Mercedes Schneider has been watching the slow train wreck in New Orleans. As she puts it in her latest post, “Add another car.”
School closings, graduation scandals, confused parents.
The great experiment in complete privatization is going into a ditch. There are thousands of children. Who will save them now?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The New Orleans “miracle” is a bit of Louisiana mythology that continues to be sold by conservative think tanks. It should be presented as the New Orleans debacle. What do they do now they have eliminated the schools of last resort, the public schools? This is a free market flop. I feel sorry for the poor students stuck in failing or crooked charter schools.
yes; and other places where school reform efforts have actually greatly harmed cities and hurt children and devastated the teaching force also get stuck trying to push off that “miracle” claim: once it is settled onto reformers’ heads, it is endlessly pushed out into the world of media as fact
New America (Eric Schmidt-Google) has a COO that brags in her bio. about her part in privatizing New Orleans’ schools. New America is infamous for the firing of Barry Lynn’s group, which is now independent and operating as Open Markets. The alleged cause of the firing, Lynn’s group reported that technology firms have too much power.
Diane In the below Boston Globe article below, we see “rise from the ashes of failure” stories of individual persons who, after horrible failures, finally turn their lives around. If we can relate these experiences to the constant stories of charter failures and their ideologies, I have to wonder if there will come a point where similar flashes of clarity will trigger a turn-around. CBK
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/07/27/flash-clarity-lives-marred-drugs-find-meaning/cglhQDNIs2mbZA3G75ta7I/story.html?et_rid=819576871&s_campaign=globesmostpopular:newsletter&et_rid=819576871&s_campaign=globesmostpopular:newsletter
NOLAs answer to managing the students that charters reject: Trauma school…NOLA is going down the path of not just privatizing these kinds of services, but that charters are now free to use these kinds of facilities as a dumping ground for children they don’t want. Since the “successes” of the charter model depends on their rejection of SPED students, this seems like the perfect solution to that problem, particularly since there are no more public schools left to send these kids. ” A typical student may have exhibited verbal and physical aggression, caused property damage or refused to do classwork. It’s a place for kids who have almost nowhere else to turn — when they’ve been asked or told to leave their previous schools. ”
This description of students needing services sounds like plenty of kids in a typical urban setting who have suffered trauma. But these kids are normally helped within their public schools, not separated and outsourced to an outside private business. Given the current conditions in New Orleans, this model strikes me as being nothing more that a huge $$$ opportunity for these non-profits. Just one more way to keep the privatization machine well-oiled. I’m not saying that children don’t need these services, but once again parents will be shut out of the decision-making process when a charter school conveniently rejects their child. There is nowhere left to go except Trauma School.
The CEO is Liz Marcell Williams, formally of TFA and Harvard Graduate School of Education. She also worked for Recovery School District.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-marcell-williams-8bba315/
https://www.cfrla.org/our-story
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-orleans-school-trauma_us_5c1d2c7fe4b0407e907abcf3
Except that the only “alternative” charter for middle school students has ALSO closed. Mercedes mentioned that in her article.
Maybe the school was deliberately closed to drive traffic to the Trauma School. When there is money to be made, students are no longer the priority. Companies deliberately manipulate markets.
Hi there, I’m Liz Marcell Williams and I’d love to correct many of the inaccuracies in your comment.
First, let me tell you a little about me. My background is in special education, so I always tell people that it’s ironic to be running a substantially separate setting after spending the first 15 years of my career promoting more inclusive practices. It’s why we’ve built our referral and intake process to ensure that we are never a first resort and never a “dumping ground” but rather a clinical setting that matches the right level of care to children with significant emotional health needs. As you note, children who’ve experienced trauma can – and should – be served in a loving school environment. Over 60 percent of the 49,000 public school children in New Orleans exhibit signs of PTSD due to exposure to chronic community violence and stress – that’s 29,400 kids. Our capacity is 43. So, most children’s needs are addressed in the school setting. We serve children who have not responded to appropriate school-level interventions and supports. Children are placed with CfR through the IEP process and remain enrolled in their sending school while they’re with us, since they will return to that school when they’ve built the skills to be successful in the traditional school setting. Because we provide medical and clinical services, parents must consent to our services. No child can be placed here without that consent, and parents can revoke consent at any time.
Second, I’ll give you some context about Louisiana. Under our previous governor, health care was completely privatized and high-quality state-run services were eliminated. In a state with some of the worst health outcomes in the country, the neediest people lost access to care. This decimated what continuum of care there was for people with mental health needs, and for at least four years the options for children with significant needs was to rely on their school to provide that care OR to be hospitalized in a psychiatric facility, the closest of which is more than one hour away. This means that children in need or more intensive treatment either didn’t get it, or were removed from their community. Nationwide, about 10 percent of children with behavioral health needs are served in alternative settings. In Louisiana, that, figure is 0.4 percent. This points to a huge gap in services for our most at-risk youth. We exist because programs like the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital were closed and never substituted. We exist because kids haven’t been receiving the services they need. We exist because, in a state with some of the lowest Medicaid reimbursement rates in the country, traditional behavioral health providers have declined to offer these services.
Third, I’ll tell you about CfR. We are not a “trauma school” – in fact, we’re not a school, although we provide instructional services designed to build confidence and stamina and provide access to our state’s Tier 1 curricula. We are a therapeutic day treatment program, co-located with Children’s Hospital New Orleans and in collaboration with Tulane University Medical School’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. We have three members of Tulane’s faculty – two clinical psychologists and one triple-board certified psychiatrist – on site four days a week, as well as two postdoctoral fellows in psychology. We implement the only validated therapeutic intervention for African American youth. We offer daily group therapy and therapeutic enrichment activities such a music therapy, art therapy, yoga, coding, and drumming; twice-weekly individual therapy; and medication management for those families who opt for that (most do, because the opportunity to have a prescribing psychiatrist actually observes the effects of medication is beneficial to ensuring the right prescription for children who benefit from medication). Since we launched, we’ve reduced the average length of time a child is in our program from 16 to 11 months. We’ve cut our children’s incidence rate of crisis hospitalizations by 60 percent. We have an 81 percent success rate in transitioning children to a less restrictive environment. Our staff are trained in restorative justice practices and Therapeutic Crisis Intervention in Schools, and we have trained trainers in those programs. It’s true, our frontline staff are paid better than they would be paid elsewhere. We have a strong commitment to keeping a safe environment based on healthy, positive relationships and, as such, we prioritize a low child:staff ratio. Our team members would be paid hourly in comparable positions elsewhere instead receive an annual salary that is, on average, more than they would make elsewhere, along with full benefits and paid vacations. We believe in a living wage for all team members and that compensation values their hard work. However, we have an inverted salary structure in that our mid-level staff make comparable salaries to folks working in similar roles in schools and other organizations, and those at the highest level of the organization make less than they – we – would elsewhere. The suggestion that this program was developed to make money for staff is both false and offensive. For example, we spend over $600,000 a year on transportation alone so our children can ride safely on small vans with adequate supervision. Currently, not one cent of that is reimburse-able. Our money goes to services for children.
Fourth, while our system of schools is still deeply inequitable and has much work to be done, I must address the note that I “worked at the Recovery School District.” It’s true – I did. That’s because the RSD worked to get the funding to make the launch of our program possible. We were started as the New Orleans Therapeutic Day Program through the Recovery School District. Their staff worked to get a millage passed so that funds that had previously been allocated to facility upkeep, could be redirected to programming for demonstrated child needs – namely, truancy and mental health. The RSD invested in our city’s most at-risk youth and had an equity agenda that led to numerous initiatives including, but not limited to, a differentiated funding formula ensuring that all children with disabilities receive the support they need to access services. We became the non-profit Center for Resilience when our schools reunified under New Orleans Public Schools because we want to be available to children outside New Orleans and to expand to provide more clinical services.
I’m deeply proud of the work we’ve done and the care we provide to the very small number of children for whom the traditional school isn’t yet the least restrictive environment. I work with a team of adults who are attracted to working at CfR because we offer a different, child-centered, assets-based approach to lifting up children. We actively work against systemic failures to provide our children with the care they deserve in a culturally sustaining, deeply caring environment. I’d invite you, first, to learn more about our beautifully rich, deeply flawed city and its educational landscape, extending far beyond the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, back to the very first public schools we had. And I’d encourage you to visit our program so you can speak from a place of knowledge rather than assumption. I think we just might surprise you.
Maybe Paul Vallas can come back & save RSD…