(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Just out of curiosity, I decided to look into the Reardon data to see how many Arizona district/charter combos outperformed or tied the Recovery School District in academic growth. The above list is by no means exhaustive, more the product of throwing in some district names into the data base before my morning caffeine. The list is not short, and includes several very poor and isolated school districts.
Mind you that no one bombed any of these districts with millions in philanthropy. You can’t go to a bar in Snowflake Arizona and meet a group of six Teach for America students the way you can in the French Quarter. They also managed this somehow without a “harbor-master.” Finally, the Reardon data ends in 2015, and since then the trend in statewide data in Arizona has been positive, but in the RSD not so much. Hopefully Reardon will update his study so we can track this over time.
I want to be careful to note that I regard the Recovery School District to have been a very clever innovation for a district that had almost nothing to leverage but empty school buildings after a hurricane. If that hurricane however had leveled Houston or Dade County I’m afraid that the limited supply of philanthropic dollars and TFA teachers would have been unequal to the (much larger) task. In order to reach scale, we are going to need solutions that do without substantial infusions of outside money, as that is likely to be in increasing short supply.
Having said that, RSD landing in the 92nd percentile in growth in the Reardon data was truly a magnificent accomplishment. The leap however from “well done” to “everyone needs to do this now!!!!” looks very dangerous imo.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
“What? No harbormaster!? But, but, but who will ensure quality?!”
Autocatalytic improvement…