A Scholarly Masterpiece: William Frantz Public School | tultican #BLM #BLACKLIVESMATTER

A Scholarly Masterpiece: William Frantz Public School | tultican

A Scholarly Masterpiece: William Frantz Public School

By Thomas Ultican 4/18/2021

My wonderful friend from New Orleans, Mercedes Schneider, said of this meticulously researched book, “Intense, captivating, and horrible in its reality, William Frantz Public School is a story overdue for the telling – a must read for those seeking to understand New Orleans’ history and the lingering impact of White racial superiority upon the Black community and city infrastructure.” I concur. It is a captivating read.

At its 1938 founding, speakers proclaimed the new William Frantz Public School (WFPS) a “protection for democracy” and a “fortification against encroachment of those terrible ‘isms.’” (WFPS page 3)

However, racism did not just encroach; it dominated. WFPS was built to be a White students only school. Sitting on the border between the all white Florida neighborhood and the all Black Desire neighborhood, WFPS only served the White families. Worse still; the authors report,

“The Orleans Parish School Board built no schools between 1941 and 1951. As a result, existing neighborhood schools throughout the city faced overcrowding. The problem was particularly acute in Desire. Due to the severe overcrowding, many Black children attended school for only a fraction of the time as their White peers living in the Florida neighborhood.” (WFPS 9)

With the Brown versus the Board of education decision in 1954, the Supreme Court declared racial segregation as a school enrollment policy unconstitutional. Louisiana segregationists quickly coalesced to become leaders of their state’s CONTINUE READING: A Scholarly Masterpiece: William Frantz Public School | tultican

An Important New Book About New Orleans and Its Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

An Important New Book About New Orleans and Its Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

An Important New Book About New Orleans and Its Schools

Three scholars have recently published a very informative book about the history of education in New Orleans. The authors tell this story by scrutinizing one very important elementary school in the city, the one that was first to be desegregated with one black student in 1960. The book is titled William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans (Peter Lang). The authors are Connie L. Schaffer, Meg White, and Martha Graham Viator.

This is the school that enrolled 6-year-old Ruby Bridges in November 1960. Her entry to the school each day, a tiny little girl accompanied by federal agents, was met with howling, angry white parents. Her admission to an all-white school in New Orleans was a landmark in the fight to implement the Brown v. Board decision of 1954. It was immortalized by Norman Rockwell in a famous painting called The Problem We All Live With.

The authors set the stage for their history by pointing out that the Reconstruction-era constitution of Louisiana forbade racially segregated schools. In the early 1870s, about one-third of the public schools in New Orleans were racially integrated. Some schools had racially CONTINUE READING: An Important New Book About New Orleans and Its Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Failure to Disrupt. Again – Have You Heard

Failure to Disrupt. Again – Have You Heard

Failure to Disrupt. Again

The pandemic gave the education technology industry the opportunity to FINALLY deliver on the bold promises it has been making for decades. What happened instead was just another failure to disrupt, says MIT’s Justin Reich. Transcript is here. And a description of the Imagining September project with links to participate is here.

Have You Heard 

Failure to Disrupt. Again – Have You Heard

Naima Coster’s “What’s Mine and Yours” Complicates the School Segregation Story | Bitch Media

Naima Coster’s “What’s Mine and Yours” Complicates the School Segregation Story | Bitch Media

“What’s Mine and Yours” Complicates the School Segregation Story

It has been more than 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education legally desegregated U.S. schools, but schools are as segregated now as they’ve ever been. In 2014, Nikole Hannah-Jones, then a reporter for ProPublica, opened many people’s eyes when she chronicled how the segregation embedded in Ferguson, Missouri’s school system contributed to the untimely murder of Michael Brown Jr. in 2014. Since then, Hannah-Jones and other education reporters have blown the lid off the idea that U.S. schools treat all students equally and that they follow a system of meritocracy. EdBuild, a public school-focused nonprofit, released a study in 2019 that found that schools systems primarily serving children of color typically receive $23 billion less in funding than those that serve white children—this has a rippling effect that can determine the trajectory of each child’s life. “You can tell these dollars make a difference,” Rebecca Sibilia, CEO of EdBuild, told the New York Times in 2019. “Walk into a rural nonwhite community. Walk into an urban nonwhite school district. You can see what that means in terms of how much that has added up over time.”

It’s not only funding—or a lack thereof—that keeps students from receiving the education they deserve. There’s also a concerted effort in wealthier communities to create enclaves that purposely exclude children from poorer communities, the majority of whom are children of color. The same EdBuild study found that more than 50 percent of children in the United States are in segregated districts where more than 75 percent of their classmates are either white or nonwhite, depending on where they live—and wealthy parents, many of whom are white, fight tooth-and-nail to keep it that way. That’s how we’ve gotten to the point where nearly one-fifth of public schools in the United States have close to no students of color. (These are the same schools that hoard more than their fair share of resources.) Our schools are still separate and unequal, an idea that is central to Naima Coster’s second novel, What’s Mine and Yours, which focuses on two parents, Lacey May and Jade, and their children, Noelle and Gee, respectively, as their school begins an integration program that ignites tensions.

On the surface, Jade and Lacey May have a lot in common: Both women are working-class parents in North CONTINUE READING: Naima Coster’s “What’s Mine and Yours” Complicates the School Segregation Story | Bitch Media

My Complete, Unedited Review of Doug Harris’ Book, Charter School City | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

My Complete, Unedited Review of Doug Harris’ Book, Charter School City | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

My Complete, Unedited Review of Doug Harris’ Book, Charter School City

In January 2020, Commonweal Magazine asked me to review Doug Harris’ book about New Orleans charter schools, Charter School City.

I completed my review in February 2020, but with the pandemic, my review was not published until November 2020.

As so often happens in publication, the review I submitted was pared down considerably, which editors reserve the right to do though the result might make the review seem shallow or incomplete. In this case (and to my dismay), the edits in one section involved a splicing that altered the meaning of my words. (For the backstory on that error, see this email exchange.)

According to the terms of my contract with Commonweal, I needed to wait 90 days before publicizing my originally-submitted, unedited review. And so, since those 90 days have passed, I offer below my complete review of Harris’ book.

Book Review: Douglas N. Harris, Charter School City: What the End of Traditional Public Schools in New Orleans Means for American Education, University of Chicago Press, April 2020.

***

My family is from New Orleans. My father and his siblings grew up in a white neighborhood, intentionally zoned, and attended all-white schools in the 1920s and 30s, also intentionally zoned. In the 1950s, my family relocated to neighboring St. Bernard Parish, as did many former white residents of New Orleans. My mother also grew up in New Orleans and relocated to St. Bernard, where she attended an all-white high school in the early to mid-1960s. Around the time my mother was a freshman in high school (1960), just as Ruby Bridges became the first black child to attend New Orleans’ all-white William Franz Elementary school,St. Bernard opened a school on the St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line expressly to allow white residents of New Orleans to use school vouchers to escape federally-mandated integration of New Orleans public schools. Though the voucher school was forced to close a year later, the virulent anti-black CONTINUE READING: My Complete, Unedited Review of Doug Harris’ Book, Charter School City | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog