Mike Deshotels, veteran educator and blogger in Louisiana, reviews the accumulating evidence and concludes: the claims of success in the Recovery School District are a complete fraud.
Most recently, the charter cheerleaders at the Cowen Institute at Tulane University withdrew in its entirety a report making claims of vast academic improvement. Someone there had too much integrity to let the report remain out front, in public. It was not true.
Then, as Deshotels shows, students in the Recovery School District posted “dismal results” on the ACT, even though they boast of college prep as their goal. It. Is a goal they have not reached.
And there is more:
“The accurate comparison of RSD charters with other public schools in Louisiana showing that RSD charters consistently perform in the bottom third of all schools. So why has the Louisiana Recovery District been touted across the nation as the miracle model for school reform and for the turnaround of low performing schools? That has happened because supposedly prestigious groups like the Cowen Institute in the past had issued glowing reports of progress by the RSD using carefully selected data, much of which was bogus and covered up the truly poor performance of the RSD.
“The sad part of this education reform hoax, is that thousands of students and teachers have been harmed in the process. Dedicated teachers were unfairly fired; thousands of students have been pushed out into the streets while the new charter managers cooked the books, and the charter operators made off with huge profits from our tax dollars. This is what the Cowen Institute and charter advocacy groups like Educate Now have promoted to the public, our state legislature, and even to the “do gooder” national news shows like Morning Joe, where both conservative and liberal opinion makers touted the New Orleans RSD school “miracle”.
“So several other states have created their own Recovery Districts and Achievement Zones patterned after the New Orleans model, only to produce disastrous results, because they were fooled by the corporate reformers and privatizers of public education. Politicians in some states are including in their platforms privatization plans based on the New Orleans Recovery District model. Never before have I seen both a local and national news media more complicit in the proliferation of false propaganda that benefits con-artists like the privatizers and charter promoters portrayed in the RSD model. Yet the retractions of these bogus reports are rare and the hoax goes on.”
Don’t be fooled by the hoax and the lies. There is no New Orleans miracle. There is a district where public education was almost completely eliminated and replaced by privately managed charters; a district where the teachers’ union was ousted; a district where 7,500 teachers (3/4 of them African American and OF the community) were summarily and unjustly fired; and a district that continues to be low-performing, ranked 65th of the state’s 68 districts.
Eventually even the mainstream media will discover that they have been hoaxed by the reformers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think the mainstream media already knows this, but their lords and masters, the billionaires, hold them hostage with fear of losing a paying job in tough times.
Yes, I agree. The oligarchs own the news and also a lot of university “research.” Scary.
Yes they do. But it’s sad that it doesn’t get reported as widely as the misinformation. The public only gets to hear about the “miracles”. Mainstream media is bought and paid for by our billionaire boys club. I just heard a glowing report on NPR about all the wonderful things Deasey accomplished in CA. The public only gets to hear the untruths.
The public gets to only hear the glowing untruths from the traditional media owned by the billionaires. The truth may be found outside of that outdated, corrupted, bought and paid for traditional media for those who take the time to look.
For instance the 20 to 70 thousand who read Diane’s blog daily. Now, if everyone who read Diane’s Blog were to click the Twitter link and feed her posts to Twitter, then Diane would trend daily there and attract a lot of attention to her site.
It’s so easy to do. Just click that Twitter link and if you don’t have your own Twitter page, set one up.
No. NOLA schools have recently been touted by the mayor of Dallas, TX as a model.
Well, we need to send this article to the mayor.
It is sad how many lies these people are getting away with. They have the public thinking that they are in it “for the children,” but their main goal remains to line their own pockets. They come in, take over, and leave destruction in their path. Strengthening the community and parent involvement helps low achievement situations, using effective strategies that relate and that appropriate for the age and subjects being taught, providing services that improve the whole child, and communicating effectively, truthfully with parents, changing mindsets, and teaching students how to study – those are things that help improve academic achievement.