This article is an outstanding and heart-breaking account of the harsh treatment meted out to the public school teachers of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It appears in Education Week.
About 7,000 veteran teachers were summarily fired. Most were African-American and most were women. They fought their firing in the courts because they did not receive due process, but a few months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal. Their legal battle was defeated, like them.
Many of their schools were physically destroyed. Most were turned into charter schools. Public schools that were once the heart of their communities, are gone. Now everything is choice, as though a goal of reform was to destabilize black communities.
Defenders of the wholesale privatization, like Leslie Hacobs, defend it on grounds that test scores are up. We all know that the data about this experiment are hotly contested. Since so many children never returned after the storm, it is hard to make fair comparisons.
Read this article and ask whether it was a good trade off: ruining the lives of thousands of dedicated teachers and uprooting historic communities as the price of a few more points on standardized tests?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a tragic story about the destruction of a community and disregard for workers’ rights. Clearly these women had no due process or seniority rights in this right to work state. I am sure there are even more heart wrenching tales from the destruction of public education in New Orleans. While this story relates the loss and mistreatment of senior teachers, I would think there are more tragic tales to be told. I wonder what happened to the teachers that were mid-career with children to support and no husband with benefits to lean on. I would love to know what happened to them as well.
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“About 7,000 veteran teachers were summarily fired. Most were African-American and most were women. They fought their firing in the courts because they did not receive due process, but a few months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal.”
Justice has historically viewed as having two components-justice as being legal and all that entails and justice as fairness/equality. Think of the statue of justice, supposedly blind to interests-the legal aspect, holding the scale-the fairness/equality aspect so that both concepts are part of one “Justice”.
I defer to Andre Comte-Sponville’s chapter 6 about Justice in his “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues” (which book all should read). Here’s a portion of what he writes:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than [self] interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”
Expediency (the devastating state of affairs after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans) should not trump justice but unfortunately for the approximately 7,000 teachers and the school children expediency has trumped justice, especially with the Supreme Court refusing to do their part of the legal side of justice. Very sad indeed!
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LA GOPoliticos care not a wit for blacks, women, or public schools. They consider Katrina a blessing.
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/john-kasich-abolish-teacher-lounges
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Meanwhile, Ohio governor Kasich wants to abolish teachers’ lounges, so teachers don’t get a chance to meet and gripe about what’s being done to them. This summarizes the Republican (and now, unfortunately, Democratic, as manifested in Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and New York State governor Andrew Cuomo) strategy towards workers (and, where still exant, their unions) — keep them fragmented, divided, isolated, voiceless, powerless and compliant.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/john-kasich-abolish-teacher-lounges
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More on New Orleans: Dr. Kristen Buras is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Her recent book, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, chronicles education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, focusing on the history of racism in public education in the city and grassroots organizations’ responses to reform. There’s an excerpt on Googlebooks, which contains some ways in which she uses Critical Race Theory.
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My middle class, white wife was among the 7,000 who were fired. She was able to some part-time work while evacuated and then was rehired when she returned to New Orleans. More than the year’s lost salary, we miss the lost year toward retirement. Money can be made up; time cannot.
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A few years ago, my husband was a finalist for an administrative position at Tulane. We visited New Orleans for a few days to decide if we would like to move our family there, including our two school age children. After our visit, followed by research on area schools, we decided that we would not move. “School choice” left us with basically no choice, unless we wanted to fork out tens of thousands of dollars a year for private school. Getting into one of the higher performing public/charter schools was impossible, and the quality of education available at the remaining schools was poor. In the end, choice left us with only one reasonable choice- to stay where we already lived in the Northeast.
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Diane Ravitch says that 7000 teachers from New Orleans Parish school district were fired after Katrina. Before Katrina there were 63,000 students in the school district, therefore the student to teacher ratio would be 9. This compares very well with expensive private schools, but why were the New Orleans schools were some of the worst?
Delving into the article cited by Diane reveals that 4300 teachers were summarily fired not 7000. Now the same math reveals a new student to teacher ratio of 14 once again very respectable number. Most public school districts even in effluent communities have a higher student to teacher ratio in the low 20s.
Looking into the population of New Orleans it was 484,000 before Katrina and 254,000 after Katrina. It must also mean that the student population must also have reduced by the same ratio, i.e., about half. The school district also lost a majority of the infrastructure. It was a very poorly managed district and was about to be taken over by the state. What were their choices?
One choice for the district was to increase the property taxes by a factor of two to keep all the teachers working. Keep all the 7000! teachers and make the teacher to student ratio to 4.5? They did not make this choice for obvious reasons.
They did summarily fire all the teachers (no one knows the exact number, but it is definitely not 7000), but each one of them was asked to reapply and many were rehired. A significant fraction must have been rehired since the schools operated as usual the year after Katrina. Once again we have no idea how many were rehired. One must ask why did they do it and was it legal? The courts have decided that it was legal and the citizens must abide by the court ruling.
After all these years, the population of New Orleans is back to about 80% of pre-Katrina and most schools are run by charters. The question is are they better? What is the real student to teacher ratio? Let us get some facts before we judge.
The district must have a bloated administrative staff who were also probably fired. Question is did they get their job back later.
Finally, when New Orleans lost half the population and infra-structure after Katrina, probably half the students and half the staff were relocated and left the city. The kids did not disappear, but they went schools in Huston and other cities. It is probably the same with the teaching staff. The news is that the teachers were summarily fired, but a large number of New Orleans citizens lost their jobs due to Katrina.
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You do not want to live in an effluent community.
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Sorry for misuse of the word
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I should have use affluent instead effluent in my post.
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I was one of those teachers that were fired. I was with the system for 22years!
The model ideal of a true Charter was to give teachers the opportunity to create a school, “bottom -up”. The idea was to cut the costs of administration n spend it on the program. My experience in a CHARTER (gone wrong)is that it’s not happening. Experienced teachers are seen as a liability, not good for the bottom$line, short changing teachers while paying the principal an obscene salary with a glutted office staff and worst of all NOT THERE TO LIGHTEN THE BURDENS ON TEACHERS! Definitely not a “pal”!
Then to top it off there is no review of the Board or Administration to see if they are following the Charter. When they break STATE IEP laws, as they did in my experience, they say, and I quote “we got permission” Under a Charter with no Union protection for student or teacher, they terrorize the teacher. A teacher cannot take a stand for his or her students or be fired.
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