Corporate school "reform," Opt Out movement and grass-roots opposition in a nutshell, with a good summary of Tennessee's "achievement school district"

Comes now Salon.com with a pretty comprehensive takeout on corporate school reform, hardly unbiased -- the headline refers to "phony education reformers" -- but well documented, the kind of story I've wanted to link people to for a nuts-and-bolts explanation of why I get so upset by self-styled reformers from President Obama and Governor Rauner on down.

I especially like the attention it gives to Tennessee's so-called "achievement school district," a scheme for putting schools that don't perform well on standardized tests into a statewide "turnaround" system operated by charter school companies. Partly because I'm suspicious of anything that has the word "turnaround" in in and partly because I'm even more deeply suspicious of Rauner's rhetoric about consolidating downstate schools, I suspect we're going to see something like it proposed in Illinois.

Here's what Jeff Bryant of Salon.com says about it:

In Tennessee, also an early adopter of reform fads, leaders had put into place a system that used student scores on standardized tests to pronounce schools as “failing” and provide the rationale for the state to take over management of the schools by an appointed board. What follows these takeovers, invariably, is that the agency, whose officials are handpicked by conservative lawmakers, transfers the schools to privately operated charter management organizations.

In Tennessee, the state takeover agency is called the Achievement School District, but the model is being adopted under other guises by many other states.

Now Tennessee’s much-lauded takeover program has run into “political trouble” according to a recent article in Education Week.

“Several Democratic state lawmakers,” according to the article, “will propose bills this upcoming legislative session to either shut down the turnaround district, which mostly is based in Memphis, or severely limit its authority to take over schools.”

The legislature’s Black Caucus, the representatives of the communities most often targeted by the takeovers, are helping to lead the pushback.

In Memphis, where the ASD has charterized more than two dozen schools, parents are leading the fight as well. As Chalkbeat Tennessee reports, members of the district’s neighborhood advisory councils have called the takeover process a “scam” and claimed the method for taking over their neighborhood schools “was rigged in favor of pairing struggling schools with charter operators.”

But the trouble with the ASD isn’t purely “political.” The takeover effort is also in trouble because it doesn’t work. The EdWeek article points to a recent Vanderbilt University study that showed district-led turnaround efforts had performed better than the the ASD. The study concluded, “Until the state-run district can begin to show academic progress, it shouldn’t be allowed to take over more schools.”

Cite: Jeff Bryant, "We’re onto the phony education reformers: Charter school charlatans and faux reformers take it on the chin." Salon.com 9 Jan. 2016 http://www.salon.com/2016/01/09/were_onto_the_phony_education_reformers_charter_school_charlatans_and_faux_reformers_take_it_on_the_chin/.