For over a decade, Tennessee has been home to an ambitious plan for turning around low-achieving schools. Now Chalkbeat reports that state leaders are ready to shut down this failed experiment.
The Achievement School District was created by a 2010 law and launched in 2011, part of a package that helped win Tennessee an early Race to the Top waiver from the requirements of No Child Left Behind.
Kevin Huffman was brought in to serve as state commissioner of education; his education background was three years in the classroom via Teach For America in Houston, then ten years in TFA leadership roles. To run the district, he brought in another Houston TFA grad who had gone to launch his own charter school in Houston, YES Prep— Chris Barbic.
The state would bundle up low-achieving schools into a new sort of “district,” where schools would be converted to charters, whose leaders would have freedom to turn the schools around. The ASD plan was ambitious and laid out clearly on their website (now visible only via internet archive):
The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state.
What’s more, that feat would be performed within five years. It was an ambitious goal, emblematic of that time when education reformers believed that superstar CEO-type leaders, unencumbered by too many rules and too little autonomy could turn schools around in ways that the professional educator crowd just couldn’t imagine.
Instead, in the summer of 2015, Barbic resigned. The ambitious goal disappeared from the website. In his farewell note, Barbic held fast to the idea that poverty could not be an excuse, that “’poverty trumps education’ sells our educators, and more importantly our kids, way too short,” but he also wrote this:
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.
The standout line in this article, for me, is that Kevin Huffman spent a whopping 3 years in the classroom. Such hubris to assume that after 3 years in the classroom, one is fully experienced to "turn around" an entire school district of low-performing schools. Barbic was arrogant too, but at least he finally caught on. It's not the teachers' fault! There are larger socio-economic issues here. And, yes, poverty is a major factor.