Education writer Peter Greene takes a look at the history of the Achievement School District and the factors that led to its downfall in a recent piece in Forbes. Here’s more:
To run the ASD, Huffman called on Chris Barbic. Barbic had completed a classroom stint with Teach for America and then gone on to found his own charter management group (YES Prep). Barbic seemed like a strong choice, and he promised to get the job done in five years. After three years, real data was hard to come by, but the best assessments were that the ASD schools were still at the bottom of the pack; the official state list released in spring of 2016 showed that most ASD schools were still in the bottom 5%. But by then, Barbic had resigned.
The ASD grew too quickly. It tried to scale up to the point of being ineffective for some schools. It did a lousy job of listening to the community, and depended too much on folks from outside, instead of growing a local, sustainable support culture. Also, turning around a school takes time.
School takeover models remain one of the great policy artifacts of ed reform hubris, the notion that if we just let the right people grab the wheel, they can fix things right up (because, honestly, the education professionals and experts either don’t know or aren’t trying). But one of the repeated lessons of the last decade is that school turnaround via takeover is really hard to pull off.
MORE on the ASD’s history and why it ultimately failed>
More about the Tennessee Achievement School District:
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