New Orleans Tonight I might have a Fat Tire in memory of four years ago, as I did, when marooned in Denver a mile high
while I watched New Orleans flood. I won’t have a bowl of buffalo chili, as I did then, but hopefully I’ll find a bowl of gumbo. I’ll be with family, and we’ll mourn the past and still hope and commit to the future. I will also mourn the fact that four years after the storm in addition to insufficient housing and health facilities, local democracy is also still being withheld from New Orleans citizens because we are not allowed to vote on the issues involving our public schools, their recovery and future, because of literally, as the conservatives say, the “tyranny of the state.”
In our case that still means the fact that the State Superintendent of Education, business lawyer and high paid, Paul Pastorek, continues to refuse to commit to allow the transition of the New Orleans public schools, charter and non-charter, to return to the supervision of an elected school board. Where else are local citizens not allowed to hold their public schools accountable at the ballot box? I mean where else in America.
Is this about “No Child Left Behind” and underperforming districts that are allowed to be taken over? No, the clock has wound down on that excuse, and supposedly (and I say “supposedly” because there is no transparency in this area!) the charters under state-control are doing better. No this is simply anti-democracy and possibly an anti-New Orleans form of autocracy.
Pastorek partnered with the Times-Picayune the other day to trumpet a poll that locally and statewide about returning our schools to local control. Out state and in north Louisiana where on any good day, it’s still pretty easy to whip up an anti-big-sin-catholic-black city crowd, pollsters found a wild majority against local control. Closer to home they claimed 45% were uncommitted to local control. Poppycock piled on bull corn! Where do they find these people?!?
Truth is there are so many problems still confronting the citizens that the State and the education czar both know darned well that no one in New Orleans is really paying much attention to this yet, and they are counting on that fog of disaster to obscure this a while longer. I wish unions and community organizations in the city would ban together again, just as we did to pass a living wage ordinance to put an ordinance on the ballot demanding the return of our ability to elect a school board, binding or not.
I would love to see that the election campaign in New Orleans where we campaigned for the right to vote and hold schools accountable and Pastorek, Governor Jindal (maybe?), and the rest of the uptown crowed tried to convince the voters that we were Ok as taxpayers to foot the bill, but we alone in the United States were not qualified as citizens to govern our own schools locally.
We need democracy to recover in New Orleans to bring the vestiges of Katrina to an end and accelerate complete recovery.