The ASD selected 9 new schools to be taken over this past week in Memphis. From the commercial appeal, those schools include:

Wooddale Middle, Raleigh-Egypt High and South Side Middle, which have already been assigned to charter schools. Nine others — Florida-Kansas Elementary, Denver Elementary, Airways Middle, Brookmeade Elementary, American Way Middle, Hawkins Mills Elementary, LaRose Elementary, A. Maceo Walker Middle and A.B. Hill Elementary

There are a lot of questions being asked following this announcement. Andy Spears at TnEdReport asks why the ASD, which has been shown to be struggling with its current portfolio by an objective analysis, is continuing to take over more schools:

While it may be fair to give the ASD more time to prove it can be effective with its existing schools, it seems irresponsible to allow the ASD to take on more schools. The leaders of the ASD would not be likely to put more students into a classroom of a teacher who failed to meet their desired student achievement targets. Why should more schools be handed over to a model that’s not only not living up to its own hype, but also failing to outperform the district schools it has taken over?

Personally, this seems like a valid critique of the ASD, especially when 9 of its own schools are also on the priority list. Why take over new schools if those schools that have already been taken over continue to struggle?

Questions are also being asked by teachers at some of these schools. Several that I know expressed frustration and anger over the takeover via facebook, one saying that teachers at their school “won’t take this laying down.” Its unclear whether or not they can do anything at this point, but it will be interesting to see where this initial anger takes us in the coming weeks and months.

Personally, I have two big questions. First, why is the ASD continuing to focus solely on Memphis? Their press release was heavily tilted towards Memphis. It didn’t even mentioning Nashville or Davidson County, which contains 15 priority schools. Its mission is to help the schools in the bottom 5 percent in the state (not just Memphis) to move to the top 25 percent in 5 years. But currently they operate only 1 school outside of Memphis. This this a consideration only of feeder patterns? Are they not being given enough resources? Could it be that the ASD doesn’t want to venture into a more politically active community in the State capitol for fear of backlash? Or is there some other reason for the singular focus on Memphis while other districts continue to have struggling schools? These are questions worth answering given the mission of the ASD as a state-wide organization, not a Memphis-centric organization.

My second big question is this – how much of the selection process is truly driven by the data indicators used by the ASD and how much of it is purely neighborhood and feeder pattern consideration? The ASD’s own site states that selection is made using the following methodology:

We worked closely with Shelby County Schools this year to define the criteria we’d use to select schools for matching.  Although every Priority school is eligible—there are 59 in Memphis—we wanted to add extra objective factors to the selection process to ensure we focused on schools that would most benefit from intervention.  Recognizing the value of working together to serve families—and the eventual return of all schools when they leave the ASD—we agreed with Shelby County Schools that in addition to Priority list status, schools had to have a “yes” on at least half of these extra performance criteria to be eligible for matching (emphasis added by me):

• Is the school returning on the Priority Schools list?

• Is the school in the lowest 25% of all Priority Schools?

• Did the school have less than 5ppt gains in composite proficiency levels?

• Did the school achieve less than a Level 4 TVAAS rating in Math?

• Did the school achieve less than a Level 4 TVAAS rating in Reading?

• Did the school achieve less than a Level 4 TVAAS rating in Science?

Nowhere is there any reference to neighborhood considerations. However, after examining the feeder patterns and the ASD takeovers for this year that they included in each of the presentations they plan to give to community members for each school, I have to wonder how big of a role this plays. This begs the question – is the ASD selection process truly fair and unbiased? I don’t have the answer to that yet, so my next step is to recreate the data used to make these decisions to get a better sense of who the schools that were selected stack up against those that weren’t in terms of data as well as school location and feeder pattern.

Teachers, if you work at any of the schools being taken over, we would like to hear from you about the conditions at the school. What are parents, teachers and students thinking and feeling? What are colleagues plans for next year given these new developments? Please leave a reply in the comments or email us at [email protected].

Follow Bluff City Education on Twitter @bluffcityed and look for the hashtag #iteachiam and #TNedu to find more of our stories.  Please also like our page on facebook. The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the author and do not represent those of any affiliated organizations.