Not too long ago, teachers, instructional coaches, principals and other educators poured into Memphis, Tennessee, energized by and drawn to an aggressive effort to turn around the state’s chronically poor-performing schools — schools that, for decades, had been failing generations of students.
Memphis, once the epicenter of the civil rights movement and now an economically devastated blip along the banks of the Mississippi, wasn’t simply home to a majority of the state’s worst schools. At the time, it was home to nearly all of them — 69 out of the 83 identified as the bottom 5 percent in Tennessee.
But help was on the way for Teacher Town, USA, as the city would later be called. With the boon of a $500 million grant from the Obama administration’s hallmark competitive education program, Race to the Top, the state hatched an ambitious plan to catapult those schools into the top 25 percent.
To do so, the state’s Department of Education created an entirely new district, the Achievement School District, which took direct control of the schools identified as the worst of the worst. The majority were handed over to charter operators, like KIPP, Aspire and Green Dot, national organizations that had a proven track record of making academic gains for historically disadvantaged students. A few schools were taken over directly by the state and given a significant amount of autonomy over things like hiring, teacher pay scales and day-to-day school operations.
At the time, the state was making waves for its wholesale embrace of the education reform movement, and the creation of the Achievement School District, or ASD, was its most radical plan yet.
Seven years later, however, the results are a mixed bag, at best.
The district as a whole has a 92 percent attendance rate, but a 40 percent graduation rate — lagging far behind the state’s 89 percent graduation rate. And when it comes to academic performance, 8 percent of students tested in the top two tiers of the state’s assessment in reading and just 1 percent did so in math. Moreover, only 5 percent of students score well enough on the ACT to qualify for the state’s higher education scholarship program.
Tennessee’s experience isn’t unique. Triggered by mediocre results in the classroom, other states are also scaling back turnaround efforts. Still others are just beginning to chart a course to improve their schools. The experiences reflect the difficult process of reversing the trajectory of failing schools, experts say.
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In June, the current state education chief, Candice McQueen, announced plans to tamp down the program, or, at the very least, take the emphasis off the Achievement School District as the main vehicle for improving failing schools.
Instead, the state will give districts more time to try to improve schools on their own. If, as a last resort, a school is filtered into the state-run district, the input of the community will be more heavily weighted in choosing the specific turnaround strategy, and the school will have a more clearly defined set of benchmarks for what it needs to do to exit the district.
Those details are outlined in Tennessee’s new K-12 education plan, which every state is required to submit for approval to the U.S. Department of Education under the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Notably, the proposal comes on the heels of a significant restructuring and downsizing of staff at the Achievement School District, including the elimination of principals, assistant principals, teachers, teacher coaches and administrative staff.
McQueen characterizes the move not as a wholesale policy shift away from the state’s big improvement gamble, but instead as a refinement of offerings that rely on a more collaborative approach with existing schools districts.
“The restructuring of our ASD has potentially been overstated that we are backing away,” she says. “That is not accurate. It’s actually about the sustainability of the district.”
The state will rely on a growing portfolio of turnaround options, including the state’s already established Innovation Zones, which have garnered attention for producing more positive academic gains than the Achievement School District. Another strategy is to use a new endeavor, Partnership Zones, which is based on turnaround models in Massachusetts.
“School improvement work is very dynamic and unique in nature,” McQueen says. “You have to look at the specific needs of the communities and schools.”
To be sure, when the plan for the Achievement School District was originally hatched, few understood the magnitude of challenges that awaited.
“It started with a great deal of optimism and enthusiasm by the folks who worked in the ASD and the state level folks,” Joshua Glazer, associate professor of education policy at George Washington University, says. “They really, really believed in what they were doing. I think they thought it would be transformative. They learned, as do many people who take on these challenges, that it’s incredibly difficult and complex, and I think for everybody it was a somewhat sobering experience.”
Glazer, who’s spent years studying the Achievement School District and interviewing hundreds of people involved in the effort, says that many of the charter operators were unprepared for the specific challenges that the structure of a state-run school district presented, despite having had success in other cities.
“I think they’ve made really smart adaptations and they’ve learned a lot,” he says. “But it’s taken time. It’s taken years.”
Today, many education policy experts point to what they call disappointing results as proof of how elusive wide-scale school turnarounds have been, despite the billions of dollars spent on such efforts.
For example, in addition to nearly $4 billion spent on the Race to the Top program and millions more spent on smaller-scale programs, like My Brother’s Keeper and Promise Neighborhoods, which were aimed at picking off smaller parts of the larger school turnaround effort, the Obama administration directed more than $7 billion to the School Improvement Grant — described at the time by former education secretary Arne Duncan as one of the administration’s “biggest bets.”
But a recent report issued by the federal government shows that despite the intense focus and surge in resources, the majority of failing schools were hardly any better off: Using data from nearly 500 schools in 22 states, the report, published Jan. 19 by the Institute of Education Sciences, showed no evidence that the program had significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation or college enrollment.
The report was characterized by some as a sobering reminder that despite extensive efforts, little data exists on the most effective strategies and the extent to which states have the capacity to support school turnarounds.
Education policy experts underscore how difficult it is to fix schools that have been failing for generations, as most poor-performing schools have. Academics aside, such schools are often also hampered by things like racial and economic segregation, as well as high rates of unemployment, incarceration, homicide, drug use and gang violence.
When it comes to Tennessee’s Achievement School District, complicating factors include crippling poverty, high rates of students with disabilities and constant student mobility. More than 70 percent of the 10,000 students enrolled in one of the 29 schools in the district are poor, and about 13 percent qualify to receive special education services.
Above all, the district and state education department faced down significant pushback from parents and others in the community who viewed the effort more as a takeover than a cooperative process, especially when it came to handing over traditional neighborhood public schools to charter operators who previously hadn’t set a foot in the city.
“I don’t think families had an idea of how poorly the schools were doing in many cases, so a lot of the changes seemed really radical and they didn’t feel that they were truly incorporated into the decision-making process,” Gini Pupo-Walker, leader of the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition, says. “That creates a feeling of distrust.”
That’s a common thread in Glazer’s research.
“You can communicate all you want, but it is what it is,” Glazer says. “I don’t think you are going to really convince the local population, or at least enough of it, that this is something they should want.”
He continued: “One thing we’ve learned is that the folks in the ASD, they looked at those test scores and they said, ‘My God these schools are horrible, why would anybody want to save them. What are they fighting to save?’ But when you talk to the community, they see these schools as being more than just about academic outcomes.”
To be sure, evidence does exist showing the Achievement School District is having a positive impact, even if it’s not the resounding evidence many had hoped for.
For starters, the district has propelled more than 20 schools out of the bottom 5 percent. There’s also been a significant decrease in suspensions rates as more schools embrace restorative justice models. Most importantly, McQueen and others say, the state has raised the floor for what it means to be a low-performing school.
Prior to the creation of the Achievement School District, the proficiency rate for the bottom 5 percent of Tennessee’s schools hovered around 15 percent for students in kindergarten through grade 8. In 2015, the proficiency rate for the bottom 5 percent was 26 percent.
“That’s still significantly below where we want to be, but as we think about it from a broad perspective, we have raised the bar for what it means to be a bottom 5 percent school,” David Mansouri, president of the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, says. “Having a strong state lever for school improvement is one of the reasons why we have been able to raise that bar.”
Some education reformers, like John White, the state superintendent of Louisiana schools, are rejecting the narrative that little is known about how best to improve failing schools. He points to the Achievement School District, as well as his own Recovery School District, as places where, in fact, a lot is known about the topic.
“I think the difference in terms of where we are today than 15 years ago is we have a much more solid base of evidence of what works and what doesn’t,” he says. “There is an unfortunate line of reasoning among some talking heads that there’s not a lot of evidence about what works, but there is significant research on programs that have demonstrated significant effects in low-income communities.”
White would know. Before becoming Louisiana’s top school chief, he ran the state’s Recovery School District — the state’s turnaround effort that included most New Orleans schools post-Katrina. Before that, he worked under former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and school chancellor Joel Klein, where he oversaw the turnaround of 100 schools and the rapid expansion of the charter sector.
“The question is,” White says, “whether there is a willingness and know-how to make it work at scale.”
Other states are joining Tennessee in scaling back major turnaround efforts. Michigan, which launched its Education Achievement Authority in 2011, shuttered it this summer after years of allegations of corruption and mismanagement. And after more than a decade, Louisiana is handing back its Recovery School District to the locally elected Orleans Parish school board.
“We’re at a point now, more than a decade into the intervention, where we’re ready to talk about closing out the intervention and having the schools be in an continuous improvement model rather than an intervention model,” White says. “So that’s a success.”
But other states, including North Carolina and Nevada, are just now setting out on a mission to correct course for their slate of failing schools.
New efforts are largely a result of the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which gives states increased flexibility to create accountability systems that suit their unique needs, including how to fix their worst schools.
Civil rights groups, however, are concerned the new law includes too much flexibility and could allow states to shirk their responsibility for historically disadvantaged students who are often disproportionately enrolled in the poorest-performing schools. Indeed, a review of more than a dozen state education proposals by a group of education policy experts show states have more work to do on their new education plans to ensure those students are learning and that poor-performing schools are improving.
But others, including McQueen, say the flexibility is exactly what states need to more effectively fine-tune plans to the specific needs to students.
“ESSA really provided us with an opportunity to build on what we learned over the last several years,” she says. “It’s allowed us to refine and scale up the best practices and provide more clarity and structure about schools improvement decisions.”
“The ASD has been very effective in allowing us to change the conversation about school improvement in Tennessee,” she adds. “We feel like you have to have a state-level conversation around this topic, and states are leading in areas of improvement by first calling out where underperformance exists.”
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Tennessee Moves Beyond Ambitious School Turnaround Model originally appeared on usnews.com
