Do Not Follow New Orleans’ Lead on Charter-School Education.
On July 1, 2018, the Washington Post published an op-ed entitled, “Following NewOrleans’ Lead on Charter-School Education.” The author, education policy analyst Emily Langhorne of the Progressive Policy Institute, uses this opportunity to promote what she terms the “quiet milestone” of Hurricane Katrina’s “wip[ing] out the city’s abysmal public schools” and the “rebuilding from the ground up as a laboratory for charter schools” operated under the direction of the state via the Recovery School District (RSD), an “experiment” that Langhorne declares “proved successful.”
On July 6, 2018, the Network for Public Education (NPE) published a report that I drafted and that counters the claims of New Orleans’ charter-experiment success. My report, entitled, “New Orleans Schools Post-Katrina: Rebirth or Afterbirth?”,counters claims of the New Orleans, Post-Katrina, All-Charter Miracle narrative on three important fronts, which I briefly describe in this posting.
First of all, white student privilege is alive and well in New Orleans, schools, just as it was pre-Katrina. Perusal of 2017 letter grades for New Orleans schools shows that schools with notable concentrations of white students are mostly graded A and B, with one C and one D. Moreover, 34 of the 85 New Orleans schools—or 40 percent—were graded D or F in 2017.
Only one of these 34 D-F schools had a notable white population. All had predominately black populations. So, not only does one see that 40 percent of almost-all-charter New Orleans schools (four are still direct-run schools by Orleans Parish School Board, or OPSB) still have grades D and F in 2017—12 years post-Katrina; one also sees that these D and F schools demonstrate racial inequity in an almost-all-charter school system.
One might even use the term, “abysmal” to describe such equity and arguably, quality, failure.
A second point in my report is that state takeover of New Orleans schools did not counter corruption; it seems to have magnified opportunities for it. The section on fraud and corruption is extensive; in it, I trace the roots of corruption to then-Louisiana-state-superintendent, Cecil Picard, and his manipulation of US Department of Education (USDOE) Office of Inspector General (OIG) report on Continue reading: Do Not Follow New Orleans’ Lead on Charter-School Education. | deutsch29
Want to read about the history of charter schools and vouchers?
School Choice: The End of Public Education?
(Click image to enlarge)Schneider is a southern Louisiana native, career teacher, trained researcher, and author of two other books: A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education and Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?. You should buy these books. They’re great. No, really.
