Mercedes Schneider, Louisiana high school teacher with a Ph.D. in research methods and statistics, has a dogged dedication to setting the record straight. She knows that New Orleans is not a miracle district. She has pointed this out time after time, yet the media continue to spout the same claims from the advocates of privatization: wipe out public education, fire all the teachers, welcome privately managed charters, staff the schools with Teach for America, and–Voila!–everyone succeeds, no child left behind, an excellent education for all children! The actions are true: the public schools were closed, the teachers were fired, the charters sprouted in every part of New Orleans. But the results didn’t happen. New Orleans is today one of the lowest performing districts in the state. We leave it to students of mass psychology and the media to explain why the national media falls for the narrative repeatedly. Maybe because it is a good story, even if it is not true. Maybe they want to believe in miracles.
When Mercedes Schneider read that Nathan Deal, the Governor of Georgia, was coming to New Orleans to see the miracle with his own eyes, she wrote this post. Very likely, he and his delegation will be taken to the schools with selective admissions. They are the Potemkin villages of New Orleans. It is always best to verify before you trust (Ronald Reagan said, “Trust but verify”). In this post, Schneider shows that most of the graduates of the New Orleans’ Recovery School District have scores so low on the ACT that they are ineligible to receive state scholarships for two-year community colleges. This is sad. The suppression of the facts is also sad. Spreading a failed model is sadder still. The most successful nations in the world have strong public school systems, not vouchers or charters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
‘Hype’ is the wrong word. ‘Lies’ works much better and is more accurate. I just checked the synonyms for hype and lies does not appear in the list.
PR and allege make the list, but not lies and the corporate reform movement is all based on lies that are pushed out there with costly PR paid for by billionaire oligarchs.
Perhaps when it comes to the jargon of the charterite/privatization movement there are one or two gems among the dross.
Given the dismal [or better yet, “miraculously dismal”] performance of those Potemkin Charters of $tudent $uccess, we might better describe Nathan Deal’s possible tour as his chance to see what “factories of failure” look like.
Factories of failure. That bitterly twisted sneer, jeer and smear of all public schools by the corporate education reform crowd.
Little did I know it was simple psychological projection.
😎
Reblogged this on The Art of Teaching Science and commented:
As I wrote in the previous post, the Georgia governor’s plan to take over “low performing” schools and use them to install a New Orlean’s charter school recovery district in Georgia. Dr. Mercedes Schneider has some advice for the governor.