Chris Barbic has returned to Tennessee to join its “charter school center.”
Barbic, you may recall, launched the much-lauded Achievement School District in Tennessee, drawing upon $100 million from the state’s $500 million Race to the Top grant. He promised to take over the state’s lowest performing schools, hand them over to charter operators, and propel them into the top 25% of schools in the state, in five years’ time.
After four years, he stepped down due to a heart attack. By the end of year five, none of the schools in the ASD had been vaulted into the top 25% of schools in the state. They all remained mired at the bottom of the state’s list of schools, as measured by test scores. Since Barbic’s departure, the leadership at ASD has changed hands a few times, but the evaluations have not improved. ASD was a flop.
However, the concept was adopted without waiting for results by a few other states, including North Carolina (one school was in its state-controlled version of ASD) and Nevada (no success). Georgia proposed to create a similar district, but it was turned down by voters.
State takeovers have typically failed. Michigan launched its “Education Achievement Authority” several years ago. It was a disaster, and it was closed down.
New Orleans is the original prototype, where all the district’s schools are now operated by charter managers. Despite lots of hype, it is hardly a model. The latest state scores for schools found that almost half the charters in NOLA were rated either D or F. Overall, the district’s test scores were below the state average. The highest performing schools are the most selective. NOLA is a low-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest performing states (on NAEP, the national testing program that compares states).
They just keep failing up. It just goes to show that it isn’t a “good education” and hard work that gets one a high paying, prestigious job…it’s the “ins” that one gets/has.
It’s quite the business, the Education Deform industry. Again and again, people are able to fail upward.
You have to wonder if Oprah will front some more $$$$ and vault Barbic into hero status again.
From the story: “Chris is dedicated to students and good schools and he’s not afraid to try new things and to innovate,” said Maya Bugg, CEO of the Tennessee Charter School Center.
The story doesn’t mention what “new things” will be tried. And, of course, the statement “try new things and innovate” is redundant. Does she think that simply starting charter schools is a “new thing”? That would be odd, for we’ve seen this “new thing,” and its failures, again and again and again.
In Hinduism, Maya is the goddess of the world illusion.
“Our larger vision is that all students across Tennessee have access to a high-quality public education, and we think we can leverage public charter schools to help that along,” Bugg said of the publicly funded, independently operated schools.”
This quote caught my eye. I wish they would leverage themselves. Why can no one see the wisdom in allowing regular old schools to operate in an environment of intellectual independence? If there were not foolish people telling me to teach certain things a specific way, I might be more productive as a teacher.
Case in point: a teacher I know used to give an assignment to her middle school classroom in which the student was required to observe a spider during the Autumn. Recently an old student remarked on Facebook how that one assignment got her interest in nature. Unfortunately, that is not allowed now. Local administration dictates what is taught relative to the “standards.” Students will remember nothing.
Bob, how often you have commented on the impact of standardized testing and top down curriculum. We could all use some independence.
“Teaching to the standards” has led to dramatic distortion of curricula and pedagogy. It’s obscene. Because of Gates and Lord Coleman, our K-12 textbooks and many of our K-12 schools are shadows of what they once were.
and no one EVER mentions that trying new things which fail miserably is irresponsibility writ large
One day, a couple months into the year, I arrived in my classroom to find boxes of a new literature program from Pear$on and an email saying we were to switch to these immediately. I opened the boxes, looked at the books, and ignored them for the rest of the year.
Politicians have no patience for small scale experiments. They want to see millions or billions spent, millions of kids and teachers experimented with. They look down on scientists, small scale experiments; they find them pitiful.
Despite the failure of the Achievement School District, Tennessee continues on its quest to financialize its public schools. This charter school fund, a non-profit in name only, has been established to create islands of opportunity for investors. With the demolition the New Orleans public schools as a model, the private company can then perfect the art of segregation while they use public money for the purpose of separating diverse students into schools where management believes they belong according to skin color and perceived individual differences. This time they have added a new lever to their scheme. The public schools have much less of a say in the authorization of private charter schools. This added benefit allows investors much more control over how much money they can make and how many public schools they can plunder.
“Patterson (CEO of the Memphis Fund ) is also a member of the new Tennessee Public Charter School Commission, which in 2021 takes over responsibility for hearing appeals from operators whose applications to start, renew, or amend charters are denied by local school boards. That responsibility currently rests with the state Board of Education, but is shifting to the commission under a 2019 state law backed by Gov. Bill Lee.”
“Formed in 2013 through a merger of two charter groups, the charter school center is a research, resource, and advocacy group that aims to support and develop high-quality public charter schools.
“Our larger vision is that all students across Tennessee have access to a high-quality public education, and we think we can leverage public charter schools to help that along,” Bugg said of the publicly funded, independently operated schools.
Others who joined the center’s board this year are Terence Patterson, CEO of the Memphis Education Fund and past president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission; and Lydia Hoffman, a partner with the Charter School Growth Fund, a national nonprofit organization that invests in charter school work.”
Odd that all these “public education advocates” work exclusively on charter schools and do absolutely nothing to support or improve public schools, anywhere.
Why not just call them “charter and voucher supporters and promoters”? That’s what they are. Surely people have noticed by now that none of these groups or individuals do anything for kids and families in public schools and often actually work against our schools. What we end up with then are hundreds of groups and thousands of politically connected people advocating on behalf of charter and private schools and no one advocating on behalf of public schools. That’s not fair to public school students.
“Meanwhile, just 38 percent said they want to see the Trump administration focus more energy on expanding the number of charter schools. Roughly half of Republicans favor a greater federal focus on expanding charters, compared with just 29 percent of Democrats.
But for the 19th straight year, respondents said a lack of money is the biggest issue that their public schools face. With the pandemic already spurring an economic crisis, education leaders have warned of devastating cuts to school budgets.”
For 19 years the public has been telling ed reformers what they want and for 19 years and thru Presidential terms of both Parties, ed reformers have been completely ignoring it.
The public says “lack of funding is the biggest issue our schools face” and then ed reformers- people who don’t use public schools- tell them “no it’s not, what you need are charters and vouchers”
Thru Bush, Obama and now Trump. 20 years.
Lack of funding is a key problem for making schools safe during the pandemic. Privatization is a contributing factor that reduces funding to public school districts. Privatization makes public schools less efficient leaving them with fixed stranded costs like heat, insurance etc. and less money to pay these bills. That results in public school students having services curtailed or eliminated.
Republicans want to expand vouchers and charters so that they can get more kids into religious schools (charters are often started and run by fundamentalist Christians). Here’s why: polls show that young people in the United States are on the opposite side of every issue from the Republicans. So, they are facing extinction in the near future unless they create a lot of fundamentalist madrasas to indoctrinate the next generation of kids. Trump promised several times during his convention that he would ensure, in a second term, that K-12 schools teach “patriotism” and “American exceptionalism.” In other words, that they would be made into right-wing propaganda vehicles.
I left a comment on a previous post about 19 segments, during the four-day convention, that Trump and his people devoted to “school choice” during the four-day event. (I kept a list.) And there were probably some that I missed.
EVERY MEMBER of the Trump immediate family who spoke at the convention–Trump, Melania, Don Jr., Eric, and Tiffany–spoke about “school choice,” as did VP Mikey Dense.
Public schools often start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance and sometimes a patriotic song. In the district where I taught we celebrated Veteran’s Day and Flag Day in a big way, and we honored our community workers including police, fire fighters and postal workers annually. We also taught government in 4th grade.
American exceptionalism? If anything, our response to Covid-19 has shown we are far from exceptional.
Trump and Miller and Barr are not patriots. They do not stand for the ideals on which this country was founded. They want autocracy, not democracy. What Trump refers to as instruction in patriotism is the teaching of knee-jerk jingoism.
Trump is not an ideologue, unless you mean the root meaning from the Greek ideos, “one’s own.” But people around him are, and they are using Trump to prepare the way for a future fascist autocrat.
Aie yie yie. I meant the Greek idios.
Betsy DeVos has finally come off her extended summer break and addressed the pandemic and schools:
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2020/09/01/opinion-betsy-devos-education-secretary-letter-america-parents-school-choices-covid-19-decisions/3445699001/
Unfortunately she offers absolutely nothing to the 90% of students and families who attend the public schools she opposes ideologically, instead opting to campaign for vouchers again.
Completely irrelevant to the vast, vast majority of students and families. Ed reformers simply perform no work on their behalf because they attend public schools.
Third US President in a row to offer absolutely nothing of value to 90% of the schools and students in the country. Isn’t 20 years of this enough? Why does this echo chamber so dominate education policy, and how has that harmed students in public schools?
If anyone at the US Department of Education can find time in between working on their political campaign to promote private schools, can someone ask them why we’re paying them to exclusively serve 3% of US students?
Seems like we could cut staffing by 97%. Maybe use the funds to but some laptops for the public schools and students they abandoned.
I will not be surprised if Barbic adopted Trump’s dystopian style law-and-order re-election theme and claim without any evidence or facts that all of the kids in his charter schools are violent thugs and the only way anyone can teach them is to treat them like criminals with cattle prods, caning as corporal punishment like it is used in Singapore, and harsh Marine Corps boot camp style discipline.
That seems to have been the Republican Party’s solution to all problems starting with President Richard Nixon when he declared War on Drugs that increased America’s prison population ten fold by the time President Ray-Gun was out of office.
Walmart has taken over many schools in Arkansas, especially in Little Rock which is poor and mostly African American. White kids go to private Christian schools. My kid went to public school. Presidential scholar, starred in the school play…has learning disabilities. They were doing a good job in many of the schools considering the abject poverty of the district. Walmart has no business in school.
Barbic couldn’t handle the 10 or so charter schools under his command in Memphis, so they appointed him to handle all charter schools in Tennessee. If he fails in Tennessee, he sure will end up as the tzar of all charter schools in the US.
I wonder what his salary is now in this new position. It used to be over $300K in the ASD—in the city with the highest poverty rate among all US cities.
Ah, yes, of course