The (Under) Achievement School District

Turns out, all that mission creep over at the Achievement School District (ASD) is really just creepy. Oh, and disruptive. And also not really all that helpful for kids. But, hey, they’ve got cool happy hours!

Gary Rubinstein has the latest update on how the ASD is doing relative to stated policy goals. Spoiler alert: Not good.

Here’s some of his analysis:

Though my own calculations made it clear that the six original ASD schools had not made it out of the bottom 5% after six years, it doesn’t become ‘official’ until Tennessee releases its next ‘Priority List’ which it does every three years.  But a few days ago, they released something just as good, the so-called ‘Cusp List’ showing all the schools in the bottom 10% which includes what percentile each school is at.

Here are the results:

School Percentile
Cornerstone 8.2%
Brick Church 4.3%
Humes (closed down and became Frayser Achievement Elementary School 1.3%
Corning 2.2%
Frayser 1.3%
Westside 2.2%

So, yeah. Not really moving the original schools into the top 25% of all Tennessee schools. At all. The best result was a single school moving from the bottom 5% all the way up to the bottom 9%. The other originals? Still in the bottom 5%.

The ASD’s directors, as Rubinstein notes, just keep moving on to new opportunities. The students in the ASD experiment don’t have that option, though.

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