Archives for category: New Orleans
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Mercedes Schneider: The Betrayal of John McDonough High School in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2018 //
4

The historic John McDonough High School was one of the few schools in New Orleans that experienced only minor damage during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It should have reopened but it didn’t.

It needed repairs but the state-run district neglected the school. When John White was briefly in charge of New Orleans, he promised a major renovation. He promised to give the school to Steve Barr of Los Angeles, charter entrepreneur.

Thirteen years later, renovations have begun.

Mercedes Schneider tells the sorry story of delay and neglect here.

Don’t believe stories of the efficient new administration in New Orleans. Not true.

Categories Accountability, New Orleans

Cory Booker and the American Dream

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2018 //
30

I have never met Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. I probably never will. I only know him as a politician who did his best to turn Newark into another New Orleans, without a hurricane. He became the best buddy of the horrible Governor Chris Christie, who together persuaded billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to put up $100 million to open charters in Newark, an effort that was chronicled in Dale Russakoff’s “The Prize.”

He has been honored by any number of rightwing groups, like the conservative Manhattan Institute. It was funny to watch him fulminate Against Betsy DeVos’ nomination, since he shares her agenda, including vouchers.

Here is his description of the deferred American Dream.

In his account of his life, he stresses his ties to Newark but does not mention that he attended one of New Jersey’s fine suburban high schools, which prepared him for entry to Stanford University, then a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, then Yale Law School. He is not a humble Newark guy. He is part of the elite, which need not be hidden. He succeeded, and a great public high school set him on the road to success.

If he plans to run for President in 2020, he has to own his entire history and break his ties with the DeVos ideology.

Categories Democrats, New Jersey, New Orleans, Newark

Louisiana: Tensions Flare in Legislative Hearings about Charters and Race

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2018 //
11

 

A Democratic Representative from New Orleans, who is black, wants a moratorium on charters until there is an audit of their performance. A Republican State Senator who heads the Senate Education Committee, who is white, was outraged.

Tensions flared. 

In a session already marred by short tempers, two lawmakers Thursday engaged in a heated racial exchange over a bill that would impose a moratorium on charter schools.

The verbal fisticuffs, which quickly became the talk of the State Capitol, took place between Sen. Conrad Appel, R-Metairie, a veteran member of the Senate Education Committee, and Democratic New Orleans Rep. Joseph Bouie, the former head of the Legislative Black Caucus, who was testifying before the panel.

Bouie complained that charter schools badly need scrutiny, and that African American students were suffering as a result of the charter school “experiment.”

“This is the big elephant in the room,” Bouie said. “It appears the only place the benign neglect occurs is a majority African American district.”

Moments later Appel fired back.

“Sir, let me tell you something. You are so far off base with your racial comments. It’s disgusting,” he told Bouie.

The senator said he was tired of hearing similar comments year after year.

“If there is a bunch of kids out of work that are 24 years old, it is because the goddamned city does not produce jobs for those kids,” Appel, said, a reference to New Orleans.

Bouie said a recent study by Tulane University concluded there are 24,000 people ages 16-24 out of work in New Orleans. “They were youngsters who came through the experiment, charter schools,” he said.

Bouie said most public school students in New Orleans are African American. “And that is true, Sen. Appel, whether you like it or not,” he said.

At one point Appel dubbed Bouie’s comments “all b.s., all b.s. I’ve got to go….”

The ugly exchange flared up during a lengthy discussion of Senate Bill 292, which is sponsored by Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge. Bouie, a member of the House Education Committee, accompanied Barrow to tout the merits of the proposal.

Faced with hostility from charter advocates, Barrow withdrew her bill, which would have audited existing charters.

Rep. Bouie said in an interview that most of the charters in New Orleans are “failing schools.” Barrow said that most of the charters in the state are rated C, D, or F.

So long as no one wants to know why charter schools are performing so poorly, the hoax will continue. That will satisfy the charter advocates, but it won’t help the students.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New Orleans

Plessy and Ferguson Explain What Happened to the Public Schools of New Orleans

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2018 //
12

 

In 2010, after the publication of my “turnaround” book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” I was invited to speak at Dillard University, a historically black university in New Orleans. Two events about that occasion were memorable. After I spoke, a woman in the audience got up to speak, and she said, “First they stole our democracy, then they stole our schools.” Later, during the post-lecture reception, I met a white woman whose last name was Ferguson and a black man whose last name was Plessy. They were descendants of the two principals in the historic Supreme Court case of 1896 that approved state laws requiring separate-but-equal public facilities.

The Plessy and Ferguson I met had joined to create an organization to fight for social justice.

“When Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson decided to start a new civil rights education organization that would bear their famous names, they sealed the deal in a fitting local spot: Cafe Reconcile.

“They represent the opposing principals in one of the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions, Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws mandating segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It stood from 1896 until the court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

“The descendent of the man who tested Louisiana’s law requiring separate railroad cars for whites and blacks and the great-great-granddaughter of the judge who upheld it met in 2004.

“The truth is, no reconciliation was required.

“The first thing I said to her,” recalled Plessy, “was, ‘Hey, it’s no longer Plessy versus Ferguson. It’s Plessy and Ferguson.’ ”

“Her first reaction was to apologize.

“I don’t know why,” she said in an interview. “It’s just that I felt the burden of it, this great injustice.”

“Plessy’s response?

“I said, ‘You weren’t alive during that time. I wasn’t either. It’s time for us to change that whole image.’ ”

What an amazing turn of the historic wheel! Plessy v. Ferguson had become Plessy and Ferguson, teamed up for good causes.

Phoebe Ferguson, great-great-granddaughter of the judge who upheld the Plessy v Ferguson decision, is now an outspoken advocate for public education and the right to a free and appropriate education for all children. She was executive producer of  “The Perfect Storm: The Takeover of New Orleans Public Schools,” a series of short videos that reveal the true story behind the creation of the nation’s first all-charter school district. The Plessy and Ferguson Foundation sponsored the series.

Each video is short. Together, they are an effective counter to the multi-million dollar marketing campaign that has sold the public and the media the myth of the “miracle” of New Orleans.

I am not posting any more today so that you will have the time to see all the videos in this series.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Orleans, Privatization

New Orleans: Researchers Find That Charter Schools Dropped Pre-K Because of Cost

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2017 //
28

The Education Research Alliance for New Orleans issued a report about Pre-Kindergarten in the nearly all-charter district. It found that the growth of charter schools had a negative effect on pre-kindergarten because of the lack of funding.

In this study, we examine how the growth of charter schools in New Orleans affected pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program offerings as the school system transitioned from a centralized school system to an almost-all-charter district. In Louisiana, charter schools can opt into offering state subsidized pre-K for low-income and special-needs students, but the per pupil funding level is far below the average cost of educating a pre-K student. In New Orleans’ decentralized setting, schools offering pre-K must cover this funding gap from other sources of revenue.

School districts and charter schools have different incentives for offering optional educational services, such as pre-K. In order to better understand school-level decision making, we interviewed school leaders about their reasons for offering or not offering pre-K. We also analyzed data from 2007 to 2015 to determine whether charter schools that offer pre-K programs gain a competitive advantage over those that do not. Our key findings are:

After the reforms, the number of schools offering pre-K and the number of school-based pre-K seats dropped, even after accounting for drops in kindergarten enrollment. The decrease in seats occurred primarily in charter schools.
At charter schools that continued to offer pre-K after Katrina, school leaders offered two school-centered motivations – pursuit of higher test scores and early recruitment of families committed to sticking with the school for the long-run – in addition to more mission-focused commitments to providing early education for the benefit of students and the community.

Through analyses of student test scores from 2012 to 2015, we find that offering pre-K had no measurable effect on charter schools’ third grade math or ELA test scores, potentially as a result of high student mobility between pre-K and third grade.

Charter schools that offered pre-K programs saw short-term, but not long-term, enrollment benefits. On average, charter schools with pre-K filled half of their kindergarten seats with existing pre-K students, whereas schools that did not offer these programs had to fill all kindergarten seats with new students. However, charter schools offering pre-K did not have any advantage in persistent student enrollment after kindergarten.

It is important to emphasize that our results do not speak to the important and cost-effective benefits of pre-K for students, as those have been well established in prior research. Rather, the study is meant to show how charter-based reforms influence how and why pre-K and other optional educational programs are offered in almost-all-charter systems. While we discuss below new efforts to address the shortfall of pre-K seats, our study provides initial evidence that decentralization without offsetting financial incentives can lead to reduced investments in programs that advance the broader social goals of public education.

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Early Childhood Education, New Orleans, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: Betsy DeVos Discovers “A Nation at Risk” and Claims That Choice is The Answer

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2017 //
14

Mercedes Schneider’s reviews Betsy DeVos’s speech to her friend Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence.

Betsy and Jeb have this in common: They both hate public schools and have devoted their life to demeaning, belittling, and attacking the schools that 85-90% of American children attend. They are in love with consumer choice, and they would like nothing better than to direct public funds to religious schools, for-profit schools, cyber schools, and homeschooling.

As Mercedes notes, Betsy (or more likely, a speechwriter) discovered “A Nation at Risk,” The 1983 jeremiad that blamed public schools for the loss of industries to Germany and Japan. The report was written in the midst of the 1982 recession, and the commissioners decided that the schools were to blame for the downturn. When the economy recovered, no one bothered to thank the schools.

Betsy devoutly believes that choice will fix everything, but “A Nation at Risk” didn’t mention choice.

And she continues to ignore the evidence of the past 25 years of choice. Her home state of Michigan is overrun with charter schools, and its standing on NAEP fell from the middle of the 50 States to the bottom 10 from 2003 to 2013. The news out of the New Orleans all-Charter District throws cold water on the Charter Movement, as New Orleans continues to be a low-performing District in a low-performing State. The evidence on vouchers continues to accumulate, and it is not promising. In the most recent voucher studies, students actually lose ground. After three or four years, those who have not left to return to public schools catch up with their peers who stayed in public schools, but that’s probably because the weakest students left.

Now that Betsy is talking numbers, maybe she will pay attention to the research on charters and vouchers and admit that her favorite panacea is not working.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Michigan, New Orleans, School Choice, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Salesman David Osborne On the Road Selling Defective Model of School Reform

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2017 //
27

Mercedes Schneider heard about the book promotion tour of one David Osborne. Osborne is late to the party. He has written a book claiming that New Orleans is the shiny new model for school reform. Way back during the Clinton administration, Osborne achieved a modicum of fame for his book Reinventing Government, which proposed that government agencies should compete with private businesses. The competition, he argued, would produce public benefits and make government more efficient. Vice President Al Gore invited Osborne to work with him to introduce his ideas into the federal government. I’m not sure where that project went, but charter schools certainly fit the paradigm. The Clinton administration got behind the idea and set the pattern of federal support for the experiment.

Well, we have had charter schools for 25 years. They are no longer an experiment. They are not a bright, shiny innovation. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any innovation produced by charter schools, other than getting rid of unionized teachers. It is odd to see an author pop up with an idea that has been tried for 25 years and claim that he is on to something fresh.

Even stranger is that Osborne points to New Orleans as the epitome of reform, the cutting edge that offers hope to schools everywhere. Where has he been hiding these past few years?

Schneider notes that the all-charter Recovery School District that Osborne admires has yet to crack an ACT score of 17, which is very low indeed. Osborne doesn’t mention this. He seems to have stopped learning anything about New Orleans about five years ago.

As Schneider shows in another post, The Myth of the New Orleans Miracle has collapsed.

“For a full decade following Hurricane Katrina (2005-2015), those pushing state takeover and the resulting conversion of all state-run New Orleans schools into charters have been quick to promote the marvels of their miracle.

“Twelve years later, in 2017, not so much, unless cornered for a sound byte.

“Market-based school choicers have increasingly less to work with regarding the NOLA Charter Miracle sales pitch. Consider the 2016-17 district performance scores. Those New Orleans state-takeover (now) charter schools are no longer separated from the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), so now those “failing schools” that the state supposedly miracle-whipped are now part of a single district (let’s call it NOLA), with one single district performance score resulting in one single district letter grade– and that single performance score and resulting letter grade really took a dive in 2016-17, from 85 B (sort of) to 70.9 C.”

If you look at her tables, based on stated sources, the Recovery School District in Baton Rouge is graded F.

Does David Osborne know this?

He seems remarkably uninformed.

Kind of like a journalist claiming that using leeches to bleed patients is an important discovery.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, New Orleans, Privatization

Gary Rubinstein: Louisiana and the Hoax of Growing AP Performance

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2017 //
7

As Gary Rubinstein writes, Louisiana is one of the most “reformed” states in the nation. It’s superintendent John White is a TFA alum and a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. It has an all-charter city. It has vouchers. It received a Race to the Top grant. What could possibly go wrong?

Rubinstein writes here about a seeming paradox: Every year, Louisiana State Superintendent John zwhite boasts about an astounding increase in the proportion of students passing AP exams. Yet, Louisiana has pretty awful performance on the AP exams.

Paradox solved!

Louisiana moved from fourth worst to third worst in the nation on AP performance. It was recently overtaken by North Dakota.

Read his post and ask yourself why anyone would boast about such low performance. Is that what they teach at the Broad Academy?

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Louisiana, New Orleans, Privatization, Race to the Top

BREAKING NEWS: The Myth of the New Orleans “Miracle” Exposed!

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2017 //
22

What a time to get this news: Thanksgiving Eve.

The New Orleans Tribune rips the myth of the New Orleans miracle.

Digest it over the weekend.

We have been hoaxed by Reformers.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Hoax, New Orleans, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: Sex Scandal at New Orleans Charter School

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2017 //
11

There is an inherent problem with privatizing and deregulating publicly-funded schools. Without supervision, without oversight, without accountability, bad things may happen. And they may not be noticed unless there is a whistle-blower, because that’s what happens in the absence of oversight.

Mercedes Schneider reports here on a sex scandal in a New Orleans Charter School.

“It baffled me when I read that administration at a New Orleans charter school, Success Preparatory Academy, failed to immediately alert police regarding a cell phone video of a sexual incident that happened on campus in April 2017.

“School admin are mandated reporters of sexual abuse.

“However, what really sealed the deal for the two administrators arrested is their apparent ignorance that deleting the video from a student’s phone constitutes destroying evidence, and emailing the video– one that falls under the definition of child pornography– to oneself and to another administrator– constitutes possession of child pornography.

“But there is more:

“When made aware of the incident, the principal of the school also failed to report it to the police, and he publicly defends the failure to report the incident to police as well as the decision of the other admin to delete the video from the student’s phone; return that phone to the student, and email the pornographic video to herself and another admin.”

Do sex scandals happen in public schools? Yes. But they are likely to be reported because there is oversight and supervision, and because teachers know that they are mandated to report such cases.

A student was forced to perform sex acts in a bathroom. The student’s mother reported the incident to the police, and the school’s administrators were arrested.

“According to the Advocate, all three administrators (Gangopadhyay, Kusmirek, and Shane) hail from Teach for America. As administrators of a K-8 Louisiana school, all should have been well aware that they are mandated reporters of “the involvement of the child in any sexual act with… any other person… or the aiding of the child’s involvement in any sexual act with any other person [or] …pornographic displays.”

Maybe they didn’t learn that in their five weeks of training.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New Orleans, Scandals, Students, Teach for America
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »