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Tumult in NOLA

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2012 //
17

Two months into the school year, the head of the Recovery School District abruptly fired the principal of Walter L. Cohen High School as well as several teachers and announced that he was turning the school over to a charter operator called the Future Is Now.

Students reacted angrily and protested the disruption in their school. They issued their own demands, which included the funds to repair the building, reinstatement of the fired staff and a full report from the charter about its record, its test scores, suspensions, police reports, graduation rates, attrition rate and other data about its performance.

The Future Is Now is a charter chain led by Steve Barr (formerly of Green Dot in California) and real estate developer Gideon Stein of New York City, who has been associated with Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy schools.

The following exchange of letters between Tracie Washington, a prominent civil rights attorney in New Orleans, and Gideon Stein, shows the heat of the controversy. In New Orleans, the wishes of parents, students, and communities count for nothing. All decisions are made elsewhere.

From: “Tracie Washington”
Date: Oct 9, 2012 6:02 PM
Subject: RE: Walter L. Cohen High School
To: “Gideon Stein”
Cc: “Vaughn R Fauria” , , , , , , , , “Mary Joseph” , “Judith Browne-Dianis” , “Tracie Washington”

Gideon:

The problem is the presumptions made that started this web of deception and mess. That web continues, even today with Recovery School District (RSD) and FINS-Nola backdating a contract (it’s a public record folks; that’s a big ‘no,no’). Apologizing to me means little. You and your Board and the RSD did something that really is unforgiveable. You entered a community and said “I know what’s better for you and your children. I will not consult with you, but instead take over your community.” I’m saddened not because you did this. You are not a member of my community. But Black folk in this community did it to other Black folk. And yesterday, when these students were exercising civil disobedience the likes of which I had not seen from our young folk, RSD threatened them with the declaration of truancy, which is criminalization in our community.

On Sunday, the students told our community they felt like slaves. SLAVES. It’s 2012. FINS-Nola and RSD made a group of Black children feel like slaves. We have Congo Square. I guess we should have simply sent the kids there on Friday.

I don’t know how you resolve the lies told to take away the rights of these parents and students. You all have been paid. So it’s all better because now you say you’re sorry? Really.

You get to fly out of here. So it’s up to Black women to clean up this mess? My grandmother worked for $3/day and carfare so that I would not have to clean up behind white folk. Not today. This is your mess Gideon. Stick around!

I’m just sick!

Tracie L. Washington, Esq.
President & CEO
Louisiana Justice Institute
Every day without fail — Make Justice Happen
1631 Elysian Fields Avenue | New Orleans, Louisiana 70117
p 504.872.9134 | f 504.872.9878 | c 504.390.4642
Admitted to Practice in Texas and Louisiana
tracie@LouisianaJusticeInstitute.org | tlwesq@cox.net
http://www.LouisianaJusticeInstitute.org
Visit our blog and comment: http://www.JusticeRoars.org
Learn about LJI’s Project Transparency: http://www.NolaPublicRecords.org

From: Gideon Stein [mailto:gstein@finschools.org]
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 5:42 PM
To: Tracie Washington
Cc: Vaughn R Fauria
Subject: Re: Walter L. Cohen High School

Tracie,

I’m replying to you and Vaughn and bcc’ing the rest of the FINNOLA board and other people cc’d on your email. First, let me state that FINNOLA is very sorry for any disruption and hurt caused to the Cohen community. As with John McDonogh, FINNOLA recognizes the important history of New Orleans schools and the unique identity that students, alumni, parents and the community all share with respect to their schools. FINNOLA is committed to working with all stake holders at Cohen to hear concerns and ensure that community interests are considered along with our commitment to providing the best possible education for children.
I spent time at Walter L. Cohen today and can report that the protests are over, the kids are back in class and we are working with the RSD and NOCP to address many of the issues raised by the Cohen students.

Sincerely,

Gideon

—
Gideon Stein
President
Future Is Now Schools
646.373.3888

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, New Orleans, Privatization, Students

Still No Miracle in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2012 //
5

We have felt the full court press of the faux reform movement for more than a decade. Chicago has been burdened with it for nearly 20 years, New York City for 11 years, Washington, D.C., for five years.

The one city that reformers love to cite as their victory is New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina, in their narrative, was a blessing in disguise (and Arne Duncan said it was the best thing ever to happen to education in New Orleans).

New Orleans now has more of its students in charters (about 80%) than any other city, so it is the paradigm of the reform movement, the model for all other cities, which–if reform continues to advance–will one day have no public schools, except as dumping grounds for the kids rejected by the charters, and no teachers’ unions.

Given the status of New Orleans, it becomes very important to protect its image. And so the reformers talk about its rate of improvement, but never mention that the district is one of the lowest-performing in a low-performing state. Before the Jindal takeover of the state board of education and the state education department, New Orleans was ranked as 69th of 70 districts in the state by test scores. And 79% of its highly-praised charters received either a D or an F from the state.

But! There is good news. Superintendent John White put out a press release to announce that students in New Orleans improved their ACT scores by four-tenths of 1 point! That is right: four-tenths of one point on the ACT! Why, that is almost half of one whole point!

Fortunately, math teacher Gary Rubinstein subjected this amazing progress to careful examination. He describes John White’s celebratory press releases as an example of “How to Lie with Statistics.” The ACT score for students is New Orleans, Gary points out, is actually very low, only 16.8. Be sure to read Gary’s post.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, New Orleans

How Some African American Leaders Went Wrong on Reform

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2012 //
2

Karran Harper Royal is a leader of Parents Across America.

She lives in New Orleans, where she went to public schools. Her child attends a charter school.

She spoke at the SOS 2012 meeting in Washington, where she analyzed why some African American leaders and civil rights figures got on the wrong side of education reform.

The video was made by Norm Scott, retired NYC teacher, leader of the Grassroots Education Movement, and producer of the celebrated film “The Inconvenient Truth Behind ‘Waiting for Superman.'”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, New Orleans, Parents

Chris Christie’s Plan to Privatize NJ’s Low-Performing Schools

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2012 //
21

The Education Law Center, an independent organization that advocates for the children of New Jersey,  obtained a copy of a proposal that the Chris Christie administration made to the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles.

The plan calls for aggressive state intervention in the state’s lowest performing schools. Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf wants to set up an “achievement district” for the low-performing schools. These schools would likely be closed and handed over to private managers as charter schools. The state plan calls for eliminating collective bargaining in these schools.

The amount requested was $7.6 million, of which the Broad Foundation has thus far supplied $1.6 million.

This should not be a difficult sell for Cerf. He is a “graduate” of the Broad Foundation’s unaccredited Superintendent’s Academy. And the chairman of the board of the foundation is his former boss, Joel Klein.

It’s somewhat strange that people like Cerf (and Arne Duncan, for that matter) think that a school gets “reformed” or “turned around” by firing the staff, closing the school, and handing it off to a charter operator. Cerf is a smart enough guy, and he surely knows that charters on average don’t produce better results than the public schools they replace unless they push out the low-performing kids.

One of the news stories says that Cerf wants to use New Orleans “recovery school district” as a model for New Jersey, but I wonder if he knows that 79% of the charters in New Orleans were graded either D or F by the state, and that New Orleans ranked 69th of 70 districts in the entire state.

How long can this shell game go on?

I understand that the people in the Abbott districts (the poorest cities where the lowest-performing schools are) may be accustomed to getting pushed around by the state, but how will the people of New Jersey feel about Christie and Cerf bringing in a raft of charter school operators to privatize what used to be their public schools?

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Cerf, Chris, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Klein, Joel, New Jersey, New Orleans

How New Orleans Did Not Get Turned Around

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2012 //
16

A reader in New Orleans responded to the post about the failure of the school-closing strategy in New York City with the following comments. Despite the constant repetition of the story about the “miracle in New Orleans” by Arne Duncan and the media, the New Orleans district continues to be one of the lowest performing in a low-performing state. You may recall that Secretary of Education said that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to the education system of New Orleans. It’s hard to produce a hurricane to wipe away public education, as happened in New Orleans. Next best to accomplish that goal is a national strategy of closing schools and opening new schools, especially charters, supported by many foundations and the U.S. Department of Education.

Message: Don’t believe the hype:

While the New York story played out differently because of the players. local and state politics the script for the wrong-headed school reformers is basically the same. In New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina we changed the criteria for failing schools thus declaring more than 100 public schools as failing and turned it over to the free market (charters).  Just like New York the reforms created a failure, seven years later the New Orleans reformed school district ranked 69 out of 70 of all the school districts in the state taking mandated standardized tests last spring. Equally as disturbing, the high poverty schools in the reformed school district in New Orleans scored lower than the high poverty schools in several cities across Louisiana in 11 of 12 areas tested.  The bottom line is that despite the billions of dollars from the federal government and foundations, firing of all those old bad teachers, no teacher union and no local elected school board the New Orleans reforms failed miserably.

But despite their failure, the Governor and the state department of education is taking its failed model to school districts across the state and have recently passed a ill fated voucher program that will take put more state funds in the private sector and fail more children.

Unbelievable but True!!!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Louisiana, New Orleans

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul?

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2012 //
6

Lance Hill of the Southern Institute of Education and Research reflects on the evolution of charter schools in New Orleans.

Charter schools that perform better by recruiting and retaining better students don’t exist in a vacuum: skimming the best and most profitable students affects other schools, though it is hard to detect in systems with few charters.  The systemic effects are easier to see in a “closed system” as we have in New Orleans in which 80% of students attend charters.  Every high-performing charter creates a chronically low-performing school somewhere in the system. The students that charters reject, who are high-needs and high-cost, become concentrated in a separate set of schools.  These “dumping schools” concentrate students with enormous skill deficits and disruptive behaviors, making it impossible for educators to teach and also creating an intractable non-compliant student subculture.  Privatization creates good schools by creating even worse schools.

The evidence of this “rob peter to pay paul” phenomenon is not difficult to find.  As charter schools increased in relative performance the first few years in New Orleans, the remaining state-run public schools were locked into chronic failure.  For four years in a row, the direct-run state schools posted an average 80% failure rate on the 8th grade math LEAP progression test.  This, despite the fact that the state had doubled the expenditure per pupil for a period of time and all these schools were directly run by Supt. Paul Vallas who selected the “world class” school administrators, contracted to staff the schools with the “best and brightest” teachers (TFA), and controlled the curriculum and hours of instruction.  It was clear that the every year charters would skim the best students from the remaining schools and dump the low-performing students forced on them by the lottery.

In 2007, the highest ranking official in the state takeover of New Orleans schools said in a meeting that I attended that some charters were systematically dumping challenging and low-performing students into the remaining public system. Six years after the takeover, only 6,000 of the total 42,000 students remain in non-charter dumping schools:  100% of those students are in state-run schools that the state graded as “D” or F” in 2011.  It is a wonder that New Orleanians can’t figure out why we have the highest per-capita murder rate in the nation, and school-age teens are the principal perpetrators of the most reckless of the violence.

Creating excellent schools is not the same as creating excellent school systems.  The free-market has one goal: profit.  It did not come into existence to create innovative and equitable public services.  The New Orleans Model ensures that successful schools are created at the expense of the system as a whole; one student advances at the expense of another.  If other school systems opt for the New Orleans Model, they need to do so knowing that the result will be a separate and unequal system of “college prep” and “prison prep” schools.

Lance Hill, Ph.D.

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, New Orleans

Who Knows Naomi Klein?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
23

A reader thinks that Naomi Klein should revisit the Louisiana story and see how the “shock doctrine” has progressed:

Diane, I too have a passion for Louisiana, and a couple of friends there who also keep me in the loop.Your tireless efforts to tell the truth about what has happened in Louisiana since Milton Friedman decided to use “Shock Doctrine” to his advantage is very important to stopping Jindal from his merciless destruction of public education and democracy itself!

For those who are not familiar with Naomi’s introduction to “The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”- here is a brief excerpt from her intro:

“Over at the shelter, Jamar could think of nothing else. “I really don’t see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn’t have died.”

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped around. “What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn’t an opportunity. It’s a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?” A mother with two kids chimed in. “No, they’re not blind, they’re evil. They see just fine.”

One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, “Uncle Miltie”, as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,” Friedman observed, “as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity.”

Friedman’s radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans’ existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that “Katrina accomplished in a day … what Louisiana school reformers couldn’t do after years of trying”. Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman’s plan “an educational land grab”. I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism”. ~Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” [2007] ~ read the excerpt as taken from here: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/excerpt

I would like to see three media sources come to do a follow-up on Naomi Klein’s introduction to her world renowned book: “The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.

Can we get Naomi Klein to do a follow up?

How about teaming up with Joanne Barkan who wrote, “Got Dough” [see link to this article here: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/dissent/v058/58.1.barkan.pdf ] in Dissent Magazine?

And of course, how about teaming up with Ed Shultz? Cant he three of them get together with you to increase the public’s awareness of the unconscionable crimes being committed against Louisiana’s children, against their own state constitution? Gotta love, Ed! I’m so glad he had you on his show. I want him to invite you as a REGULAR guest! Still wish Maddow would wake up and bring you on too, but I digress.

I think the 4 of you could do some real good together as partners to help Louisiana get out of “disaster capitalism” and spread that healing to the nation, ridding us of the marriage between Neoliberalism and Neoconservativism through corporate education reform that is destroying public education and democracy!

Thank you again for helping the children, families, teachers, and communities of Louisiana by shining a light on the horrors of corporate education reform in this state.


 
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Louisiana, New Orleans

My Friends in Louisiana

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
15

Readers may notice that I often post about what is happening in Louisiana.

There are several reasons for this.

One is that Louisiana is truly an important site for what is now called school reform. It became important after Hurricane Katrina wiped out most of the public school system, and New Orleans became a closely-watched experiment in privatizing public education. Corporate reformers frequently refer to New Orleans as their shining example of the good that will come as a result of getting rid of public education, teachers’ unions, and veteran teachers.

Another reason is that I have amazing contacts in Louisiana. The most important contact is Dr. Lance Hill of the Southern Institute for Education and Research. He sends me the latest studies, reports, and news articles. Hill is a careful researcher, and I frequently rely on him to get the facts right. And experience has proven to me that he is invariably correct in his data and use of data. I want to mention here that Lance Hill was first to spot that 98 percent of the eligible students in Louisiana passed up the chance to apply for a voucher. Lance also has supplied me the data demonstrating that New Orleans is one of the lowest performing districts in the entire state. And one other thing, at a time when the elites of New Orleans are gaga for privatization, Lance knows the other side of the story, the one the national media never reports; he hears those who have been dispossessed and left out. Lance invited me to New Orleans two years ago, and I spoke at Dillard University, where I heard some of those voices. I thank him for his integrity, his moral center, and his commitment to the children of the state. And his friendship.

And last, I have gotten myself on some really terrific email lists in Louisiana. I read Mike Deshotel’s blog Louisiana Educator. I get regular updates from two other lists. And I have friends that I made when I spoke to the Louisiana School Boards Association this past March. I can’t name all my contacts, as some have relatives working in state government and I don’t want to get them fired.

And now I have a number of Louisiana teachers who are regular readers of this blog. I learn from them. They keep me informed. I’ll keep doing what I can to tell the public what is happening in your state. You keep hanging in there, ignoring the insults from the governor and the legislature, and stand by the children.

Categories Louisiana, New Orleans

Charter School Parents Get Angry

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2012 //
12

In New Orleans, the Algiers Charter School Association hired a management consultant from New York City to address their problems. Some of their schools have very high scores, and some have very low scores (critics say they are dumping grounds to help the other schools).

The management consultant fired central staff, reassigned principals and embarked on his own plan to shake things up.

This is what happened, as reported in “The Lens”:

ACSA puts controversial personnel moves on hold after crowd chants: “Raza must go”
 
BY , CHARTER SCHOOL REPORTER. JULY 2ND, 2012

More than 300 mem­bers of the Al­giers com­mu­nity gath­ered at the Mc­Donogh 32 Lit­er­acy Char­ter School to speak out against re­cent fir­ings and the trans­fer of suc­cess­ful prin­ci­pals to fail­ing schools within the char­ter or­ga­ni­za­tion.

A call and re­sponse chant of “Raza must go” and “erase the board” came fol­low­ing the end of an un­of­fi­cial pub­lic com­ment sec­tion and dis­rupted the reg­u­larly sched­uled Al­giers Char­ter School As­so­ci­a­tion board meet­ing Thurs­day, June 28.

“Raza must go” is a ref­er­ence to Amir Raza, a con­tro­ver­sial leader who worked as a con­sul­tant to the Al­giers Char­ter School As­so­ci­a­tion, and who was re­cently hired as in­terim Chief Aca­d­e­mic Of­fi­cer.

The board made it clear that the pub­lic com­ment ses­sion, held be­fore the meet­ing was called to order, would not be part of the pub­lic record. Ac­cord­ing to board mem­bers, the pe­riod for pub­lic com­ments was un­of­fi­cial be­cause it did not re­late to any ac­tion items on the meet­ing agenda.

At­ten­dees’ shouts over­pow­ered ef­forts to call roll, read min­utes, and re­view fi­nan­cial state­ments. After a few min­utes of try­ing to begin the reg­u­lar meet­ing, board re­treated into ex­ec­u­tive ses­sion to dis­cuss per­son­nel is­sues while com­mu­nity mem­bers chanted: “Shame on you.”

“I need peo­ple on the board to call an ac­tual meet­ing to ad­dress our ac­tual ques­tions. Can you or can you not call a spe­cial meet­ing?” asked com­mu­nity mem­ber Mitchell Thomas. The crowd waited in si­lence for the re­main­der of his al­lot­ted two-minute speak­ing time.

“You knew Mr. Raza was an issue here for us. I think you de­lib­er­ately left this off the agenda,” Edna Karr teacher San­dradee Gray said. Gray’s com­ment ap­peared to echo a gen­eral frus­tra­tion within the crowd.

Val Exni­cios of the Al­giers Neigh­bor­hood Pres­i­dents’ Coun­cil also had con­cerns.

“It is the opin­ion of all six­teen pres­i­dents that Mr. Raza ex­hib­ited the ut­most lack of re­spect, ex­treme ar­ro­gance, and an un­com­pro­mis­ing de­meanor,” Exni­cios said. “We could not, under any cir­cum­stances, work with Mr. Raza for the ben­e­fit of the ACSA [Al­giers Char­ter School As­so­ci­a­tion].”

Teach­ers and com­mu­nity mem­bers also spoke out against the rash of re­cent fir­ings re­lated to Raza’s ef­fort to re­form the schools.

“You say there’s a short­age of math and sci­ence teach­ers. There was no short­age until you fired all our cur­rent teach­ers. Tell me, are you fill­ing these po­si­tions with cer­ti­fied teach­ers or Teach for Amer­ica? I do not want my stu­dents to be guinea pigs for TFA [Teach for Amer­ica],” Gray said.

Many spoke on be­half of O. Perry Walker Prin­ci­pal Mary Lau­rie, whose trans­fer to Al­giers Tech­nol­ogy Acad­emy drew ire from the crowd.

Mar­tin Berhman Char­ter Acad­emy Prin­ci­pal Rene Lewis-Carter faced trans­fer to fail­ing Mc­Donogh 32.

After an hour-long ex­ec­u­tive ses­sion, the board re­con­vened and re­versed its staffing de­ci­sions.

An an­nounce­ment pro­vided by the board said, “At the ACSA board meet­ing last night, the board de­cided to fur­ther con­sider par­ent con­cerns and will meet with man­age­ment and lead­er­ship to dis­cuss the re­ported per­son­nel changes that were sup­posed to take ef­fect June 29. To that end, NO prin­ci­pal and cen­tral of­fice per­son­nel changes will take ef­fect today. The board will pre­sent its de­ci­sions at a spe­cial meet­ing Tues­day, July 3.”

Willie Zan­ders, a lawyer for the par­ents’ group op­pos­ing Raza’s re­forms, an­nounced an ad­di­tional meet­ing July 5 at 5:30 p.m. in the Casimier Love Out­reach Chris­t­ian Cen­ter on Opelousas St. in Al­giers.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, New Orleans

The Scarlet Letter in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2012 //
16

I received an email from an educator in New Orleans who read my post about the proposal by a management consultant to require low-performing charter schools to  post their grades on the wall and on their clothing. The informant said  that the proposal to the Algiers Charter Schools Association was not merely theoretical. It was already imposed at the McDonogh #32 charter school. He or she sent me two photographs: One showed the school’s letterhead, declaring it has a grade of F, the other showed a public banner with the school’s F grade and its goals for improvement boldly displayed.

I think most educators would consider this practice of public shaming to be a barbaric remnant of another century, not even the 20th century.

What next? Dunce caps for the children? Public dunking for the teachers? Enforced silence for all? No breakfast or lunch until the scores go up? Or will the educators–teachers and administrators–have the school grade tattooed on their foreheads?

To think this came from a management consultant firm. I wonder where they have been successful in the past. Which corporations have they “turned around” with their strategy of public humiliation? Or is it reserved only for educators and schools?

Apparently, humiliating students is not all that unusual. A New Orleans contact sent me this 2007 story about a charter school where students are handed a sign that says “YET,” meaning they have not yet met expectations; for three days, they must wear the sign around their neck, are not allowed to talk to other students and must eat lunch alone. Apparently, shaming works.

Is this something that white college graduates do to poor black children? I can’t imagine that these teachers were treated this way when they went to school. I would not tolerate these techniques for a minute if it were my children or grandchildren.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Louisiana, New Orleans
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