Mercedes Schneider heard about the book promotion tour of one David Osborne. Osborne is late to the party. He has written a book claiming that New Orleans is the shiny new model for school reform. Way back during the Clinton administration, Osborne achieved a modicum of fame for his book Reinventing Government, which proposed that government agencies should compete with private businesses. The competition, he argued, would produce public benefits and make government more efficient. Vice President Al Gore invited Osborne to work with him to introduce his ideas into the federal government. I’m not sure where that project went, but charter schools certainly fit the paradigm. The Clinton administration got behind the idea and set the pattern of federal support for the experiment.

Well, we have had charter schools for 25 years. They are no longer an experiment. They are not a bright, shiny innovation. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any innovation produced by charter schools, other than getting rid of unionized teachers. It is odd to see an author pop up with an idea that has been tried for 25 years and claim that he is on to something fresh.

Even stranger is that Osborne points to New Orleans as the epitome of reform, the cutting edge that offers hope to schools everywhere. Where has he been hiding these past few years?

Schneider notes that the all-charter Recovery School District that Osborne admires has yet to crack an ACT score of 17, which is very low indeed. Osborne doesn’t mention this. He seems to have stopped learning anything about New Orleans about five years ago.

As Schneider shows in another post, The Myth of the New Orleans Miracle has collapsed.

“For a full decade following Hurricane Katrina (2005-2015), those pushing state takeover and the resulting conversion of all state-run New Orleans schools into charters have been quick to promote the marvels of their miracle.

“Twelve years later, in 2017, not so much, unless cornered for a sound byte.

“Market-based school choicers have increasingly less to work with regarding the NOLA Charter Miracle sales pitch. Consider the 2016-17 district performance scores. Those New Orleans state-takeover (now) charter schools are no longer separated from the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), so now those “failing schools” that the state supposedly miracle-whipped are now part of a single district (let’s call it NOLA), with one single district performance score resulting in one single district letter grade– and that single performance score and resulting letter grade really took a dive in 2016-17, from 85 B (sort of) to 70.9 C.”

If you look at her tables, based on stated sources, the Recovery School District in Baton Rouge is graded F.

Does David Osborne know this?

He seems remarkably uninformed.

Kind of like a journalist claiming that using leeches to bleed patients is an important discovery.