Tennessee’s top policymakers don’t trust Memphis. Especially when it comes to running schools. They showed it with the Achievement School District. And, they are showing it now with a new oversight board – appointed by politicians in Nashville like Gov. Bill Lee and House Speaker Cameron Sexton.
Here’s the thing: The ideas of these old, white men failed when it was called the ASD and they will fail again.
And the ASD just kept failing. Subsequent education chiefs tried a variety of ASD heads and an array of ever-vaguening goal statements, and yet by 2024, they were still nowhere. Under four different state education commissioners, helmed by five different leaders,and aimed at shifting sets of goals and strategies, the Achievement School District never accomplished the kind of dramatic school turnarounds that its supporters aspired to.
State takeovers mostly fail. They use the wrong metric for failure, the wrong diagnosis, the wrong pool of “expertise,” the wrong motivation, and the wrong timetable, and Tennessee’s ASD, with its dogged over-a-decade unsuccessful flailing, provides one of the most thorough debunking of takeovers.
