Parents in New Orleans are likely to learn that their child is enrolled in an F school. Under federal law, they have a right to transfer to a higher-performing school.
But here is New Orleans’ dirty little secret: Most of he choices available to parents are also F rated schools.
This stunning article takes you inside the story that has been mythologized in the national media.
Consider this:
“More than seven years into the New Orleans choice experiment, documents and interviews reveal the schools are so academically anemic that the RSD fell short in its attempts to comply with federal policy requiring school districts to offer higher quality alternatives to students in failing schools.
“If every student in a failing school wanted to transfer,” said Gabriela Fighetti, RSD’s executive director of enrollment, “we would not be able to guarantee them a slot.”
“Dozens of public records reviewed by The Lens show RSD officials last summer grossly underestimated the number of failing schools it oversees. One week, City Park Academy was offered as a destination for countless students eligible for transfer through the federal choice program. The next, it was identified as a failing school required to offer alternatives to its own students.”
Meanwhile, many states and districts plan to copy New Orleans, which has been overhyped to the media.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Choice has always been a shell game. Its not about providing better choices, just the illusion of choice so people think Reformers are doing “something”
Out last superintendent, Paul Pastorek, told LDOE in a meeting about 5-6 years ago that “kids are trapped in failing schools right now. This has been going on for decades. We don’t have time to experiment or figure out how to solve these problems. We can’t take the time to ready, aim and fire. All we have time to do is fire and do anything, employ any strategy that might work.”6 years later that strategy has wrought what you would expect. No targets hit, and a lot innocent victims.
And these are the people we put in charge of teaching our kids.
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School “choice” is rooted in the idea that children fail primarily because of the school they go to rather than family socio-economic factors (well, actually, “choice” is rooted in making money off of education, but let’s not be impolite). Until people realize that poverty is the problem rather than the school, parents will go madly chasing their tails all around the district trying to find “the” school to fix the problem, all while the eduvultures reap the profits and laugh all the way to the bank.
On a side, but related, note, I just returned from vacation in New Orleans. Due to an old and not updated GPS system, we took an unexpected turn through a variety of neighborhoods that aren’t exactly on the tourist maps. It really brought home that all the schools really are charter schools. I knew that, but seeing charter after charter brought it home. Hurricane Katrina was only the beginning of the destruction of a beautiful city. And then, of course, we came home to Chicago and Hurricane Rahm. Sigh.
Our data show that kids who go to American schools with less than 10% of the students in poverty outperform the best in the world. All we have to do is ensure that no American child goes to a school with > 10% poverty.
The answer is simple, it’s just not easy. It’s that pesky detail that this is mathematically impossible to implement for everyone if 24% of American kids live in poverty.
It is not to the advantage of rich conservatives in Louisiana to have a lot of good schools especially in New Orleans. The economy of New Orleans is heavily based in the tourist industry and the backbone of that industry its unskilled labor that pays minimum wage to people who are generationally locked in place. When Katrina came hundreds, maybe thousands of adults were afraid to leave because they had never been outside of New Orleans or at least not out of the immediate metro area—Orleans, Jefferson & St. Bernard parishes and were not really welcome in St. Bernard except to work. Some might have people down in Plaquemenes Parish, but those were heavily fishers and plant workers. Quite a lot of better off families were paying for their kids to go to Catholic school before Katrina, even if they were not Catholics and had to remedy the theology over the dinner table. Even before the infestation of the charters they had a bunch of trouble getting real teachers for the schools. That was how I got there. They recruited experienced, certified teachers from all over America and replaced us with TFAs after the storm when Jindal got into office. New Orleans supports Louisiana and they want to keep the tourism strong with lots of slave labor.
One thing really strange about the charters is that they did not want to give charters to the teacher groups who wanted to start them early on. But they embraced corporate and religious groups. I remember a group from Edison, some businessmen from the Middle East and some nuns at a meeting I went to. The only local group in the running was the Treme group and they were not teachers. I know this because I was part of a group of teachers who applied for a charter. We were all highly qualified and highly experienced ( I am talking 20 years or more of experience and Masters degrees) and had been hired through the Orleans Parish Teaching Fellows, the group that I mentioned above, before Katrina. BESE did not want us. Prior to the storm, the Teaching Fellows group also lost their contract. That was never explained but it looked like they wanted cheaper and less qualified teachers even then.
The Recovery School District was a plan on the shelf before Katrina. It had to be as no one could put together that plan after Katrina and implement it in about one week. These people have patience and will wait for the proper opening just as in 9-11. When those incidents then happen the plan in place is put into operation immediately. Now in New Orleans they must lie as they are total failures there starting with Vallas formerly from Chicago and Philadelphia where he made a mess of both school districts. This is typical “Orwellian Doublespeak” in which losing is winning. Of the about 120 public schools in New Orleans I think there are about 18 left, the rest are charter of some type. Read the DOE OIG Sept. 2012 report on the total lack of accountability of charter schools in Florida, Arizona and California. I am sure it is the same in your state also.
The old chestnut, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Hmm–now WHO said that?
Actually, Orleans Parish has some great schools. They are run by …. Orleans Parish.
It is the Recovery School District that has struggling schools. It is run by… LDOE/BESE.
I also wonder about decrying the overuse of testing and the humiliation of labeling schools with letter grades and at the same time using those test scores and letter grades to say that all the choices in New Orleans are bad ones.
It’s hard to keep track of the different types of schools in New Orleans. There is the Recovery School District and then there are the regular public schools. But even the RSD schools aren’t all run under the same agency. I don’t know how any parent could make a choice. The data from the failing charter schools are removed from the database, so it makes the total reform data look better than it actually is. I think the NOLA public schools are actually doing the best overall. That is why the overall NOLA data looks better. When the RSD data is looked at separately from the public school data, then you see the real picture. There is a website called Research on Reforms that gives the real data picture for NOLA. Such a sad situation for these parents and students.
Here is a great post about the corruption in how Louisiana is being managed by our governor and the ineptness of Education Superintendent White. Mr. White formerly ran New Orleans Recovery School district and left it in a shambles. No accountability??? When will the public wake up and hold our elected officials accountable for allowing these guys to destroy our public systems?