Mercedes Schneider informs us that New Orleans, the nation’s first and so far only all-charter district, must downsize. It has 50,000 seats, but only 47,000 students. How will the district handle this challenge?
The core problem, she points out, is that each school has its own bureaucracy. How will they decide how to “right size” the district?
She writes:
Stability in a school district is not a goal of market-based education reform. On the contrary, “disruption” is the name of the ed-reform game; supposedly disruption and market forces somehow come together to foster parental empowerment and a “choice” situation in which the best schools automatically thrive and the less-than-best are efficiently weeded out as a result of empowered parents not choosing them.
The simplistic, smooth-operation fantasy noted above has never come to fruition in New Orleans’ “portfolio” district– one comprised completely of charter schools, some under the same management organizations, most authorized by the district but some authorized by the state (under the label Recovery School District, or RSD, with the true purpose of converting traditional New Orleans schools into charter schools) but none directly operated by a local, elected school board.
Having no consistent, centralized, publicly-elected oversight of a loosely-comprised school “district” creates many problems. First of all, the level of bureaucracy is magnified as each school or small groupings of schools is under its own appointed board and management organization. It is therefore no wonder that in New Orleans K12 schools, more salary dollars for admin increased as salary dollars for teachers decreased. Lack of centralization also makes it unrealistic to track students who leave one school to be sure that they arrive at another school. In 2015, then-RSD assistant superintendent Dana Peterson admitted that he “didn’t know” how many students disappeared from the decentralized, RSD schools.
Then comes the issue of how parental choice translates into impractical outcomes, including the inability for parents to get their children enrolled in schools physically near their homes. Parents must apply for schools using New Orleans’ “OneApp” application process, which parents complain is opaque. In 2013, I wrote about the difficulty in navigating the OneApp, which left parents to mostly choose from schools graded D or F. Some schools institute additional acceptance criteria, such as special meetings and parent essays. Former RSD superintendent Patrick Dobard admitted in 2018 that New Orleans needed “more good schools.” Nevertheless, somehow, New Orleans’ white students seem to overwhelmingly end up enrolled in New Orleans schools rated A and B, so it is no wonder that New Orleans parents complain about the opaqueness of the OneApp process.
“Parental empowerment” seems to practically translate into “selective parental empowerment.”
By June 2018, all-charter New Orleans was once again under a New Orleans school board (as opposed to being under the state-run RSD). However, the schools still have that previously-mentioned extra layer of “portfolio” bureacracy. It seemed that the New Orleans Public School (NOLA-PS) district (as the new district is called) was primarily in place to investigate financial mismanagement and fraud, such as the “emergency revoking” of three charters due to financial issues and the 2019 Kennedy High School grade-fixing scandal, which resulted in transferring Kennedy and another school to another management org (that is, to a different, non-cheating, extra “portfolio” layer of bureacracy) and NOLA-PS instituting a new means of auditing student records.
As customary, I have taken an excerpt from this very interesting post. Open the link and read it all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is only one way to downsize charters, take away the public money to all private sector charter schools that do not comply with the same legislation/laws that real public schools must follow, and then the charter industry will downsize to 1 percent or less of the total schools as it is in Finland.
There is no compromise with greed. Do it, and their reed will eat you alive.
LikeLike
Two liberal UC-Berkeley professors make heads on this blog explode.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-should-revive-school-vouchers-as-a-liberal-cause-education-equal-access-11641242963?mod=hp_opin_pos_6#cxrecs_s
LikeLike
From the “unbiased” (sic) Wall StreetJournal, it’s to laugh. Ha, ha, ha, he, he, he. How does the WSJ define liberal? Anyone slightly to the left of the WSJ editorial page is considered liberal? Arne Duncan? Please, get a new script.
LikeLike
The WSJ article is behind a pay-wall save for a brief intro.
LikeLike
I searched the title and found the full article in a website called Top Technical Solutions. It was written by a corporate lawyer and contained just a couple more paragraphs past the introduction in front of the WSJ paywall, some poorly explained nonsense that vouchers are a liberal idea because rich people hired tutors during the school shutdown, so to catch up, poor people need “vouchers in proportion to the percentage of income they [are] willing to contribute toward tuition.” In other words, the more you have to spend on tuition, the more money you get. Hmmm. Not liberal. Head not exploding.
LikeLike
Under the guise of choice and with the actual goal of privatization, New Orleans has created an inefficient system of privately operated schools, many of which duplicate the services of one another. Privatization imposes inefficiency. These private entities are top heavy with hefty administrative overheads and duplicated costs. An assortment of smaller, privately owned schools are far less efficient and more costly to operate than a system of community public schools. Public schools can spread administrative costs and other shared services over a network of schools. Public schools are generally managed by elected boards, and they belong to the public, not hedge funds or millionaires. They have the advantage of offering services by trained professionals. Due to their efficiency, they can consolidate services and proportionately spend a greater portion of the budget on instruction. Isn’t instruction the heart of what schools should be doing? Public schools do not produce profits that go in the pockets of rich share holders. They help stabilize communities and prepare students to become responsible citizens.
LikeLike
So, we now have a Pluto-Profit-Producing system of charter schools.
Each deliberately designed by powerful elites to maximize technology’s ability to mutate and replicate complicated, expensive education bureaucracies that excel at exclusion, obfuscation and well-maintained caste systems which persistently separate by color, class and culture.
Old 🍷 Wine In New Bottles.
LikeLiked by 1 person
very nice: “designed by powerful elites to maximize technology’s ability to mutate and replicate”
LikeLike
TechsCOVtoo
Deform is a wine
In bottle of Klein
The fruit of the vine
Of Mobius twine
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, it’s just the beginning. Wait until we have endless churn between private, charter, public schools and homeschooling. None of them will be able to plan anything.
If the ed reform vision plays out on its current trajectory there will absolutely be places where there is no slot available for an entering or transferring student. The old “enroll your child in school” that people now take for granted? They’ll no longer be able to take that for granted. With the current voucher schemes they’re promoting you could have one school drop 10% for one year and increase 15% for the next year.
There’s not even contemplation of these problems in ed reform. Not even an attempt to imagine what the problems could arise with privatized systems- it’s just cheerleading.
The charter leader in New Orleans who says it’s impossible to plan with the churn? She better get used to it. This is the ed reform vision for public education and it will only get worse. There is NO planning for the downside of privatization. No possible downside is ever even mentioned.
I’ll never forget Arne Duncan blithely proclaiming that “10%” of schools would be charter schools, so there would always be endless capacity for public schools to act as a safety net behind ed reform schemes. They just invented a number. That’s the extent of the “planning”. Add vouchers and all bets are off. You’ll see places in this country with NO public school of any kind. It will no longer be universal.
LikeLike
I’m shocked there are problems in privatized school systems. To listen to the paid promoters and salespeople I would assume markets solved all these issues.
Were we misled? Did they wildly exaggerate and oversell the benefits of abolishing public schools and replacing them with private contractors? So, they’re not, actually, “agnostics” after all?
LikeLike
The whole notion of how many “seats” a school or district has at its disposal is an arbitrary figure, that depends on a district’s notion of acceptable class sizes and/or per-student room occupancy levels, but has little to do with what kids actually need to succeed.
LikeLike
Ed reform’s one and only idea- privatize:
“David Osborne
Dec 16, 2021
What Should Our Leaders Do About Failing Schools?
Innovation zones—with autonomy, accountability, independent boards, and extra funding—can bring improvement”
Now that New Orleans is privatized one would think they’d come up with another idea, if for no other reason than to improve the privatized schools in New Orleans, but no- lobbying for charters and vouchers is full time work. Cannot rest while a single public school still exists. Onward! They will conquer public schools!
LikeLike
There is unlikely be any incentive to improve charter schools as the model requires them to deliver their service on the cheap so they can create more profit. Ever increasing expansion is also a key element of their endless profiteering. Peter Greene has a good article today on why it is difficult to overcome failing privatization because it is making so much money for investors. While his article focuses on real estate in Florida, it is indicative of the huge amounts of money that privatization produces for well connected in private equity.https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2022/01/fl-charter-chool-new.html
LikeLike
David Osborne is a charter school cheerleader. Trying desperately to revive his once-heralded reputation as Mr. Third Way (public-private competition and partnerships). He jumped on the charter bandwagon as others were abandoning it.
LikeLike
Mercedes’ well written post dripped with sarcasm. Churn and burn! The students in New Orleans haven’t had enough instability and disruption from the pandemic. They need to be kept on their toes by having their schools closed and their teachers fired. Children’s toes should have grit. It’s the shock doctrine. There has been another deadly disaster in New Orleans so, disaster capitalism has returned. First Katrina: closed schools meant charter takeover with cheaper, newer teachers. Then Coronavirus: closed schools means fewer cheaper, different new teachers in different schools.
Walk it off, kiddos! When I was your age, I walked to school in a blizzard every day with no shoes, uphill both ways. I didn’t even have toes back then. Sometime in the 2030s, there will be another disaster, and students will finally be able to stop attending school and get a job. Children are resilient and have a RIGHT to work 80 hours a week in a shirtwaist factory with no fire escapes. “Aw, I’m an orphan. Aw, I’m only five years old.” Get a job! In the meantime, churn and burn.
LikeLike
Numerology is pseudoscience involving numbers. Lots of Americans, for example, believe in what they call “Angel Numbers”—happening to look at a clock when it reads 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33, etc. Each of these combinations is supposed to have some Deep Spiritual Significance—is supposed to be “the universe telling you something.” LOL. Well, yeah. The universe is telling you that, according to your clock, it is eleven minutes after one. Angel numbers are faddish contemporary superstition in the West. They are numerology.
Numerology is really ancient. It was practiced in the earliest civilizations. It was “science” before there was science. Astrology is a variety of numerology. So are so-called “lucky numbers” and “sacred numbers.” So is the so-called “Bible code,” in which hidden messages are supposed to be encrypted into Biblical texts based on numbers assigned to letters of the Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic or Latin alphabets.
Schizophrenics often start thinking that numbers that they randomly encounter have significances that they don’t have. This is a logical fallacy or, in severe cases, pathology, known as apophenia–seeing patterns in random input. Math is about patterns. Seeing mathematical patterns that aren’t there is numerology. The visional analogue of this is paraidolia—seeing patterns where they don’t exist—images of Jesus on your toast, ghosts on the moor.
It’s sometimes claimed that “you can argue any point of view with statistics.” That’s a claim that statistics is a pseudoscience, that it’s numerology. But that’s wrong. You can argue any point of view with BAD statistics.
Just wanted to get that clear. Numerology is mathematical pseudoscience. Sometimes it’s superstitious belief. Sometimes it’s just chicanery, a flim flam, a scam. Well, you wouldn’t understand this. It’s very deep. It involves numbers, but what it says is that you should send me $100,000 in cash to invest for you, and you can’t lose. Here’s a PO Box in the Cayman Islands.
And that’s what current “Education Reform” is. It’s numerology. It goes by the name “data-driven decision making,” and it’s the brainchild of Billy Gates. All you have to do is to try things, give tests to see if they work, and then tweak what you’ve done based on the test results. Oh, and advance students based on their test scores, and replace schools and teachers and administrators based on those scores as well.
But—and here’s the rub–if the “data” aren’t valid, then the decision making is just bullshit. Garbage in, garbage out. This is why where and how the supposed test “data” were arrived at really matters. Every time test results come out, journalists write breathless screeds about how this or that is failing or showing success because of the test scores. And they NEVER—at least I have never seen this in the thousands of such news reports I’ve seen over the years—stop to ask themselves whether the test scores can be trusted, whether the tests measure what they purport to measure and do so reliably and validly.
They don’t. The state tests don’t validly measure what they purport to measure, and so the “decision making” based on those scores is type of numerology. It’s bs. It’s a variety of pseudoscience. It’s angel numbers and astrology.
LikeLike
Edited version:
LikeLike
I don’t care what you say, Bob
The most mathematically significant time of the day by far is “3:14”
Pi time
LikeLiked by 1 person
And 2:71 is a close unner up. “e time”, but you have to have a special clock to show that, which, fortunately, I do.
LikeLike
Yes. Very important to maintain ritual observance of Pie Time!!!
LikeLike
You would appreciate this book, SomeDAM. And the fact that Paul Erdős referred to children as “epsilons.”
LikeLike
You can also argue any point if view with good statistics.
People do it all the time when they tout spurious correlations.
There is nothing wrong with the statistics that indicate the correlations.
The problem is that correlation in and of itself is meaningless.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You can also go “statistical test shopping”, trying different ones until you find one that indicates what you wish to show.
I learned about this early on when back in a freshman biology course I discovered,to my surprise that different statistical tests yield different outcomes, with some tests allowing you to reject the null hypothesis and conclude the
effect you are trying to show is real, with other tests not allowing you to do so.
LikeLike
Note that I said “trying to show” because that is precisely what the person who is statistical test shopping is doing.
They are not acting as scientists but as biased hacks.
LikeLike
Of course, in my freshman biology course, I went with the test that showed the effect was real.
LikeLike
The other thing you can do is play the “confidence game”, although that might be less convincing.
Th standard is normally 95% ,but it’s really just a convention and you can claim effects are “real” with lower confidence.
And people regularly do.
The probability that the result is due to random chance is greater, of course, but most people don’t understand that so one can often get away with the claim.
LikeLike
Unfortunately. They never told me about these games in my stats courses.
I had to pick them up on my own (eg, in biology class)
LikeLike
Practically speaking. “good” statistics support what you want to claim and “bad” statistics don’t.
Hope that helps.
LikeLike
This is a requirement, I think, for getting a grant from the Gates Foundation. You have to start with the conclusion that Gates wants you to reach, then you interpret data or choose studies to support that conclusion. Will, this study of two students with red hair in New Orleans shows dramatic improvement of test outcomes after the introduction of third-grade retention.
And your phrase “the confidence game”–LMAO!!!
LikeLike
I believe there used to be a game show “Truth or Confidences”
LikeLike
Bob, that might not be a requirement for getting the first grant from the Gates Foundation, but us surely the requirement for getting the second grant.
LikeLike