In my latest piece for The Progressive, I outline the sneaky approach Gov. Bill Lee is taking to maintain his privatization agenda:
In 2012, Tennessee’s began a scheme known as the Achievement School District, or ASD. The goal was simple and bold: Take a handful of schools in the bottom 5 percent of student achievement, according to state test scores, and move those schools into the top 25 percent in student achievement in just five years.
Tennessee’s charter school law gave charter operators ten year charters from the granting district. Since the ASD had taken over the local schools (most of them in Memphis), the ASD was now the charter-granting district. Now, schools in the ASD would not be eligible to return to their home districts for ten years, rather than the five years envisioned in the initial ASD legislation.
In 2020, New York City math teacher and popular blogger Gary Rubinstein, who tracked the ASD from its inception, reported the ASD’s “initial promise” to take over the bottom 5 percent of schools and “catapult them into the top 25 percent in five years” had “completely failed . . . . Chris Barbic resigned, Kevin Huffman resigned, Barbic’s replacement resigned. Of the thirty schools, they nearly all stayed in the bottom 5 percent except a few that catapulted into the bottom 10 percent.”
Education advocates around the country should beware these sorts of moves—power grabs cloaked in the guise of “assistance or guidance,” legislation to extend failed reform models, and/or the repackaging of proven reform failures as something shiny and new.
Of course, Lee’s not just finding new and innovative ways to privatize, he’s also deliberately starving schools of funding:
The Tennessee General Assembly approved Gov. Bill Lee’s budget proposal. The budget includes no appreciable new money for schools in spite of the state having a surplus in the current year of over $1.4 billion so far.
And now, a word on testing from a school principal in Chicago:
The federal government agreed to waive standardized testing last spring, but this year the answer was no. So in two weeks, we will take our children to empty gyms, sit them masked at spaced-out tables, and watch for two days while they take a test that answers none of the questions that matter.
But teaching better is not why we do statewide testing. Results don’t even come back until the year is over. It’s especially hard to see how this year’s numbers will tell us anything, with half our kids still remote and no option to take the test at home.
We give these tests to make judgments: who’s up and who’s down, who’s red and who’s green. We give these tests because we pretend test scores tell us what it means to be a good school, a good teacher, a good student. But they don’t.
And, a note for Tennessee parents on opting-out of TNReady:
There are only eight states that allow you to opt your child out of testing. Tennessee is NOT one of those states. However, there are no state laws in TN that require your child to take any TNReady test, so you and your child can refuse the test.