Jim Arnold, former superintendent of Pelham City public schools in Georgia, has a message for Governor Nathan Deal, who is running for re-election. Governor Deal thinks Georgia needs a “recovery school district,” like the one in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Jim Arnold says Governor Deal is wrong.
Arnold writes that Louisiana is a low-performing state and Néw Orleans is a low-performing district.
“Louisiana, where Advanced Placement exam results for 2013 are ahead of only Mississippi, is known more for LSU football and Duck Dynasty than public education…..
“The vast majority of charters in Louisiana, except for those with a selective admission process, are rated D or F by their own state. The New Orleans Recovery School District that Nathan Deal suggested we emulate was rated as one of the lowest performing districts in the state.
This plan was part of the “bait and switch” campaign in Louisiana to increase the number of charter schools in that state after Hurricane Katrina. Their method was simple: if evidence for the success of charters is required, simply lower test scores, apply charters wherever possible then raise the scores back through whatever test manipulation is needed to “prove” the case.
“The RSD efforts in Louisiana are a miserable failure by any measure. In spite of the promise to return schools to the public after the initial takeover in 2006, not one school in the RSD has been returned to local control after 8 years.
“The governor’s suggestion of studying the implementation of such a model in Georgia speaks more to his lack of a coherent educational policy than to his ideas for educational progress.”
Arnold has some ideas for improving public education in Georgia:
He writes:
“Believe in and support teachers:
1. Poverty is the cause of achievement gaps and the number one obstacle to educational success. Stop the culture of blaming teachers for poverty.
Teachers don’t cause poverty any more than law enforcement causes crime or doctors create disease.
2. Invest in teachers: Restore professional development funds. Professional development should be experienced teachers working with less experienced teachers. Pay great teachers to share their knowledge and ideas in ways that allow them to stay in the classroom. One great teacher working with 3 or 4 others is a powerful tool. Large groups of teachers listening to one “expert” in an auditorium is not.
3. Pay great teachers more to work in high poverty schools: Working in these schools is difficult. Make it worth the effort for teachers that want to increase their salaries and stay in the classroom. Want to attract great teachers to high poverty areas? Pay them to travel and teach there. Want to identify high poverty schools? Simply look at standardized test scores. They don’t tell you anything about teaching and learning but do serve wonderfully to point out the zip code effect of the level of poverty in a given area.
4. Eliminate standardized testing for other than diagnostic purposes: The money saved would be more beneficial invested in teaching and learning than in the autopsy reports generated at the insistence of accountabullies in the name of accountabalism. Allow teachers the opportunity to teach without having to teach to the test.
5. Don’t believe in magic bullets: The answer is not in canned programs guaranteed to produce higher test scores. The answer is in the power of great teachers. Invest in people and not in programs. Success through standardization is a myth. Every student needs and deserves individualized learning at all levels. Educational achievement, like excellence, cannot be legislated.
Technology is a tool for teachers and not an answer unto itself: For every child that learns through technology alone there are more that fail miserably without the intervention and guidance of a teacher. Lower class sizes, eliminate furlough days and give teachers the time and tools to teach.
6. Help prevent legislative meddling in teaching and learning: Unfunded mandates and legislative attempts at applying statewide solutions to local educational issues have done more to hurt public education than to help. Standardization is not a solution unless your goal is to help Bill Gates sell a lot of technology. Georgia teachers can also find a better way than age level to determine educational placement. Children learn at different rates and in different ways. If a child cannot jump a bar 4 feet high, raising the bar to 6 feet does not encourage continued learning and effort. Expecting every child to achieve at the same rate at the same level ignores fundamental differences in human development…sort of like Arnie’s plan to test special education students out of special education through higher expectations.
Top down implementation does not work in education any more than it does in government: Issuing a decree that all children will succeed does not automatically mean that all children will succeed.”
I am appalled to see even the thought of Georgia schools going the way of Louisiana. First it won’t work because Georgia has a tradition of students going to public school whereas, in Louisiana, where the Catholic Church is dominant, parents who could afford it, and some who really couldn’t, send their kids to parochial schools. 20% of students in LA reportedly attend parochial schools. And that was before they got voucher money.
The parochial system in Georgia is inconsequential. The only kids who went to private schools were the very wealthy who often put their child on the waiting list before the baby was born, those who went to a few small religious schools and those for children with learning disabilities, and those in the rural areas who went to segregation academies (that integrated in the 1990s so they could get some decent athletes).
The problem Georgia is having with education is called Republicans taking over the government. Under Zell Miller, Georgia’s schools improved. He got money for buildings, pre-k, technology, graduate degrees for teachers, and scholarships. The first thing he did was raise teacher and staff pay by 15% across the board. Zell was a teacher himself. It made a huge difference. Many of the improvements were funded by the lottery he got passed.
Then we got a governor, Roy Barnes, who went to South Cobb High School. He hated teachers and set out to degrade them, enlarge the classes, take their paraprofessionals and eliminate tenure. According to a coworker who went to high school with him he was disruptive and a poor student, often in trouble. Although Barnes masqueraded as a Democrat, he was really a DINO. The teachers across the state and their families and friends got rid of Roy after one term, even though it opened the door for a Republican. Sonny Perdue was fairly moderate and did not hate teachers. Nathan Deal was at the edge of Georgia politics for a long time,basically a nutcase, but as backwards as Republicans have become now and as freaked out as they are about having a black president, they elected him anyway. It’s disgusting. Georgia seems to be lowering itself to the level of the rest of the deep South instead of elevating back to a status of moderation similar to the quality that North Carolina used to have.
The Recovery District in Louisiana is a collosal failure. The RSD schools function worse, in many cases, than the board run schools they replaced. They are a repository for cheap, untrained, inexperienced Teach for America not-teachers. They have done stupid things like putting hot little middle school girls on the same campus with hot high school boys. There have been suicides and complaints of serious bullying. And the charters are no better. They are allowed to use biased religious curricula that distort American history and to hire teachers who have less than a college education. But the real story is this: The public schools are often overcrowded while the RSD schools sit half empty. Even the poor parents are aware and don’t want to send their kids to them. At least this is the case in Baton Rouge. In New Orleans they have no choice in this land of fake school choice, because there are almost no board run schools. I have taught both in Atlanta and in Louisiana!.
This is a great list.
Reblogged this on Education Talk New Orleans and commented:
Copy Louisiana, LOL, LOL, LOL, I hope Georgia listens to this guy.
Really, why would ANYONE copy Louisiana???? It’s schools are the biggest mess I have ever seen and teachers are retiring and quitting in droves.
A friend who works for Teacher Retirement says they were standing in line last year and his office had trouble getting the paperwork finished before the deadline this summer. Of course John White says the retirement rate is just a little higher than usual, but that doesn’t count the teachers who have left the state or decided to do something else. He is real good at twisting the facts, just like out dear absentee governor, Pyush Jindal. (Watch that name. He calls himself Bobby Jindal and he wants to be President. Huge enemy of public education.)
I mean when your largest school systems (East Baton Rouge) have to recruit from out-of-state in far away places like Pennsylvania, even though the teachers aren’t going to be able to cope with the heat and the children are not going to be able to understand their teacher’s accent, your schools have a SERIOUS problem, particularly when there are three universities in the area, LSU, Southern, and Southeastern that offer Education degrees. And those are just the ones in or near Baton Rouge!
If our own graduates don’t want to teach in our schools then what is that saying about our schools. No, copying Louisiana would be a death knell for Georgia’s schools.
Pelham is way down in south Georgia. It is near Albany and Plains. I was unfamiliar with it until I looked it up. It is significant that the former superintendent’s advice is being picked up because where he is from is a long way from civilization. The rural schools really benefitted from the changes in education made by Zell Miller.
Now there is some hope, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, who is from Plains Georgia, is running for Governor and may be able to unseat Nathan Deal. The Carters have always been supportive of public schools.
As I’ve said time and again and documented over the past decade through research in New Orleans, the Recovery School District (RSD) is not a model to be replicated.
If there is any doubt, read Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, which chronicles the inequities and injustices in New Orleans’ RSD. It will be released in an affordable softcover version later this week:
As well, read this Warning for Communities coauthored with longtime education groups in New Orleans. It includes firsthand testimony regarding the many problems generated by the RSD and charter schools:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k8kzqe6xgeay72u/AACvJftmJ-h9UHet-ltgSBmna?dl=0
I posted his list on FB and it has received lots of comments.
I want to share this comment I made in response to a commenter on FB.
anyone who frequents the Ravitch blog knows I am the education analogy queen so I have two for you. First, public schools are like the scene in Star Wars with the trash compactor. Forced austerity from the right and crazy testing, VAM and CCSS mandates from the left equals is in the trash compactor (the difference being, of course, that instead of trash we have 90% of America’s children and youth with us hoping we can save them). Second, “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom;”. You know the children’s book. A told B and B told C I’ll meet you at the top of the coconut tree. Etc. and in the end all the letters fall and sadly that is where we are headed. A could be GW Bush with NCLB. B could be Ted Kennedy. C and D are Eli Broad and Bill Gates. EFG are Obama, Duncan and anyone involved in the New Orleans Recovery School District.
We have a mix of left over integration resistance, side effects from integration norms, a money grab on large pools of money (read charters and vouchers), union busting (and in NC the lack of collective bargaining power to begin with), a mistrust of all things public and the de-professionalization of teaching.
I think open dialogue, bold conversations, an end to racist tendencies, a concerted focus on poverty and as much local control (without resorting to charters or mayoral control)—in short, our democratic ideals in full play, are the only way to recover.
Click to access Comparisonof2014LEAPResultsforRSD-NOtoOtherLouisianaPublicSchoolDistricts-Rev.pdf
The reports on the site Research on Reforms tells the real story of what is going on in NOLA. Check it out.
It’s interesting. If Gates and others believe that standardized tests reveal achievement, but their own kids are in private schools where achievement is not measured by way of lots and lots of standardized “benchmarking,” then is the public school student who showed appropriate “achievement,” (read, growth) but who has no connections to he banking or business world going to be selected for top tier schools and better jobs out of school over the graduate of a private school because of those gains?
That is to say, what is the REAL standard?
Perhaps it cannot even really be encapsulated.
Perhaps the success of students later in life is part schooling, part personality, part exposure to other ways of living, an ability to adapt, an ability to notice decorum and an ability to ignite their own ambition? But if we dress test scores up and try to pass it off as “achievement,” aren’t we inappropriately streamlining the schooling part? Aren’t we narrowing that parent of a student’s equation unnecessarily? Where that aspect of schooling is NOT being narrowed by those attending private schools?
What is noble in establishing student achievement? And should achievement by students in public schools carry them on a different pipeline because of the involvement of mandates? And if so, why and where is that pipeline leading them?
Thank you, Jim Arnold, for speaking out so boldly for all of us and expressing what needs to be said LOUDLY and repeatedly throughout our state.