Tag Archives: Andy Spears

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Christy Calls on MOB to Stop Asking for Campaign Help

Yesterday, it was revealed that Marsha Edwards, CEO of the Martha O’Bryan Center, had sent emails requesting volunteers for School Board candidates endorsed by political group Stand for Children.

At least one of those candidates, Miranda Christy, is speaking out, calling on the group to stop sending such emails.

In a Facebook post she says:

The Martha O’Bryan Center is a wonderful institution providing critical services to District 5 families. I have always been inspired by their work in alleviating poverty in District 5, and I would never want them to put their tax status in jeopardy. Our campaign had no knowledge that they were circulating a request for volunteers, and we would never encourage it. We have only one volunteer (and no staffers) who to our knowledge has ever worked at the Martha O’Bryan Center (and he is a longtime friend of mine), and we ask that they stop making such requests for volunteers.

For their part, Both Martha O’Bryan’s Edwards and Stand for Children’s Dan O’Donnell deny any coordination.

It will be interesting to see if the other candidates endorsed by Stand call on MOB to stop the volunteer recruitment for their campaigns.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

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Stand With Charters

Nate Rau of the Tennessean reports on apparent coordination between political advocacy group Stand for Children and advocates for charter schools in MNPS.

From the story:

The head of a prominent Nashville nonprofit coordinated with the well-funded political group Stand For Children to find campaign workers for four school board candidates who are friendly to charter schools, according to emails obtained by The Tennessean.

In one June 23 email, Martha O’Bryan Center President and CEO Marsha Edwards encouraged her staff members to either volunteer or work for $10 per hour to go door to door in neighborhoods to talk with voters.

The revelation comes as the campaigns for School Board seats are entering the final days.

Stand for Children previously released a puzzling list of endorsements, praising the current board for progress made while opposing many of the incumbents who brought about that progress.

The political group has also been tied to the nonprofit Nashville RISE.

As Rau’s article notes, a significant portion of Stand’s funding comes from outside Tennessee.

The emails provide further credence to earlier claims about the familiar national playbook being used by RISE, Stand, and other groups in Nashville.

Amanda Haggard wrote earlier about the spending in the School Board races:

(Jackson) Miller has brought in around $90,000, with the largest contributions coming from charter school backers like DeLoache and Trump supporter and English-only backer Lee Beaman. Stand for Children’s O’Donnell says checks are on the way from his organization and mailers have already been sent out in support of its endorsed slate. Additionally, Beacon Center board members other than Beaman have donated the maximum amount in multiple races.

According to Rau, both Edwards and O’Donnell deny any coordination.

Here’s the email chain between Edwards and O’Donnell:

From: Marsha Edwards Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2016 4:15 PM To: Everybody; J Leckrone External; Jon Driskell Cc: Marilyn Greer (MarilynGreer2@gmail.com); Daniel O’Donnell (dodonnell@stand.org) Subject: FW: URGENT ‐ Volunteers needed

Hello Everyone – I am passing on an urgent need for paid canvassers this Saturday and Sunday (and beyond).  Below is the Districts that are in play and the candidates that are paying for canvassing help.  I believe that the pay is $10.00 an hour and you cam contact Daniel O’Donnell at dodonnell@stand.org.  for additional information.  You can also just volunteer.    If you haven’t done this type of work before, it is really easy.  There is an short orientaon on the candidate and posions and then you are given a list of addresses.   You knock and talk or you leave the informaon sheet.  Somemes you have to take a note if someone wants the candidate to call them, etc.   Both Peter and I have done a lot of this and it is really fun.    All of these candidates are endorsed by TN Stand For Children and are candidates that want to bring more collaboraon and data driven deliberation to the School Board.   They are all friendly to charters as one strategy to improving results for children.    Also, Jane Meneely  (#3) is working for us as an event consultant on a new event we are planning.  She would be a strong school board member.  I spent some me with Miranda Christy (#5)  this morning and feel she would be another strong, smart , well informed and thoughtful school board member.    Marsha

Marsha Edwards President and CEO Martha O’Bryan Center East End Preparatory School Explore Community School 615.254.1791 www.marthaobryan.org www.eastendprep.org www.explorecommunityschool.com

From: Daniel O’Donnell [mailto:dodonnell@stand.org] Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2016 2:27 PM
To: Marsha Edwards Subject: Re: URGENT ‐ Volunteers needed

Hey Marsha ‐ appreciate your efforts with the list, just haven’t heard from anyone. We have capacity to hire MANY canvassers, which would dramatically improve our trajectory…. but very few takers.
Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 23, 2016, at 2:15 PM, Marsha Edwards <medwards@marthaobryan.org> wrote:
Daniel – I have asked my College Success Team if there are college students or grads that would want to be a paid canvasser.  Not sure if the tutor list helped at all.  MAE   Marsha Edwards

President and CEO Martha O’Bryan Center East End Preparatory School Explore Community School 615.254.1791 www.marthaobryan.org www.eastendprep.org www.explorecommunityschool.com     From: Daniel O’Donnell [mailto:dodonnell@stand.org] Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2016 11:46 AM To: ‘Bill DeLoache (bdeloache@gmail.com)’; ‘etduncan@solidus.com’; Brent Easley; Marsha Edwards; Shaka Mitchell; Ravi Gupta; charles friedman; Todd Dickson; John Eason; al.coverstone@gmail.com; Benjamin Schumacher; ‘randy.dowell@gmail.com’; Shani Dowell Cc: Nadira Freeman Subject: URGENT ‐ Volunteers needed

Hey everyone –   Where we are sll falling well short is on volunteers. Essenally the same dozen people that were knocking doors for candidates two weeks ago are the same dozen people slated to knock doors this weekend.   The only way we win any of these races is by knocking doors and talking to voters. Everything else is secondary. This is something that our opposion increasingly understands, as we see MNEA volunteers out in force for Jill, an army of moms out for Amy, etc. To put it bluntly: we are being outworked by our opponents, pung us on a losing trajectory. The good news is that we sll have me to win, we can win every race… if we show up.   We are making a big push for this weekend. The incumbents will be at a board retreat, off the battlefield. Next weekend is July 4th and we expect a lot of folks to be out of town. The weekend after that is the last weekend before people start vong. We’re running out of me and every single campaign needs much more support if they’re to hit voter contact goals.
I am asking you to PLEASE send emails and make calls in the next 48 hours to as wide of a network as you possibly can. Ask your friends and colleagues to show up this weekend. I’m including details for each campaign below, but call me at 615‐804‐9539 if you need anything:

JANE MENEELY – DISTRICT 3 ‐‐Meet at Jane’s house (1514 Shelton Ave) ‐‐Shis: Sat 9:30 am and 2 pm / Sun 1 pm ‐‐Yazoo beer at the end of your shi!   MIRANDA CHRISTY – DISTRICT 5 ‐‐Meet at 204A Myrtle St ‐‐Shis: Sat 9:30 am, 12:30 pm, Sun 1 pm   JACKSON MILLER – DISTRICT 7 ‐‐Meet at  Jackson’s house (2304 10th Ave South) ‐‐Sat 8:30 am or 1:30 pm, Sun 1:30 pm   THOM DRUFFEL – DISTRICT 9 ‐‐Meet at Thom’s house (613 Lamar Dr). ‐‐Three shifts: Sat 10:00 am, 1:30 pm, and 4:30 pm, Sun 2 pm

Thanks, DOD P.S. Yesterday I literally scrolled through every contact in my phone and sent 19 texts to friends that haven’t been engaged. It took 30 minutes and need 4 new volunteers. I suggest doing the same. P.P.S. We still need many, many more paid canvassers. Please also work your contacts for people who would be interested.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport 


 

 

 

 

 

 

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MNPS School Board Race Spending

Amanda Haggard has an interesting piece out about the MNPS School Board race and the key players.

She covers groups like Project Renaissance/Nashville RISE and Stand for Children.  And she notes their top targets: Will Pinkston and Amy Frogge (they are less aggressively against Jill Speering).

It turns out, the same donors and backers supporting Renaissance/RISE are also spending to unseat Pinkston and Frogge.

Frogge penned a pieced not long ago about why school board race spending is skyrocketing.

Here’s Haggard on the spending this year:

And then, of course, there’s the money. So far, Druffel has outraised Frogge by $10,000, bringing in almost $37,000 — $20,000 of which came from donors in District 8. Pinkston has secured a little under $70,000, along with endorsements from Mayor Megan Barry and former Gov. Phil Bredesen, for whom Pinkston was a top aide.

Miller has brought in around $90,000, with the largest contributions coming from charter school backers like DeLoache and Trump supporter and English-only backer Lee Beaman. Stand for Children’s O’Donnell says checks are on the way from his organization and mailers have already been sent out in support of its endorsed slate. Additionally, Beacon Center board members other than Beaman have donated the maximum amount in multiple races.

It’s worth noting that Beaman and the Beacon Center are supporters of school vouchers. Likewise, as was noted in an earlier piece on Nashville RISE, the umbrella group Education Cities is backed in part by voucher advocates:

And here’s something interesting about all that: The funders of Education Cities include The Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and The Gates Foundation — the Big Three in corporate education reform.

Perhaps more interesting is the group of partners, including the pro-voucher Fordham Institute.

Early voting begins tomorrow. Stand for Children says it is sending mailers and more money is coming to defeat Pinkston and Frogge (and ostensibly Speering). This in spite of some rather odd reasoning around Stand’s endorsements.

What does all this mean? The next few weeks will likely see the MNPS School Board races turn a bit ugly, as those who want a new agenda spend aggressively to defeat the very incumbents who have brought about mayoral collaboration and the arrival of a much-heralded new Director of Schools.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

 

 

 

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TC Weber, Amy Frogge, and The Tennessean

TC Weber is up with a post today on the Tennessean’s recent endorsements in Nashville’s School Board races.

He provides a thorough rundown of each endorsement, but I want to focus on his comments regarding Amy Frogge and the Tennessean’s decision to not only endorse her opponent but also chastise her for her social media and other behavior.

Here’s what TC had to say:

This brings us to District 9, quite possibly the most egregious of all the endorsements. The Tennessean chose to endorse challenger Thom Druffel over incumbent Amy Frogge. In doing so, they didn’t only endorse Druffel, but utilized this opportunity to take Frogge out to the proverbial woodshed in a manner that runs counter to their call for greater civility among board members and honestly, came off as a personal attack. They wrote, “A passionate parent and attorney, Frogge also has served as a disruptive force unwilling to step outside her box and has shown a pattern of being responsive and respectful only when constituents agree with her. Whether it involves social media behavior like writing acerbic posts and deleting comments that are critical of her, this behavior is not conducive to productive community engagement.”

Hmmm… let’s take a look at some of those posts and you be the judge. There was a piece Frogge wrote on excessive testing that was picked up by the Washington Post, another from The Tennessean about the importance of teacher voice in the national discussion on education, and one that Diane Ravitch picked up on her blog where Frogge discusses discipline issues in a local charter school. The tone throughout these posts is direct, factual, and research-based. The one on discipline caused the most uproar, but tell me, how is that different from the what Secretary of Education John King has been recently saying about discipline practices in charter schools? I guess when the Secretary of Education says it, it’s thought provoking, but coming out of the mouth of an intelligent and vocal woman, it’s being a disruptive force. (emphasis added)

Here, TC nails it. In the same endorsement piece where the Tennessean endorses Will Pinkston in spite of what they claim is his bad behavior on social media, they call out Frogge for being disruptive and endorse her “nice” opponent.

What else did the Tennessean find disruptive? The fact that Frogge advocated to have a woman included among the finalists for MNPS Director of Schools. They claim her push for this inclusion could have derailed the entire process. First of all, there’s little evidence that simply adding a candidate for consideration, even fairly late in the process, would have taken the whole search off track. Second, let’s look at the MNPS directors of the past — all men.

Frogge should be commended for raising the issue. And likewise, when her colleagues pushed to move on without adding a candidate, Frogge didn’t throw a fit or leave the game, she kept on going. She stayed engaged. And she was part of the team that helped bring Shawn Joseph to Nashville. The same Shawn Joseph the Tennessean is excited about having here.

Amy Frogge is a fierce advocate for her schools and constituents and a strong presence on social media. She raises issues that are sometimes uncomfortable but that need to be addressed. As TC intimates, the Tennessean appears to be applying a double standard.

Fortunately, Frogge overcame a significant tidal wave of spending and negativity when she was first elected in 2012 and she’s well-equipped to weather the storm this time.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

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MNPS Unveils New Pay Scale

WSMV reports that MNPS has unveiled its new teacher pay scale:

Metro Schools has unveiled a new pay scale for teachers, which will show as soon as their next paycheck.
The school district says the pay scale will deliver a “significant pay increase” for many teachers.

According to the old scale, teachers with eight years or less of experience were paid $42,082 and teachers with 10 years of experience were paid $44,536.

With the new pay scale, salaries will range between $42,100 and $44,750 for teachers with under 10 years of experience. Teachers with 10 years of experience will earn $47,000.

Here’s a link to the complete pay scale for certified teachers.

A previous analysis found that MNPS lags behind several similar districts in terms of teacher pay.

The upgraded scale shows that teachers with 10 years of experience are now closer to their peers in similar urban districts. However, teachers at the top end of the scale still lag behind their peers in similar districts. Still, the move marks progress and an important investment in the teachers of MNPS.

More on Teacher Pay:

The Importance of Teacher Pay

The Value Proposition for Teachers

You Can’t Buy Groceries with Gratitude

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

 

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Questar’s Challenge

After missing a self-imposed deadline to select a new testing vendor, the Tennessee Department of Education finally announced Questar as the choice to design and implement TNReady for the 2016-17 school year and beyond.

Questar is tasked with picking up the pieces of the mess left by Measurement Inc’s testing failures last year. There’s plenty of information about the struggle leading up to last year’s debacle, and it’s information Questar may want to study closely.

Questar does have a record of coming in to fix a previous vendor’s mistakes. Most notably, in New York. Interestingly, Questar used questions designed and developed by Pearson (the previous vendor) in the first year of new tests in New York.

This arrangement is not uncommon and in fact, is similar to Measurement Inc’s contract with AIR to provide questions from Utah’s test for TNReady.

However, such an arrangement is not without problems.

Politico reported on challenges last year when Questar took over New York’s testing. Specifically:

An error found in the fifth- through eighth-grade English exam, and one that the state education department already has advised will be in the math exams, hasn’t helped the situation.

The tests directed students to plan their written answers to exam questions on “Planning Pages,” however no planning pages were included in the test booklets, according to a report from the Buffalo News.

Pearson immediately released a statement saying the design error was not its fault and Questar said the tests were still valid and blamed the transition for the error.

It’s the type of blame game that may sound familiar to those who watched this year’s TNReady fiasco.

A blog post from a parent blog in New York describes how the error unfolded. Schools were notified well into the test administration:

The message was sent at 9:09 AM from SED and I saw [it] at 9:30 …when most students are done and have turned in their books…. Even if an administrator is on their email all day (which they aren’t) it is too late to walk around on tests that started at 8:00 to interrupt testing rooms to correct the mistake.

And while Questar gets high marks for its transparency efforts, some see a bit lacking in that department as well:

It is true that the amount of operational test material and the number of items disclosed is more than was given out in each of the prior three years of Pearson’s core-aligned testing. And since 2012, this is the earliest this has happened. [Note: When CTB/McGraw-Hill was the test publisher during the NCLB years, the complete test was accessible to the public on SED’s web site within weeks of its administration, along with answer keys. Item analysis data followed shortly thereafter.]
Upon review of the just-released spring 2016 testing output, however, certain useful data have not been made available. SED has been moved to offer us a translucent view of the exams, but it still is not being entirely transparent.

The bottom line: Questar is walking into quite a mess in Tennessee. It’s something they are surely aware of and something they have experience handling.

Going forward, the question will be how does Questar work with TNDOE to bring transparency and efficacy to a process that lacked both in 2015-16?

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

 

 

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Neveready

Will Tennessee ever have a TNReady test?

The answer to that question got even fuzzier today as a Department of Education “deadline” to name a new test maker came and went with no announcement.

From Chalkbeat:

Tennessee has missed its own deadline to hire the testing company that will pick up where Measurement Inc. left off this spring.

The state canceled the North Carolina test maker’s contract in April, weeks after the launch of the company’s online testing platform went so badly that the tests were halted entirely. In May, officials awarded an emergency contract to testing conglomerate Pearson to grade some tests that did work — and said they would choose another company to handle the state’s testing program by the end of June.

The missed deadline comes just days after another scathing report revealing the details of emails leading up to the TNReady first day failure.

Apparently, when TNDOE sets a “deadline” it’s totally optional.

What does this mean?

The tight timeline also means that students and teachers likely will enter the school year without a sense of what their end-of-year tests will look like. Last year, some students began taking practice tests in October; it’s hard to imagine that happening this year.

Perhaps TNReady is really just about developing the life skill of adapting to chaos.

For more on education policy and politics in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

 

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The Hunger Games for Schools

What happens when a large, urban school district expands charters and maximizes “school choice?”

One policy advocate in Detroit described the environment this way:

“I often describe this whole environment as ‘The Hunger Games’ for schools,” said Tonya Allen, president of the Skillman Foundation, which invests $17 million a year to try to improve the lives of Detroit’s poorest children. “You get these kids who are moving three or four times in the elementary school years. I did that, but it was because my mother couldn’t keep her rent together. Here, it’s being incentivized.”

This from a recent story in the New York Times about education in Detroit and the impact of an education environment that places a premium on choice.

The story is worth noting in Tennessee because the National Charter School Conference just left Nashville and because so many education reform advocates in Nashville and at the Tennessee General Assembly are pushing an agenda of “free market education.”

So, what happens when you have virtually unlimited choices?

Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.

“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”

It all started with a focus on bringing a free market approach to public education:

The 1993 state law permitting charter schools was not brought on by academic or financial crisis in Detroit — those would come later — but by a free-market-inclined governor, John Engler. An early warrior against public employee unions, he embraced the idea of creating schools that were publicly financed but independently run to force public schools to innovate.

So, how’s that free market working out?

By 2015, a federal review of a grant application for Michigan charter schools found an “unreasonably high” number of charters among the worst-performing 5 percent of public schools statewide. The number of charters on the list had doubled from 2010 to 2014.

And here’s what the competition among schools for students looks like:

The competition to get students to school on count day — the days in October and February when the head count determines how much money the state sends each school — can resemble a political campaign. Schools buy radio ads and billboards, sponsor count day pizza parties and carnivals. They plant rows of lawn signs along city streets to recruit students, only to have other schools pull those up and stake their own.

Another key policy analyst describes the issues this way:

“People here had so much confidence in choice and choice alone to close the achievement gap,” said Amber Arellano, the executive director of the Education Trust Midwest, which advocates higher academic standards. “Instead, we’re replicating failure.”

Oh, and here’s what happened when city leaders and legislators tried to introduce a level of accountability to rein-in the chaos created by too many operators and a wide open market:

In the waning days of the legislative session, House Republicans offered a deal: $617 million to pay off the debt of the Detroit Public Schools, but no commission. Lawmakers were forced to take it to prevent the city school system from going bankrupt.

Translation: Still no real oversight, still a wide-open, chaotic market for schools.

Often we hear legislators and choice advocates say that the situation in certain urban districts is so bad we may as well try to expand choices and even add vouchers or expand charter options because it can’t get worse.

Guess what? In Detroit, it got worse. A lot worse. As the article notes:

Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.

Chaos. Uncertainty. Instability. That’s what a free market approach to public education brought Detroit. And, sadly, it also resulted in academic outcomes even worse than those expected in one of the worst public school districts in the country.

Choice advocates would have us believe that having more options will lead to innovation and force the local district to improve or close schools. Instead, in the case of Detroit, it led to chaos. The same fate could be visited upon other large, urban districts who fall into the free market education trap. Another unfortunate lesson from Detroit: Once you open the door, it’s very, very difficult to close.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

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The One About the Emails

Grace Tatter at Chalkbeat has an interesting look into emails between the Tennessee Department of Education, Measurement Inc., and school districts as the state prepared for the TNReady tests.

The central message is that there were clear warning signs that TNReady simply wasn’t.

But, there’s one key email that pretty much says it all:

Either way, the department’s top technology official put it simply when he emailed McQueen on the day of the failure. “It appears that greater procedural and operational rigor could have prevented the network outage,” Cliff Lloyd wrote to McQueen. (emphasis added)

The whole piece is worth a read — lots of good info about what was known and when.

But, read what Cliff Lloyd wrote again. The disaster that was TNReady in 2016 could have been prevented. Both the state’s vendor and state officials simply didn’t do what was required to make that happen.

More on TNReady:

TNReady: Time for a Trade?

An $18.5 Million Emergency?

Not Ready at All

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

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A Friendly Reminder

The National Charter Schools Conference is in Nashville this week and includes a number of sessions, including one highlighting the work of the Tennessee Achievement School District.

Here’s how that session is described:

From Recovery to Extraordinary: States and Charter Schools Working Together

The Louisiana Recovery School District and the Tennessee Achievement School District have brought new attention to the role that charter schools can play in replacing poor performing schools. They have also tested the theory that the freedoms associated with chartering can in fact benefit those who are the most at risk. This panel will explore the role that charters have played in serving the hardest to educate and what policymakers should consider to better serve these students.

This session happened today and included a presentation from TN ASD Superintendent Malika Anderson.

It’s interesting that the TN ASD is pitched as a success story, given that the results have been mixed at best.

In fact, the community at Neely’s Bend in Nashville was not too happy about being thrown into a sort of Thunderdome for school survival back in 2014. But it seems unlikely that Anderson mentioned that.

The ASD community relations effort in Memphis has been so bad that the local NAACP chapter has called for a moratorium on expansion there.

There’s also been some pretty thorough analysis of what appeared to be a rigged Neighborhood Advisory Committee process.

Then, there’s the Vanderbilt University study that suggests the ASD isn’t quite getting the promised results:

While there were some changes year-to-year — up and down — there was no statistical improvement on the whole, certainly not enough to catapult these low-performing schools into some of the state’s best, which was the lofty goal.

This followed a report by Gary Rubinstein noting the ASD’s numbers simply aren’t that great:

As you can see, four of the original six schools are still in the bottom 5% while the other two have now ‘catapulted’ to the bottom 6%.

Oh, and that Neely’s Bend school that was taken over by ASD-approved operator LEAD? Turns out, it was turning around on it’s own and performing better than many ASD schools:

Neely’s Bend is showing a growth rate well above the district average and has posted consecutive years of growth in both Math and Science, with some pretty solid numbers in Science over the past two years.

While testing chaos has been cited as a reason to pause ASD expansion plans for the moment, it’s also been noted that the ASD has moved beyond the original, planned mission:

Instead, the ASD has followed a rather bumpy path, growing while struggling to meet performance goals. The ASD needs growth of 8-10 points a year in the schools it operates in order to hit its targets — and it is well below that number now. That may be in part due to the rapid growth beyond original expectations.

The point is this: The Tennessee ASD is hardly a success story. It’s a great story of PR spin and fun cocktail parties, but the actual results are limited, at best. And, it’s operated with quite a bit of controversy in both Memphis and Nashville. It’s never a good plan to pit one school against another in a fight for education survival. And it is certainly not clear that the ASD plan is better than the turnaround that was already occurring at Nashville’s Neely’s Bend.

Those looking to Tennessee for guidance on how to create an “Achievement School District” would be best served using our state’s experience as a guide for what not to do.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport