The TN Department of Education notified schools last week that were placed on one of 3 of their lists:

• Priority: bottom 5% of schools in TN (TN DOE gives these to the Achievement School District to turn around)
• Focus: 10% of schools with largest achievement gaps (regardless of overall performance)
• Reward: schools with highest growth

But this week, some of these schools were told there had been a big mistake.  Apparently, the TN DOE was going against what was written in the NCLB waiver and ended up having to take about 40 schools off the focus list and add some that were originally reward schools. 

From an anonymous teacher in Washington County:

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.

Big Easy, Little Choice Posted on February 26, 2014

A parent advocate says run—don’t walk—from New Orleans-style school choice

By Ashana Bigard
When I talk about *choice* in New Orleans I use quotations with both fingers and I wink too. Supposedly we have what’s called a *choice model for excellent education* but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of schools in New Orleans now operate the exact same way. They have rigiddisciplinary codes that punish poor kids forbeing poor and are neither nurturing nor developmentally appropriate.

I’m an advocate for parents in New Orleans, which means that I work with them and represent them when their kids are suspended or expelled from school. Last year we had 54 school districts in New Orleans and all of those different districts make their own rules. For six years after the storm, the schools all set their own expulsion policies. As of last year we have a uniform expulsion policy but individual schools still make their own suspension rules.

Punished for being poor
Most of the cases I see involve kids who are being discriminated against and criminalized for being poor. Think about it. If I’m setting up a school where I know that the majority of students I’m serving are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch—to access free lunch in New Orleans your family has to earn less than $12,000 a year—why would I punish kids for not being able to pay for things that are clearly out of the range of what their families can afford? It isn’t logical. Yet as an advocate I have to go and argue with the school that if this child doesn’t have a belt or his mother can’t afford a size 15 uniform shoe that costs $200, you don’t have the right to put them out of school and keep them from being educated. This is a child we’re talking about. Even if you’re saying *we’re going to teach this child a lesson,* what are you teaching him other than that *if your parents are poor, you can be hurt*? What is the lesson?

Case closed
The case that still breaks my heart involved a 14-year-old who kept getting demerits because his uniform shirt was too small and came untucked basically every time he moved. His mother was a veteran, well-educated, and had sold real estate but got divorced and ended up losing her job, and became homeless. They were living with friends and really struggling. The school expelled the child because he’d had three suspensions—the last one for selling candy to try to raise enough money to buy a new shoes and a new uniform shirt. I felt that if the mother went and told her story that the school would understand and wouldn’t hold up the expulsion. She didn’t want the school to know how impoverished she was but I convinced her to do it, so she came and told all of these people what she was going through—about her struggles. I thought for sure the board would overturn the expulsion, not just because her story was so compelling, but because there wasn’t actually anything in the school’s discipline book about selling candy. But they upheld it and it broke my heart that this kid was being put out of school because he was poor.

Little prisons
The majority of schools in New Orleans have these overly rigid disciplinary codes—they’re run like little prisons. The schools aren’t nurturing and they aren’t developmentally appropriate. Children need social development time. They need recess, they need to be able to talk at lunch. You’ll hear the schools say *we’re providing structured social development*—but there’s no such thing! If you have to manage kids’ social development, it’s not social development. Typically you’ll hear from school leaders that they have to have this overly rigid school climate because the school has just opened and it’s chaotic. They’ll say something like *we need these rules in place until we get a structured, calm environment, then we can make it less rigid. But first we have to calm these children and get them to a place of orderliness.* But children will never be calm, orderly robots unless there’s something wrong with them. They’re never going to get to the place that you’ve decided is necessary before they can have more freedom. In order for children to know how to operate in freedom, they have to have freedom to operate in. We don’t teach kids to eat with a fork and spoon by not giving them a fork and spoon!

Recess and recourse
When parents ask me for advice about schools in New Orleans they never ask *what are the best schools*? They want to know what the least terrible schools are. I tell them to go for one of the Orleans Parish School Board schools because at least then they’ll have some recourse. I tell them to look for schools that have recess and try to find the good teachers. And if they end up at a school where the teachers are really young, look for developmentally appropriate material and bring it to the teacher—kind of like *educate the educator.* So many of the teachers in New Orleans are brand new—this isn’t their profession. They don’t know about child development or adolescent development. I also tell parents to document absolutely everything. If you have a problem with something that happens at the school, keep a record. Try to create an email trail and keep a log of   everything that happens. At some point there is going to be a class-action suit because our children’s rights are being violated and we need as much documentation as possible.

The choice to leave
My daughter attended a kindergarten where the students spent most of the day doing worksheets. I didn’t feel that this was in any way developmentally appropriate. At six years old, my daughter should love math—I love math!—but the school was basically fostering a hatred of math. Their response was basically *if you don’t like our program, you have the choice to leave.* So I left. As of last year, though, parents in New Orleans no longer have the choice to leave schools they’re unhappy with after October 1st. In order to transfer, you have to get the approval of the school board to agree to release your child, and you have to get the other school to agree to take your child. Our children are prisoners—are kids are inmates—and in order to get them out, we have to beg for pardons, which may or may not be granted.

A sorting mechanism
OneApp, the centralized enrollment system for the New Orleans schools, is supposed to make it easy for parents in the city to have their choice of schools. But parents aren’t going to have real choice just because they filled out the OneApp application. For example, you can’t see a school’s discipline guide before you register your child. And if I want my child to go to a school that has recess, art or educates the whole child, I have very little choice at all. I can try for one of the high-performing charters—the magnet schools that existed before the storm—but which are now even harder to get into than they were before Katrina. Parents of special needs kids, by the way, have even less choice, because so few of the schools will accept their children at all. What OneApp does is ensure that the various charter operators get the enrollment that they were promised. No matter how bad the school is, or how terrible the climate, we’re going to make sure that you get those kids.

Fight harder than you’ve ever fought
If New Orleans is being held up as a model for the schools in your community, I have some advice for you. Fight harder than you’ve ever fought to make sure that this doesn’t happen to you. Because once you’re in it, it’s so hard to get out of. Fight tooth and nail. If people come to your community and try to sell you bull crap, come down here and talk to us first. Read anything you can get your hands on. They’ll tell you that your input matters, that your schools are going to be run according to a community model. Don’t believe it. At the end of the day, they could care less about what kind of schools you want. In fact, I’m pretty sure that we said that we wanted arts and music in our schools—that those were really important to us in a city like New Orleans that’s build on arts and music and culture. Instead we got prisons.

Ashana Bigard is a life-long resident of New Orleans and a long-time advocate for children and families. She helps lead the Community Education Project of New Orlean

This was printed with permission from this awesome website:  www.edushyster.com 

Tennessee's Achievement School District is modeled after New Orleans' Recovery School District.  Tennessee parents do NOT want this system here.

Giving our public schools away to charter operators is not acceptable.
It is especially sneaky and dishonest to give them away one grade level at a time (starting with only the Kdg. & 1st grade in year 1, and adding a grade each year thereafter) so that the charter operator isn't held accountable by test scores for several years. Plus it hides the glaring low enrollment rates due to parents transferring their children to other public schools.  The claim that "the ASD must immediately intervene to save those poor, failing students currently in those schools" is a big, fat lie.  Those current students aren't being helped one bit by only taking the brand new younger grades.  It really IS about profit, isn't it?

This is NOT what those parents want for their children.  They want fully funded public schools.  Parents voices are repeatedly being ignored. Parents in those communities will not forget this in the voting booths.

Stop giving away our public schools away.
They belong to the public.
 

Westwood Elementary is a strong neighborhood school.  It has a proud history, has strong support from local church congregations, and is a hub in its community.  In 2012, Memphis residents voted to give up their Memphis City School charter to merge with the successful Shelby County School district.  Westwood parents were eager to be a part of this new merged system. But only 4 months into the newly merged district, Westwood Elementary parents and staff are being told they have no choice:  Their public neighborhood elementary school will be given to an out-of-state charter chain next year against their wishes and despite their protests.

Parents and leaders in the Westwood community know their school's test scores were improving.  Their students were making great gains.  They saw how hard their teachers and students were working.  

They've been researching the other ASD schools that have already been taken over by the state.  They notice that the ASD test scores are dismally low, especially in reading.  They see the crazy new grading scale that the ASD implemented to inflate children's grades.  They question the data and find glaring discrepancies.  

They see these huge red flags:

• An observant Westwood Dad notices that the ASD is fudging the numbers for some strange reason. The rollup TVAAS Composite averages for the ASD are crazy inflated!  Looking at the 6 ASD schools individual scores  6 schools currently in the ASD on the TN Report Card for 2013 (Cornerstone Prep - Lester Campus, Frayser Achievement Elementary, Corning Achievement Elementary, Brick Church College Prep (Nashville), Humes Preparatory Academy, And Westside Achievement Academy), it is plain to see that those individual school's numbers don't add up to the ASD District's glowing Composite score.  Why???

Their neighborhood may be low-income, but they know they are being forced to do something that isn't right for their children and community.  Their public neighborhood school is being handed, on a silver platter, to an out-of-state charter chain.  This is not their choice.  Their choice would be smaller class sizes for their children.  Their choice would be support in their school building from counselors, a full-time school nurse, and assistants.  Their choice would be fixing the leaking windows from the 1950s.  

Their citizens voted to be represented through an ELECTED school board, not a charter chain looking to make money from their children.  The Westwood community isn't fooled.
 
(This was posted anonymously, with permission, to protect the privacy of these parents in Memphis, TN)

Is the ASD targeting the "top of the bottom" schools to try and "cream" the best for their score portfolio???