Gary Rubinstein’s Blog: I’ll Huffman and I’ll Puffman and I’ll Blow Your District Down
Kevin Huffman was the first Teach For America alum to become a state education commissioner. Despite having only taught for two years between 1992 and 1994 and having had no role related to schools for the next seventeen years (he was a VP of TFA for a time) he was appointed to his position in Tennessee in 2011 by the current Governor, Bill Haslam. In November 2014 after the Governor was re-elected, Huffman ‘resigned’ saying that “it feels like the right time to pass the baton.” Huffman was one of the ‘Chiefs For Change’ a group of reform-minded ‘leaders’ who have nearly all resigned or been fired over the past few years.
There is a trend I’ve noticed recently where reformer leaders resign their positions rather than get fired and then they disappear from the public. Besides Huffman, the most notable one is Huffman’s ex-wife, reform celebrity Michelle Rhee, now Michelle Johnston. My sense is that these reformers are following the old adage sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln, “Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” I have mixed feelings about this rotating group of reformers strategy. On the one hand, it seems like the opposition to their brand of reform is winning some battles as these leaders step down. But I worry that these are only victories on a superficial level and that these reformers are still very active behind the scenes while new fresh faces, someone like Campbell Brown, get a turn to be in the spotlight before they too go underground.
Sometimes these reformers pop up again in unexpected places. Huffman was in Pennsylvania the other day where he testified in front of their senate and also wrote an op-ed for one of the local papers with the title ‘Want Pa. schools to flourish? Try this Tennessee model that worked.”
Tennessee has been getting a lot of mileage out of their 4th and 8th grade NAEP ‘gains’ on the most recently published scores a few years ago. Obama praised them in a State of The Union address for this. Reformers do like to cherry pick the results that suit their narrative. So there was little mention about how Tennessee’s 12th grade NAEP scores had some of the lowest increases or about how their scores on their own test scores have been flat or even down by a little in recent years. Also the NAEP gains, reformers imply, are a direct result of the reforms they enacted through Race To The Top even though some other states, notably Louisiana, did the same reforms, even more so, and didn’t get any gains at all in NAEP.
Huffman is encouraging Pennsylvania to start a state-run district modeled after the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD) which, itself, is modeled after the New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD). Throughout the country, different states are considering creating their own version of this kind of school district. It is unfortunate that in the ed reform discussion there is way more PR than there is true transparency. So Huffman can get the opportunity to speak to the Pennsylvania senate and to write an op-ed where he can say:
The early returns in Tennessee are promising. Last year, schools completing their second year in the ASD had strong growth, and we anticipate that this year’s results will show even stronger performance.
This is not true, even by Tennessee’s own metrics. The mission of the ASD is to take schools that are in the bottom 5% in the state in terms of test scores and, in a five year period, get those schools into the top 25%. The initial idea was that there could be no accusation of them doing this with different students since they would take over existing neighborhood schools. This isn’t quite what happened and now they have gotten permission to recruit kids from further away districts for next year.
But just by the numbers, the results are truly mixed. Of the original 6 ASD schools that are currently in their third year Gary Rubinstein’s Blog: I’ll Huffman and I’ll Puffman and I’ll Blow Your District Down | National Education Policy Center:
