New Orleans

Recently there has started to be some discussion, it would be a stretch to call it a debate at this point, about the governance of the schools and whether to allow us sorry, no account New Orleans citizens to finally take our place again in a democracy where we might practice some accountability.  Even writing my 6-year update for the book, I was scratching my head at the preposterousness of some of the problems, particularly one by Leslie Jacobs, now the head of the rebranded Chamber of Commerce, but previously a member of the state education board.  She had proposed a Cerberus-headed monster which would ostensibly be under an elected board, but require the elected board to appoint a board underneath them just to administer the charters.  Like I said, bizarre!

Suddenly though it has all become clearer to me thanks to the new, young, fast talking head of the RSD from New York.  Reading the papers a quote jumped up to me, when John White, admitted that the “emperor had no clothes” and that “…the district will ultimately need new revenue sources to ensure the ‘long term sustainability of a system of independent charter schools.”  This “network” of so-called independent charters is referred to as a “portfolio” system, since there are so many operators with independent systems and of course budgets.   Independent budgets being the soft, exposed underbelly that they had all realized, but that I  hanging out there as “joe sausage head” had been missing.  The state reimburses each charter directly.  It does not go through a central system as it does for the Orleans School System but goes directly to the charter.  The charter kicks back a sliver to the RSD but that is capped at 1.75% by state law.  All of the insiders from White to Jacobs and on up and down the line, knew they were sitting high atop a house of cards, just waiting for the next scandal, and there have been many, where money was missing or teachers were being imported from Turkey or whatever.  The state minders don’t have the horses to ride herd on the portfolio of random charters, so they have trouble.

The code words about “other sources of revenue” means that they have to get their hands around the school millage money that goes to the Orleans system and they can’t get that legally since the state has usurped control of the schools.  They all know there has to be a centralized school system to handle admission, train and hire teachers, do the legal and accounting, and myriad other tasks, but all of that costs way more than 1.75%.

What is really going on is the preparation for another bait-and-switch.  The RSD will have to be subsumed under the elected Orleans Parish School System, but the so-called “reformers” want to try and figure out a way to bamboozle the situation so that we pay for their play, and they still escape all democratic accountability.  All of these city slickers understand that in our broke ass city there is no way that we are going to pay school taxes to two systems and in fact legally there is no way the RSD could become a separately constituted system.

This is the story no one around the country is really telling.  The charter system is “one off” and not a replicable system.  At its heart where the dollars flow, it is simply not sustainable!

In the morning Times-Picayune test scores eviscerated the pilot school voucher program promoted by Governor Jindal (nota bene: Bobbie having a bad week after being eviscerated as a total, scheming hypocrite on the front page of the New York Times on Saturday for political double talk around the BP disaster, where it turns out the state is also not holding up its end of the job!) and implemented 2 years ago. On equivalent LEAP scores that are mandatory for 4th graders, the public schools kicked the proverbial in comparison to the same cohort attending mainly parochial schools in Orleans parish with the vouchers. Essentially in typical school fiasco, we are now paying to subsidize private and parochial educations with taxpayer dollars to do a worse job for our kids. The state superintendent apologist for the schools, Peter Pastornek, tried to equivocate and blame both the tests and the kids, but he’s never listened to criticism of the mandatory testing before….

Meanwhile during what Rebecca Skolnit called the “elite panic,” former Governor Blanco was conned into signing an executive order allowing the New Orleans system to be charterized for a 5-year period before they would have to be booted out or renewed. The Times-Pic is a little disingenuous in saying that the real options are a 3-year renewal, a longer renewal, and the boot or switch to another charter operator without every explaining how citizens might return these public properties to public accountability and public supervision by elected school board members. It is clear now that as the bell gets ready to ring on the 5 year timer this fall and winter, everyone is totally clueless about the process of renewing or handling anything to do with these schools. The Scott Cowen and Tulane cabal are already doing the heavy whine as they try to cover up and rationalize the results at Capdau which they began running ahead of many other charters. Other recent reports have also begun to trickle out indicating that test scores in many of the charters are weak, money has shown up missing in a couple of high dollar high profile scandals, pet principals have been raking in princely sums, and god knows what else.

For all of the rock throwing at the public school system in New Orleans and the elected school boards, these secret societies running the charters seem to be a thousand times worse. There really is no excuse for public property being treated as private playthings, especially when we are talking about our children’s education!

Silver Spring

So instead of returning to a decaying economic structure, New Orleans is talking about revitalization, a buzzword behind the new energy in the city, carried by an intensity and idealism that would have bordered on indecent in the old, charmingly carefree New Orleans.

It is there among the legion of young nonprofit workers crowding the bars of the Bywater at night, drawn to what one described as her generation’s civil rights struggle. They envision the city as a national example for innovative schools, smart urban planning and a housing stock built to the highest environmental standards.

And it is there among the swaggering entrepreneurs, who have set up small branding firms, music licensors and green energy companies in the downtown warehouses. Over drinks at a downtown boutique hotel, they seem largely untroubled by the reluctance of Fortune 500 companies to bring their headquarters here. This is not a town for old-line corporate thinking. This is a town for pioneers, risk-takers, they say.

But this energy is not enough, on its own, for a new, flourishing, functioning New Orleans. A large-scale rejuvenation of the city’s economy needs a large-scale commitment, with the city’s leadership on board. And the tens of billions of government dollars flowing into the city for the next few years give it a rare, but not unlimited, chance to make that kind of commitment.

I have to first confess that I sent the article to my two adult children IMMEDIATELY!   They were born and raised in Bywater, and we all still live there now, so anything that paints New Orleans and Bywater as ground zero for what’s happening in America, I send off immediately with big exclamation points.  I also like the line about rebuilding New Orleans as this “generation’s civil rights struggle.”  Let’s hear and think a lot more about that, and then push to make it real and not just “branding,” which is what it is now in many ways.

Of course the undemocratic, charter-ization of the public schools, the urban planning talk with little action, and the housing stock largely still not built, all make this seem like a charade unless this generation is going to supply the discipline and courage to the rebuilding that would make the civil rights analogy more real and vibrant.  The “swaggering entrepreneurs” are perhaps tipsy as they leave those bars and the watchword for their enterprises may still be “small,” but we wish them well, especially because change is going to require a flat our confrontation and hammer and tong war with the deeply entrenched, CBD and uptown “leadership” of the city.

I like the spin.  We need as many advertisements for the city and it’s rebuilding as possible, even if this one seems to be using the money still coming for revitalization as a magnet to attract schemers and hustlers.  But, we have a huge amount of work in a lot of areas unmentioned here to actually make the city not only different, which it has always been, but better, which the people deserve.

New Orleans

In New Orleans teachers are being “surplused.”  Given that literally thousands of teachers were fired (not laid off) in the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans and that the population has been increasing steadily since then, these teachers were working last spring are simply not being rehired.  Since New Orleans is also ground zero in the charter school world, this also means that the combination of the district and principles are pushing out seasoned, experienced teachers and in many cases hiring Teach 4 America types.

There was some controversy in the article between whether or not the Recovery District was worse in 2008 than in 2009 and how much of the blame rested on principles versus the district, but the bottom line seemed to be the same:

• Teach 4 America and related programs are cheaper.
• Teach 4 America spokesperson in New Orleans simply and callously said that “completion” is better – but that’s about job slots not about who can do the teaching job.
• Teach 4 America turnover is phenomenally high because of inexperience, inadequate training, and the rigors of the workplace, i.e.  the classroom.  How is this good for students?
• Teach 4 America folks are uncertified and replacing senior teachers who ARE certified.

All evidence is that teachers are the solution to most education issues, not the problem. A system produces the way teachers teach and how they use their time, so this fungability of people and the cheap tradeoffs that are being encouraged here are worth a hard look.  Add the scandal of union busting that in post-Katrina New Orleans took the largest union in the city, the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO/AFT) and vacated their contract and broke their local from over 5000 members to only hundreds (though growing now without an agreement), and we really need to look at whether we are getting good young teachers with heavy idealism, or young people desperate for a resume building job in a bad economy who are tossing seasoned professionals out on their ears.

I’m not liking this.

New Orleans

The head of the Recovery School Districts is the nationally known Paul Vallas.  He is a product of the Chicago city system under Mayor Daley II and a frequent, though losing candidate in Illinois local and state politics.  His main paychecks in recent years have come from schools.  He was big stuff in Chicago and then ran the system in Philadelphia before coming to New Orleans in post-Katrina.

Thanks to a huge “okey-doke” after Katrina school know-it-alls and business interests managed to get Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco to agree to “charterize” the school district and in the wake of the hurricane given all of these charters – the largest charter experiment in America – a 5 year agreement where they could not be challenged or accountability to the voters through a democratically elected school board.

Most of this took advantage of the financial catastrophe of the school district and the incredibly mysterious and unfortunate decision of the elected school board to almost indefinitely postpone opening of the public school system after the hurricane blocking the return of thousands and thousands of families.  So the state took over and through the state superintendent had been running many of our schools with no voter accountability whatsoever under Louisiana’s State school czar, Paul Pastorek.

Vallas and Pastorek seem to want to substitute some kind of business contract as if that is the same as democratic accountability by the voters.  And, if it sounds like a mealy-mouthed runaround that would allow the State of Louisiana to continue running the New Orleans school system rather than the citizens, taxpayers, and voters of New Orleans, then that is because that is exactly what seems to be intended.  The state would contract with the operators of the charters and democracy and real accountability would go out the window.

For his part Pastorek seems to hope that he can flim-flam his way around this problem with total double-speak.  In the New Orleans Times-Picayune he had the following preposterous quote:  I’m in favor of returning the schools back to local control as soon as possible.  I’ve said that since Day 1.  But I’ve also said since Day 1 that they shouldn’t necessarily go back to the School Board.  They should go back to whatever entity is prepared to handle the responsibility. We’ve created a different kind of school than what they are used to managing.”

Huh?  Sorry, Mr. Pastorek, the only legal and democratic “local control” is in fact through the local elected members of the Orleans Parish School Board.  The rest is obfuscation and bull-hockey.

The Governor’s executive order expires 5 years after Katrina, so there is only 1 more year to go before we should have had legitimate, democratic accountability and local control again, but it seems all of this flannel mouthed talk by Vallas and Pastorek is an attempt to try to keep New Orleans citizens from running New Orleans schools.

And, that’s wrong – no two ways about it!

The Times-Picayune today lists all of the test scores and finds that Lusher (which is now a very selective “public” school) is performing well, but not twice as well as others like Mary Bethune for example where the principal is making less than half of what Riedlinger is being paid.  I’m not saying Riedlinger is a bad principal, but she’s not god’s gift to children’s education either, and certainly that extra hundred grand or so she’s pocketing could make a real difference in the education of a lot of little ones.  I also think she’s been a wheel-and-dealer in the past as well and had to sit out for a spell some years ago when Lusher was under the Orleans School Board for jimmying a favored pupil into the school from outside the zone.  That’s not a capital offense or anything, and I’m sure it was educational for her, but whatever it might have been, it certainly indicates she needs good supervision and real accountability, and not just a rubber stamp board with an open checkbook.
New Orleans is the largest charter school site in the country, and this is all out-of-control!