We have felt the full court press of the faux reform movement for more than a decade. Chicago has been burdened with it for nearly 20 years, New York City for 11 years, Washington, D.C., for five years.
The one city that reformers love to cite as their victory is New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina, in their narrative, was a blessing in disguise (and Arne Duncan said it was the best thing ever to happen to education in New Orleans).
New Orleans now has more of its students in charters (about 80%) than any other city, so it is the paradigm of the reform movement, the model for all other cities, which–if reform continues to advance–will one day have no public schools, except as dumping grounds for the kids rejected by the charters, and no teachers’ unions.
Given the status of New Orleans, it becomes very important to protect its image. And so the reformers talk about its rate of improvement, but never mention that the district is one of the lowest-performing in a low-performing state. Before the Jindal takeover of the state board of education and the state education department, New Orleans was ranked as 69th of 70 districts in the state by test scores. And 79% of its highly-praised charters received either a D or an F from the state.
But! There is good news. Superintendent John White put out a press release to announce that students in New Orleans improved their ACT scores by four-tenths of 1 point! That is right: four-tenths of one point on the ACT! Why, that is almost half of one whole point!
Fortunately, math teacher Gary Rubinstein subjected this amazing progress to careful examination. He describes John White’s celebratory press releases as an example of “How to Lie with Statistics.” The ACT score for students is New Orleans, Gary points out, is actually very low, only 16.8. Be sure to read Gary’s post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is a “link” missing in this story: who is the wunderkind who created the reform movement in Chicago and left it in the hands of Arne Duncan…the wunderkind went to New Orleans after Katrina and won accolades from the NYT and other great papers as the super agent of change…and then to Philadelphia and helped to place the schools there in such a wonderful mess…and now has his own “group” of highly paid agents of change and rescue as he continues to “save?” schools: Paul Vallas is the reform movement’s super star. I think that ASPCA saved more dogs after Katrina in New Orleans than the system of change educated children.
The poorest kids never returned to New Orleans
In order to continue to really help get the wonderful word out to Louisiana taxpayers convincing them of the awesome education plan, John White has hired former chief of staff for Jeb Bush, Didre Finn, to manage the communications office for the LDOE. It’s not only important to follow the money but also the people! Isn’t this just dandy?
http://theadvocate.com/news/3937753-123/education-chief-hires-pr-manager
New format of the blog isn’t good. The boxes around each paragraph makes a visual barrier for progessing to the paragrah.
I don’t have any control over the format. Will check with others. I don’t like it either. It shows up that way on my iPad but not on my regular computer.