Writing in his blog Curmudgucation, Peter Greene reviews Kevin Huffman’s career as a big Reform honcho and his latest advice about what the federal government should do to make schools better. Peter noted that none of Huffman’s ventures has been successful, which makes a fine example of someone who has mastered the art of “failing upward.”

Peter Greene writes:

A few weeks ago, Kevin Huffman was in the pages of the Washington Post, bemoaning the lack of education discussion during the Presidential campaign and offering thoughts about What America Needs To Do Next. Nobody needs to read it. Really.

Kevin Huffman is a long-time reformster; in fact Kevin Huffman, as the Tennessee Grand High Commissioner of Education, represents a reformster milestone. Huffman’s career path took him to Swarthmore, which led to a Teach For America posting, which led to law school, which led to practicing education law in DC, which led back to TFA, first as general counsel and later as various VP executive titly things. Then, a few years later, Governor Bill Haslam tapped him for Tennessee Educational Poobahdom. Which made him the first TFA temp to get to run an entire state’s education system. 

Once in charge, he made his reformy mark. (I will mention, because someone always brings it up, that he was for a brief while married to Michelle Rhee). He chimed in with Arne Duncan to claim that low-achieving students, including those with learning disabilities, just needed to be tested harder. And as a super buddy of charter schools, he took $3.4 million dollars away from Nashville city schools because their board didn’t approve the charter that he had personally shepherded through the process.

He became one of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the Race to the Top keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn’t like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters)

Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of business investment opportunities private charter schools?

The ASD was Huffman’s audacious attempt to bundle the bottom 5% of schools and take them over as a state-run “district.” The 2012 edition of the now-defunct ASD website proclaimed:

The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students’ life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.

 Three years later, Barbic gave up, saying, 

Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment. I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD. As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.

Barbic was replaced by a Broadie, who also failed to do anything other than move some goal posts (no more of that “top 25%” stuff). Huffman couldn’t close the deal on selling the model to other states. And the ASD just kept failing. 

Failing so consistently that a little more than a week after Huffman’s WaPo op-ed, Chalkbeat reported that research by Brown’s Annenberg Institute found that the ASD “generally worsened high school test scores.” It also didn’t help on ACT scores and “data related to attendance, chronic absenteeism, and disciplinary actions wasn’t encouraging, either.” Researchers found neither short-term nor long-term gains for students, and Tennessee legislators seem to finally be getting the idea that the ASD is junk.

But the guy who created it is still failing upward, having passed through the reform-pushing City Fund and now working as CEO of Accelerate, one more educational consulting fix-it shop operated by people with lots in the reformy funding universe (the board includes John White and Janice Jackson). They’re particularly keyed in to tutoring and individualized instruction, both computerized.

So what advice does the chief with no actual edu-wins to his name have to offer? Well, he thinks that George W. Bush was swell, and remember, reading and math scores wet up in the early days of No Child Left Behind. Folks like Monty Neill of Fairtest have since pointed out that these gains were only on the state Big Standardized Test. I was in the classroom at the time, and I can tell you exactly why test scores went up initially– because once the tests were rolled out we could learn how to teach to the test, and after a few years we had collected all the test prep gains we were going to get. 

Huffman likes the “gains” in race to the Top testing which, again, reflect teachers learning how to game the new PARCC and SBA tests. 

But, Huffman complains, by the end of the Obama administration, the feds were giving in to demands for more local control and pre-COVID test scores were already dipping, then “following the academic wreckage covid-19 left behind, heavy deferral to the states on spending and policy has left us with massive learning gaps and no national plan for closing them.”

It takes a person whose educational “experience” is almost entirely outside the classroom to believe that the Big Standardized Test is a useful measure of learning that should be the centerpiece of education policy rather than understanding that BS Testing is the most toxic force to be unleashed on education in the last couple of decades.

Huffman argues we need “strong national leadership around education policy,” which makes sense only if such leadership is guided by an actual understanding of teaching and learning and schooling, but history suggests that isn’t happening any time ever. But, he asserts, everyone wants “the best basic education for their children.” I don’t know what to do with that “basic” in there. 

How do we get it?

For starters, the next president should issue a national call for all states and all groups of students to surpass pre-pandemic learning levels in reading and math by 2030 — and direct the Education Department to report on each state’s progress.

God, one of my least favorite forms of management– management by insistence. This is like sales managers who issue increased sales targets with helpful directives like “sell more.” But worse, this is demanding that schools focus more intently on the wrong damn target– test scores.

Huffman also wants the feds to replace ESSA (too weak) with “a return to nationwide education goals” along with accountability measures. And also, grants for states that “pursue ambitious education reform” as, one assumes, defined by the feds.

In other words, Huffman would like to rewind to 2002 and start NCLB/CCSS/RTTT all over again, and I guess we can say that keeping on with something that hasn’t worked yet is on brand for Huffman. But man– it all didn’t work the first time, and not just “didn’t work” but “did more harm than good.”

But he has some specifics that he wants the feds to enforce this time. One is phonics-based learning and I don’t have time to get into the reading wars other than to say that any time someone says “if we just use X, every student will learn Y” they are wrong.

He also wants the feds to boost high-dosage tutoring, which coincidentally is one of the foci of his present gig. High-dosage tutoring is hard and expensive to scale up, with the research support very narrow and specific. He also wants more CTE (fine).

Bottom line, Huffman wants presidents not to abdicate their “responsibility to push school districts toward success,” a sentiment in line with the reformster notion that everything wrong with education is the fault of lazy educators who have to be coerced into doing their jobs (and certainly not treated like partners in the education world). 

The federal standards and BS Testocrats had their shot, and they failed hard. In many ways, their failures are still haunting the public school system. Huffman is a poster child for the Teach For America crowd who visited a classroom for a couple of years and parleyed that into “education expert” on their resume, going on to promote and support an array of ill-advised policies flavored with a barely-concealed disdain for the people who have actually made education and teaching a career. They should not get a do-over. They cannot be taken seriously, even if they manage to be platformed by major media outlets.