Maybe you didn't read the paper?  (we don't blame you if you didn't).  You still need to know this big news, so we will email it to you.  You don't want to be out of the loop, do you?  You're welcome.
 
THE BIG NEWS:
There was a big, important survey given to teachers in TN by the Tennessee Consortium on Research, Evaluation and Development, an organization that "is responsible for carrying out a detailed, focused program of research as part of Tennessee's Race to the Top grant."  

On this important survey, the biggest shocker (not to us) was that:

56% of the 27,000 Tennessee teachers who responded to the survey want to abandon the standards!

56% of the 27,000 Tennessee teachers who responded to the survey want to abandon the standards!!

56% of the 27,000 Tennessee teachers who responded to the survey want to abandon the standards!!!

and also: 
13% want to delay the implementation 


The next biggest shocker (not to us) was that Governor Haslam announced he plans a full vetting of the Common Core standards sometime in the future.  This is a desperate political move and TN parents aren't fooled.  It is just like the Senate Common Core hearings that were held over a year ago in September 2013.  Anyone seen the report on that, yet?  We assume the report must be stuck in the TCAP results department being aligned and post-equated by t.    

This article excerpt is shared with permission of its author:

Run schools like a business? Flip that theory to see flaws
by Lisa Woods, originally posted on 7/20/2014 at News & Record

I would like to posit a scenario where “job performance and value” are based on the following objectives and conditions:

• You are meeting with 35 clients in a room designed to hold 20. 
• The air conditioning and/or heat may or may not be working, and your roof leaks in three places, one of which is the table where your customers are gathered.
• Of the 35, five do not speak English, and no interpreters are provided.
• Fifteen are there because they are forced by their “bosses” to be there but hate your product.
• Eight do not have the funds to purchase your product.
• Seven have no prior experience with your product and have no idea what it is or how to use it.
• Two are removed for fighting over a chair.
• Only two-thirds of your clients appear well-rested and well-fed.

You are expected to:

• Make your presentation in 40 minutes.
• Have up-to-date, professionally created information concerning your product.
• Keep complete paperwork and assessments of product understanding for each client and remediate where there is lack of understanding.
• Use at least three different methods of conveying your information: visual, auditory and hands-on.

The “criterion” for measuring your “worth and value” is that no less than 100 percent of your clients must buy and have the knowledge to assemble and use your product, both creatively and critically, and in conjunction with other products your company produces, of which you have working but limited knowledge.

Only half of the clients arrive with the necessary materials to be successful in their understanding of your product, and your presentation is disrupted at least five times during the 40 minutes.

You have an outdated product manual and one old computer, but no presentation equipment. Your company’s budget has been cut every year for the past 10 years, the latest by a third. Does this mean you only create two-thirds of a presentation? These cuts include your mandatory training and presentation materials (current ones available to you are outdated by five years).

You have no assistant, and you must do all the paperwork, research your knowledge deficiencies and produce professional-looking, updated materials during the 40 minutes allotted to you during the professional day. You cannot use your 30-minute lunch break. Half is spent monitoring other clients who are not your own.
Your company cannot afford to train you in areas of its product line where you may be deficient, yet you are expected to have this knowledge and incorporate it into your product presentation in a meaningful way.

You haven’t had a raise in eight years and your benefits have been purged, nor do you receive a commission for any product you sell. Do you purchase all the materials needed so your presentation is effective? Will you pay for the mandatory training necessary to do your job in a competent and professional manner?

School is not a business

Does this business model seem viable? Of course not.

Nor would it be appropriate for me to come to your job and evaluate you on a set of standards for which I have no experience or knowledge beyond use of your product (assuming from your presentation that I understand it). This is an absurd comparison, yet schools are continuously compared to a business model, which, when reversed, would be considered stupid by those in “business,” for there would be little if any profit, and the expectations of 100 percent success are delusional at best.

Think about what is provided for you to succeed at your job and imagine how you could meet your goals with the conditions described above.

Is “100 percent high quality” an adequate and realistic assumption for the quality of your workforce? Does your company have any poor employees? If an employee shows promise but needs help, is it provided, or is she fired immediately? Are the same criteria used at all levels of employment for all people? Must your employer have a reason to terminate an employee or can it fire someone it doesn’t like?

There are so many blanket statements made implying that most teachers are incompetent and only want more money. This is offensive.

Reality check: Most teachers do so for their love of learning and children and to make our community and beyond a better place. None would ever delude herself into thinking there is a lot of money in this career. For most, it is a vocation, not a job.

Bad teachers don’t stay

Because our state provides no right to collective bargaining, tenure is job protection. In my 30-plus years as an educator, I have rarely seen ineffective teachers remain long on the job. Are there some? Sure, but basic statistics will tell that a 10,000-employee company (Guilford County Schools) will have a statistical spread where “average” and “high average” is the largest chunk, and hopefully the smallest percentage is the “least effective.”

Does it bother me when I know there are less-effective teachers making the same pay I do? Sure, but complaining about it won’t make my compensation commensurate with my value and work product. Look at the current teacher assessment instrument. While it needs improvement, I can’t imagine that someone who is incompetent and showing no improvement would last long.

Tenure is not granted willy-nilly at the “magic” four years. Nor does it guarantee a job.

If a teacher’s evaluations are not up to a specific standard, the teacher is put on probation. And if no improvement is made, goodbye! And, with the continuous cuts and diversion of funds through vouchers to parochial schools, who knows how many public school teaching jobs will be left?

Tenure does not guarantee quality teachers, but applying the business model to schools is as absurd as applying the “school reality” to business. Until a better and fairer assessment and compensation structure is created, those “in the trenches” are actually consulted, and the reality of our working environment is considered and remedied, the symbolic little gesture of tenure will be an important one to insure that excellent teachers remain in North Carolina.

Lisa Woods, a master teacher at Weaver Academy for the Performing and Visual Arts, has taught in the Greensboro and Guilford County school systems since 1989. She holds an MFA and National Board certification and has completed all coursework for a master’s in education. She was on the national faculty for the National Paideia Center in Chapel Hill and has taught studio art from grade school to the college/graduate level.

 Click HERE to read the story of the blueberries
which will radically change your perception about students

The Achievement School District of Tennessee, or ASD, was modeled after the Louisiana Recovery School District, or RSD.  The superintendent of the ASD is a friend of mine from my days as a TFAer in Houston, Chris Barbic.  The goal of the ASD is to take over the schools in the bottom 5% in terms of test scores in the state and within five years get the scores up so those same schools are in the top 25%.  The schools, as I originally understood it, would have the same zoned students after the were taken over by (they use the euphemism ‘matched with’) the usual suspects of TFA charter chains, like KIPP and Rocketship.  The first cohort of the ASD was 6 schools started in the 2012-2013 school year.  This grew to 17 schools in 2013-2014, and now 23 schools for 2014-2015.  I was skeptical of this plan from the beginning.  As I wrote to Chris in one of my open letters, still unanswered, I felt like this was a goal that can only be achieved by some sort of cheating or lying.  One cheat that is happening is that many of the charter schools did not take over existing schools but became new schools which phased in one grade at a time.  This makes it pretty hard to say that a school that never existed was originally in the bottom 5% of schools.

As reformers are all about accountability and data, the ASD, of course, issues yearly reports about the progress that it is making toward the goal of moving the schools in the bottom 5% to the top 25% in five years.  This year Tennessee has been very slow in releasing their state test scores.  In early July they first released data for the State.  On these, the average scores in the state were not very good.  On average, as I wrote about here, 3-8 math scores went up by a percent while 3-8 reading scores went down by a percent.  At the end of July they released the data for the individual districts.  In that release, we learned that the ASD scores increased more than the state averages.  I wrote here, about how that really wasn’t saying very much, particularly since the 4% the ASD reading scores had gone up by still meant that the 2013-2014 reading scores were lower than the 2011-2012 ASD reading scores.  Then, in August, they finally released the final part of their data, the ‘growth’ scores of the districts and the test scores and growth scores for the individual schools.

A year ago the ASD, despite the fact that their reading scores dropped by almost 5%, somehow scored the highest possible score, a 5 out of 5 on the Tennessee ‘growth’ metric.  This was, they said, a sign that things were moving in the right direction.  This year, however, despite the fact that at the end of July we learned that the ASD ‘grew’ better than the state did in general, the final report in mid-August revealed that the ASD didn’t get another 5 in ‘growth.’  For the 2013-2014 school year, they got the lowest possible growth score, a 1.

You’d think that this would damper their spirits, but as they’ve got to show that they’re still on track to reach the goal of moving the schools from the bottom 5% to the top 25%, they released a report highlighting some of their successes.  It turns out that some of the schools are doing quite well while others are bringing down the growth average.

They even produced this nifty scatter plot showing how some of the schools are well on their way to cracking the top 25%.

So, according to this graph, there are four schools that are really moving up the charts, and one of them, oh my! Frayser 9GA is way up there, having moved from the bottom 5%, apparently, to nearly the top 50%!  Most of of the other schools haven’t made much movement, however.  In the ASD report, there were some graphs showing how different schools ‘grew’ from last year to this year.

So there are schools getting it done, like Frayser 9GA, and other schools that are still failing, like, say, Westside Achievement Middle School, with its declining scores in both categories.

So I did what no Tennessee education reporters have the ingenuity to do, I did some research and analysis.  The first thing I noticed was the fine print at the bottom of the scatter plot showing the movement of some of the schools.

Notes:  1-yr success rates; 2014 percentile calculations based on 2013 data;  Carver and Frayser HS used for historical data for GRAD and F9GA, respectively.

Hmmmmm.  What does that mean?  So I investigated further.  What I learned is that Frayser 9GA isn’t, technically, a school for which it is possible to calculate the growth between 2013 and 2014.  Also, it is debatable, if it can be counted as a school at all.  Here’s why:

Westside Achievement Middle school, the one that had the dropping scores in the bar graphs above, serves students in grades 6-8.  They were one of the original 6 ASD schools in 2012-2013.  Rather than send their eighth graders to Frayser High School in 2013-2014, they decided to expand Westside Achievement Middle school to have a 9th grade in their building.  They enrolled 99 students and called the ‘school’ Frayser 9GA for ‘9th Grade Academy.’  2013-2014 was the first year that this school existed, which is why comparing their scores for their 99 9th graders to the scores of already existing Frayser high school is not a fair comparison.  This article from the local Memphis newspaper explains that 85% of the 8th grade class at Westside Achievement Achievement Middle School wanted to continue at that school for the new 9th grade program.

Now in the 2013-2014 school year, Westside Achievement Middle School dropped from a 5 on their ‘growth’ to the lowest possible 1.

But the ASD decided to call the 9th grader program at Westside Achievement Middle School, all 99 students there, its own ‘school’ rather than what it actually is, a grade in the school.  It is not playing by the rules to pick a grade out of a school, call it its own school and then plot it on a graph as if it was an actual school that was once in the bottom 5% of schools and that with the help of the ASD catapulted to the top 50%.  So the question is, how is it that this school is failing to grow their 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in 2013-2014, yet they are getting miraculous results with their 9th graders?  And what would the score for this school be if they counted the four grades as one school rather than pulling out the 9th grade class and calling that its own school? Arne Duncan was in Tennessee today and spent time with Chris Barbic and even took a selfie with him.  Tennessee and the ASD are favorites of Duncan to tout his success.

It is fortunate for Duncan that he will be out of office when the house of cards that is the ASD comes tumbling down, three years from now.  I’ve noticed that many reformers have been going into hiding lately:  Wendy Kopp stepped down from being CEO of TFA.  Michelle Rhee stepped down from being CEO of StudentsFirst.  Others will surely follow into the safety of their underground bunkers.  Duncan will leave office and will surely find a safe place to hide from all the questions as the reform movement continues to collapse.  What will happen to my old friend Chris Barbic when this all goes down?  He’s always been a decent guy.  I worry he might be the only one with enough principle to go down with the ship while the others cowardly abandon it.

We apologize if it is difficult to read the above letter from a TN school asking families to do a fundraiser to pay for Common Core instructional materials.  The parent was so disgusted that she crumpled the letter up and threw it in the trash.  Then she thought better, took it out of the trash, snapped a picture, put it on Facebook with an angry message, tore the letter into tiny pieces, and then threw it away.  

PTAs and PTOs used to do fundraisers to pay for special things for their schools like playgrounds, field trips, and outdoor classrooms.  Now, many school organizations are fundraising to purchase Common Core materials and computers for Common Core testing.  This is so sad for those children.

Conversations and Facebook posts from fed-up parents about fuzzy, frustrating common core math and Islam homework assignments are multiplying.  And the school year just started!  This Common Core commotion is not going away.  

Common Core is not rigorous, it is ridiculous... 
Meaning, it is making some people ridiculously rich. 

This week's Education Summit that Governor Haslam is hosting in Nashville is one of those exclusive events for ridiculously rich people to attend.  The people invited to Haslam's exclusive event are mostly all supporters of his reforms and of Common Core.  They are "invested" as "stakeholders" in public education, and many of them make six-figure salaries from these reforms.  In fact, some of these "stakeholders" (such as SCORE) would not have jobs without Common Core in Tennessee (thanks to money from Bill Gates).  According to SCORE's tax return, Jamie Woodson, CEO of SCORE and former TN Senator, made a sweet salary package of $328,361 (including a $25,000 bonus) and SCORE COO, Sharon Roberts, made over $160,000.  It is an obvious case of the Governor is stark naked, but nobody wants to say anything because they are all making big bucks from selling him the invisible clothes.

It is also very important to notice that there are no public school parents included at the table of the Governor's Summit.  The only parent representation is the TN Parent Teacher Association (PTA).  But, did you know that the TN PTA executive board members do not even have children currently in school? and that the National PTA has accepted millions of dollars from Bill Gates to support Common Core, some of  which was given to PTA before the Common Core standards were even finished?  

If you are lucky enough to be invited to Haslam's dog & pony show, be sure to stop and talk to the protesting parents and grandparents outside.  Ask them how Common Core is affecting their children.  Ask them why they are refusing to allow their children to take the tests.  If you're wondering where all the teachers are, they are at school teaching because notice that this summit was strategically scheduled on a school day at a time that teachers are unable to attend.  (Although, there may be some teachers there who take one of their precious personal days to bravely protest for their students).

Follow the money, and you'll find the motives.  That is what TN Parents does for free.

A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR CIVIL LAWSUIT HAS BEEN FILED AGAINST KEVIN HUFFMAN, CHRIS BARBIC, TENNESSEE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, TENNESSEE ACHIEVEMENT SCHOOL DISTRICT, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CHARTER SCHOOL AUTHORIZERS AND YES PREPARATORY ACADEMY

Rodney O. Ursery, J.D. and Clara D. West, Ph.D. are the Plaintiffs Who Filed the Lawsuit In Pro Se

Memphis, TN (September 8, 2014) – Rodney O. Ursery and Clara D. West, two former applicants for a charter operator’s authorization for the 2014/2015 school year, have filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Kevin Huffman, Commissioner of Tennessee Department of Education (“TDOE”); Chris Barbic, Superintendent of the Tennessee Achievement School District (“TASD”); as well as the TDOE and TASD; along with two other defendants: the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (“NACSA”) and YES Preparatory Academy (“YES Prep”).

Among the thirteen causes of action, the complaint alleges unfair business practices, violations of Tennessee Consumer Protection Act, civil conspiracy, and violations of constitutionally protected rights. The lawsuit seeks a court order prohibiting YES Prep, a charter school enterprise headquartered in Texas, from opening schools that it illegally obtained in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil action, which also requests a jury trial, was filed in the 30th Judicial District Chancery Court, Shelby County, Tennessee.

Ursery states, “For far too long, it has been recognized and stated in the court of public opinion that Huffman and Barbic have utterly abused the power of their positions when it comes to regulating the Tennessee's school system. Now, I’m confident that their reign of terror, which has been plagued with conspiracies among crooks and cronies, will finally be revealed in a court of law, that is, if justice prevails.” West added, “It's as if we have to fight Brown v. Topeka Board of Education again. Our proposal offered equity in education through student-centered learning using individualized learning plans and iPads, just like the countries that consistently outrank the U.S. in education. We were unfairly denied the opportunity to help educate the lowest-performing students, who the system has already left behind and identified as the future prison population. It's all about leveling the playing field.”

According to the complaint, the defendants deliberately designed and implemented discriminatory selection and approval practices, customs and procedures to deny Plaintiffs’ application. The lawsuit further alleges that during the time when TASD solicited Requests for Qualification to apply for a charter operator’s authorization for the 2014/2015 school year, Barbic, TASD and NACSA conspired to approve charter operator’s authorization(s) for the 2015/2016 school year, an opportunity, which was made available only to YES Prep. It is alleged that Barbic, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of YES Prep, illegally authorized YES Prep to seize nearly 6,000 elementary school students in Memphis, TN.

Moreover, the lawsuit alleges that NACSA, who “partnered with” TASD to provide support and management services for the application process, is not a “professional” organization. NACSA does not have any government-approved, professional standards of operations; nor state licensing or certification; and it is not subject to any government agency, review board or code of ethics to govern its acts. Finally, the lawsuit states that Huffman and TDOE enacted a regulation which granted Barbic and TASD carte blanche to deny due process to applicants who are denied charter operator’s authorizations as there is absolutely no redress, grievance or appeal process to review any of the defendants’ actions.

For more information, contact the plaintiffs at: ru4justice@facebook.com or 901.300.0162.

This lawsuit is brought by two individuals claiming $10 million in damages because they were denied charter operator authorization by the ASD. $10 million dollars!!!  Those damages are a clear-cut case for how profitable a charter operator authorization can be.

Interesting how a potential charter school is suing some big guns in TN over unfair business practices, isn't it?

We've heard for years how there is a severe case of the good ol' boys club, "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine," nepotism within the TN DOE between other self-serving high-dollar organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and SCORE.  

It is hard to ignore the evidence of that nepotism when you read how:

• TN pays more than any other state for Teach for America temporary teachers through a $6+million NO-BID contract signed by Kevin Huffman, who formerly had a cushy job at Teach For America.  
• Our public schools are strangled, teachers and administrators are cut, and then the students, buildings, and tax dollars are handed over on silver platters along with generous grant dollars and tax incentives to their buddies' charter chains (like YES Prep, where ASD Superintendent Chris Barbic has very close ties and has richly profited from).
• The ASD schools have worse results than the public schools they killed ever did, but the ASD schools aren't feeling the wrath of the TNDOE's micromanaging and bullying like the public schools.
• Charter schools are making some people very, very rich. 
• Charter schools get preferential treatment within districts and the state:
• charters are exempt and/or given waivers from TCAP score accountability (especially if they are friends and/or donors to politicians)
• charters are exempt from giving the expensive and time-consuming benchmark RTI2 assessment tests that public schools are now being forced to do by the TNDOE.

When we allow corporate greed to infect public education, it is to be expected that profiteers will attack each other over business practices. We hope that this lawsuit will shine a light on these shady practices.

Perhaps this isn't "dog eat dog" but more like a pack of dogs attacking public schools.  If the plaintiffs win, where will that $10 million come from?  Public school funding???