Huffman Hires Outsourcing Expertise and Former Direct Instruction Salesman

When former Teach for America executive, Kevin Huffman, was named Tennessee's Education Commissioner earlier this year, it was a sure sign that TFA had moved into a key position in implementing a third decade of the same corporate education reform that has produced so little learning at such great costs, both human and economic, since the 1980s.

Last week Huffman named two new lieutenants in his and the Business Roundtable's latest efforts to do for education what they have done for business: make themselves fat while destroying the system.  Named as an assistant commissioner of career and technical education was Danielle Mezera, who served as corporate education adviser to Mayor Karl Dean, as the Nashville mayor suffered repeated attacks of "outsourcing envy" as he had Mezera study the sweet financial deal that Memphis had sold their souls to land from the Gates Foundation.

Mezera is quoted in a piece from Scholastic Adminstrator in 2008 entitled "The Outsourced District," which examines the arrival in Nashville of the new movement to turn schools and school services into corporate revenue streams (my bolds):

. . . slowly but surely the possibility of hiring outside organizations mutated from a far-out notion to an idea under consideration. This is partly because it was creeping into the community and taking root. One kipp school, delayed due to Tennessee’s restrictive charter law, finally opened its doors in 2005. A Big Picture School started a year after that.

. . . . The process has accelerated in the last year with the arrival of a new mayor, Karl Dean, who is intent not only on expanding Purcell’s education legacy, but forging his own. His attention to the issue may be fueled to a certain extent by a bit of old-school rivalry: Memphis, a long-time rival of the district, is bringing in outside organizations—and successfully. Call it outsourcing envy, but Dean wants what Memphis has.  The push for outside help came in large part from a 2007 visit by the mayor and his team to Memphis.

“We went to Memphis because we had heard all these great things,” says aide Mezera, who advises Dean on education. “The mayor looked at me and asked, ‘Do we have that in Nashville?’” After going through the laundry list of programs, the answer, uniformly, was no.  In a major speech this spring, Mayor Dean made a very public case for why Nashville needed outside help—TFA, in particular. . . . .

The other corporatist added to Huffman's TN government payroll for the benefit of corporations is Kathleen Airhart, who worked for Putnam County Schools before, during, and after a very lucrative 2-year stint with McGraw-Hill's SRA Direct Instruction division during the Reading First heyday that soon became swamped by a tsunami of corruption.  Airhart will serve Huffman as the department of education’s new deputy commissioner.

Airhart was apparently able to leverage her years of influence as Supervisor of Special Education in Putnam County  to become an account rep for McGraw-Hill from 2005-2007, even as she remained an employee of Putnam County Schools.  This is from LinkedIn:

Superintendent of Schools

Putnam County School System

2007 – Present (4 years)

Putnam County is an innovative system located in middle TN with 11,000 students and 20 schools.

Curriculum Representative

McGraw-Hill Publishing

July 2006 – March 2007 (9 months)

TN Educational Curriculum

McGraw-Hill

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; MHP; Publishing industry

2005 – 2006 (1 year)

Supervisor of Special Education

Putnam County Schools

Education Management industry

July 2003 – July 2006 (3 years 1 month)

Supervisor of Special Education, Consulting Teacher, Classroom Teacher

Putnam County School System

1995 – 2005 (10 years)

Airhart even managed to complete a dissertation during her time as a special ed supervisor/McGraw-Hill rep.  And yes, the study explored reading test score gains on the same product line that she was selling.  In fact, after she became Director of Putnam County Schools, she provided McGraw-Hill with glowing and seemingly outrageous claims about the scripted parrot learning system that she had previously hawked while writing her dissertation.  These clips below (click to enlarge) are from a sales document, Corrective Reading, that McGraw-Hill published on the Web dated 2008.


_________________________

So with Dr. Airhart now in charge of enforcing this chain gang parrot system in all of Tennessee's schools, we can pretty much expect miracles, I guess.  Damn the poverty, full proficiency ahead!! 

Three to four year gains in 15 weeks?  Really?

I decided to have a look to see if these miracles were reflected in Putnam County state reading scores.  And if a miracle took place, it surely was not witnessed generally in Putnam County, at either the lowest percentiles or the highest.  Not once and not over time. See below.

Could we be about to enter another era of big time fraudulent reading claims as an excuse to initiate lockdown learning in every Tennessee school?  Sounds like that could be what's required to put Tennessee, or at least Kevin Huffman, on the road of First to the Top.  But don't worry: the guys who made the economy work like it does today have all sort of miracles up their sleeves.

From the TN TCAP website:

How Low, Middle, and High Achieving Students in Putnam County Compare with Similar Tennessee Students

TCAP Reading/Language

Achievement Levels within the Putnam County		Percentile Ranking within Tennessee
System 25th Percentile	Year	Grade (Subject: Reading/Language)
		3	4	5	6	7	8
	2001	25	32	27	29	30	37
	2002	33	29	29	32	30	28
	2003	34	33	25	30	25	27
	2004	34	36	33	30	33	33
	2005	36	37	38	36	35	35
	2006	34	34	30	39	33	31
	2007	34	33	28	35	37	32
	2008	31	35	31	32	38	39
	2009	30	35	36	37	32	32
	2010	32	34	33	34	34	31
	2011	33	30	28	32	33	33
Achievement Levels within the Putnam County		Percentile Ranking within Tennessee
System 50th Percentile	Year	Grade (Subject: Reading/Language)
		3	4	5	6	7	8
	2001	52	58	53	57	56	61
	2002	54	50	56	55	53	59
	2003	61	56	48	57	52	50
	2004	58	60	53	54	59	58
	2005	56	60	62	57	55	62
	2006	56	56	57	65	56	58
	2007	59	58	51	58	63	54
	2008	54	60	55	56	63	66
	2009	54	58	60	58	56	58
	2010	54	56	57	58	56	54
	2011	52	54	52	54	56	57
Achievement Levels within the Putnam County		Percentile Ranking within Tennessee
System 75th Percentile	Year	Grade (Subject: Reading/Language)
		3	4	5	6	7	8
	2001	75	80	76	79	82	82
	2002	78	73	77	77	76	82
	2003	80	76	71	77	74	76
	2004	78	78	74	77	79	78
	2005	79	77	79	77	78	80
	2006	78	77	75	83	75	82
	2007	80	77	74	79	85	77
	2008	76	82	76	79	84	84
	2009	78	77	81	79	77	79
	2010	73	79	79	78	81	76
	2011	71	74	76	74	78	80