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.
States increasingly lean on charter organizations to take responsibility for their most underperforming turnaround schools. These efforts employ a different constellation of regulation, market forces, and community involvement that constitute more complex environments for charters. This article relates the experience of operators within the Tennessee Achievement School District adapting to stringent performance demands, weak markets, and a vocal community. Results show the pressures this environment placed on operators to improve outcomes with restricted controls while simultaneously acting as community organizations dedicated to a wide range of goals. We conclude that while charter organizations can support school turnaround, the demands of a contested and complex environment require well-resourced organizations capable of meeting diverse expectations from varying stakeholders.
The development and scale-up of school improvement networks is among the most important educational innovations of the last decade, and current federal, state, and district efforts attempt to use school improvement networks as a mechanism for supporting large-scale change. The potential of improvement networks, however, rests on the extent to which they can thrive in the turbulent world of U.S. education. In this article, we adapt a model of innovation scale-up and apply it to the problem of scaling-up educational networks. The framework identifies the constituent components of networks and environments, and the relationship between them. We demonstrate the framework’s utility by illustrating the relationship between two prominent educational networks –the Success for All Foundation and America’s Choice– and the educational environments in which they operated at two different points in time. Results suggest that without robust environmental support, networks are prone to a high degree of uncertainty and unpredictability.
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