just doing ivory tower research but also help private corporations to succeed.
Interestingly, Singer-Gabella was (has been?) helping Grad Academy Memphis which is part of ASD!
GRAD Academy seems to be a charter chain.
And GRAD Academy Memphis has closed this year!
http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/37223174/grad-academy-memphis-to-close-after-school-year/