This is the Big Leagues” Charter-Led Turnaround in a Non-Charter World

Abstract

As part of a wide-ranging school reform package, • 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.

The Ties That Bind: Building Civic Capacity for the Tennessee Achievement School District

“…One reason this dilemma remains pertinent is that the political and educational dimensions of reform are inextricably linked (Stone, 1998). The best designed programs are ineffective if they fail to last, and even if they survive, a contentious environment diverts resources to managing confrontation and away from developing and improving educational programs (Massell, Glazer, & Malone, 2016).…”

Charter Schools in Turnaround: Competing Institutional Logics in the Tennessee Achievement School District

“…Both the ASD and RSD circumvented the authority of the local school board and were accountable only to state-level authorities. Furthermore, both were legally required to accept students regardless of when they registered or whether they had special needs, and without conditions such as requiring parents to participate in school events (Hill & Maas, 2015; Massell et al, 2016).…”

“…SCS officials could (and did) alter these boundaries thereby influencing operators’ budgeting and ability to predict student enrollment (Massell et al, 2016). SCS also restricted ASD charters’ colocation in buildings with SCS schools, effectively ending operators’ ability to “phase-in” one new grade level a year in converted priority schools.…”

“…Finally, operators struggled to apprehend the depth of special education needs that the ASD forced them to confront and for which most were unprepared (Massell et al, 2016). 9 A leader from Pinnacle with schools in SCS and the ASD expressed a view shared by all operators in our sample:Probably the biggest difference between our open enrollment school and our ASD school .…”

“…After a national search, Chris Barbic, the founder of a celebrated charter network in Texas, was appointed as the ASD's first superintendent in 2011 and was given considerable latitude to determine how those key principles would be operationalized (Massell, Glazer, & Malone, 2016). The ASD launched its first cohort of six schools in the fall of 2012.…”