If you’ve followed Tennessee Education Report, you know that teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein is a long-time critic of Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD).
Rubinstein’s latest blog on the topic is about a conversation he overheard from reformers touting “lessons learned” from Tennessee’s failed school takeover experiment.
The bottom line is that reformers never learn any lessons. Because, well, it’s not really about reform. It’s about privatization and about money.
Here’s some insight from Rubinstein on the idea of charterizing so-called “failing” schools and how that strategy actually failed.
As a refresher, the Tennessee ASD started with TFAer Kevin Huffman, funded by TFA lover Arne Duncan’s Race To The Top money hired TFAer Chris Barbic to create a ‘turnaround’ district in Memphis. The ASD took over existing schools that were in the bottom 5% and made them into charter schools with the ambitious goal of ‘catapulting’ (their word, not mine) the schools into the top 25% in five years. Well, over ten years have passed and exactly 0 of the schools they acquired made it even out of the bottom 10%. Study after study has concluded that the ASD had no positive impact. Sadly, the ASD continues to limp along and it serves as a model for other states to do a similar thing around the country.
In all my years of reporting on ed reform, The ASD has been so easy to tear down. They took over 30 schools, often ignoring pleas from the community not to, and turned around exactly zero of them. And the ASD shows how flawed the modern ed reform concept is since they got so much money and all the freedom that they wanted and yet they were still not able to show any results. If it wasn’t so sad for the community that had to endure this, it would be comical.
An Agenda Revealed
Then came the panel. This was a sad low-energy panel because they all just knew that they were trying to put a positive spin on a complete disaster. The first question was about what they learned and they all talked about how the initial plan was to give the schools autonomy, but when the schools did not improve they realized that the schools had not actually earned their autonomy yet so the state had to take more control. But this goes against the whole charter school philosophy that they need the autonomy and that will motivate them to do well since they know they will lose their charters if they fail to improve.
Sadly, as the below pieces indicate, the ASD continues to march on in Tennessee:
Chattanooga Group Opposes ASD Reboot
Lee Continues Privatization Push
In Pennsylvania, public school supporters push back against privatization.
And, back to Tennessee, the battle over Critical Race Theory heats up in Williamson County.