Atlanta is impressed by the elimination of public education in New Orleans. The school board is planning to become an all-charter district.
Apparently, no one told the school board that the Recovery School District in New Orleans is one of the lowest-rated districts in the state. As Mercedes Schneider recently showed, the ACT scores for the state of Louisiana had New Orleans ranked 66th of 70 districts in the state. Most of the charter schools are graded C, D or F by the state, which makes their students eligible for a voucher.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t understand what the linked document is saying. Is this the thing that says Atlanta is going to become an all-charter district?
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Indeed. Let’s not panic until the “Oh stewardess? I speak jive!” lady shows up and translates just what this incomprehensible presentation says.
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It’s a cluster – !
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Anyone truly interested in this should look at http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2015/02/new_orleans_school_divide_pers.html to see how NOLA scores have improved. Comparing vs. state-wide makes no sense vs. looking at the growth in ACT scores, which as occurred even as ACT has become required for almost all students.
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I think people can ask whether test scores in New Orleans would have improved with or without an all-charter district if the federal government and foundations had poured resources in like they did post-Katrina.
I also think one would have to wait until the effects of that additional (and extraordinary funding) have filtered through and the school system is running on ordinary funding, which I believe is just now happening.
It just isn’t miraculous to me to say “we poured money in here after a disaster and the scores went up!” I don’t know what to attribute that to-the additional resources or the charter system.
I think New Orleans is just about the worst template ed reformers could point to, because it was a really unusual set of circumstances. I don’t know why they rely on it so much.
Why does no one mention Muskegon Heights, MI, for example? That’s an all-charter district that occurred in the ordinary course of business. Isn’t that a more relevant example?
http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2014/04/mosaica_out_as_manager_of_musk.html
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From your article: “Orleans Parish high schools had an average score of 20.5, one of the best in Louisiana, where students averaged a 19.2. But students attending state Recovery School District schools averaged 16.4, one of the state’s worst.”
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John, I think comparing pre- and post-Katrina is a flawed narrative as the article does (2005 and 2014). The migration of the poorest from New Orleans during that time, with a sizable proportion never returning is unaccounted for.
Also, it appears that the improvement has flatlined. The scores rose 0.2 since the prior year. I mean, that could just be margin of error or accounting for variations versus the prior graduating class.
In a vacuum, it appears to be something. In reality, it really might reflect the way Katrina changed the population of New Orleans.
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I agree. It’s another reason it’s a poor national template. I don’t know what would happen to public schools here if there was a huge catastrophe and the population changed. I certainly wouldn’t use the results (good or bad) to promote a national agenda.
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Lots of the poorest people in New Orleans went to live in Houston, Mobile, Pensacola and Atlanta after Katrina. Some were relocated to cities further away than these.
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A road to failure that will never be held accountable.
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I think it’s incredibly important that the Atlanta Board of Education has a disproportionate number of members who are from TFA. I count at least 4 members. TFA has intentionally been stacking boards of ed with reform-friendly TFA alums. Now we see another example of the harm of this program.
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Katie Osgood: as always, sharp eyes!
😎
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Here is the link to the Atlanta BoE members: http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/Page/40514 The four TFAers are Courtney English (I-AL7), Jason Esteves (AL-9), Matt Westmoreland (D-3) and Eshe’ Collins (D-6). I encourage everyone to click into their bios to see the organizations they’ve been in involved with, their youth, and the corporate choice of language. For example, Jason Esteves’ bio says, “Jason is a practicing attorney at the Atlanta law firm of McKenna Long & Aldridge, LLP, where he brings businesses, nonprofits and individuals together to solve problems and get results. Jason has also served on the boards of KIPP South Fulton Academy…” He did his TFA stint and then straight to law school. Or Courtney English which reads, “Courtney D. English, was elected to the Atlanta Board of Education in 2009 at 24 years old; and was at that time, the youngest person to bke elected citywide in any capacity in the city of Atlanta’s history.” He did TFA for two years and went straight into the politics of school. Then there is Eshe’ Collins who chose to include “As a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at A.D. Williams Elementary School, 92 percent of her students met or exceeded expectations on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test for both grade levels.” Citing test scores in a bio shows a deep edreform bias, something we know TFA focuses on heavily. And Matt Westmoreland, well he is a white boy from Princeton, need I say more?
This atrocity is exactly what TFA’s end game is. An all charter district would be a wind fall for TFA and its corporate partners. Their youth and isolation within the edreform machine has clearly had a strong and damaging influence on their beliefs. Expect TFA to keep pushing people like this onto school boards and political office through their political branch, LEE. This is why TFA cannot be allowed to exist.
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Also, I know Jersey Jazzman and WaPo’s Valerie Strauss have written about the politics of this school board and TFA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/21/teach-for-america-americas-fastest-growing-political-organization/ Diane has also featured these races: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/19/tfa-about-to-take-control-of-atlanta-school-board/ TFA is truly seeing the fruits of its privatization agenda in Atlanta. Cha-ching….
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That is shocking. I can’t imagine city officials letting that happen. Atlanta never had a lot of trouble getting teachers, although they did have to be tough, and preferably African-American and graduates of the AU Center schools to last. It was not a particularly nurturing system. I was over 40 at the time and experienced and it was still hard. They cannot quit during the school year as TFAs often do, either. Once you sign a contract you are there for the school year unless there is a serious emergency, like it was with our MOID teacher when her husband was planning to kill her. Even substitutes had to have college degrees.
APS always paid a little better than the competing suburban systems, tried to hold their job fairs first and get their teachers signed quickly once they were picked, paid twice a month instead of once, gave much better benefits, and gave teachers credit for ALL their experience, unlike the larger suburban systems. Plus, even though Georgia is a right-to-work state, the unions were strong. How in the world did TFAs get elected to the Board? How did they even get employed? APS is a mostly black system and they like their teachers to look and talk as their students do. Atlanta usually checks out its candidates and the teachers have a strong influence over the Board.
Somebody was not watching the chicken coop if that is what happened because TFA is not an organization that is local or African-american based. The people of Atlanta are also not stupid. They do not necessarily automatically vote for a black or gay face. Voting is a serious thing in Atlanta, very serious. I lived there 30 years and you had better be neither racist nor homophobic to try to be an elected official, work for APS or for the City. And it would help if you don’t speak with an accent other than Southern and you know the words to Lift Every Voice and Sing .
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I don’t have time to post a detailed response, but APS is not converting all of its schools to privately operated charters. Georgia is likely to pass legislation authorizing recovery districts, but the linked document is in relation to how APS and all other GA school districts will comply with a law that goes into effect 7/1/15. The law is related to school governance, how schools are “accountable’ to the state DOE and theoretically additional funding for education (no one should hold their breath on that happening).There are three choices Charter, Investing in Educational Excellence (IE2) and Status Quo. Districts are either opting for Charter or IE2. The Fulton County School District converted to charter status in 2012. Here is an article from last year on the topic http://getschooled.blog.ajc.com/2014/10/08/flexibility-choices-fo-georgia-schools-is-freedom-just-another-word-for-no-money/
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Oh, God, the language is hilarious. School districts now have to check a box that says “Status Quo” if they don’t want to be privatized?
I wonder who invented and then defined these terms! 🙂
I mean, come on. That’s not education. It’s political marketing.
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Ya, the choices should be, status quo, or, new fangled freaky, just to keep the language even.
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And what the so-called reformers refuse to admit is that they are the status quo.
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Michael, you can’t say it enough. They ARE the status quo
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NO! None of them are The Status Quo!!
Here’s Real The Status Quo (from very early on):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8THWF09D9w
And they’re still around!
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So not going along with what are ed reform defined terms and ed reform “solutions” means the district loses funding?
That’s very innovative and collaborative, I must say!
It’s a threat. I’d have more respect for them if they’d deliver the threat without all the BS.
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Chiara, yes, you seem to be correct on this. There is no incentive to remain a traditional district under these terms.
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The budget gets cut no matter which choice a district makes. I live in a district that has chosen IE2 which is typical of the more affluent districts. This year is the first year since 06-07 where our district school calendar is 180 days and our district is one of the two or three most affluent in the state. While this law could potentially be used for privatization it’s really more about giving the state legislature political cover for ignoring the state’s school funding formula and its rampant issuance of waivers to bypass the GA school code. The law enabling full district conversion to charters will likely pass in the current legislative session. Our legislature is enamored with “recovery districts”, but that isn’t what the linked APS document is addressing.
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PJL, I am no fan of charters. But I read a little bit and see that “charter school system” is not the same as “all-charter district.” I don’t have the link but Hall County schools seem to have done this already.
My understanding, from a scant amount of research, is that Georgia has a different definition for charter school system than say that of New Orleans or Muskegon Heights.
I believe that the “clusters” are geographic regions within the city and students may apply to schools within those regions. Therefore, schools are at least somewhat nearby and proximity from home as well as transportation issues are minimized. Within this, schools can specialize in particular types of study or approaches. Some schools are charter and some schools are traditionally public. Not all schools are run by private management companies.
I don’t know if this system will work or not. It does seem like a more level playing field than we have in Michigan. My county has a job-skills training center that allows juniors and seniors to pursue culinary arts for example. They take a bus to the technical training center for specialized morning classes and return to the high school for the remainder of the day to fulfill state-required core classes. Lots of our kids like it. (The technical center is run by the county ISD, so it is public.) I think the Atlanta model is kind of like that.
It does entrench charter schools into the system but, again, I don’t think it’s a charter takeover.
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The bottom line for me is this: this is an experiment but if it doesn’t “work” there’s no going back.
If the US privatizes the public K-12 school system, that’s all she wrote. It’s gone and it won’t matter if the new system is “better” because we won’t get a truly public system back. Privatization only works one way.
I personally think we will deeply, deeply regret that decision in an “epic blunder” sort of way.
I’m shocked at how reckless it is.
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You are correct about the different definition regarding charter districts. That’s what I apparently didn’t convey clearly in my first response. This law is different from pending legislation in GA that will permit the N.O. or Muskegon Heights type of full charter conversion. The school governance piece could potentially be a positive thing depending on how it’s implemented. My district has chosen to go with IE2 and not the charter model.
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I would think they would have big issues with charters because they too closely resemble the segregation academies with which Georgia was plagued up into the 1990s and only integrated because they needed athletes.
APS did get one charter around 2000, but it was started by parents and teachers and a City Councilwoman in the Grant Park/Ormewood area of SE Atlanta, a gentrified area near the zoo and Moreland Ave. just South of I-20 which was interracial and mixed gay/straight. It was well educated, community active, loved to party and generally liberal. The system was building a new elementary and the parents saw an opportunity to take over the old building that 3 generations had attended. Then they were planning to add a middle school so they kids would not have to go across town to attend a decent one since King, the feeder for the area, had a racist principal, a history of violence and was just an extremely horrible school. They ran their curriculum proposal past the 5 teachers who were members of a local Presbyterian USA church nearby—just passed it among us for comments. These were not just a bunch of Republicans starting a white charter. They were Georgia liberals, including some gay couples with children who were starting the school.
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It’s never about the kids. It’s the dollar signs swimming in front of their eyes. Profit over people instead of the commonweal.
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One person’s “new market” is another person child and the family’s hope for the future.
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TC
February 10, 2015 at 2:10 pm
Ya, the choices should be, status quo, or, new fangled freaky, just to keep the language even.
“Status quo” is inherently negative and limiting. It assumes the school wants to change nothing. It’s political, and manipulative.
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Yep, I got that. Status quo is seen as a probem.
Funny, because in Atlanta, status quo classic coke was fine and, new coke was a failure.
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See above comment for the “Real” Status Quo!!
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So Atlanta is not planning to become an all-charter district?
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What this tells me is that private industry allows money for marketing and PR. In the public sector, such expenditures are considered suspect, possibly propaganda, especially in a time of budget-cutting
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The charter reform in Ohio isn’t going to work, because it’s based on authorizers of schools, not the individual schools.
The big authorizers (who are the worst offenders in Ohio) will simply rely on averages-they’ll add up all their schools and come up with a passing score. It actually benefits the worst offenders, because the bigger sponsors will have more ratings which will level out their numbers.
I’m really starting to think an inability to look at a SYSTEM, to look at CONTEXT, is almost a learning disability in ed reformers: it’s SO consistently their problem 🙂
This would work if sponsors had one school. It won’t work because the worst offenders in Ohio have a lot of schools. One good school will get the sponsor off the hook, because it will bring up the total score.
They shouldn’t even bother. It won’t work as advertised.
http://edexcellence.net/articles/the-rating-system-at-the-heart-of-kasich%E2%80%99s-charter-school-reforms
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Original e-mail date: November 9, 2014
Subject line: Turning APS into a Charter System to still operate status quo
It has been difficult wanting to offer what follows, but sometimes it is better to go at difficulty head on.
My voting and encouraging others to vote to put Cynthia Briscoe Brown [1] on the Atlanta school board has turned out to be a great mistake. So I offer my apology to all I had encouraged to vote for her.
I had hoped, actually believed, Cynthia would bring a greater measure of intellectual, moral, and ethical maturity to the board than would especially the four Teach for America youngsters on the board. Never was there the thought that Cynthia would go along with the stupidity of turning APS into a Charter System or go along with any effort to undermine APS as a public institution, as a public good.
APS as a Charter System will do nothing but keep the district stuck in a Beverly Hall kind of status quo, but with a difference. Beverly Hall obviously held scant empathy for the adults in APS. Now, even at this early stage, we see a new superintendent who is pushing that lack of empathy down upon the children, and implicitly blaming the children for the superintendency’s failure to learn to improve the district. That is why when the Superintendent’s Winter Card Contest [2] was announced, by which “[o]ne winning design will be selected by the superintendent,” I reached out to Superintendent Carstarphen to ask, “Do you really want to do this to the children? Why not a Winter Card Collaborative?” Reaching out to ask these questions and to invite the superintendent to think about a better way, a way to honor and to preserve the human dignity of all the children, proved pointless.
Now comes this business-style status quo kind of “APS Attendance Dashboard” [3] that greatly disturbs heart and soul.
Nothing about the dashboard contributes to helping anybody do anything better. The dashboard, no matter how well done using slick technology, evidences the kind of numeral illiteracy that is good only for reacting to the past – much like driving down the road by the view in the rearview mirror. As such, the dashboard makes its mindlessly easy to hold people accountable for making attendance targets, for “making the numbers,” just as Beverly Hall held people accountable for making especially test score targets and reduced the children to passive participants in generating the numbers.
But that is not the worst of it. To see the worth of it, click “Interventions” at the bottom of the APS Attendance Dashboard to read horrifyingly stupid ways for addressing student attendance. For example, “Create competitions among homerooms for the best attendance and provide a prize for the winner” and “Have students sign an attendance contract” and “School offers short term incentives for students to attend school and increase attendance.” While Beverly Hall obviously was pretty void of empathy for adults in APS, we are now witnessing lack of empathy for even the children in APS. Remember, to understand a system, pay more attention to what it does than to what it says.
Now it has become inarguably clear that all the rigmarole APS put into deciding to turn APS into a Charter System amounts to nothing more than Cynthia Briscoe Brown and fellow board members (save perhaps Steven Lee) and the superintendent showing they bring nothing beyond the capacity to maintain the status quo, the real status quo, under a different name. The rigmarole has been a colossal waste of time and money that could have gone into engaging all stakeholders in learning how to improve the current state of APS. But that would have required leadership.
Better had APS leadership capable enough to work on improving APS under the derisively named “Status Quo” option.
Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA
edwjohnson@aol.com
Bcc: List 2
[1] http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/Page/40514
[2] http://www.atlantapublicschools.us/Page/43925 (no longer available)
[3] https://public.tableausoftware.com/views/AttendanceandSuspensions1415/AttendanceDash?:embed=y&:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no
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I don’t think this will happen. Atlanta is essentially a good system with some bad schools. It is also proud of its heritage as a predominantly African-American district under African-American control. It has a lot of well educated older teachers who have put their lives into the system. Many have Ph.Ds and an M.ED became a standard thanks to Gov. Zell Miller whose first act was a 15% pay raise and the lottery to fund scholarships for both teachers and students, Pre K, buildings and technology. It has turned out a lot of famous people, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and all 4 of his children. Atlanta also has a long history of PUBLIC education. The parochial school system is insignificant. There have always been a few small privates, mostly for kids with learning disabilities and then there are the few schools for the VERY wealthy, called the 3 Sister and Paideia, which was started by hippies. It had a bang up special education department of which I was long a part. I taught at APS throughout the 1990s.
I do not think APS would give up its heritage. In fact I would say that the teachers would have a huge and peaceful (Atlanta does not have violent riots) demonstration to prevent it. Even before social media they could organize one within 24 hours complete with signs and media. The street committee was something to behold. Unless they have become totally afraid of this nutcase, Deal, in the Governor’s mansion, they will stand up. We got rid of Roy Barnes, who was a DINO and was a bad student at South Cobb High, after one term because he was abusive to the teachers. Although he was the last Democrat, Atlanta will rise even from the ashes of the cheating scandal. Beverly Hall was supposed to be a way to stop the cronyism and cheating in the system, which was noticeable in 1990 when a low functioning school scored too high on the IOWA to get its Title 1 money and could not get its grant together until I, a teacher, re-wrote it. Unfortunately, Beverly’s god became money and apparently she became corrupt.
I don’t think the teachers would tolerate being employed by a charter system any more than the high school students tolerate uniforms (unless they have forced them in by now and they don’t realize it.). Their job security is too important to them.
And if any APS people are reading this, sorry, but the worst school in APS is better than the good ones in New Orleans. APS has good schools that are caused by having good teachers who are dedicated to making sure their kids learn, test cheating or not. NO may have a few good schools, but that is caused by selective admission, not quality education. I was shocked and mortified by the lack of quality in regular education in New Orleans. APS also had a quality special education department even back as far as the 1980s. You can tell a lot about the quality of a school system by the quality of its special education. They even managed to isolate an abusive teacher who was utterly incompetent but highly connected. Couldn’t fire her, but they fixed it where she couldn’t hit any more!! Put another one in regular education and got rid of a couple of drunks. (If your kids can talk, the teacher won’t hit.)
APS, like Georgia, will rise again, throw off the shackles of the Republican Party and become, again, what it is, a moderate Southern state. It has always been more like North Carolina than Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama and is embarrassed by the backwards nature of those states. Remember, Georgia has a MAJOR CITY, the world’s busiest airport and some smaller cities as big as the capitals of those other states. Atlanta politically runs moderate to liberal, not center right to teaparty.
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