The Truth About The New Orleans School Reform Model
Anyone who saw the remarkable HBO series “The Wire” remembers the scene in the fourth season, focused on Baltimore public schools, where the term “juking the stats” defined how corporate-driven re-engineering of the public sphere has distorted institutions so they no longer serve ordinary people.
An anniversary post for The Atlantic described that memorable moment thus:
Historical pressures push teachers in season 4 as President George Bush’s No Child Left Behind education plan casts a real-life shadow. When a new city teacher, formerly of the Baltimore police, hears how his school will teach test questions, the young man immediately recognizes the dilemma: “Juking the stats … Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels. I’ve been here before.”
Juking the stats is a practice now so ingrained in the way education solutions are posed to the public that examples are rampant.
But anyone who wants to have a genuinely honest discussion about education policy based on the real facts of the matter – and not statistical distortions achieved through gross manipulation and “policy speak” that covers up realities on the ground – needs to constantly question what policy leaders and their scribes in the press are foisting off as “information.” There are better sources to turn to, and the Internet makes that search remarkably easy.
No Way To Talk About NOLA
An especially egregious example of “juking the stats” is the way school administration in New Orleans – where, basically, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina was used as an opportunity to summarily fire school teachers and turn over the majority of schools to privately managed charter school operators from out of town – is now being marketed to the entire country as a “solution” for public education everywhere.
As I pointed out in a recent piece for Salon, “In the most recent presidential election, both candidates hailed the New Orleans charter-dominated system as a model for other states to follow. It has been touted by think tanks on the center left and the far right as “what should come next” for “transforming” the nation’s schools.”
I went on to explain that although this model of “reform” was being touted by politicians and in the press, “There’s no evidence anywhere that the NOLA model of school reform has ‘improved education.’”
This prompted a letter to my Salon editor from an official of the Recovery School District in New Orleans (RSD NO) – the administrative apparatus put in charge of most of New Orleans schools post-Katrina – that there were “several inaccuracies regarding the Recovery School District and the state of public schools in New Orleans.”
I post the exchange that ensued not just to take readers deep into the weeds of understanding why the NOLA model for running schools should be avoided at all costs, but also to exemplify why and how to contest the “solutions” for education policy constantly being marketed to us by a disingenuous campaign that distorts data to serve its generally hidden ends.
Call…
“Jeffrey [sic] Bryant states “There’s no evidence anywhere that the NOLA model of school reform has ‘improved education’.” The percentage of RSD students performing at grade level on The Truth About The New Orleans School Reform Model: