New Orleans will soon be the first urban district in the nation that is all-charter, the first district where public education has been completely extinguished.
Because so much money has been invested in the privatization of the schools in New Orleans, there is a media machine that cranks out favorable stories about it. The state board of education, the state department of education, and the Governor are determined to prove that privatization was successful.
But there is another side to the story. Read it here. Read about a district that has low rankings on state measures, a district that has depended on fluctuating state standards, a district that depends on Teach for America, where charter leaders are paid handsomely.
Raynard Sanders, a professional educator and critic of the Recovery School District, says that New Orleans is a great case study:
“It’s a system where many of the schools take in only the most desirable students and then “create an economic opportunity for the people who operate the school,” he said. And many have been hurt in the process of experimentation, Sanders said, “because the rights of students and the sanctity of public education have been trampled on and forgotten about….”
“In New Orleans, the privateers got everything they wanted and more, and still failed, Sanders said. “It is a great case study, and also one of the biggest scams done on public education – and parents and students — in the history of the country.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The writer of the linked article, Kari Harden, left the Advocate (La newspaper) because she believes in reporting the truth. The Advocate, shall we say, expected more of a slant from her writing.
Her article linked above is a marvel, especially in its trapping the “mother” of La state school takeover, Leslie Jacobs, into stating that performance isn’t the issue; its governance. (A lie, of course, since “failing school” is all about labeling schools using letter grades and state takeover is founded upon “grading” schools.)
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I attended a meeting convened by NC’s state superintendent yesterday (of parents) about how best to display NC’s new letter grades.
I have a stomach ache.
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Letter grades are Jeb Bush’s contribution to “school reform.” They are ridiculous. Imagine if a child came home from school with an annual report card containing one letter. Parents would be outraged. How can it make sense to label an entire institution with a single letter? This is part of the privatization hoax. Set schools up to fail instead of helping them. Next year they can be privatized, turned into a charter, and kick out the kids with low scores.
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In the inaugural grading in Utah this year, my school got a “C.” Every school in the state but one (which got a B) with the demographics (fairly high, but not quite Title I poverty) got a C or lower. So we spent all of that tax money on testing and grading to list the schools by poverty.
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Yes, MOST NC schools are expected to have a D or F. I am happy DPI consulted parents to find out about placement and inclusion of the information on the website. But I think the only way to make the performance letter grade nebulous is to have a twin sister letter grade that covers other important strengths of public schools. Otherwise I believe the information is deceptive—even if required by our General Assembly, it is deceptive for DPI to allow the easy conclusion to be that our schools are in fact failing. At some point we can’t just say, “well the General Assembly told us to.” Right? When is enough enough? We can look at other states and know what part of the ALEC plan this is. Why are we not stepping ahead of that game and being smarter than it?
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The privatization movement is alive and well in several districts in Colorado, too. How on earth are we going to stop this insanity?
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A marvelous question. But is it insanity of parents to want to opt out of some public schools? Even if many charters are crappy, and even if the choice is semi-illusory, isn’t it still a choice, a degree of freedom that every parent wants? The essence of American culture is not wanting to be told what to do, or what one HAS to do (go to a specific school). I suspect that’s why the myth of charter schools is so powerful.
And THEN if the parent really wants the kid in a charter he/she will see to it that the kid toes the line and does not get expelled back to the public school.
There are many negative aspects to the privatization movement, but the notion that one has a choice appeals to so many, arguments for public schools as against charters have an up hill fight.
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Another great article by Kari Harden, on the mystery behind a “”miracle” school that was never revamped as promised:
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/john-macs-future-still-up-in-the-air/
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This is some article. It speaks directly to the heart of the matter, that students don’t matter, only the profits matter. When there are no more monies up for grabs, management can simply walk away without repercussion, or the school gets closed, again without anyone being held accountable for what happens to the kids and the neighborhood.
In New Orleans, at this point, it is easy to imagine the despair and despondency of the parents, kids, the neighborhood. They certainly have been disinvested in their futures. Likely, they feel now “why bother” when their voices have been crushed and their hopes dashed.
These reformers are good at talking. They talk doublespeak and shove their reforms down our throats. They make huge promises, and when it all goes south because the money has been…. squandered (?), taken (?), skimmed all as profit (?), rather than being invested into even in this case repairing broken windows…we need articles like these to expose the lies.
Maybe instead of generously donating billions to politicians to change laws and push charters, those monies would be better spent rehabilitating broken windows, providing extra curricular activities, wholesome meals, after school programs and tutoring, and real, qualified teachers who are invested in their careers. Everything else is a phantom bandaid placed only for the end game – profit.
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“…those monies would be better spent rehabilitating broken windows…”
Very well said, Donna. When I learn about the tactics of the profiteering “reformers” it is like an exposé of “America’s Most Wanted”. I truly believe that what currently passes as “reform” will one day be deemed criminal.
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New Orleans is not the first urban district to go all charter and destroy truly public education. In September 2012, the Muskegon Heights Public Schools became the Muskegon Heights Public School Academy through Michigan’s misdirected law that allows our governor to appoint emergency managers/dictators to both cities and school districts. Governor Snyder appointed Donald Witherspoon to become the emergency manager/dictator in this district. Mr. Witherspoon immediately ended the union contracts and all staff were fired. He then contracted with the for-profit (we don’t care about educating the kids) Mosaica Education to further run this district into the ground. So, in the summer of 2013 every former student in the Muskegon Heights Public Schools was required to “apply” for admission to this “all-charter” school district. In January 2013 I filed IDEA Part B “systemic” complaints against the Muskegon Heights Public School Academy, Mosaica and the former Muskegon Heights Public Schools, and on behalf of “every” student age 3-26 (Michigan special ed rules allow students to have an IEP to age 26). Diane, with my thanks wrote a blog about my successful Part B special education systemic complaints that identified gross negligence and complete denial of a Free Appropriate Public Education. Literally, 167 students with IEPs and 167 IEPs out of compliance. More disturbing, the Michigan Department of Education and the Muskegon Heights ISD had written a report two years prior to my complaint that identified gross systemic violations and did nothing with their findings until my systemic complaints.
I believe that every student in the Muskegon Heights Public Schools and subsequent “charterized and privatized” district has lost his/her constitutional right to a meaningful, free appropriate public education. Mosaica has been fired but a new and most likely not improved private corporation will be hired. I will continue to believe and preach that the words “public” and “private are incongruent when used in the same sentence to discuss or describe “public education.”
On another note butt on the topic of Louisiana, this state has not only destroyed public education; it has passed legislation to destroy special education. The LA legislature has passed legislation to allow a student’s IEP team to set graduation requirements and low the bar of expectations to sub-terrain. Even the U.S. Dept. of Ed has sent Governor Jindal a letter urging him to veto this devastating legislation.
Bottom line; Louisiana parents need to decide of their children matter.
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Marcie,
I was aware of Muskegon Heights when I wrote that language. Muskegon Heights is a tiny district. New Orleans is an urban district. It is the first sizable urban district to be privatized. The media are drawing lessons (usually the wrong ones, based on PR) from the New Orleans story.
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So the cautionary tale is only cautionary to some people.
Funny, it’s kind of like the Wolf of Wall Street seems like a cautionary tale and yet I know two 19 year old kids who say they idolize Jordan Belfort.
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Agreed, Diane. I don’t know what it is going to take for Americans that say they care about public education, to take action before it becomes something that America used to value.
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Muskegon Heights is actually more radical than New Orleans, because it’s a private manager over all the schools. “The school” as an entity ceases to exist. It’s meaningless.
“The management firm would be responsible for a long list of services, including curriculum development, instruction, business administration, transportation and food service. Basketball and football programs would have to be maintained at the middle and high schools.”
The private manager will control each and every aspect of what makes a “school”. It puts paid to the notion that the schools have “autonomy”. They have less autonomy than they had in a public system. Who are they supposed to appeal to if they don’t like the curriculum, or want to try something new? The management company? The three member appointed board who hired the management company? “The schools” are a shell, a legal fiction. The management company IS the schools.
Currently, they’re begging the new management company to retain the contract employees who work there. They were certainly “empowered” by this awesome new model, huh? “Please don’t fire everyone again”.
They lost complete control over their schools. They have no say in anything.
http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2014/05/muskegon_heights_request_for_c.html
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Sanders said, “because the rights of students and the sanctity of public education have been trampled on and forgotten about….” The journey through education reduced to a crass Darwinian struggle.
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Yes, a crass, Social Darwinist struggle, overlaid with rhetoric that is simultaneously deceptive and insipid.
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totally.
Absolutely.
And when you think you find a solution in your mind, it gets trampled by some other facet of the struggle.
For example, I have been so excited about having an Hispanic principal and a visionary for dual language immersion. To me, making language a focus surrenders all differences. . .it elevates a truly academic pursuit that can only lead to increased congnitve ability and communication. But the old guard felt threatened and managed to run her off. Part of me thinks there is resentment of an old WASP culture seeing the schools become rampant with ESL students who are poor and who are Roman Catholic. No mention of these sentiments will be made, but the struggle is there. Just as you have phrased it. . .Darwinian. It’s something I never figured I would see like this in this century.
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If language is culture, shouldn’t Spanish speakers be expected to learn English if they want to live in the USA?
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Harlan,
yes. But research shows if you know two languages you can learn a third and fourth fairly easily. To me being “global” is being able to communicate in more than one spoken language.
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Still waiting for anyone to comment on New Orleans who has the expertise/competence to tell us about school quality beyond just passing rates on state tests or, perhaps worse, A-F ratings . . . .
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WT,
You post this often. And I agree that school grades (A-F) and state tests are weak or partial indicators of school quality. Especially when school grading systems can be gamed by the state (see Bennett in Indiana, Bloomberg / Klein in NYC and Louisiana with the latter two lowering cutscores to demonstrate “improvement).
But you still ignore that this is the metric that reformers use to criticize schools then disavow themselves when convenient. The very definition of hypocrisy. A sword then a shield.
But I do agree on your main point.
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I agree that a discussion about what defines school quality is an important one for New Orleans. There is also a point to be made in using the state’s own (if convoluted) grading system to show that even by their own definitions they are failing after close to 9 years. But in these two stories (especially the second) I tried to delve into what defines a good school beyond the test scores and letter grades. There is one question I think is always at the heart: Would you send your own child here?
“Within a week, the three schools under the governance of Collegiate Academies were accused of violating the civil rights of their students while the organization’s flagship school, Sci Academy, was ranked as the #2 high school in Louisiana by the U.S. News and World Report.”
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/civil-rights-complaints-are-filed-against-three-n-o-schools/
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/n-o-charter-school-ranks-second-among-la-schools/
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Actually, Diane did post a piece (by Mercedes Schneider, if I’m remembering correctly, but maybe I’m not) a while back about the nightmare parents have to go through just to get their kids into one of the RSD schools, let alone one near them that has openings for all siblings and that anyone would want to send their kids to. It was a very long and convoluted article (reflecting the long and convoluted application/admission process), but it was very much worth reading. I’ll try to dig around and post it if I find it.
Admission to charter schools is only one tiny piece of the problem surrounding New Orleans schools, but it is an important piece and one that speaks to qualitative issues of people’s actual experience of the RSD rather than just test scores.
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Do you mean no parent can just rest assured that there is a school with a spot for their child?
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Here’s the article I was referring to: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/07/17/how-school-choice-works-in-new-orleans-hint-it-doesnt/
In the process of searching for that article, I found at least a dozen other posts that deal with qualitative issues in New Orleans beyond test scores posted on Diane’s blog. Go to “blog topics” above – New Orleans has its own whole category. Please read through those before posting any more lies around here, WT.
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Nice try, but neither that post nor the Schneider post to which it links provides any evidence whatsoever about school quality, which is what I asked about.
Let me say it again: if you just want to make a point about ed reformers’ hypocrisy, fine. But if you’re going to affirmatively claim that New Orleans schools themselves aren’t of high quality, you have to come up with a competent study of what “high quality” is rather than just relying on amateurish bloggers who can’t do anything other than cite the passing rates — we all know that isn’t the best measure of a school’s quality.
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What exactly is your definition of “quality”, then, WT? I would think experiential factors like the stress of not knowing whether your child will even have a school to go to would be a significant part of “quality”. Also, the learning environment, such as whether or not the school is a military-style, punitive, “no excuses”, humanity-erasing introduction to prison. Clearly rich white folks think that the school environment is an important component of school “quality” – a number of Diane’s other posts under “New Orleans” delve into those issues.
If you only want to look at “results”, what results do you suggest? I’m not aware of any study yet that shows that charters get better high school graduation rates, especially when you factor in their huge attrition rates from lower grades to higher grades. It’s easy to claim higher college acceptance rates if you only allow students to graduate from your school who are for sure on the college path (an option not open to real public schools). I’m not aware of any studies showing that charter graduates are any more likely to graduate from college or earn any more over their lifetimes than comparable public school graduates (again, allowing for the fact that charters have far more control over who they allow to graduate), at least none that weren’t funded by the rephormers themselves. If you’re aware of any such studies, by all means, enlighten us.
BTW, “amateurish bloggers”. That’s funny. As opposed to experts like, say, John White or Michelle Rhee or Bill Gates. If you want to point out specific mistakes you believe Ms. Schneider has made, please feel free to bring it. Otherwise, you’re just trying to silence opinions and information you don’t like.
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I’m not trying to silence Mercedes, I’m saying her opinion of New Orleans school quality doesn’t mean much if it’s so heavily based on measures that she would otherwise say are bogus.
Not a hard point to comprehend.
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WT,
WTF? Why don’t you just tell us your opinion so we can get this game you play over with.
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Give us your definition of “school quality” before you throw this kind of question. If you won’t (and I’m afraid you can’t), then, what you say sounds nothing but a recycled piece of apologist opinion on ‘poor’ private/charter schools…
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TCliff & Ken Watanabe: deflect, divert, sleight-of-hand.
Y’all nailed it.
Here’s an eye-opener for the shills and trolls that visit [I am being polite] this blog: do your homework first. A news flash: Dr. Mercedes Schneider has her own blog—
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com
She teaches in New Orleans. Given her other credentials, that gives her a pretty solid perspective on what is going on there. Spend a nanosecond or two of your time reading up.
And I repeat here what I have written elsewhere: don’t feed the shills and trolls; it just encourages them.
Your call. But remember what an old dead Greek guy once said:
“Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.” [Homer]
You are not obligated to encourage more empty words.
😎
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Not my problem to define “school quality” — that is Mercedes’ problem. She desperately wants to say New Orleans schools are affirmatively bad, yet doesn’t have any actual evidence beyond their test scores and A-F levels.
I thought we all agreed those aren’t good measures of school quality. So if you want to say New Orleans schools are bad, tell me what measure of school quality you’re using. And make it a good one, not just silly complaints that it’s complicated to fill out a list of which 8 schools you want.
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Too bad one’s cultural bias on the city clouds judgment on how schools are doing. No one is saying that NO schools are doing comparably well as schools in other districts, cities, or other states. Everyone knows almost all schools are facing numerous challenges since(or, even prior to) the Katrina. It’s nothing more than silly to put exactly the same type of expectations/standards(i.e., test scores) without taking an account of socioeconomic factors, available educational resources, school infrastructures, public safety of community, etc. With both state and private fundings, RSD schools were supposed to function as a role model of ‘good school,’ and many of them have so far failed miserably.
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Can this situation be reversed? Is anyone working to do so?
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Simple question: Would Arnie Duncan send his children to a school in Louisiana. We all know the answer to that question (so does he) and this is exactly the problem the entire administration’s approach to school reform. Unless you walk the talk, especially with reforms that are dramatically changing the landscape of schooling in America, then reform strategy is not only dishonest, but appears to be pursuing larger ideological goals other than educating children. I should, very tired of all these studies that attempt to quantify what is going on these charter movements. You cannot describe a child’s school experience by looking at spread sheets. From the descriptions of what is going on in these no excuses schools, you can be certain that for children, this is not a good school experience or for that matter a human experience. The regimentation, the yelling, the test prep, the untrained teachers, I could go on, but no one in our political class (certainly not there wives) would permit this kind of treatment of their children.
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Life itself is a ‘no excuses’ road. Just sayin’
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Were you an author of the common core?
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A while back, Arne Duncan visited the Carver campus in New Orleans that is the setting for the story I posted above about a recent civil rights complaint alleging abusive conditions. I wish I would have asked him “Would you send your kid here?”
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In the caste democracy we seemingly live in, where those in the upper, protected echelons of law making are abysmally out of touch with the impact of policies they enact, it is almost an impossible scenario to even wish for experiential “walk-a mile” reciprocity.
In a parallel universe, I have recently learned that front line fighters of foreign wars who left the field in response to the horrors which were committed account for the nearly all AWOL listers. Charles Glass, the historian, recently commented that, “None of [the WWII deserters’] comrades on the front lines ever turned them in because many of them had felt that same impulse themselves. They were under such pressure. It was one of the considerations that they had that they might just run away one day. It was the rear echelon soldiers, those who never saw combat who would in the event turn those deserters in to be court-martialed. Men at the front lines go through all kinds of emotions, conflicting emotions, and sometimes they have such trauma and such stress that they crack…the men who are beside them understand it better than those who were in the offices and in the rear echelons.” (Democracy Now! 6/4/2014)
Those “on the ground” will always be expendable for those whose pretentious and, dare I say, misinformed ideals are fiercely ignorant and destructive to fellow human beings.
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“caste democracy.” An interesting phrase. No one approves of legal caste. If there is economic stratification here (and of course there is), is your point that there should no richer people and poorer people, that all should be economically equal?
And if so, how to you achieve that and retain freedom at the same time?
I’m just wondering where you assumptions take you when followed out.
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This is O/T but it’s too great not to share:
The disconnect between the love for Emanuel in DC and and the, well, LESS than love for him in Chicago:
“Now, just nine months out from the next election, Emanuel is unexpectedly vulnerable, with an approval rating that is perilously low. The comedown for the Illinois native, who terrified staffers and donors over more than a decade in Washington, has been striking. So has been the contrast between how he’s regarded in D.C., New York and Los Angeles — as opposed to some wards of Chicago.
A Chicago Sun-Times poll released last month showed that Emanuel would draw just 29 percent of the vote if the election were held then. His 8 percent showing in the survey among black voters, a crucial voting bloc for him last time, creates a truck-size hole for another candidate to drive through.”
It’s like Christie and Cuomo! I’m starting to see a pattern here..
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/rahm-emanuel-dc-hero-chicago-goat-107511.html#ixzz33soRnV00
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Great article Chiara!
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The privatization of schools in New Orleans is, indeed, one big scam.
But is it the “biggest scam in the history of public education?”
Doubtful.
That award has to go either to A Nation at Risk, which warned that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened American national security, or to No Child Left Behind, which ushered in more than a decade of “rigor’ and testing, or to the SAT and the ACT, the two most prominent college admissions tests, which do little more than measure a student’s family income.
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
* “The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
No Child Left Behind was based on An Nation at Risk’s “warning.” Rather than focus on what we know might improve public schooling, we instead graded schools on an impossible metric (100 percent proficiency) and wasted more than ten years on tests and narrowed curricula.
College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 15 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after that nothing. As one commented, “I might as well measure their shoe size.”
Moreover, both the College Board and the ACT “sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
The authors of a study in Ohio found the ACT has minimal predictive power. In their concluding remarks, the authors ask, in amazement, “…why, in the competitive college admissions market, admission officers have not already discovered the shortcomings of the ACT composite score and reduced the weight they put on the Reading and Science components. The answer is not clear. Personal conversations suggest that most admission officers are simply unaware of the difference in predictive validity across the tests.”
The authors suggest ulterior motives on the part of college officials:
“An alternative explanation is that schools have a strong incentive – perhaps due to highly publicized external rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report, which incorporate students’ entrance exam scores – to admit students with a high ACT composite score, even if this score turns out to be unhelpful.”
Yes, what is taking place in New Orleans is a scam of the first order.
But that scam takes a back seat to the ones listed above, and as I’ve pointed out many times here, both the ACT and the College Board were major players in developing the Common Core, which is on pace to become the greatest public education scam in history.
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And the TFAers get first crack at admissions at Ivy League colleges and the scholarships to go with them. And that handy $10,000 to use for incidentals.
Voila! One year of grad school and the 20 somethings with no real education experience are all groomed to set education policy in the U.S.
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Can we, the people, bring a class action against the privatizers? Against the politicians who have changed laws to ruin public education? Are there any lawyers here who know what we can do to stop the madness?
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Do you mean the same politicians whom the people put in office in the first place? I suspect, although I’m no lawyer, that courts would throw out the suits, saying that the people have already an adequate remedy, i.e. vote out the offending congressmen.
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You do have a point there, Harlan.
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What about the children? Aren’t families and businesses screaming about this loss of time and skill development?
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