Lance Hill, a New Orleans civil rights activist, describes
the ongoing debacle of special education in that city.
The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the state in 2010 for
pervasive discrimination against students with special needs. Just
recently, SPLC filed another suit against the state department of
education, the state board of education, and Commissioner John
White for continuing discrimination against these students. Lance
Hill writes: “The root-cause of discrimination against
special needs students in New Orleans is the privatized charter
school model in which a school’s viability depends on its ability
to post high or constantly improving annual test scores. Special
needs students are more costly to charters that depend on
inadequate and fixed state funding. The easiest way to decrease
costs and increase test scores in this “competitive market model”
is to exclude special needs students. Louisiana has implemented
some policies to discourage “student skimming” and discrimination,
but we can expect that charters, which are essentially government
funded private businesses, will eventually succumb to market forces
to maximize income over costs–even if it as at the expense of the
most vulnerable and needy student populations.” Millions
of dollars have been poured into New Orleans by philanthropists,
foundations, corporations, and the federal government, all to prove
that privatization is a great success. But the privatizers don’t
tell you about their exclusion of children with special needs. They
prefer to keep it quiet.
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You can’t make as much money if you are a charter that offers the full spectrum of Special Education. It is all about the money.
What’s really sad is how many people think that this is as it should be – why spend money on kids who (in Rahm’s words) “will never amount to anything”? People buy into the myth that we’re really in a budget crisis, and if we have such limited resources, then they should be spent on the kids who will make the best use of them. This is now a perfectly acceptable “liberal” position (if not *the* “liberal” position).
Fake liberals. I would like to see where Rahm said that. He needs to be gotten. If the parents knew he said that they would probably hold a sit-in at his office and bring their kids. The nerve of people. And in America!
That’s what he told Karen Lewis. She’s done her best to let people know who he is.
I taught special ed. in New Orleans for a little over a year before Katrina hit. It was a mess even then. We did not get our state money for supplies and equipment because, as a coordinator put it, “math got it”. This was when a connected former Board member who was making more as a consultant than she did on her job hooked up a computerized math program to be purchased through a crooked congressman’s brother. She recommended its purchase by the system. She had been the system’s math coordinator, so of course the system listened to her “professional” viewpoint. Of course all was lost in Katrina, including, interestingly enough, the records, even though the damage on the West Bank was comparatively minor.
I had to fight for everything I got in NO including getting my kids’ food ground up and the right for them to attend a major field trip with the rest of the school . Then we just got cut completely out of the school picnic on Lake Ponchartrain. Despite many accessible spots, the one they chose was over a levee. Our bus could not get over it and most of my kids couldn’t walk. We had to go back to the school. My room mother, who was mentally disabled, GOT the principal. I got the technology teacher for saying the picnic wasn’t for “those children”. The primary teacher, who was able to get her kids over the levee because they were very small, got the school nurse. The nurse left early that day—a bad scene because one of the primaries had a seizure when they got back to the school. The principal kept calling and calling her. Oh, the only way I got a computer was when some were donated to the school. When I saw them go by my room—in the basement, the only accessible floor in the school, I went quickly, very quickly, to the office and requested one.
Now as for the charters, last fall I confronted the head person of a charter group, Black Alliance for Educational Options (Baton Rouge Chapter) and asked him about kids with serious special needs, the kind I taught, the ones who need a self contained class but may join others for certain activities like music— severe/profound multihandicapped and severely autistic, how the charter schools would accommodate these children. I reminded him that if charter schools are public schools, that there was a requirement of open admissions. He hemmed around a bit and then told the truth as I looked at him in his scared looking eyes. I will never forget it. “Charter schools are not for all children”.
That’s right. They are only for children who learn easily and who don’t need professional teachers who know what they are doing.
A thought here. The charter school movement could probably be killed off fairly easily with a good sized group of special education parents demanding that their children be appropriately served with services as outlined in IDEA and the settings they need. Schools hate 2 words and I suspect charters are even more afraid of them. These words are LAWSUIT and MEDIA. I think they would run for the hills, especially when the kids came in with a diaper and a g-tube and a wheelchair as most of mine have been. Or how about a 150 pound 15 year old, non verbal girl with autism who once choked a teacher? Her mama was a well educated activist, by the way. After all, charter schools are public schools!
Dear Oprah–Here’s a story for you…
Nope, I believe she’s a rheeformer.
It’s an exciting day for public schools. Arne Duncan found an actual public school teacher he approves of, and Rahm Emanuel walked into a real public school.
Arne Duncan @arneduncan 5h
Fantastic article on a fantastic teacher, Mary Hawkins-Jones from @MCPS http://wapo.st/13U06y4
I hope their new-found enthusiasm for public education doesn’t wear off on the SECOND day of school! Keep those test scores up, kids, and our nations leading reformers may visit you again sometime.
It’s damage control + positive PR. There’s no way it could be anything else, they have been playing the privatization game too long and it is far too lucrative to change sides.
I’d expect something hostile soon…
It’s still the myth of the miracle teacher. He still doesn’t understand that it’s about all teachers, not *a* teacher.
You judge a civilization on how it treats its weakest people. The United States of America has stood proudly for quite a number of years in pursuit of a level education playing field for disabled students. We have had a golden age of special education (although not perfect and seriously underfunded) which ushered in the kinds of accommodations, trained teachers and others, services, etc. that could bring these children to an opportunity to strive to be the best (by law that changed to appropriate and in some states adequate)that they could work towards. From coast to coast, from sea to shining sea, we made a promise to bring the civil rights for the disabled learner through Federal and State Mandates. But that was then and this is now.
Now we are acting in abandonment of the Do No Harm and teach to the challenges of every child and bring them to the possibility of a productive and decent life. Today we could even refer to the description of child abuse as we have, for the sake of measuring and sorting for the value-added child, testing to distraction and pain and suffering the special needs/challenged learners. For their own good and improvement? No! But to unfairly have them take tests with the full population of students with readiness so that the scores will be skewed and look like there is a failure in statistics, teachers, and public schools. It has caused schools to close and students to be humiliated and sickened, as well as, disliking school and all for what!?? To unravel and reshape our entire national education system in pursuit of the global tech workforce for tomorrow.
This new vision of America and a privitized For Profit school system for the needs of a global race to space, corporate high tech workers, government and defense complex workers, etc. It is a wholesale abandonment of the students who are challenged by poverty, disenfranchisement, and disabilities. Not enough return on the expended dollars according to some and accepted by others. At a time of desperate concerns of falling behind the rest of the world in math, science, and technology there is a scramble to find through the sorting boxes known as charter and private schools a crop of high performing students. For the rest there will be a push through drop out race to prison and the streets. For others there will be a low wage workforce to serve the needed by more mundane needs of society. The public schools will be like clinics with minimum standard of education and services for the great mass of students. So that the American Dream will only be a reality for a very narrowed few and only a dream for some and nightmare for others.
This is happening now in every state. Follow the money and follow the reforms and education trends. Civilization and our country were almost ready to receive a B+ for making a committment and promise to the weakest learners among us and their families. Instead we have slipped to a D and heading for Failure and disgrace of our own ethics, standards, and humanity. It is a betrayal of law, of government, of education, of our children and the promise of an opportunity to a life and a future for survival. The testing and measurement mechanisms are a sham and for profit and the trampling of special education is a travesty.
Well stated, ronee.
BTW, do you know where George Buzzetti is? Hasn’t commented her in a loooong time.
George is still fighting and advocating in California and doing a masterful job. He believes he was taken off this site and I could not confirm that. If so, it is a real loss and appreciated that you are missing his very valuable information. I believe he tried to reach out and find why his comments were removed but to date no answer. He is very valuable as a resource and a loss to the conversation and the crises.
Renee, George was not blocked. we have communicated offline about his inability to post and there was a technical glitch. He is not the first person to have this experience. Same thing happened to a relative.
Ironically, charter schools should be developed to meet the needs of special populations. Imagine a school whose specialty is autism or ADHD or physical disabilities (such as hearing). These schools could cater to special needs, hiring and training teachers to deal with their unique problems and learning styles.
How about a charter in the inner city where poverty is an issue? This school could provide an outreach to future students by visiting their homes to provide language and speech development at the age of two and three. I see such a school providing numerous forms of enrichment, not just for the student, but for their entire family.
Of course, these programs might be educationally sound, especially if they were not funded on the backs of the public school system. However, the underlying motivation of the charter school movement is to break the teacher’s unions and not to provide quality education.
I am always happy to know there are those out in this new world of conversation through an unseen source of energy that people are caring and concerned for their fellow human. It is how to exact that caring that is the problem. We have limited resources and more needs then can be taken care of. It will always be in the animal kingdom in which we exist that the strong will survive over the weak, those with the greatest amount of resources, tools, and power can more comfortably and ablely exist and distance themselves from struggle, and that which is unknown to us can in the end dominate the result.
However, I do believe in strength in numbers, one person can make a difference, and a cry within a concert of voices can rise above the shouts of powerful commands and demands of those that would be driven through greed and power as the overlords and rulers. We have already put in place a system inclusive of options for all learners. To be level in an opportunity for education (whether it be life skills or classic learning) there are tools and teachers that are needed to correctly grow the child.The parents and educators and others who fought for that level education playing field never thought it or believed it to be on “-the backs of the public school system” but rather the civil rights of the neediest of our learners. It wan’t thought to be charity or an extra gift of promise to those that some believe are not going to bring a return on the taxpayer dollar. It was about education and learning and surviving in a cruel and cold world which has gotten colder and more cruel. Democracy is being challenged for the best of itself and the disabled are the marker for that.
We are the wealthiest country in the world and we have squandered and have been robbed of our coffers at the expense of those who can least afford to be abandoned.
Charters and private schools have an elite function of looking for what has been called the “best and brightest” the “value-added” the “global workforce of tomorrow” and they are sorting mechanisms for same. The families of disabled children, in a country without adequate healthcare and a job market that has left our citizens in dizzing millions without ability to adequately take care of themselves kicked to the curb and left to forage for services and assistance can not afford the privitized sector. What they can receive if we would only live up to our Federal Mandates (IDEA, Sec. 504 of Civil Rights Act, ADA)
is a measure of some level education playing field for the children of the greater number of our population throughout the country, not abandoning and reducing this public school support. It is their right and our responsibility.