If your memory is good, you may recall Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top, which had $5 billion of unrestricted funds with which to spur education reform. Duncan had a contest in which states competed for a piece of that big pie. To be eligible to compete, states had to pass a law authorizing charter schools, and almost every state did. They had to agree to adopt national standards, which meant the unfinished, untried Common Core State Standards, as well as the tests based on the standards. They had to agree to evaluate individual teachers based on the rise or fall of the test scores of their students.
Eighteen states “won.”
The biggest winner was Tennessee, which won $500 million. Tennessee’s biggest new program was the creation of its so-called Achievement School District. The ASD would gather the lowest performing schools in the state into a non-contiguous district and turn them into charter schoools.
The ASD hired Chris Barbic, leader of Houston’s YES Prep charter chain, to run the ASD. Barbic pledged that he would raise the state’s lowest-performing schools into top-performing schools in five years.
He failed. The state’s lowest performing schools continued to have low scores. In 2015, he resigned, saying he needed to focus on his health and family.
The ASD limped along for another decade, without success. Nonetheless, some other states–including Nevada and North Carolina–copied the model, creating their own all-charter districts. They also failed.
The Tennessee Legislature voted this week to shut down the ASD.
The ASD removed low-performing schools from local control and placed them under a state-run district, with the goal to push Tennessee’s bottom 5% of schools to the top 25%. Many of the schools were turned over to charter operators to run under 10-year contracts.
Research showed the ASD led to high teacher turnover, and did not generate long-term improvements for students. The district also faced community backlash for taking over schools in districts that served mostly low-income communities and predominantly Black student populations. The ASD cost taxpayers over $1 billion. Only three schools remain in the ASD.
Every other part of Race to the Top failed. Evaluating teachers by test scores was a disaster: it rewarded teachers in affluent districts and schools while penalizing those who taught the neediest students. Charter schools did not have higher scores than public schools unless they chose their students carefully, excluding the neediest. The Common Core standards, with which tests, textbooks and teacher education were aligned, had no impact on test scores. The U.S. Department of Education evaluated Race to the Top and declared it a failure., in a report quietly released on the last day of the Obama administration.
On to vouchers! Since voucher students don’t take state tests, no one will know that this is a boondoggle that benefits those already in private and religious schools.
The search for miracles and panaceas goes on.
Trump’s answer. Parents know best.
Next time you get surgery, make sure the surgeon is not licensed. Next time you take a flight, be sure to fly with an unlicensed pilot.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Actually, the biggest winner (or really loser) of Race to the Top funds was NY State, which received $696 million. In order to compete, the state raised the cap on charters, creating hundreds more slots in NYC — and charters now cost NYC over $3.2B per year. The state also began to require that teacher evaluation be based in large part on student test scores, adopted the highly restrictive Common Core standards that required teachers to assign 50-80% of “informational text” in place of novels, plays, and poems, and design high stakes tests aligned to those faulty standards. All these moves led to the largest testing opt out movement in the country in NY. Even though many of these damaging policies have since been eliminated or rolled back (sadly, not the increase in the charter numbers), the opt out rate remains pretty high statewide at about 15% — with much higher rates on Long Island.
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All the waste and fraud from test and punish, charter schools and now vouchers have not improved education significantly. It has mostly harmed public education by transferring public money out of the public schools and into the pockets of privatizers that continue the stream of broken promises, disinformation and privatization. Public money should be used for public schools that serve all students, and private educational choices should be a personal economic responsibility. Repeated failure does not deter the privatizers that simply invent a new angle to build on an old scheme to gain access to public funds.
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Thank you Diane, well said. Let there be light.
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Race to the Top and ASD were such predictably and utterly failed ideas that it is surprising that the Trump Maladministration has not yet put these forward as a model and decided to withhold government funds from any K-12 school that doesn’t adopt these models. Perhaps we could turn all our schools into a charter chain headed by one of Elon Musk’s DOGEY thirteen-year-olds.
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Poverty and all the hardships it engenders is the problem. Not the teachers.
Although I saw this everyday of the almost three decades I taught inner city kids in Brooklyn, NY, it was as plain as the nose on your face after a month on the job as a beginner substitute teacher.
And the “reformers” knew (and still know” this.
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