In 2012, Tennessee created the “Achievement School District” (ASD) and promised that it would catapult the state’s lowest performing schools into high-performing schools. So confident were state leaders that they hired Chris Barbic, who ran a celebrated charter chain in Houston, and he was confident that the state’s weakest schools could be transformed within five years by handing them over to charter operators. Other states were excited by the idea and created their own state takeover districts.
The ASD failed, even though it was funded by $100 million in Race to the Top money. But Tennessee refuses to accept that taking over struggling schools and giving them to charter operators is a bad idea.
The North Carolina Policy Watch reported on Tennessee’s insistence on protecting failure. North Carolina created an “Innovative School District,” modeled on the ASD.
Greg Childress writes:
The state-run school district in Tennessee, the one on which this state’s Innovative School District (ISD) is modeled, has failed.
According to reports out of Tennessee, the Achievement School District (ASD), is working on a plan to return 30 ASD schools in Memphis and Nashville to their local districts by 2022.
State officials in Tennessee contend the district, which was established in 2012 to improve achievement in low-performing schools, “grew too quickly” and that “demand outpaced supply and capacity.”
Still, Tennessee officials aren’t giving up on the ASD. They’re billing the new proposal as a “reset” of the district, which has fallen short of its goals to move low-performing schools from the bottom 5 percent and into the top 25 percent.
Most ASD schools were handed over to charter school operators after being pulled from local districts.
“The Achievement School District remains a necessary intervention in Tennessee’s school framework when other local interventions have proven to be unsuccessful in improving outcomes for students,” officials said in a presentation obtained by Chalkbeat.
“The Commercial Appeal” in Memphis reports that most of the schools remain in the bottom 5 percent and that several have closed due to low enrollment. Teacher retention has also been a major challenge, the paper reports.
Tennessee school officials plan to stand by their Big Idea, even though its failure is clear even to them.
North Carolina’s “Innovative School District” has not fared any better. Although the state wanted the ISD to be a major reform effort, like the ASD, only one school entered the new district. NC had other low-performing schools, but whenever one was told to join the ISD, its leaders ran to their elected officials and got exempted.
To put it mildly, NC’s ISD has “struggled to get off the ground.”
Childress writes:
After only one year, state officials made wholesale leadership changes at ISD. The ISD got a new superintendent, the lone ISD school got a new principal and a new president was hired to lead the private firm that manages the school.
James Ellerbe, the ISD superintendent hired in July, reported this week that there are 69 schools on the state’s 2019 qualifying list, meaning the low-performing schools are at risk of being swept into the ISD.
The ISD will bring only one school into the state-run district next year. The school with the lowest performance score among Title I schools in the bottom 5 percent will be brought into the ISD.
The ISD was approved in 2016 by state lawmakers even though the ASD had showed little signs of success after being in business four years.
Not only is the NC ISD based on a failed model, its one school has both a principal and a superintendent!
All of which leaves unanswered question, why do failed reforms never die?
THE BIG MONEY BACKERS since these people are the ones who will be “Ka-chinging” to the bank.
“State officials in Tennessee contend the district, which was established in 2012 to improve achievement in low-performing schools, “grew too quickly” and that “demand outpaced supply and capacity.”
The failure may also be attributable to a failed belief that privatization is a magic bullet. Any number of teachers could have told state officials that transferring public schools to private companies does not change the level poverty of the student students in the district. Part of the failure may also be due to the fact that market based education is a bad idea. Amateur business people with no training or experience in education cannot adequately replace professional educators.
Interestingly enough, Nevada’s Guinn Center used data from Tennessee to write white paper on the success of Tennessee. I told Nancy Brune at the time she should be ashamed of herself. That paper included Tennessee and New Orleans as success stories? That is just overwhelmingly misinformed and I told Brune I was disappointed in that garbage.
The Nevada ASD imported some of the failed Tennessee ASD folks – Jana Wilcox Lavin and Rebecca Feiden. Jana’s background in public relations. She came to Nevada insisting that we give her a “new school”. I guess she blamed her failures in Tennessee on older schools with bad plumbing?
Anyhow Jana Wilcox Lavin held huge townhalls where hundreds of parents and students showed up to shout her and Rebecca Feiden down and tell them NOT to grab their schools. Parents fully expressed that they were tired of their children being experimented on. Jana was a huge failure. Recently Betsey DeVos rewarded Jana with a $20 million dollar grant. Nothing like throwing huge amounts of dollars at a problem – throwing good money after bad.
I personally blame Billionaire Elaine Wynn. This garbage came from the top at the Nevada State School Board. Her right hand and former Nevada Superintendent Steve Canavero insisted on putting this failure into legislation.
Then in Nevada State School Board Meetings Elaine Wynn made crazy lists using criteria and formulas that basically gerrymandered schools the state could grab to throw into the ASD. The real failure lists in Nevada were actually half charter/rural schools – but there is no remedy for either. Making the ASD an experiment on brown children in Vegas. Places like Elko literally had 100% of their schools failing without any other choice close by unless kids drove to Salt Lake City or up into Idaho. The ASD did not grab anything in Elko. Jana was focused on failing schools in “new buildings” in Vegas.
At the last legislative session before the ASD was dissolved, Canavero presented some convoluted scheme to team schools up with charters. None of which made sense since charters are actually failing to graduate in Nevada. Nevada Charter data has never been great. Yet somehow the public schools are supposed to learn from them? Many charters do not even have data because they purposefully do not included a data year.
My school was actually paired with Agassi. That place is the epitome of what NOT to do. The staff has turned over every year since it has opened. Folks love the building but a building is real estate not learning. Agassi poured money into that place. Kids went on trips to Europe etc. But Agassi ‘s charters do not teach kids and kids do not learn there. It is a real disservice to the community. The behavior is off the chain. And most teachers quit when they learn they are expected to work 7 days a week – Saturday and Sunday included. Agassi was moved to Democracy Prep and the ASD. I do not hear good things. Anyone who works there – gets out as soon as they can.
So the failed Nevada ASD had Agassi and Futuro and a couple of other tiny new charters. Then the ASD was finally dissolved. Folks paid $10 Million to former Nevada School Board Member – Allison Serafin to recruit through Opportunity 180 and we ended up with a puny failing dysfunctional charter district.
Now Betsey DeVos has given $20 Million to Jana Wilcox Lavin to do the same? Even after the ASD is gone, folks still lurk her getting money to harm kids.
Thank you for your first hand account of the hodgepodge of poor educational practice that results from privatization. Additionally, the endless politicking that occurs as adults scheme to make as much money as they can off the privatization scam leaves what is best for students in the dust. You also illustrate how seizing public real estate is a big motive in privatization. The objective is to move public assets into private pockets. Finally, the public is catching on to these profiteering grifters.
great definition for the entire structure: Privatization=hodgepodge of poor practices
” I guess she blamed her failures in Tennessee on older schools with bad plumbing?”
Haha. “Give me a palace and I work miracles in education. “
Because the reforms don’t fail. They succeed wildly. They only appear to fail because you think improving education was the goal.
Success was never the goal. The goal is $u¢¢€$$.
Reforms in K-12 education based on rancid high stakes testing, lies, misinformation, and someone in the private sector making a profit/fortune will never work.
The only success that comes from greed and fraud is the money charlatans deposit in their bank accounts.
Success and failure are relative to the end in view —
but not all players see the end in force.
These programs are not failing —
they are doing exactly what their programmers program them to do.
Across the board, so-called education “reform” has produced an embarrassing parade of abject failures. The nearly two decades of swings and misses have been far from innocuous, instead they have been failures that were harmful, damaging, and scarring to students as well as teachers. These educational carpetbaggers from the corporate world are as shameless as they are clueless. Even the few with good intentions have completely failed see the problems they claim they want to fix through the eyes of the children who struggle in school. They have also ignored the millions of very successful who have provided them with the blueprint for academic achievement. Instead they continue to think that standards, tests, and software will be the salvation of those who are simply less fortunate.
Charter schools, vouchers, testing, merit pay, state take-overs all fail at systemic improvement. Promoters keep trying because for them success is profit and union busting not improvement or equity.
I think the answer to this is part of a much bigger issue.
It isn’t just education reforms that fail over and over again and don’t get discredited.
Look at trickle down economics! Giving huge tax breaks to the very rich creates huge deficits and tanks the economy. Raising taxes on the rich helps the economy and lowers the deficit.
And yet a so-called journalist in the NYT last month irresponsibly gave the economics of “trickle down” the exact same legitimacy as the economics of raising taxes on the rich! The NYT reported on trickle down economics as if it hadn’t been tried and tanked the economy over and over again in the last 35 years!
Nearly half of Americans APPROVED of the Republican party that pushed trickle down economics and believed their own jobs were because of Trump’s great economic policies of giving billionaires a huge tax cut.
It is similar to how education reporters cover the “success” of education reform without any context. Look at this great ed reform idea from the same billionaires who tell us how great trickle down economics is — and here is “proof” it works – a charter that graduates all its seniors! And journalists at the NYT and other so-called “liberal media”, seem to be taught that thinking for themselves is not allowed, so any historical evidence that trickle down as failed over and over again is irrelevant and so is any examination of the fact that half or 75% of the students who entered that charter seemed to have disappeared before graduation! Their job as NYT reporters is to present what both sides say by giving both sides “equal weight” except one side must never be identified as “rich billionaires and the people in think tanks and advocacy organizations whose salaries depend on their largesse” but the other side must always be identified as “teachers’ unions”.
That’s why failed education reforms fail and yet get to survive to fail again. Just like trickle down economics.
Never question what happened in Tennessee. No point. Things fail in Tennessee because our leaders are clueless. They might share this with other places, but we are tops when it comes to incompetent leaders.
The elephant in the room in most of these ventures marketed as if reforms is a determination to keep schools segregated by race, household wealth, and social class.
Laura Yes, disenfranchisement is multi-generational and cultural, but gets its kick-start again in K-12. CBK
Why do failed (educational) reforms survive, only to fail again? I think there is a partial, although significant, answer that folks on this site know full-well! Because these reforms begin by focusing on “education” reform, rather than “social” reform. This approach enables political elites and corporate privatizers in hegemonic positions of power to 1. ignore the real obstacles to education success; namely poverty, racism, as well as other debilitaing socio/cultural factors, and 2. further entrench a capitalist approach to solving issues of educational achievement via the schools. This allows these politicians and corporate privatizers to a) make a profit in the name of educational altruism, and b) while conitnuing to use public schools as the “sin eaters” of American society. Clearly, this approach to education reform is decades old with no sign of changing. When the assault on education began in earnest wih A Nationat at Risk, there was no turning back.
It’s interesting (= maddening) to see that even as colleges and universities face budget cuts, layoffs due to Covid, new buildings pop up on campuses even as we speak, while those who still have a job freeze to death in the old offices, or slip on the floor because of the dripping water from the ceiling.
Isn’t it time that we declare the “charter school experiment” a failure?