Andy Spears shares the lessons of Tennessee, where an ambitious state takeover plan for schools was a long-running failure.
In the face of dissatisfaction with current elected officials, some in Pittsburgh are calling for a state takeover of the city’s public schools:
There is, therefore, only one choice: Mayor-elect Corey O’Connor must appeal to Gov. Josh Shapiro to support legislation placing the district’s finances under state supervision, and disbanding the elected board in favor of appointed experts.
The writer continues:
PPS is broken beyond repair. Only an outside force can transform it. Happily, there is a mechanism to apply such a force.
The solution to the alleged brokenness of PPS is to throw out the will of voters and have an unelected board make decisions.
That’s no solution at all.
Ask the residents of Memphis, who saw the state of Tennessee take over the district’s struggling schools and put them under the authority of an appointed Superintendent.
The experiment was called the Achievement School District (ASD) and it was a complete failure.
he Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD) has been a miserable failure. It has also cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion since its inception.
Here’s more:
Four Tennessee schools are now returning to local control after getting taken over by the state ten years ago. The Memphis-area schools were brought into the Achievement School District with the promise from state leaders to turn things around.
But the schools are now returning to Shelby County Schools with no significant improvement in test scores.
“The state has failed miserably in running schools and the state should not be in the business of being a school district, period,” State Rep. Antonio Parkinson said. “The Achievement School District came in and aggressively divided these communities and took over these schools, and then they performed worse than the schools they actually took over.”
When Memphis residents sought answers as students were shuffled to ASD-managed charter schools, they were met with unaccountable (and unsympathetic) leaders.
When schools closed, sometimes just weeks into the school year, families were left scrambling.
And, a decade after the experiment started, students in ASD-managed schools were no better off (and sometimes worse) in terms of academic achievement.