Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10
Has the flood of lies about education reform has reached a crescendo 10 years post Katrina? The news media (and President Obama) has mostly spun a narrative of “improvement” and “real progress” post Katrina. However, there are several notable stories out this week that are providing counternarrative. I will begin with a look at the national and national comparative data for Louisiana and the RSD in my new policy brief that I collated primarily from Louisiana voices and was released by the the Network for Public Education. I will then conclude with a roundup of the lessons learned from the aforementioned counternarrative.
In 2003, the Louisiana legislature created the Recovery School District (RSD). With this law, schools that did not meet “minimum academic standards” were to be taken over by the state.[ii]
Then came Hurricane Katrina.
Striking the coast on August 29, 2005, Katrina destroyed not only New Orleans, but also much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Soon after, in November 2005, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 35.[iii] The new law lowered the academic criteria that made a school eligible for takeover and empowered the state to takeover 100 plus “low performing” schools. The RSD was given the vast majority of New Orleans public schools, leaving just a few high-performing schools to be run by the Orleans Parish School Board.[iv]
In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education and education reformer Arne Duncan infamously referred to Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing to happen to the education system of New Orleans.”[v]Repeatedly, the RSD has been acclaimed as a positive “game changer for New Orleans”[vi] and has been held up as a model for school reform by various education reformers, politicians, foundations, think tanks, and lobbyists in states across the nation. More recently, the education reformers have parlayed a single research study as demonstration of success in the RSD.[vii]
For the 10th anniversary of Katrina, this brief seeks to provide an overview of Louisiana and RSD data ten years after the implementation of widespread “education reform” in New Orleans.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
The NAEP is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10 | Cloaking Inequity:
