You remember, I hope, the saga of the New Orleans Public Schools District: Abandoned by white families, underfunded by a overwhelmingly white Legislature and Dtate School Board, the public schools were segregated and held in low regard. Then came Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which severely damaged most of the schools; the students scattered. The state stepped in and created the Recovery School District, whose job was to get the schools rebuilt and reopened under new management. To get rid of the union, the entire teaching staff (mostly Black) was fired, and teachers were allowed to reapply for their jobs.
When school opened again, most of them were privately managed charter schools, many of the newly hired teachers came from Teach for America, and the district for a time enjoyed a large infusion of funds from the federal government and large foundations, all committed to the success of the charter model.
The Hechinger Report tells the story of a new school that opened this fall. For the first time in two decades, it is a district-run public school instead of a charter school.
Be skeptical of claims about dramatic improvements in student outcomes when comparing pre-Katrina to the present. The enrollment in 2004 was nearly 70,000, and is now about 40,000.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This sure was quiet compared to the ballyhoo when it went charter
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That’s the irony of the story. The politicians killed off public schools under the belief they would solve all their problems, but they haven’t. Maybe parents are tired of schools that discriminate, open and close like daylilies and are unresponsive to student needs. Perhaps parents want schools in which they have a voice, offer civil rights protections, hire certified teachers and are located in their neighborhood.
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You are right, I deeply feel. While I lack some information on Charter Schools it seems that Public Schools provided most of what student needed, and there was room for improvement in Public Schools.
The question of having rights is an important one. Having some representation is most likely a human necessity.
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“There’s a sense that if we’re a system of choice and a system of innovation, one choice should be a school run in a traditional way by the school district directly, with a focus on the neighborhood,” Zervigon said. “That should be one of the choices, and there’s a strong feeling about that.”
Trying to rebuild public schools during a time of dwindling enrollment is no easy task. However, if the goal is to create a school that is responsive to the needs of the people, the district should consider a locally operated community school. Since the federal government was so generous in providing seed money for charter schools in New Orleans, it should be equally generous in funding a community school that will meet students where they are, attend to their needs and create a welcoming, inclusive vibe for both students and families. Such as school should be eligible for some type of grants since it is a new and innovative concept for New Orleans public school students.
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I am not holding my breath on that money
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There is a federal grant program for community schools. Of course, the date has passed for the upcoming school year, but NOLA should plan ahead. If public schools don’t apply, some charter chains will gobble up the funds and spend it on some commercialized, canned product. What they should do is talk to the community, spell out their needs, develop a plan, write up and come up with a way to evaluate it. Most of these grants follow this type of format or something similar. https://www.communityschools.org/department-of-education-full-service-community-schools-grant-program/
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FINANCIAL FRAUD BY CHARTER SCHOOLS IS STEALING TAXPAYER MONEY FROM GENUINE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate “school choice” charter school operators that the IG investigation declared: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals.”
In the 1990’s, hedge fund billionaires discovered that they could profit from the school choice movement and so they took over by founding corporate chains of charter schools that have reaped billions of dollars since then through various mechanisms, such as REITs that collect exorbitant lease and rental profits from charter schools…as the expense of public schools.
Charter schools claim to be non-profit. And yet, There are numerous schemes for running a non-profit for profit. For example, in two reports — “Chartered for Profit” and “Chartered for Profit II” — The Network for Public Education explains the most common schemes: Some charters lease their buildings back from related businesses. In one New York case, a chartering organization leased a space from the diocese, then leased that space to its own charter school for over TEN TIMES the amount it was actually paying.
Then there are “sweeps” contracts, where a non-profit charter hires a for-profit management organization to handle everything, in return for nearly every dollar the charter takes in. As one contract cited in the report states, the management organization receives “as remuneration for its services an amount equal to the total revenue received” by the school “from all revenue sources.”
In many cases, a non-profit charter school simply serves as a pass through for money headed to a for-profit business.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE STRATEGY FOR DISMANTLING THE CHARTER SCHOOL MOVEMENT is to simply require that charter schools file THE SAME, EXACT PUBLIC DOMAIN QUARTERLY AND ANNUAL BUDGET REPORTS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE REQUIRED TO FILE.
Every state in our nation should have that same common sense accountability requirement for charter schools.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because THEY FAIL TO PASS THE MINIMUM TEST for being genuine public schools; that is — They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers, that is, THE PUBLIC. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties or are religious organizations. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
CHARTER STUDENTS LOSE GROUND: The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — has reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math — but online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars. CREDO has been conducting years-long research into the educational quality of charter schools and yet even this charter-school-funded research center’s findings are that in general charter schools don’t do any better academically than genuine public schools.
“SCHOOL CHOICE”: The catch-phrase “school choice” was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. That public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians is well-documented in the book “The Manufactured Crisis”.
RACIAL RESEGREGATION of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/29/report-the-department-of-education-has-spent-1-billion-on-charter-school-waste-and-fraud/#ab1fbdb27b64
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Roy and Quickwrit: Thanks for the links above, though I am sure the trend is not over, I feel the same way I felt when the pandemic began to dissipate. Though that’s not over yet either. An un- or undereducated democracy is a set-up for the fascist authoritarian who is oh-so-ready to abuse the trust of the people.
BTW, I just read on (the other Ravitch note today) where Putin closed YouTube in Russia, and before that, all independent news organizations. I guess the people trusted Putin to do what is right for them. CBK
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You say, ‘An un- or undereducated democracy is a set-up for the fascist authoritarian who is oh-so-ready to abuse the trust of the people.’ And how true is that. I am probably biased towards Trump and would not ever vote for him. It is him and not simply the Republican party that I object to. He has a set of beliefs, attitudes, that makes him, in my opinion a dangerous person to give great power.
Many of the people who support him belong to that group of ‘undereducated’ and would endanger us all by voting for him. Our democracy is a precious thing and so providing an education that asks for critical thinking is a good thing for us all.
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Ronald Lewis: I haven’t done a poll, but the only MAGA people I’ve seen talking on news programs or in my family, or in the grocery store, are in one of three groups:
(1) politically ignorant (of the dangers Trump and the 2025 document represent) as well as racist; (2) religious zealots/anti-abortionists who love freedom, but only if it’s their own, and who harbor contempt for women, even if they are one; or (3) the wealthy who hoard their wealth and don’t want to pay taxes or care for others who haven’t been so lucky as they–arrogant/capitalist/transactional-only personalities.
They are all a pox on the whole idea of democracy–some actually state that they hate democracy. But Trump himself needs to go somewhere else, preferably where he cannot harm others at will. CBK
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