Liftoff not quite achieved.
Tennessee’s Achievement School District, a plan to rescue the state’s worst schools, is not yet a decade old. But according to a proposal obtained by Chalkbeat, the ASD will not live to see the ten-year mark— at least not in its present form.
Kevin Huffman was a lawyer who had spent a couple of years in a Teach for America classroom placement pre-law school, then came back to TFA on the management side. In 2011, Governor Bill Haslam brought him on as Tennessee state Commissioner of Education. It was the most high-profile example of someone parleying TFA experience into a high-level leadership role in education. He quickly fell in step with the Duncan-Obama reform program, signed Tennessee on for Race to the Top, and in 2011, he launched the Achievement School District.
The ASD concept was simple; the state would pluck schools from those ranked in the bottom 5% of the state and lump them into a separate school district that would be overseen by state officials rather than a local school board. Focus resources on your most challenging cases and try to learn some turnaround techniques that work. In practice, that meant that the state would farm those schools out to charter school companies. The vision was as audacious as it was clear, posted on the ASD website at the time:
The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the to 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.
The “bottom 5%” was a particular nice touch, insuring that the ASD mission would never be completed; no matter how well your state system is doing, somebody is always the bottom 5%.
But that mission no longer appears on the site, because after a few years it was clearly not going to be completed for other reasons.
To run the ASD, Huffman called on Chris Barbic. Barbic had completed a classroom stint with Teach for America and then gone on to found his own charter management group (YES Prep). Barbic seemed like a strong choice, and he promised to get the job done in five years. After three years, real data was hard to come by, but the best assessments were that the ASD schools were still at the bottom of the pack; the official state list released in spring of 2016 showed that most ASD schools were still in the bottom 5%. But by then, Barbic had resigned.
Barbic offered some insights on his way out the door in 2015, including the need to actually involve the local community in the process. But perhaps his most useful insight was this one:
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.
In other words, it’s hard to change the results in a school if you don’t have the option of swapping out the students.
Barbic’s successor was Malika Anderson, who had little background in education until 2009, when she went to work in DC under Michelle Rhee and enrolled in the Broad Academy. Observers in 2015 were already voicing concerns that, at a minimum, ASD had suffered from “mission creep.” The original plan had called for a narrowly focused approach to rescuing 13 schools; by 2015 they were trying to oversee almost twice that number. Anderson offered a somewhat fuzzier vision for the ASD than the original one quoted above:
Going forward, we will continue to hold ourselves and our school operators accountable to the highest levels of student achievement and growth. We will continue to go where need is concentrated, ensuring every Priority School in Tennessee is improving because we believe that families and students in these schools deserve nothing but the best. And we will continue to ensure that the power in our district is placed in the hands of local parents, educators and leaders in the neighborhoods and communities we serve because they are the ones who best know how to serve our students. We will do so with even greater transparency and deeper levels of partnership than during the ASD’s initial years.
She lasted until 2017.
Her successor failed to turn the ASD around, and the proposal Chalkbeat reported on calls for the current stable of thirty schools to be returned to the public system. The report also lists some lessons to be learned from the ASD failure.
The ASD grew too quickly. It tried to scale up to the point of being ineffective for some schools. It did a lousy job of listening to the community, and depended too much on folks from outside, instead of growing a local, sustainable support culture. Also, turning around a school takes time.
None of these are particularly profound, and they all echo criticisms that were made of the ASD from the very beginning and every step of the way. But the ASD grew out of an era of school reform in which the assumption was that visionary amateurs could swoop in a fix everything that the education establishment could not (and that these visionaries didn’t need to listen to any of the so-called experts in either education or the community). School takeover models remain one of the great policy artifacts of ed reform hubris, the notion that if we just let the right people grab the wheel, they can fix things right up (because, honestly, the education professionals and experts either don’t know or aren’t trying). But one of the repeated lessons of the last decade is that school turnaround via takeover is really hard to pull off.
In Tennessee, the immediate challenge will be to transition those thirty schools. Meanwhile, the ASD model has traveled to other states, though in at least one state (Nevada) it has already been shut down, while in others like North Carolina and Mississippi are struggling. As for Kevin Huffman and Chris Barbic, they are now involved in the City Fund, an ed reform organization that is pumping big money into selling cities on the portfolio model, a model that treats schools like stocks in an investment portfolio and which very much resembles a more advanced version of the ASD model.
There are plenty of lessons to be learned from Tennessee’s failure, but perhaps the biggest one is this: listen to the experts. Listen to the people who know schools, who know these particular schools, who live in and know the community. We’ll have to wait to see if any of them stick.
