Thomas J. Adams, on the faculty of Tulane University, has a startling and funny column at Huffington Post about what the East Coast can learn from the Gulf Coast.
Now, New York, New Jersey, and other states have had their own version of Hurricane Katrina. Ours is Sandy.
Adams says we can do what New Orleans did:
The absolute first thing you have to do is fire all your public school teachers. Just fire them. We all know education is broken in this country and that teachers are to blame. So why not take this opportunity to do what you helped us do back in 2005? It might create a bit of confusion when the power gets turned back on and the debris gets removed, but that’s a small price to pay for our children’s future. Besides, if there’s a shortage of teachers we can help with that the same way you helped us. We certainly have a surfeit of energetic recent college graduates who we’ll happily send up there to fix your ailing schools. They may have no experience and most peer-reviewed education research concludes they’re not as effective as your former teachers, but they bring energy to the classroom! Sure, they may only stay for a year or two, but their M.B.A. and law school applications will be so much stronger because of it and they’ll make quality education a national issue.
Then he says, what follows easily is complete privatization and new opportunities:
After you get rid of your teachers it will be that much easier to turn control of your schools over to a variety of non- and for-profit groups. Don’t worry, you need not be concerned about whether these schools are effective or not, whether they cherry pick students, cook their test scores, get rid of education professionals in favor of computers, what kinds of salaries their board members are taking in, etc. As you’ve told us many times on countless of your leading editorial pages, this is the model for education reform in the country. In fact if you’re as lucky as us, this will lead you down an easy road to a voucher system in the next few years. Educational equality will come shortly thereafter, I promise.
While the privatization fever is raging, next to go is public housing, then free clinics.
Read it and remember that Arne Duncan said that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing ever to happen to education in New Orleans. I’m waiting to hear if he says the same about Hurricane Sandy.
The New Orleans school takeover was always about power and control over a specific identity group, not education reform. As Louisiana Supt. John White has said, democracy is a failed concept for “urban” (read “black and Latino”) school districts.
I suspect that Sandy will turn out to be a surge of another color. We certainly won’t hear Romney talking anymore about cutting deficit spending for the 47% who now constitute the majority after Sandy.
Professor Adams forgot to mention that it was those Satanic teacher unions that caused the flood in the first place!
I thought it was the queers and faggots that caused Katrina. (turn off sarcasm mode)
The only problem with this comparison is one with demographics. While Atlantic City and the Neptune/Asbury Park areas have a great deal of poverty, most of the coastal towns in NJ that have been damaged have middle, upper-middle class, and affluent residents. Who else could afford to live there? In the poorer NJ towns, privatization is already rampant. In fact, if I remember correctly, the NY boroughs have their turnaround schools and CT has its version of privatization for urban areas. Not sure what the CT coastal areas are like, but if they’re anything like NJ and Long Island, they are far too affluent to be affected in the same way that NOLA was. The column is comical, though.
Here in Connecticut we have very wide discrepancies along the shore. Some extraordinarily wealthy towns are here (Greenwich, Westport, Fairfield, etc.) along with some that have very high levels of poverty (Bridgeport, New Haven). Guess which communities are most under attack by the privatizers and Rheeformers?
If there is one thing the two storms and the two political parties/brands have rallied the people for it woukd be the removal of the Federal DOE under Duncan/Obama. They have created more havoc that will affect millions of children for many years to come. An entire generation will have been used for profits and greed.
This is a hilarious column. Do you watch the program Treme on HBO ? It is a wonderful show that addresses a lot of the issues brought up in this column (and was created by David Simon, who also made The Wire). Anyways, in the last episode, a few of the characters address how the charter schools in New Orleans exclude special needs students to inflate their test scores.
Our legislators, media, or anyone else never EVER question the salaries of Charter Supts (excuse me CEOs). Oh the bonuses are never questioned either.
http://www.themonitor.com/news/local/article_6532104a-1fd8-11e2-8c8a-001a4bcf6878.html
“Just fire them.” is just BRILLIANT! A cynically comical read. Thanks for sharing.
Great comedy. Not unlike Gilbert Gottfried’s comments following the Japanese tsunami. Awful timing. Combine that with his hugely broad attack of all east coasters and you have a really poor attempt at humor. Unless I missed his empathetic piece that preceded this one.