Crazy Crawfish worked in the a Louisiana Department of Education. He has an aversion to lying. This is why he is angry, and this is why he is dangerous. He knows too much. And he knows how politicians and their mouthpieces twist the facts any way that serves them.
In this post, Crazy Crawfish (aka Jason France) describes a valiant effort by the poorest parish in the state to get out from under state control, which has been a disaster. He also describes the fancy dancing by the state to justify holding on.
While the national media love to sing the praises of Louisiana’s Recovery School District, France reminds us that the RSD is the lowest performing district in the state.
He writes: “The RSD was initially sold as a temporary fix, a band aid to be applied and removed. What it has become is the source of infection and a creator of festering sores. It’s no coincidence that RSD, after 7 years, is the lowest performing district in the state. (The state claims they are the second lowest performing district, but they also exclude the lowest 10-20% of their schools from their district average for the first 2 years after they get taken over by RSD which can be perpetuated if they simply change operators every two years.)”
And this is his warning:
“St Helena has fallen into RSDs grasp, and is trying to fight back, and we all need to do what we can to help them escape the state, the RSD.
“When you see these types of lies, this raging hypocrisy, do any of you feel safe in your higher performing districts? You shouldn’t.
“Reformers, charter operators, and RSD will be coming for all of your community schools soon enough.
“The state has control of the data, and the messaging. When they decide it’s time to make new inroads into new parishes for their corporate puppet masters, none of you, none of us and none of our children will be safe.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The RSD was initially sold as a temporary fix, a band aid to be applied and removed. What it has become is the source of infection and a creator of festering sores.”
didn’t a reformer say something about ripping off band aids.? Well. . .
Reading this from Louisiana I was struck by how some places are still being monitored by the federal courts for desegregation.
One of the objectives of corporate school reform in Chicago was to get out from under a desegregation consent decree that had been in place since 1980 (there had been two; student and staff, which were combined). Almost as soon as Paul Vallas took over, the administration went on the attack against desegregation, citing (a) the costs of the “monitor” and (b) the costs of busing. It was relentless, often with ridiculous media “exposes” of the supposed waste in both.
But the aims were clear from the beginning: Vallas and those who followed him were working with all their allies to eliminate any monitoring of either student or staff segregation patterns. Their attack was expensive and relentless, with lawyers going back to court asking the federal judge (the last one was Kokoris, sp?) to lift the monitoring because, after all, Chicago had done as much as it could, blah, blah, blah.
One of the things that contributed to the ability of the corporate reformers to eliminate the consent decree was that the official parties with standing to intervene on behalf of the minority children were limited to a handful, and they were gelded. I will never forgive the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (sic) for abolishing their education work, claiming “budget reasons,” just in time for the final assault on desegregation in Chicago to take place.
A handful of people (including Jackson Potter, of CORE) tried heroically to stand up and ask that the minority children still be represented, and that the feds monitor Chicago, but around 2008 that was lost. The judge relieved Chicago Public Schools of any formal monitoring of its desegregation reality.
The elimination of black teachers and other staff under corporate reform had already begun by the time the judge bailed out. As early as Paul Vallas’s first “reconstitutions” (1996), the attack was against black teachers and other black school staff. That continued through a half dozen twists and turns since, down to the current “turnaround model” (which legally is still “reconstitution” and always involves the firing of most of the staff).
Simultaneously, Chicago Public Schools stopped compiling and publishing the annual “Racial Ethnic Survey”, one for students and one for staff. The more Arne Duncan fired black principals, teachers and other staff under various pretexts (from closings to “turnarounds”), the less information was available, after more than 40 years of regular and (we thought) routine compilation of those data.
The destruction of that bit of history by Chicago was calculated, and took place under the administration of Arne Duncan, being completed under his successors.
That brought Chicago’s racial history all the way back to the 1930s and 1940s — days when it was “illegal” to compile racial survey information showing how segregated Chicago’s public schools were. Years ago, when I began researching Chicago’s segregation patterns (which were as “scientific”, in the sickest sense, as the five year plans of any totalitarian system), we had a challenge compiling the information about the years between the 1919 Race Riot and the 1950s, because Chicago did its segregating, but then refused to allow anyone to compile the information during most of the most intense years of the Great Migration.
It was only in the early 1960s that federal officials forced Chicago to begin publishing the annual “Racial Ethnic Survey” — two of them, one “Staff” and the other “Students.” The surveys, year after year, gave a complete picture of Chicago’s segregation, listing every school and breaking down the race of students into the usual categories.
By 2008, the last full year of Arne Duncan, the Staff survey had been terminated.
As of today, they no longer have the Student survey either.
We are back to the pre-Brown days of complete segregation with complete obfuscation.
Any district that is still under a federal order, no matter how weak, should fight to keep it, as some in Louisiana are doing. The corporate reformers will not only work to destroy the most powerful black institutions in the schools districts (in Louisiana, the first victim of school reform was the United Teachers of New Orleans, AFT, which before Katrina was the most powerful mostly black labor union in the state) but also to free themselves of any oversight under federal desegregation laws.
In Chicago, that freedom from oversight, coupled with the elimination of the central data sets, have enabled Arne Duncan and his successors to get away with the most massive attack on black teachers and administrators since the days around Brown in places like Mississippi — all in the name of “standards and accountability” and “reform.”
I am wringing my hands–but I should be shaking my fists.
It’s been clear from the beginning of School Reform and NCLB that “whites” have had it with integration. So they have come up with these draconian–and fascistic–policies.
In Hartford, CT, Steven Adamowski eliminated a crucial means for the collection of data by putting everyone on free lunch–it was too costly to process all those “free lunch” applications, when such a huge percentage of students were going to qualify anyway. He is doing the same thing in Windham, CT now. Anyway, as a result of 100% free lunch, he “freed” the district from having to collect certain types of data.
I am not sure how this ultimately affects the numbers, but let’s just say that Adamowski always provides as many opportunities as possible for white flight and increased segregation.
Even before Adamowski and Vallas came to CT, though (which has a history of de facto segregation), I would cringe whenever parents would talk about the importance of “good schools” for their children, because the main feature of “good schools” in CT is a high percentage of white students (and teachers, too, of course).
The reform district in Detroit is equally frightening. Detroit Public schools was appointed an Emergency manager (bob Bobb – a Broadie). Still failing, so Gov Snyder created the Educational Achievement Authority (chancellor John Covington, also a Broadie). EAA is busy touting their results, which are dubious at best (56 percent achieved one years growth in reading in a years time ?!?! Wow. ) and asking for more money. Guess who ponied up $60 million? Michigan Educational Excellence Foundation, Bloomberg and Broad. Now Snyder and his buddies are trying to expand the EAA to “failing” schools across michigan.
The scariest part is that for the life of me I can’t find the original detroit news article that reported the underperformance of the eaa. I can only pull up the rebuttal articles. Everything – even the results of my google search- is controlled by the money.
http://www.mlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/05/bloomberg_broads_throw_weight.html
http://thelittlepaper.net/index.php/en/news/opinions/107-legislation-to-expand-education-achievement-authority-spells-disaster
Once Upon a Time, these fairy tales would have been called what they really are: lies.
I’m hoping this Fairy Tale gets a happy ending. . . at least that’s what I’m working on.