How “School Choice” Has Failed Louisiana (Especially New Orleans) Parents
Advocates of the privatization of American public education have proclaimed the week of January 26, 2014, as “school choice week.” As such, they are celebrating the creation of their own lucrative bureaucracy, one that is anything but controlled by parents.
In short, “school choice” is a misnomer.
“School choice” would be better named “forced choice,” for those in charge in the “choice” bureaucracy are the ones who control (and manipulate, and move at will) the boundaries of “parental choice.”
Let us consider the handcuffs of “school choice” as such are firmly fastened to the wrists of parents in Louisiana and chiefly in the “school choice” prison of New Orleans.
Let’s Seize Control and Call It “Choice”
In New Orleans, “school choice” received a handsome gift from Louisiana legislators in 2005 (following Hurricane Katrina) with the passage of Act 35, which handed over any school “below the state average” to the state-run Recovery School District (RSD). Act 35 gives the state carte blanche in the running of its schools– which is how New Orleans (the system with the largest number of schools taken over by the state) became almost exclusively a charter district.
(For further evidence of RSD carte blanche, consider the results of the 2013 Louisiana charter school audit.)
The goal of Act 35 was to privatize New Orleans public schools. In order to completely privatize the district (the goal of then-State Superintendent Cecil Picard), the Louisiana Constitution would have had to have been amended in order to dissolve