As part of a wide-ranging school reform package, Tennessee's First to the Top Act of 2010 created a new state-run Achievement School District (ASD) to oversee and turn around chronically low-performing schools.These schools in the bottom 5% on state accountability measures were removed from the control of their local education agencies and placed under the purview of the ASD, with the ambitious goal of bringing them into the top 25% of performance within fi ve years.The ASD's primary approach to school turnaround was to woo high-quality charter management organizations (CMOs) and other nongovernmental organizations to run its schools, located mostly in and around Memphis.This approach was inspired by the "portfolio management" model of governance, in which the role of the district shifts from providing direct guidance and supervision of schools toward managing a portfolio of schools run by independent organizations, typically within a framework of school choice.ASD leaders worked diligently to replicate the kind of institutional environment that charters have EXECUTIVE SUMMARY KEY FINDINGS• Due to the rules of neighborhood enrollment, ASD operators had to cope with a steady fl ow of new students throughout the school year, signifi cantly weakening their ability to hone in on the learning challenges of a stable corps of students.• Poverty, policy, and other systemic barriers to choice meant that many ASD students simply attended the school in closest proximity to their home and did not engage in an active selection process.ASD operators could not assume a student body whose families had made a conscious decision to attend their school.• The extreme levels of special needs students, the funding model, the diffi culty of leveraging economies of scale, and the perceived lack of strong external service providers, has made delivery of special education services a daunting challenge for ASD operators.• The delicate coexistence with SCS eroded operators' control over their environment, and required them to make painful accommodations to political resistance from a wary community.• Operators have responded to the challenges of the ASD environment with more sophisticated schoollevel designs that included instructional adaptations, computer-assisted learning, additional wraparound services, and new strategies for communicating with parents and building community trust.June 2016 | 2 found conducive to their growth and development in other settings, including efforts to maximize operator autonomy, push down per pupil funding, and enable families to more effectively select among schools.Still, certain policy constraints, such as limits on school choice, were beyond the ASD's authority or ability to change.Furthermore, the ASD was committed to managing turnaround within a traditional system of neighborhood school enrollment.High-profi le CMOs have historically been reluctant to embrace school turnaround or operate in institutional environments that differ substantially from their usual circumstances.The ASD represents a signifi cant and muchwatched effort to turn that tide.While the turnaround conditions here may have given pause to some CMOs, the ASD also presented them with a rare opportunity to prove their mettle in a district where the leaders were strongly committed to their success and aligned to the same managerial principles.This paper, based primarily on 140 interviews with leaders of the ASD and nine charters or independent operators, describes the turnaround environment and policy context of the ASD.It discusses how these circumstances replicate or depart from the more typical charter experience, the challenges that emerged, and how operators have responded to them.In general, four years of experience with the ASD have revealed daunting challenges.While charter operators were not naïve about the conditions in the ASD, many did not fully anticipate how much these differences would infl uence their instructional and organizational designs, expand their mission, and require complex adaptations.The main fi ndings of the paper are summarized below.Challenges of Neighborhood Enrollment and Constrained School Choice Tennessee legislation required ASD schools to recruit students within the boundaries of the school's neighborhood attendance areas, or from other lowperforming priority schools.The rules of zoned neighborhood enrollment restricted charters' usual ability to draw from a broad pool of families.But at least as importantly, these rules also removed a signifi cant mechanism that many charters use to create stability in their schools: control over the timing of student entry.The circumstances of high mobility that are common in poor neighborhood schools left operators to cope with new and unfamiliar students throughout a school year, and signifi cantly weakened their ability to hone in on the learning challenges of a stable corps of students over an extended period of time.Charters in the ASD needed elaborate and multifaceted strategies to deal with this transience and a wider spectrum of student experiences and academic needs.High-profi le CMOs have historically been reluctant to embrace school turnaround or operate in institutional environments that differ substantially from their usual circumstances.The ASD represents a signifi cant and much-watched effort to turn that tide.
Recognizing school improvement networks as a leading strategy for large-scale high school reform, this analysis explores developmental evaluation as an approach to examining school improvement networks as “learning systems” able to produce, use, and refine practical knowledge in large numbers of schools. Through a case study of one leading school improvement network (the New Tech Network), the analysis provides evidence of the potential power of developmental evaluation for generating formative feedback for network stakeholders regarding the strengths and weaknesses of their networks as distributed, collaborative learning systems. At the same time, it raises issues and questions to be addressed in advancing the practice of developmental evaluation, chief among them being constraints on stakeholders in leveraging feedback in productive ways.
The Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD) is among several state-run districts established to turn around underperforming schools. Like other such districts, the ASD removes schools from local control and is not accountable to local political institutions. Despite its authority, the ASD has encountered opposition within Memphis where its schools reside. For those inclined to its market orientation and suspicious of traditional districts, the ASD is an innovative effort to improve outcomes for disadvantaged students. For those that see educational failure in Memphis as the result of social and economic isolation, the ASD appears motivated by profit, paternalism, and racism. A third narrative, largely hidden from view, encompasses people who reject state takeover but seek to confront structural causes of poor performance.
Most current approaches to improving teaching and learning in American public schools rely on either market pressures or bureaucratic controls to leverage performance. In this article, however, authors Joshua Glazer and Donald Peurach examine occupational control as a third approach, whereby the internalization of norms, technical language, and practices among educational professionals drives coordination and knowledge generation and supports the implementation of ambitious instruction. To investigate the dynamics of occupational control, they use the concept of epistemic community to identify the mechanisms that unite practitioners into a community of practice extending beyond the borders of local work environments. They argue that underlying this is a shared set of theory, codes, and tools that govern interpretation and practice and, in their interaction, facilitate the continuous generation of knowledge. Illustrating the utility of this framework are two examples of school networks that employ the principles and mechanisms of an epistemic community and that can be interpreted as systems of occupational control. The authors conclude by arguing that the development of educational epistemic communities is critical to the success of current approaches to improving instruction in schools, most notably the Common Core State Standards and the charter school movement.
Although research alliances (RAs) have long been seen as mutualistic and reciprocal, RAs face numerous obstacles navigating stakeholders’ differing goals, incentives, and information. This longitudinal, comparative case study of two RAs uses principal-agent theory to analyze these interdependent challenges and their relationship to RA strategy and design. Findings suggest that while some RAs may be better designed to balance the competing interests of various stakeholders, increasingly contested definitions of RA effectiveness among those stakeholders have muddled RA identities. As a result, RA researchers are now often held to expectations that their organizations were not originally designed to meet. We argue that this has implications for how RAs are funded, designed, and, ultimately, evaluated.
