Nashville Schools Under Attack While Journalists Sleep

Over at Dad Gone Wild, blogger norinrad10 has been chronicling the various messes in the Nashville, Tennessee school scene. The latest news is not good-- one more example of a city in which entrenched media are part of the business community that is cheerfully working to dismantle public education.

Tennessee's Grand Experiments

Tennessee has long been out in front of the reformster wave, marking such dubious achievements as being the first state put a former TFA temp guy in charge of the state education system. Kevin Huffman did also mark some time as an education lawyer, but that and the two years of TFA temping were enough to rank him as one of Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change. Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn't like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters) and his commitment was strong-- when Nashville failed to approve a Huffman-approved charter expansion, Huffman took $3.4 million away from the school system. 

Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of business investment opportunities private charter schools?

Hurricane ASD landed initially on Memphis, with a business plan that is a little bit genius--"The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state." There will always be a bottom 5%. In fact, given even a tiny modicum of success, ASD will eventually get its hands on almost 100% of the schools as they all cycle through that bottom slot. More recently, ASD has worked on expanding into Nashville, and that is raising its own new set of issues.

Huffman, however, has moved on, gracefully jumping ship before he could be pushed off the plank. Late in 2014, his general incompetence and gracelessness had finally turned him into a large enough political liability to end his happy time as Tennessee Educhieftain.

Can't We Just Start Over?

Lots of folks in power had loved Huffman and thought he had the right ideas. But the whole Common Core discussion had exploded in a welter of hard-right anti-gummint much dislike, and Huffman's attempt to make every Tennessee teacher just a little poorer had not exactly won a lot of backing from that community, either.

So here comes the Nashville Public Education Foundation, a coalition of civic-minded folks that would really like to make a mark on public education as long as they don't have to A) actually talk to or deal with people who work in public education or B) work through any of those democratically-elected institutions. We've seen this kind of foundation before (I ran across it most recently in York, PA, when local businessmen decided that they really wanted to dismantle public schools without actually having to run for office or convince the general public to go along.)

Watch their scrolling bank of happy quotes and you'll see supportive words from Teach for America, the Chamber of Commerce, the mayor, a former governor, a parent, a CEO, the school director, the country music association foundation, and -- wait? what! really??-- Ben Folds.

The Foundation has had its fingers all over Nashville education, and that foundation has decided that what the city needs is to RESET.  What the heck is that?

The mission of Project RESET (Reimagining Education Starts with Everyone at the Table) is to elevate the conversation on education as we approach a vital time in Nashville’s history. Led by the Nashville Public Education Foundation, with the support of Nashville’s Agenda and media assistance from The Tennessean, Project RESET will set the table for a larger, communitywide conversation about improving Nashville’s public schools.

The event, lauded by charter operators around Nashville, is coming up at the end of the month. How much fun will that be?

Dogs and Rocks

You know the old Will Rogers quote: "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while you look for a rock." Remember this any time somebody is acting diplomatically toward you. Don't listen to what they say; watch to see if they're looking for a rock.

The rock in this case is the Parthenon Consulting Group.

Look at their website. Look at this 2009 power point presentation about educational investment. Look at this paper about investing in KSA and UAE. Check out how this publisher lists them with other examples of Strategic Consulting Firms like Bain, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group.

Look at what Parthenon had to suggest in Knoxville. Their suggestions there included cutting 300 people, which would create a big pile of money if teachers were paid as well as Parthenon consultants in Memphis (4 consultants per month = $350K).

What is blindingly clear is that when it comes to education, Parthenon is only interested in one topic-- how to make money at it.

If your landlord says he's called an outfit to come work on the problems in your building, and what you see pull up in front is a Demolition Specialists truck, you are the doggie. If you are a public school system and the Parthenon Group shows up to "help" you, you are the doggie. The Parthenon Group does not specialize in helping schools systems do a better job of educating students. The Parthenon Groups helps school systems turn into pieces that can be more easily replaced with profitable charter schools. (The Momma Bears have a great post about what Broad-style slash-and-burn looks like.)

Is anybody paying attention?

Well, no.

Scroll back up to the RESET quote, the one where The Tennessean is credited with providing "media assistance." You can peruse that site for glowing PR puff pieces in support of NPEF, with a big fat RESET logo on each one. Just yesterday they ran a super-duper article about how great it is that Nashville has Pre-K's doing academic instruction with four-year-olds. A ten-second google would have turned up ample evidence that such instruction is a terrible idea, but as we've recently seen  in New Jersey, sometimes it's just more fun to promote what you're supposed to promote instead of doing actual journalism.

And that brings us back around to the post that originally sparked my interest.

I personally called Tennessean reporter Jason Gonzales to discuss his article and asked him point blank if The Tennessean had a sponsorship role in Project RESET. He emphatically answered no, they are just producing a series of articles on the Nashville education system. Articles that all bear the Project RESET logo and have been a mixture of negative and calls to put aside petty politics. You know, politics that call for an equitable system for all kids.... When I asked Jason if he thought that information surrounding the group conducting the study was relevant he answered with an equally emphatically no. The data from the study is important, he said, but not the conductors.

I don't know a thing about Jason Gonzales, but I feel perfectly comfortable calling him dead wrong. When the city zoo hires a consultant who specializes in selling rare animal pelts, that information is relevant. When a local business hires a consultant who specializes in closing businesses and selling off parts, that information is relevant.


And when the unelected body that has put itself in charge of revamping local education hires a consultant who specializes in closing public schools and turning them into profit-making private enterprises, that information is relevant.

Why all this now? Nashville gets a new mayor and a new school chief very shortly; think of it as big welcome pep rally for them. Nashville schools are definitely the doggie. Let's hope somebody steps up to protect it before the rock falls.

Charter Takeovers Tennessee Style

If you don't have the good fortune to have a hurricane clear the public school competition out of your path, what other techniques can be used to convert to an all-charter system? Kevin Huffman in Tennessee appears to have an answer.

Kevin Huffman, as the Tennessee Grand High Commissioner of Education, represents a reformster milestone of his own. Huffman's career path took him to Swarthmore, which led to a TFA posting, which led to law school, which led to practicing education law in DC, which led back to TFA, first as general counsel and later as various VP executive titly things. Then, a few years later, Governor Bill Haslam tapped him for Tennessee Educational Poobahdom. Which made him the first TFA temp to get to run an entire state's education system. So congrats on that, Tennessee.

Since taking over that post, Huffman has taken some great reformy steps. For instance, he chimed in with Arne Duncan to claim that low-achieving students, including those with learning disabilities, just needed to be tested harder. And as a super buddy of charter schools, he took $3.4 million dollars away from Nashville city schools because their board didn't approve the charter that he had personally shepherded through the process.

That blew open the giant can of worms that is Nashville metro schools, an ugly mess that I'm still reading up on. But there's more reformster excitement to be found in Tennessee. Let's travel cross-state to Memphis and the Achievement School District.

The ASD is yet another lesson in the kind of money to be made in the business of privatizing schools. It's also a lesson in what can happen when the state stops even pretending to have a commitment to public education.

Most states way back under NCLB had some sort of mechanism for taking over local school districts that were "failing." Most of these were site-specific and theoretically impermanent responses to local issues (eg the SRC in Philadelphia)-- turnaround pro tem operators. But Tennessee has the ASD-- a state-run board that is essentially a state-wide school district composed of Whatever Schools We've Decided To Shut Down This Week. The ASD is part school district, part brokerage firm, deciding which batch of students and real estate will be served up to which charter school operators. If your goal were to simply destroy public education and replace it with a charter system, this would be a genius way to do it.

You can see their genius right there in the big fat mission statement on the ASD site:

The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the to 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students' life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.

This is just brilliant (from a ruthless privatizing takeover standpoint) because there will always be schools in the bottom 5%. Maybe somebody in the state capital is dumb enough to think that eventually ALL the schools in Tennessee will be in the top 25%. But for everyone who is vaguely math literate, the implication here is clear-- if the ASD can just show a little patience, they will eventually be the only school system in Tennessee.

That process is already well under way. The ASD started out with six schools in 2012 and is up to twenty-two this year-- all in Memphis. The state has drawn big red bulls-eyes on twelve more schools in the Memphis area (though the ASD site frames it as "eligible to join ASD, as if that's a nifty prize they've just won) with nine now emerging as likely targets beneficiaries. ASD has already begun the process of deciding which charter operator gets to pick these plums, and the candidates include many of the usual suspects such as KIPP and Green Dot.

ASD is also expanding in Nashville, and I can only imagine that charter operators bidding e-bay style for the chance to snatch these beauties. ASD of course hands the schools over stripped of many of those bothersome rules about teacher certification and job security.

So sit back and relax, schools of Tennessee. You will be assimilated soon enough. Soon every single one of you will be in the top 25%, and you'll be happily wedded to your new charter overlords. In the meantime, other reformsters can just watch and learn as Memphis schools are parceled out to charter privateers.

This new type of system-- the state as a broker between communities and charters-- seems open to all manner of abuse. It seems absolutely built for pay-to-play, and it also seems to have built-in instability, since the state can run a revolving door of charter operators depending on results, ROI, and whatever operator is the flavor of the month. Students, teachers, and community members are just fodder for this giant money-generating machine.