Back in 2012, Tennessee introduced its “Achievement School District” and hired YES Prep charter founder Chris Barbic to run it. The ASD was funded with $100 million from the state’s Race to the Top grant. Barbic said he would take the state’s lowest-performing public schools, hand them off to charter operators, and catapult them into the top 25% in the state within five years. Year after year, the ASD showed no improvement. After four years, Barbic had a heart attack and left (he went to work for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation). The ASD never reached its lofty goals.
The latest report on the ASD continues to reflect the failure of the state takeover.
Caroline Bauman wrote in Chalkbeat about the now familiar poor results as the school semester started:
At a make-or-break moment for Tennessee’s turnaround school district, its 30 schools have collectively delivered another round of low test scores.
Only 3.4% of high schoolers in the Achievement School District met the state’s proficiency standards on this year’s math and English exams, while 12.6% of elementary students reached that benchmark, according to data released by the state education department Thursday.
The news is not surprising: The Achievement School District oversees 30 of the state’s lowest-performing schools, the majority of which are in Memphis.
Still, the scores deliver another blow to the credibility of the turnaround effort once heralded as a national exemplar. This year, the district — whose low-performing schools are taken over by charter school organizations tasked with improving them — lost its third leader, had its poor performance analyzed by an academic study, and came under scrutiny from the state’s new education chief. Commissioner Penny Schwinn says she plans to announce major changes to the district soon.
Those changes will target a district where only a handful of students meet the state’s standards in reading and math.
Only 7.5% of the achievement district’s elementary and middle school students scored on grade level in English, down slightly from last year. In math, 12% of students scored at grade level or higher, which represented an increase. Both remain well below state averages.
In the district’s five high schools, scores in Algebra I, Geometry, and English rose but remained very low, while U.S. History scores slightly dipped.
About 3% of high schoolers in Algebra 1 and 4% in English 1 scored on grade level. (Two of the five high schools are alternative schools that serve students who have already fallen behind in high school).
Open the link to see the comparisons between the ASD and the state.
It is sad that other states, such as Nevada and North Carolina, created state-takeover districts modeled on Tennessee’s ASD without waiting to see the results.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Given that test scores correlate more to poverty than any other idea, this should surprise no one. It should at least be read at the funeral remembering the departed. The following should be among the now departed:
–good teachers produce good test scores
–paying some teachers more than others will mean students learn better
–teachers are primarily responsible for the lack of student achievement due to the low expectations of student behavior
–public schools are to blame for the income divide
–the ASD was a good idea
I am getting tired. We should pile all these bodies among the ones from Austerlitz and Waterloo (The Grass)
saddest truth is that so many legislators honestly believe your bullet points: Big Money (Gates’ wife, for example) argues endlessly that the public school system is “broken” because of “bad” teachers, and thus using “bonuses” as a means for finding and keeping super teachers is logical. On and on and on and on….
Test scores here, test scores there, test scores everywhere, test scores all the time.
Invalidities here, invalidities there, invalidities everywhere, invalidities all the time.
Save the children!
Well, if you remove democratic control of 30 public schools and claim that you will send the children’s test scores to the top of the state, then you get judged by the metric you chose,
Yes, I understand that particular aspect.
The more that we use their framing the slower we can get beyond the frame. We need to consistently and constantly attack the frame to deprive it of it’s legitimacy.
And the frame that I reference is the “judge by the output” and not the more appropriate “judge by the input”. Are the inputs adequate to insure that all the children have an appropriate opportunity to learn?
Obviously, at least to most here, the answer to that question is NO!
Señor Swacker,
Avatar basado en puntuación…
Casa construida sobre mentiras…
Las herramientas de los maestros nunca destruirán la casa de los maestros…
Me gusta.
It’s amazing how the privateers keep beating their dead horse: high stakes testing and failed common core standards. It’s almost as if they’re more interested in access to public money than they are improving public education…..
Everything thing the privatizers have imposed has failed. Except demoralizing teachers, disrupting communities, and creating a national teacher shortage.
It almost seems that would be their intent. But that is old news.
Vanderbilt began studying the ASD after it began. The teacher turnover rate for the first two years in the ASD was 63%.
Click to access Teacher_Retention_in_ASD_and_iZone_vF.pdf