New Orleans Charters Still Fail to Provide Required Services for English Learners
In his introduction to the 1995, Multicultural Education: A Generation of Advocacy, Jose A Cardenas describes the plight of children at school when they are not part of the culture that dominates the school: “Instructional programs designed for the cultural mainstream provided little compatibility between the educational system and the unique characteristics of different segments of the population.”
According to Katy Reckdahl, reporting for this week’s Hechinger Report, a news service of Teachers College, Columbia University, lack of cultural awareness and appropriate services remains a serious problem today in the amalgam of charter schools that now serve 80 percent of school children in New Orleans. Reckdahl explains: New Orleans Charter Schools Scramble to Teach Non-English Speakers. In the massive charter school experiment launched in 2005 following the ravages of Hurricane Katrina—an experiment paid for with huge grants from the U.S. Department of Education and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—all of New Orleans public school teachers were permanently laid off in late fall of 2005, and a large number of so-called “failing” schools were taken over by the state and subsequently turned over to charters. Charters have too often failed to provide appropriate services for students