EduShyster here prints a guest column by Ashana Bigard, a New Orleans native and parent advocate who describes the hoax perpetrated on the national media about school choice in that city.
Bigard describes schools where children are punished because they are poor.
She writes:
The majority of schools in New Orleans have these overly rigid disciplinary codes—they’re run like little prisons. The schools aren’t nurturing and they aren’t developmentally appropriate. Children need social development time. They need recess, they need to be able to talk at lunch. You’ll hear the schools say *we’re providing structured social development*—but there’s no such thing! If you have to manage kids’ social development, it’s not social development. Typically you’ll hear from school leaders that they have to have this overly rigid school climate because the school has just opened and it’s chaotic. They’ll say something like *we need these rules in place until we get a structured, calm environment, then we can make it less rigid. But first we have to calm these children and get them to a place of orderliness.* But children will never be calm, orderly robots unless there’s something wrong with them. They’re never going to get to the place that you’ve decided is necessary before they can have more freedom. In order for children to know how to operate in freedom, they have to have freedom to operate in. We don’t teach kids to eat with a fork and spoon by not giving them a fork and spoon!…
When parents ask me for advice about schools in New Orleans they never ask *what are the best schools*? They want to know what the least terrible schools are. I tell them to go for one of the Orleans Parish School Board schools because at least then they’ll have some recourse. I tell them to look for schools that have recess and try to find the good teachers. And if they end up at a school where the teachers are really young, look for developmentally appropriate material and bring it to the teacher—kind of like *educate the educator.* So many of the teachers in New Orleans are brand new—this isn’t their profession. They don’t know about child development or adolescent development. I also tell parents to document absolutely everything. If you have a problem with something that happens at the school, keep a record. Try to create an email trail and keep a log of everything that happens. At some point there is going to be a class-action suit because our children’s rights are being violated and we need as much documentation as possible.
She concludes:
If New Orleans is being held up as a model for the schools in your community, I have some advice for you. Fight harder than you’ve ever fought to make sure that this doesn’t happen to you. Because once you’re in it, it’s so hard to get out of. Fight tooth and nail. If people come to your community and try to sell you bull crap, come down here and talk to us first. Read anything you can get your hands on. They’ll tell you that your input matters, that your schools are going to be run according to a community model. Don’t believe it. At the end of the day, they could care less about what kind of schools you want. In fact, I’m pretty sure that we said that we wanted arts and music in our schools—that those were really important to us in a city like New Orleans that’s build on arts and music and culture. Instead we got prisons.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The hype around ed reform is incredible- it’s all so slickly marketed I just sort of bounce off it. It can be difficult to even get a hold of it and know what’s real because it’s so bland and uniform and carefully calibrated.
So nice to read an individual’s account of NO’s privatized system with actual, real-life details instead of pom pom waving and cheerleading.
This is from the Broad Center Twitter feed:
The Broad Center @BroadCenter 23h
Whenever you get to talk with and learn from the rock-star staff at @TN_ASD, you know it’s a great day! #buildthepossible
It would be so refreshingly honest if one of these foundations would just drop the pretense that they are “for” public schools and straight-up advocate for charters. They’re doing it anyway, and anyone reading the sites can see that. Why pretend otherwise?
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New rule–whenever you hear or read the term “miracle” associated with schools, you know that someone in authority is cooking the books.
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“At the end of the day, they could care less about what kind of schools you want. In fact, I’m pretty sure that we said that we wanted arts and music in our schools—that those were really important to us in a city like New Orleans that’s build on arts and music and culture. Instead we got prisons.”
Well said Ashana. The abandonment of art and music education in a city like New Orleans is tragic.
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She has described the classic “no excuses” charter with excessive discipline and a narrow curriculum. At the high school level the students have very few choices for electives-the arts don’t exist. The staff turns over frequently. Certain teaching positions will see several different teachers in one year. She is right, they don’t give a d@#4 about the education of children.
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