Lance Hill, a New Orleans civil rights activist, describes
the ongoing debacle of special education in that city.
The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the state in 2010 for
pervasive discrimination against students with special needs. Just
recently, SPLC filed another suit against the state department of
education, the state board of education, and Commissioner John
White for continuing discrimination against these students. Lance
Hill writes: “The root-cause of discrimination against
special needs students in New Orleans is the privatized charter
school model in which a school’s viability depends on its ability
to post high or constantly improving annual test scores. Special
needs students are more costly to charters that depend on
inadequate and fixed state funding. The easiest way to decrease
costs and increase test scores in this “competitive market model”
is to exclude special needs students. Louisiana has implemented
some policies to discourage “student skimming” and discrimination,
but we can expect that charters, which are essentially government
funded private businesses, will eventually succumb to market forces
to maximize income over costs–even if it as at the expense of the
most vulnerable and needy student populations.” Millions
of dollars have been poured into New Orleans by philanthropists,
foundations, corporations, and the federal government, all to prove
that privatization is a great success. But the privatizers don’t
tell you about their exclusion of children with special needs. They
prefer to keep it quiet.
The National Education Policy Center urges caution when reading the CREDO study of charter schools in New Orleans. Governor Bobby Jindal has already taken CREDO as evidence for the success of privatization.
NEPC says not so fast. In addition to technical issues in the study, the critics make the following observations:
“Even setting aside these concerns, the effect sizes reported for New Orleans—let alone for the state as a whole—are not impressive in terms of absolute magnitude. Differences of 0.12 standard deviations in reading and 0.14 in mathematics indicate that less than one half of one percent of the variation in test scores is explainable by membership in a charter school.
“The study’s methods raise concerns that the findings could easily be misinterpreted to inflate pro-charter conclusions. In context, there’s little to crow about: the results from Louisiana and New Orleans are not much different from the uninspiring national results; the results for the state’s suburban charter schools showed negative gain scores (somewhat less growth in charters than in the comparison schools); and the small positive results reported for New Orleans are confounded by the devastating aftermath of a unique disaster.”
An even more serious challenge to the study was posed by New Orleans-based “Research on Reforms,” which complained that the Louisiana Department of Education will not release student data to independent research organizations.
It wrote: “As long as the Louisiana Department of Education can determine to whom to release student records for research purposes, the reports produced thereof, such as the CREDO report, are nothing more than biased evaluations.”
“The Department of Education (DOE) maintains that it has the discretion to release de-identified student-level records to selected researchers, and that it has the discretion to deny the same student records to other researchers. And, for the past few years, that is what the DOE has done. CREDO received the student records, and, Research on Reforms, Inc., who submitted a public records request for the same student records, was denied. As long as the DOE gets to select its evaluators, i.e., its researchers, the impact of the state-takeover and the charter school movement will never be objectively evaluated.
“Specifically, the Department of Education (DOE) released de-identified student-level records to CREDO for the school years 2008-09, 2009-10, and 2010-11 and denied the student level records for the same school years to Research on Reforms, Inc. (ROR). Thus, ROR sued the DOE in October 2012 for violation of Louisiana’s Public Records Act. The matter is now in Civil District Court.”
Lance Hill of Néw Orleans, who has a long history in the civil rights movement, notes that Governor Bobby Jindal has been routing the “comeback” of Néw Orleans, giving credit in part to its privatized schools.
Lance points out that Forbes ranks Néw Orleans as 198th of 200 US cities in job growth. No miracle there .
Gary Rubinstein was intrigued to read a tweet by John White of Louisiana boasting about the dramatic improvements in education.
Gary decided to look more closely at the data. Not surprisingly, he found that White was playing games with numbers, which seems to be a habit in Brooklyn schools.
Gary discovered this significant fact; “In the Times-Picayune article they indicated “the percentage of students passing the exam dropped from 44 percent to 33 percent: 3,501 of the 10,529 test-takers.” So in 2012, 41% (the article had this number wrong) of students who took at least one AP test passed at least one, while in 2013 this number dropped to 33%. So they are celebrating, basically, that 4,000 new students TOOK the AP. Of those 4,000 students, only 19% passed an AP.”
So White was celebrating the number of students who took the AP, not the proportion who passed.
But wait: the lowest proportion of students who took and passed the exam was in the Recovery School District. Not quite 6% in that much-celebrated state-run district managed to pass. At SCI Academy, and the top charter school in the RSD had only 11% of its students earn a 3 or better on the AP.
So much for the New Orleans “miracle.”
If you want to read the Louisiana take on this shape-shifting scandal, read Crazy Crawfish here.
Lance Hill reports that Steve Barr has hired a principal at a salary of $115,000 for a charter school with an enrollment of 13 freshman students. Perhaps the reason enrollment is so low is that Barr hyped the schools as “the most dangerous school in America” on a TV show in Oprah’s channel. Some parents pulled their kids out. But now Barr can demonstrate how he “turned around” the “most dangerous school in America.”
Mercedes Schneider attempts to explain here how school choice works in New Orleans.
It is complicated, confusing, and messy.
More often than not, the schools choose, not the parents.
More often than not, students leaving a “failed” and closing school may “choose” to go to another F-rated school.
The one choice that is not available is the choice of a neighborhood school. They don’t exist any more.
When you try to follow the ins and outs of choice, you begin to believe that you need to hire a facilitator to help you maneuver the process.
Choice is not for the weak, the weary, or the impatient.
Corporate reformers cling passionately to the myth of the New Orleans miracle because it is all they have. The New York City miracle evaporated in 2010 when the State Education Department acknowledged that the state scores were inflated. The DC miracle never happened. The Vallas miracle in Philadelphia vanished on day one. Arne Duncan’s amazing score gains in Chicago disappeared.
All that is left is New Orleans. The media loves to find miracle schools and districts, but anyone who looks beyond the press releases soon discovers that the Recovery School District is the lowest performing district in the state.
So the reformers say, “But look at our gains.”
Mercedes Schneider takes apart those claims here.
In this post, Jonathan Pelto assembles a timeline of the stunning court decision to remove Paul Vallas as superintendent of schools of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He includes Vallas’ tenure as superintendent of schools in Chicago, where he was hailed for “saving” the schools and in Philadelphia, where he installed the nation’s most sweeping privatization plan (to that point). Philadelphia and Chicago are now in crisis. Vallas then went on to New Orleans, where he oversaw the almost total privatization of that city’s schools after Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is hailed by the media as a success but the Recovery School District is the lowest performing district in the state of Louisiana, its top schools skim, and it is propped up by infusions of millions of philanthropic dollars.
Robert Mann, a professor of communications at Louisiana State University, recognizes that the point of charters and vouchers is to withdraw into gated communities.
He writes: “Private schools have long flourished in America for reasons legitimate (religious and scholastic), and some not so legitimate (race). But now many parents and taxpayers – manipulated by politicians who argue that the only way to fix public education is to weaken it with privatization – are giving up on the very idea of public schools.
“A strong component of Louisiana’s education “reform” agenda – led by Gov. Bobby Jindal and state education Superintendent John White – is abandoning public schools in favor of private educational enclaves.”
Vouchers do not fulfill their promise. Voucher students fare poorly. Only 40% perform at or above grade level.
And more: “Then there are the 80 schools in Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD), beset with allegations of mismanagement, wasteful spending and millions in lost or stolen property. Last year, New Orleans’ RSD schools – mostly charters – were the worst performing in the city.”
The truth is beginning to break through the myths about the glories of privatization.
Governor Bobby Jindal signed legislation allowing parents in the state-run Recovery School District to vote to return their low-performing school to local control.
“The measure by Baton Rouge Rep. Ted James lets parents petition the state-run RSD to return a school to local control if that school has earned a “D” or “F'” grade from the state for five consecutive years.”
Maybe this legislation will help to puncture the myth of Louisiana’s Recovery School District, the media’s miracle district.
Diane Ravitch's blog 