The Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee is an attempt to replicate the ‘success’ of the Recovery School District (RSD) in Louisiana.  The main difference is that while Louisiana’s RSD was set into action because of a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, Tennessee’s ASD was set into action because of a man made disaster, Hurricane Kevin Huffman, the commissioner of education in Tennessee, and an old acquaintance of mine from the days when we were both in TFA in Houston in the early 1990s.  (I was Houston 1991 and Huffman was Houston 1992).  In charge of the ASD is someone who was a good friend of mine back in Houston, Chris Barbic.  Chris started the YES chain of charter schools.

The goal of the ASD is to take the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee and in five years transform them into schools that are in the top 25% of schools in Tennessee.  As Tennessee schools are supposedly all improving at record rates, this would require that the ASD school progress at much faster rates to get from the bottom to near the top.

Last year I wrote my first annual report on the status of the ASD in a post called The Underachievement School District.  At that time, they boasted that they got the highest growth score possible, a 5 out of 5, but also revealed that their reading scores dropped from 18.1% proficient in 2012 to 13.6% proficient in 2013 while the rest of the state rose from 49.9% proficient to 50.3% proficient.  I questioned the validity of the five point growth scale based on these numbers.

The state tests in Tennessee are called the TCAPs.  This year there was a fiasco where the TCAP score release was delayed so long that schools were not able to use the scores in the student’s grades.  Tennessee is all about ‘accountability’ so this was one more straw that made parents and also Republican state legislators to call for Huffman’s resignation.

Early July 2014, I wrote about how the state released a summary of the TCAP scores.  It was revealed that 3-8 math increased by less than 1% while 3-8 reading went down by less than 1%.  Nothing to celebrate there.  Instead they focused on supposed high school ‘gains.’  This was ironic to me since Tennessee was so proud of their grade 4 and grade 8 NAEP gains yet when the 12th grade NAEP showed that Tennessee didn’t do so well there, they said that they can’t be held responsible for high schoolers since those students had most of their academic careers before the reforms set it.  So they can’t take blame when high schoolers do poorly, but they will take the credit when they do well.

Tennessee is releasing TCAP results in stages.  The big picture came out around July 4th, the school results are coming, they say, around August 15th, and the district results were released today, July 30th.  With the release of the district data, they also had some press releases telling the newspapers what to say.  In the whole country I’d say that the education reporters in Tennessee are the worst.  They just take whatever the press releases say and print that without any delving into the numbers themselves.  It is a shame I have to do their job for them, but I guess someone’s got to do it.

With the release of the district data, there are the Louisiana style invented statistics like this one:

• From 2011 to 2014, the percentage of districts with the majority of their students proficient or advanced in 3-8 math increased from 18 percent to 57 percent.
  
  

Keep in mind that for the whole state of Tennessee, the percent of students passing 3-8 math rose about 10% from 41% to 51% between 2011 and 2014.  How this translated from 18% of districts having half the students pass to 57% having half the students pass is something that can very well happen when everyone is hovering near 50%.  It is a made up stat since there was so little to celebrate with the flat math and reading, including reading going down by about 1%.

So I was interested to see how the ASD fared.  Looking over their scores, 21.8% passing 3-8 math and 17% passing 3-8 reading, the first thing I looked for is what sort of progress they are making in going from the bottom 5% to the top 25% in five years.  Two years in and they are still in the bottom 5%, dead last with the second to last district not even close to them.  They will surely have to pick up the pace on their growth.

Then I saw this tweet

and thought, “that’s interesting.”  The link led me to a pathetic attempt to dress up the horrible numbers posted by the ASD this year.  I went to the link and found a page with the headline “ASD Grows Faster than State in Reading and Math, High Schools Make Double Digit Gains.”

They included this bar graph showing their ‘growth’ over the past two years in math, ELA, and science.  I noticed that while they technically did ‘gain’ 3.4% in their reading scores, they are still 1.1% down from what they were in 2012.  This reminds me a bit of a guy who is gambling and you ask him how he’s doing and he says “I’m up $1,000 in the past hour without mentioning the $1500 he lost in the hour before that.”  Also these bars since they are only being compared to each other do not make it clear how low these scores really are.

But in reform, when convenient, it’s not about score it’s about ‘growth’ compared to the rest of the state.  Well since from 2013 to 2014 the whole state went down by .4% in reading, any ‘growth’ no matter how little by a district is ‘out-gaining’, as the tweets said, their peers.  And since math across the state was flat from 2013 to 2014, rising only by .6%, almost any other possible gain by a district will be better than the state.  Still it made for this impressive looking graph comparing ASD growth to state growth.

Of course the 2.2% bar is quite large the way they did their scale.  But it is accurate that the ASD had better growth than the state between 2013 and 2014.  But the ASD has been around for two years, so wouldn’t it make more sense to compare the ‘growth’ of the ASD to the whole state for the two year period.  Well, they were wise not to, but I was wise to make it for them, and here’s what it looks like:

Suddenly, it’s not so good anymore.  The ASD grew by 1.1% more than the state in that period while the RSD actually went down by .7% more than the state went down.  At this rate of losing .35% of ground each year to the state, the ASD will never get out of the bottom 5% in reading, and for math where there is a 30% difference between the ASD and the Tennessee average, if they creep up at .5% a year it will take 60 years for them to get to the 50% mark, let alone the top 25%.  Here is another graph I made that you won’t find in the press release.  The are those proficiency numbers of the ASD side by side with the Tennessee average.

This demonstrates, as much as anything how the fact that the ASD had a better 1 year ‘growth’ than the state, the two year growth is about the same and that the ASD better start ramping it up if they plan to get their schools from way way back in dead last to beating 75% of the districts in the state of Tennessee in just three years.

But there does need to be something to celebrate so the ASD made up the most outrageous statistic of all and presented it in this graph.

According to this graph it seems that ASD high schools had 42.4% ‘growth’ in English 1, 24.2% ‘growth’ in Algebra 1, and 28.9% ‘growth’ in Biology 1.  Whoah, those are big numbers.  When I went to the page with all the databases I found that there were no numbers at all for the ASD.  Other districts had ‘growths’ generally between -10% and +10%.  But why no ASD?  Then I noticed in the fine print on this graph the very mysterious explanation:

SCORES ARE AN AVERAGE OF FRAYSER 9GA AND GRAD ACADEMY; GROWTH IS BASED ON COMPARABLE SCS HIGH SCHOOLS (I.E., CARVER HS AND FRAYSER HS 9TH GRADE CLASS)

I’ll give a hearty thumbs up to any Tennessee education reporter who gets to the bottom of what this could possibly mean.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I was once good friends with Chris Barbic, and maybe he still sees me as a good guy, though an annoying one.  I hope so.  A year and a half ago he was the recipient of one of my ‘classic Rubinstein’ open letters.  I write him emails from time to time, mostly yelling at him for having become a ‘reformer.’  He hasn’t written me back in a while, actually.  But from time to time he will respond to one of my tweets.  I’ll then tweet back and a bunch of others will usually join in and then Chris, like the groundhog seeing his shadow, but this time it is him seeing his own reflection, and he goes into hiding for a few months.

This concludes this edition of the 2014 report on the Achievement School District.  For sure there will be three more of these 2015, 2016, and 2017.  After that I will determine if the ASD has met their goal of getting the bottom 5% of schools up to the top 25% in just 5 years armed with only a healthy dose of high expectations and a whole bunch of new TFA teachers.

Public schools can be extremely political places, especially when combined with the weight of the legal system.  In fact, when combined, politics and the law can take an ideological turn that may even thwart the will of its own citizens. This can both be positive and negative, depending upon your view the particular issue.  Nonetheless, placing the responsibility of political decisions upon the representation of another person or group is indeed uncertain, and perhaps dangerous.  
 
This is a major reason we must pay close attention to our elections, and must ensure the people we trust hold elected offices. This is also why our US and Tennessee Constitution include numerous checks and balances. If a person is elected or appointed that did not represent the public, other officials could and are able to impede various actions.
 
Recently, our General Assembly has begun to identify that Tennessee is lacking some checks and balances. Apparently, Tennessee is the only state where the attorney general is appointed by the Supreme Court.   This is further complicated by the fact that the Supreme Court is appointed by the Governor. In forty-three states, the attorney general is elected, and the remaining six states have some combination of legislative, executive, and judicial input. Normally, this may have little bearing on public education, if any. However, Tennessee again is an anomaly.
 
Recently, Attorney General Robert Cooper released a statement upholding the actions of Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman, (also appointed by the Governor) about whether he had the legal authority to waive regulatory or statutory requirements related to federal and state student assessment and accountability.  Cooper cites TCA 49-1-201(d)(1), which states that the commissioner of education may waive some state laws that impede the department’s goals or missions if districts request a waiver. There were also specific prohibitions that were mentioned.
 
Many legislators, analysts, and citizens questioned the Attorney General’s ruling. Cooper uses the very language in the Federal “No Child Left Behind” law and calls them “terms of art” in order to reach the conclusion that the waiver by Huffman does not affect or involve evaluations at the State and Federal levels.  The use of the words “terms of art” by the Attorney General in his ruling was interesting, as was failure to mention that Tennessee has been issued a waiver of many of the No Child Left Behind requirements.  Tennessee is among 34 states that were granted exemptions from punitive measures of that law.
 
This is a subject that is expected to continue to be scrutinized and perhaps further debated.  If the Tennessee General Assembly feels the Cooper ruling is in error, as do many people that work within education law, and realize the contradiction by the Attorney General in his ruling, expect state legislators to recognize the necessity for tweaks to existing state law for clarification. 
 
Essentially, the AG Ruling and his legal opinion allowed appointed - not elected - officials the opportunity to bypass legislation - created by elected officials - if the commissioner deems it more efficient to do so. In this case, the cost for efficiency is public input, and legislative intent is muted. Little consideration was apparently given to the fact that the delay in receiving TCAP scores by districts impacted individual schools and district closing operations and interrupted the decision-making process they utilized in planning for the upcoming school year.  There is a danger that by silencing the public through the legal hammer at the disposal of the state and utilization of appointed officials becomes a much more progressive force than the will of parents, educators and even legislators in shaping public education policy in Tennessee. 
 
The remedy of course, is to change the method of selecting the Attorney General, and or the Commissioner of Education.  This of course will require much more debate and discussion, and perhaps legislative action.  We expect this matter will continue to be questioned among educators and policymakers.  Cooper’s ruling raised more questions than it answered. 
 
##

Kyle Mallory is a classroom teacher in Stewart County.  She was VFW Middle School Teacher of the Year.  
Samantha Bates is Director of Member Services for Professional Educators of Tennessee.   
 

TCAP scores in TN have been embargoed by order of Commissioner Kevin Huffman. Superintendents, principals, and administrators are forbidden to release or discuss this information with the public or the media.

Could it be:

• The results show that their reforms and Common Core aren't working?
• The results show that charter schools are performing worse than public schools?
• The results show that the Achievement School District won't be moving test scores from the bottom 5% to the top 25% of the state, as they promised to do?
• They need more time for their fancy new PR firm (that the TNDOE just hired with our public tax dollars) to put a polished, positive spin on the bad scores?
• They don't want parents upset that their children's report cards were negatively impacted from the TCAP delay and Huffman's illegal waivers?
• They don't want local school boards to see the real results of charter schools in their district to be able to vote on their futures before the new school year starts?
• They are protecting certain charter schools that have ties to politicians and their friends? (like Tony Bennett did in Indiana)
• It is an election year for Governor Haslam and he's already had so much negative publicity?
• They didn't want the negative news to be announced when all the Governors met in Nashville last week?
• They don't want the negative news to cloud the big Koch brothers reform party next week in Nashville?
• They're waiting for Huffman to get back from Las Vegas, NV where is is currently at the Teach For America Conference and the extravagant TFA Awards ceremony.  Huffman is being honored for the lucrative $6.7 million no-bid contract he signed for TN with Teach For America using our tax dollars. (By the way, Tennessee spends more money per Teach for America recruit than any other state, but we cannot even afford to give our qualified, experienced teachers a 2% raise as Governor Haslam promised was his top budget priority last fall.)
     

Tennessee deserves testing TRANSPARENCY.

   We, as parents, should be able to see the test questions our children are forced to answer.

   Teachers should be able to see the questions that their evaluations and jobs are so heavily based upon.

   The public is entitled to know the results of these tests that we paid for.

Commissioner Huffman is hiding something.  What is it?  Will anyone find out?  or will the test results be quietly released the Friday before the next holiday weekend?

One thing is for certain: This secrecy undermines public trust.
 

To understand why we may be approaching a charter school crisis that resembles the one that developed around subprime mortgages, you need to understand how investment banks and credit rating agencies seized upon an instrument to make homeownership available to people with limited resources as a vehicle to make fortunes and advance careers, leaving the tax payers with a large bill. I think something similar is happening today with charter schools, once seen as an opportunity to provide better educational opportunities for families in low and moderate income neighborhoods. In each instance,  an institution initially aimed at expanding opportunity for those with limited resources became, because of government favoritism and lack of oversight, a vehicle for profit taking on a grand scale by the very privileged that sometimes left those the institution was designed to help in very bad shape
 
The subprime mortgage was a loan offered by banks and financial institutions to people whose credit rating and financial position was too weak to qualify for a normal 20 to 30 year mortgage at the prevailing interest rate.  To protect the lender, this was done by making the interest rate much higher, with the penalty, in the case of default, being repossession of the home that was purchased. This was obviously a high risk endeavor for the borrower. But because the nation was becoming more economically polarized, with working class incomes plunging and middle class incomes stagnant, the Clinton administration and federal lending agencies started pushing this instrument as a way of keeping the dream of homeownership alive in the nation, especially among working class people and people of color.  Banks, savings and loans, and mortgage companies rose to the challenge, writing millions of these mortgages to people whose incomes and collateral did not qualify them for a conventional mortgage.

At times, they aggressively marketed these mortgages, pushing them on people who never dreamed they could purchase a home, triggering a wave of new residential construction in many parts of the nation.  It seemed like a democratic moment in the nation’s history- millions of new home owners, many of them people of color, a boom in residential construction, work for lawyers and bankers specializing in residential loans.
 But underlying this boom were shady practices that elected officials chose to ignore. Many of the mortgages were written in ways that hid the risks borrowers were taking with variable rates that rose sharply after the first few years.   There was no way borrowers were going to be able to pay their mortgages with the rates they would have five or ten years after they were initially written and many  would lose the homes they had purchased.

Worse yet, investment banks began to bundle these mortgages into bond offerings, and sell them as a safe investments to insurance companies, pension funds, government institutions, and high end investors around the world, raking in huge commissions as they did so.  And here, corruption on a grand scale turned a risky lending practice into a destabilizing force of deadly proportions in the global economy.  Rating agencies, seeing huge profits being made by their best customers, the large investment banks, started giving triple A ratings to bonds based on the bundling of individual mortgages which, were they rated, would have been giving a rating of “F.” This practice ended up spreading the risk into every corner of the global economy, as investors rushed to gobble up the bonds, more mortgages were written and sold to meet the demand. And for a while it all seemed to work. Millions of people who never had homes how had them, while fortunes were being made in the writing, bundling and marketing of these mortgages.
 
But inevitably, the boom turned to bust.  When the high rates on the mortgages started kicking in, millions of people defaulted on their loans, not only losing their homes but setting in motion a chain reaction which destabilized not only the banks which had written the mortgages, but the financial institutions which had bundled them, along with their customers. Some of the largest banks and insurance companies in the nation failed and went under, and others had to be rescued through an injection of funds from the federal government at huge expense to tax payers.  And as the economy plunged into near Depression, the residential housing market was shattered, and along with it the dream of widespread home ownership among the poor. Today, there are 13 million abandoned homes and commercial properties in the US, while large numbers of families live doubled and tripled up in properties which were designed to be private homes
 
While the comparison is not exact, there are some powerful similarities between what happened to subprime mortgages and what is currently taking place with charter schools, another “short cut” to opportunity which has been seized upon by elites for financial and political gain, to the detriment of those for whom the charter school was initially designed to help.
 
Charter schools, which are public funded schools which have their own boards of directors and can set their own hiring policies, curricula, and patterns of student recruitment and discipline independent of the regulations governing public schools, were initially created to promote greater experimentation and innovation in public education.  Many early charter schools were created by teachers and parents and promoted innovative pedagogies. Some still do.
 
But somewhere along the line, public officials began to see charter schools as a way of circumventing expensive labor contracts with teachers unions and of providing an alternative to public schools in inner city communities which had been battered by disinvestment, job losses and drug epidemics. They invited foundations and the private sector to come in and create charter schools on a far larger scale and with a very different model than parent/teacher cooperatives, using private money as well as public money.  The professed goal was to give inner city parents and students safe alternatives to battered, underfunded and often troubled public schools, something many parents welcomed, but inviting powerful interests to help shape what was essentially an alternate school system free from public regulation and oversight proved to be as dangerous as it was tantalizing.
 
By the end of the Clinton Administration, “Charter School Fever” had started to spread through Corporate America and Wall Street, spurred on by an investment tax credit that offered huge tax breaks for those who invested in charter school construction.  Not only did the number of charter schools rise exponentially in every city in the country, but self- described “education entrepreneurs” began creating  charter school chains, some of them non profit, some of them for profit,  which attracted  private funding along with public money, headed by powerful “CEO’s” who were sometimes relatives and friends of powerful politicians, and in a few instances, politicians ( or ex-politicians) themselves. Flush with funding the chains began building new schools in inner city neighborhoods where public schools were starved of funding, or in some cases, colonizing existing public school buildings and seizing the best facilities.  Founders of the new chains eagerly embraced the corporate model of management, giving their executives far higher salaries than their counterparts in public education, and creating a climate of insecurity and fear for their teachers, along with data driven performance targets, with the expressed goal of vastly outperforming inner city public schools on the standardized tests which had become the central component of school evaluation following the passage of No Child Left Behind.   

By the middle of the Bush administration, hundreds of new charter schools had been created in cities throughout the country and charter schools were rapidly emerging as the favored strategy for inner city education among an unprecedented array of interests including Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Civil rights organizations, Hollywood and the media, and the Democratic and Republican leadership. The prospect of creating great schools in inner city communities while  offering opportunities for profitable investment, all without raising taxes or increasing school budgets proved irresistible to a broad spectrum of the nation’s leadership. Charter Schools, like subprime Mortgages, were increasingly marketed as a Win/Win proposition for all concerned, a way to help the poor while unleashing the creative power of the private sector. The power and breadth of this emerging coalition was revealed for all the nation to see when Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans in 2005.   Charter School advocates literally seized upon Katrina as the “Perfect Storm,  putting forth a plan to turn New Orleans into all Charter School district by phasing out and closing all public schools in the city. During the last three years of the Bush administration, the plan was put into effect with the full support of the city administration and the state legislature, leading to the closing of scores of New Orleans public schools and the firing of thousands of teachers, many of them teachers of color, replacing them with charter schools staffed by mostly white teachers supplied by Teach for America.
 
But in terms of Charter School Fever and Charter School Favoritism, the Bush years proved to be only a prelude to what was to transpire in the Obama Administration.  With the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and the launching of Race to the Top, President Obama not only made Charter School Favoritism official national policy, he put hundreds of billions   dollars of federal funds behind an effort to force municipalities to close “failing” public schools (defined as failing exclusively on the basis of student test scores) and replace them with charters.  At a time when the nation had fallen into a severe Recession, municipalities eagerly complied as a way of getting much needed federal funds, closing public schools en masse  and creating thousands of new charters, often with little oversight and only the most perfunctory investigation of the school founders and boards of directors.  Ironically, this was done even though the available research showed that charters did NOT outperform public schools in the same neighborhoods, with comparable student populations.  But data and evidence, when its results were inconvenient, did not deter the President and Secretary of Education from promoting Charter Schools as their preferred solution to problems of educational inequality, a position affirmed for all to see when the President celebrated “National Charter School Week” rather than “Teacher Appreciation Week.”

It is in the Obama years, with the financial incentives of Race to the Top sparking rapid charter school growth with little oversight, that the abuses associated with charter schools began to take on proportions akin to those associated with the subprime mortgage crisis. In the case of the charter school industry, the abuses took two forms:  mistreatment of students, teachers, and families, and fiscal issues ranging from mismanagement to outright embezzlement and fraud.
 
Many of the educational abuses of charter schools stem from their determination to make sure their test scores surpass those of neighboring public schools, thereby justifying the favorable treatment they receive, and hope to receive in the future.  These abuses include:

• Discrimination against Special Needs students and English Language learners. In every city in the nation, charter schools enroll far lower number of such students than public schools in the same neighborhoods.
• Expulsion or harassment of student who do not test well, sometimes right before state tests. In some cities, public school teachers have called this “The Charter School Dump” as they can expect an influx of charter schools students, who they HAVE TO accept, shortly before test time.  On one instance a famous charter school operator in NY expelled his entire 8th grade class because of their disappointing performance on tests
• Draconian discipline policies which would never be tolerated in public schools such as putting students in closets, having them stare at walls, or wear special articles of clothing to indicate they are being punished when they violate school behavior codes.
• Telling students, parents and teachers to avoid all contact with their counterparts in co-located or neighboring public schools lest they be “polluted” or “corrupted” by such contact.
• Failure to hire or retain teachers of color. Charter schools have far lower proportions of such teachers than public schools with comparable student populations.

Not all charter schools practice these forms of discrimination. But enough do, with the number growing every day, that the issue cries out for investigation at the city, state and federal level.
 
The same is true of fiscal abuse and political favoritism, which, if anything, may even be more prevalent. These include:

• Inflated salaries for Charter School CEO’s and founders of charter school chains. One charter school operator in Washington DC is under investigation for drawing more than 3 million dollars in compensation a year.
• Putting public officials, and relatives of public officials on the boards of charter schools seeking public funding. Instances of this have been uncovered in Indiana, Florida, California, and Tennessee and can probably be found in most other states.
• Outright embezzlement of funds by charter school operators, instances of which have been uncovered in New York, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Connecticut.
• Involvement of charter school operators in real estate fraud with the intention of inflating the value of properties in neighborhoods where new charter schools are being built.\
• The creation of on line and for profit charter schools, without serious oversight, even though such entities have no track record of effective instruction.
• The granting of charter school franchises, in some states, to religious institutions which teach creationism and biblical literalism, and exclude students who do not share those beliefs.

What we have here, to put it bluntly, is a pattern of discrimination and fraud that hurts the very families the charter schools were intended to help, allows ambitious individuals to enrich themselves at public expense, and ultimately undermines the quality of public education in cities throughout the nation. The entire charter industry, riddled with fraud, corruption and discrimination, is poised to slowly build to a public education collapse if the trends of cherry picking the best students, dumping the high needs kids into public schools then closing them for under performing continues.
 
It is time that all forms of Charter School Favoritism come to an end, that Charter Schools be subject to the same level of oversight that public schools are, that closing of public schools to make way for Charters stop immediately and that there be no further expansion of charter schools until their patterns of governance and operation fully investigated.

Professor Mark Naison speaks about Charter Schools
on Education News on YouTube:
 

For Mark's Research follow these links:
  http://bit.ly/ChartersSubprime
  http://bit.ly/ChartersSubprime
For the Bibliography follow this link:
  http://bit.ly/CharterCorrupt

In a desperate attempt to save Kevin Huffman's credibility and job, a petition was started by rich people.  The signatures on the petition are an elite "who's-who" list of people who get generous paychecks from the reformy charter gravy-train.  There are quite a few "name not displayed" entries on the petition, but from doing internet searches of the people who did sign their name, it is easy to see that these people are enemies of public schools. For example:

• Rebecca Lieberman (managing director of school and sector initiatives for the Charter School Center) was quoted in the Tennesseean's article about the petition.  Lieberman has a nice, cushy job at the Charter Incubator.  According to the 2012 990 tax filing, she made a nice salary of $102,673. (their 2013 990 isn't available, but we bet she made even more last year).  Her organization hit the jackpot financially under Huffman's leadership.  The CEO's salary at the Charter Incubatorincreased a whopping $73,586 in one year! (from $120,750 in 2011 to$176,336 in 2012).  2012 was obviously a boom year for their organization, because they also added a COO position for Justin Testerman with a sweet salary of $127,015.  Nope, you certainly can't make that kind of salary as a public school teacher!
• Teach for America corps members, Derik Ohanian, who taught as a temporary teacher through Teach for America, was then super-launched into an internship with the White House for 4 months over the summer, and then landed a sweet job with the TN Department of Education (working under his boss, Kevin Huffman) as a "Leadership Coaching Consultant" for the past 5 months.  His signature surely bought some brownie points from his boss.
• Achievement School District staffers also signed the petition, of course, like Margo Roen and Alex Little.  Their jobs depend on Huffman, so it makes sense they'd sign it.
• Elissa Kim is a no-brainer signing her name since she works as Executive Vice President for Recruitment and Admissions for Teach For America.   Kevin Huffman was her former co-worker at TFA.  Huffman signing that big $6 million no-bid contract for Tennessee with TFA meant job security for her. Her salary is more than Kevin Huffman's at $224,000 plus benefits. Yes, it is a huge conflict of interest between her job at TFA and the fact that she is on the Metro Nashville Board of Education, but who cares when there is money to be made?  
• John Eason, identified in the Tennesseean article as a “philanthropist,” is really an investor in for-profit management of charter schools (reformers really, really want for-profit charters to be legal in TN and need Huffman to make it happen).  Eason co-founded Beacon Education Management which merged with another firmand now operates under another name in other states.
• The Tennesseean also writes: "Among names on the petition are several founders of publicly financed, privately operated charter schools in Nashville, including Ravi Gupta of RePublic Schools and Todd Dickson of Valor Collegiate Academy. It also includes charter philanthropists such as Townes Duncan and John Eason as well as leaders of the Tennessee Charter School Center."  Quick internet searches show that Valor Collegiate Academy is opening in Nashville, with hopes to open a whole cluster of schools in Nashville.  Cha-ching.  
• Townes Duncan, who fought to remove power from local elected school boards and give control to an un-elected state board allowing charters even more freedom to open in communities where they are not wanted.
• Representative Mark White, devoted water boy for Governor Haslam, signed it and left a touching comment, too.  There's no question of his loyalty and intentions.  We hope the rumor isn't true that Mark White is on the list as a replacement for Huffman's job.  White's contempt for public education and unwillingness to listen to parents & teachers would make him a horrible leader over Tennessee's public schools.

Click HERE to read the real "miracle" of
why TN's NAEP scores jumped so drastically in 2013
and why it won't happen again on the next NAEP.

A quote from a public school Dad:

"It kills me that Charter proponents have so little respect for the public's intelligence that they think they can create something like this and not have it be recognized as a charade starring the normal cast of characters. I also think its worth noting that there are current and aspiring school board members who have signed this petition. Voters need to ask themselves if people who are willing to support the divisive policies of Commissioner Huffman are really the best people to represent them."

Click HERE to read his article

Click HERE to see the petition to remove Huffman

Click HERE to see the Facebook page

Do not be fooled. Follow the money.
See who is really benefiting from Huffman's reforms.
 

In state after state, charter schools are proving that it is downright risky to turn public money over to deregulated corporations and unqualified individuals to run schools. The Detroit Free Press series on the scams, frauds, and corruption in many Michigan charters was an eye-opener for all those who are not part of the charter movement. The exposé of similar frauds in Florida by the League of Women Voters in Florida was enlightening to anyone other than free market ideologues. The same level of corruption–actually, even worse–exists in Ohio’s charter sector, where a small number of charter founders have become multi-millionaires, run low-performing schools, and are never held accountable.

One of the most colorful charter scandals occurred when a Cleveland charter operator was tried for funneling over $1million to his church and other businesses. The charter founder was a pastor, not an educator. His attorney said ““his client had good intentions when opening the school on East 55th Street but then got greedy when he saw easy opportunities to make money….”

The leader of California’s most celebrated charter school, with outstanding test scores, stepped down when an audit revealed that nearly $4 million had been diverted to his other businesses.

In Arizona, the Arizona Republic exposed charters that were family businesses, giving contracts to family members and board members.

In Chicago, the head of the city’s largest charter chain resigned after the media reported large contracts given to family members of school leaders and other conflicts of interest and misuse of public funds.

Last week, one of Connecticut’s most celebrated charter organizations was at the center of the latest scandal. Its CEO was revealed to have a criminal past and a falsified résumé. Two top executives immediately resigned, and legislators and journalists began to ask questions. No background checks? Accountability? Transparency?

Colin McEnroe wrote in the Hartford Courant’s blog that hustlers were cashing in on the charter school craze. Not just in Connecticut, but in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, California, Ohio, Arizona, on and on.

McEnroe wrote:

“The message is always the same: The essential concept behind the charter school movement is that, freed from the three Rs — restraints, rules and regulations — these schools could innovate and get the kinds of results that calcified, logy public schools could only dream about. And they do … sometimes.

“But handing out uncountable millions to operators who would be given a free hand was also like putting a big sign out by the highway that says “Welcome Charlatans, Grifters, Credential-Fakers, Cherry-Pickers, Stat-Jukers, Cult of Personality Freaks and People Who Have No Business Running a Dairy Queen, Much Less a School.” And they’ve all showed up. This is the Promised Land: lots of cash and a mission statement that implicitly rejects the notion of oversight…..

“What else goes with those big bubbling pots of money? A new layer of lobbyists and donation-bundlers. The Free Press documented the way a lawmaker who dared to make a peep of protest against charter schools getting whatever they want suddenly found himself in a race against a challenger heavily funded by the Great Lakes Education Project, the “powerhouse lobby” of the Michigan charter movement. Jon Lender of The Courant recently showed how one family of charter school advocates had crammed $90,000 into Connecticut Democratic Party coffers.”

If there were more investigations, more charter scandals would be disclosed.

When will public officials call a halt to the scams, conflicts of interest, self-dealing, nepotism, and corruption?

There is one defensible role for charter schools and that is to do what public schools can’t do. There is no reason to create a dual school system, with one free to choose its students and to cherry pick the best students, while the other must take all students. There is no reason to give charters to non-educators. There is no reason to allow charter operators to pocket taxpayer dollars for their own enrichment while refusing to be fully accountable for how public money is spent. Where public money goes, public accountability must follow.


- written by Diane Ravitch, originally posted at www.DianeRavitch.net

from a TN teacher:

Some TVAAS information I feel compelled to share follows. But first, repeat after me: "I love my students, I love teaching, and I'm good at it." We have to keep focused on the important things during these crazy times in education!

Last summer I did quite a bit of research about TVAAS, & here's what I learned:

I teach 4th & 5th pull-out ESL, so I share Reading instructional time when TVAAS matching rolls around in the Spring. Students are pulled out of their regular classes to attend ESL for about an hour a day. Since my students are pulled out at various times, the percentage of instructional time I claim for each student varies. For example, if a student attends one hour of daily Reading time in his/her classroom and one hour Reading time with me, the classroom teacher and I split instructional percentage & we each claim 50%.

In order for a teacher to have an individual TVAAS score (I'm talking about 4th & 5th grade now) the teacher must have the equivalent of 6 full-time students in the subject they teach in the same grade for a minimum of 150 instructional days. So if I have 20 4th graders and I claim 50% of their Reading instructional time I multiply 20 students times 50% which equals 10 students. I met the minimum of 6 students in the same grade, same subject, so now I have an individual TVAAS score. But remember, only if I claim at least 150 instructional days. I found this out because I claimed this wrong when I was on maternity leave, which is what led me to my research.

Here's where it gets interesting: If you have a student who performs significantly better than the state predicted, that student could be considered a "statistical outlier" & that student's score could be removed. I have had this happen more than once. I spoke to someone in testing who confirmed this. So basically, if a student does much better than expected, the state thinks something fishy was going on. In theory, students who perform significantly lower than expected could have their scores tossed out as well, although ironically, I've never seen this happen on my report. If you teach 120 students, tossing out a couple of scores probably won't make a big impact, but if you only have 20 students or less, it could definitely impact your growth score.

And the most interesting part of all...the state can and will throw out a score from the previous school year. So if Johnny does well in my class and terrible next year, Johnny's score could be thrown out from my previous year's score. And no one will tell you it's been thrown out.

Print your reports more than once a semester, and pay attention to the list of students whose scores were included.

And remember, you love your students, you love teaching, and you're good at it!


Tennessee parents do not want our children's teachers evaluated based on our children's test scores.  This system is unfair to both the teacher and the student.  

Tennessee parents demand testing transparency.

Education Commissioner Huffman and Governor Haslam released the state-level 2013-2014 TCAP scores this morning. We are not going to waste any time reviewing the scores here because 1) we don’t believe the test scores accurately reflect what a child truly knows, and 2) it appears that the DOE uses creative statistical analyses, subjective cut-score determinations, and lots of PR spin to make these scores be whatever they want them be.

But we would like to point out that, just this morning, Commissioner Huffman once again indicated that TCAP isn’t a good test for measuring student progress. According to Nashville Public Radio, Mr. Huffman told reporters, “I think there’s some level of a question of whether TCAP captures some of the work our teachers are doing in reading…” Ummm…Mr. Huffman, just about a year ago you testified before the Senate Education Committee and, during your testimony, you admitted that the TCAP is not “strong”. To top it off, the vice-president of the education astro-turf “advocacy” group, SCORE, also told NPR the following: “‘What we would say is it’s not necessarily a complete assessment of what students are learning in the classroom,”…adding that the state needs a test that allows students to give written explanations to show what they really know.”

So, let’s get this straight: 35-50% of a teacher’s evaluation and 15-25% of a child’s grade are based on the results of a test that is not “strong”, nor “complete”. In what other universe is judging someone on a measurement that does not accurately measure what it’s supposed to measure OK?

Parents and teachers have been screaming for years that TCAP results do not fully reflect student or teacher skills. No one listened. Huffman essentially said the same thing almost a  year ago. No one cared. And now, like a proverbial broken record, we are hearing the same old song from Huffman, but this time a member of SCORE is singing backup. On behalf of hundreds of thousands of Tennessee students, teachers, and parents, we are here to say that it’s time the DOE starts singing a couple new tunes: “Scrap the TCAP” and “YPBA” (aka “Yes Performance Based Assessment).

Our only viable hope at this juncture is that the legislature will intervene during the 2015 legislative session and try to bring some sanity to teacher and student evaluations. So, on that note, please research the candidates running for the House and Senate in your district–and vote for those who are against the use of TCAP scores in student grading and teacher evaluations. If we can get enough of them in the legislature, maybe we can finally stop the madness!