Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Education

Charter Schools “Experiment” Still at Odds with Law and Democracy

Mariehurt — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:26:12 +0000

New Orleans To the degree that many so-called educational “reformers” like to tout New Orleans and the post-Katrina usurpation of much of the school system through federal money bribes and legislative do-overs as a model, it is worth seeing how the tendency to no accountability and educational autocracy continues unabated.

The original executive orders that seized New Orleans schools from the elected school board mandated a 5-year period to move the schools to the State run Recovery School District and then move them back to the Orleans Parish School Board. Now the five year period has hit the first 8 schools and to no one’s surprise nothing is happening because the usurpers who claim reform but resist accountability have created no system that reintegrates the schools back to the School Board. To no one’s surprise the folks managing the charters want to drag their feet as long as possible as well, so were not exactly beating down the door to become accountable again.

The Times-Picayune story by Andrew Vanacore ended up on the front page even though the story was largely an editorial with a headline drawn from Vanacore’s unsupported opinion. He wrote early in the piece:

For now, city and state officials do not even seem to agree on who is responsible for clearing up how the transition is supposed to work. To be sure, plenty of administrators at the autonomous charter schools that have come to dominate under state authority simply do not think the local school board as it exists should govern anything. They worry about losing the flexibility they have in decision-making and remember keenly the corruption scandals that still mar the board’s image, though few will say so publicly for fear of alienating board members.

The jump headline was “Eligible schools decline return to local board.” No one is quoted along these lines in the story on the school level or from RSD or anyone else. There is not even the old “unnamed sources” line indentifying some quote. The headline stands solely on Vanacore’s personal opinion and allegations.

The story is clear even from the most ardent anti-school board voice, Leslie Jacobs, where even Vanacore has to concede her totally anti-democratic proposal got “no traction” (though once again largely his unsourced opinion), that the schools eventually and “inevitably” will return to local control of the Orleans Parish School Board. In fact the entire story is one of incompetence and who is one first and what is on second with the new head of the State Education Department and until recently the head of the RSD, John White, acknowledging that they need to come up with a plan and make it happen.

Driving Down Ed-cost with E-Education

dine — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:37:16 +0000

Detroit It is very depressing to read about the inability to make advances in the equity and achievement of all levels of education despite the technological advantages and increasing availability of internet access. Costs continue to soar at both public and private educational institutions. E-education options now seem beleaguered by low standards, scams, and reputational issues, even as they should have been developing as real options and opportunities for millions both domestically and globally. There has to be a way to break through this mess.

I’ve read that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in a final semi-deathbed conversation agreed that they had been surprised that the advent and growth of computers had in fact NOT contributed more to educational progress and attainment. I was struck by that failure. I remember when computers were heralded as the new day for education and the question of whether or not classrooms had computer access was sent as a benchmark of progress. WTF?!?

I read a long, frightening profile on Peter Thiel, one of the rich-as-Croesus Pay Pal co-founders and tech investors, in the New Yorker on the plane the other day. He had looked into beginning a high-tech, electronic higher educational institution but abandoned the notion even with his big bucks when he reckoned with the huge status pull of elite institutions like Stanford, Harvard, etc, and realized he couldn’t compete.

I find that discouraging, because it is hard to imagine replacing brick-and-mortar with more equitable and affordable electronic access to education with other configurations of the social and public space in communities substituting for “campus life.” if the argument to teachers, students, and, most importantly, future employers about high, demonstrable, and replicable standards are not present and provable. Teaching to the test doesn’t work, and I’m intrigued by the notions of “education as apprenticeships” to employment opportunities that I’ve seen recently in Cairo and in practice on a lot of union jobsites, but we need a mass model that works and can stand up in the debate.

I was intrigued by a piece several weeks ago in the Times that made the case for e-lectures becoming more popular, but some a lecture has a lot of growing to do in order to shape a curriculum, and the commitment of professors to both the process and the students would have to also be significant to offer an alternatives.

I’m coming up short. I hope some mega-domes are working hard to solve this problem, and the word just hasn’t trickled down yet to folks like me.

Military Schools Trump Charters in a Vote for Equity and Anti-Racism

dine — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:44:38 +0000

New Orleans News flash from the military of all places!

If you create a level of equity and seek to eliminate racism in the classroom, results will shine, and you will out public schools. If you try to teach and actually educate children, rather than “teaching to the test,” their reading and other scores on those same tests will surpass their competitors. In a column in the Times by Michael Winerip we got some good news for a chance from unexpected, uniformed sources.

The comparisons were stark. Where states are uniformly muscling in on local school district governance and educational programs (he uses TN as an example, but Louisiana is the frontrunner!), the military “doesn’t micromanage” in fact they claim to let, “Individual schools decide what to focus on.” The class sizes on average are 18:1, on a par with private schools, despite the nay saying about class size from Mayor Bloomberg and other so-called reformers. Relationships between military and their unions in the classrooms are smooth, imagine that, but of course collective bargaining and seeking agreements continues to be implemented federal policy so perhaps that should not be a surprise.

An op-ed in the same edition of the Times by several education experts, Helen Ladd from Duke and Edward Fiske formerly the Times education editor, underscores the same points. The gut grabber: “The Occupy movement has catalyzed rising anxiety over income inequality; we desperately need a similar reminder of the relationship between economic advantage and student performance.” Hello!

In their argument they cite a new study that continues to find a huge achievement gap between high-and low-income children over the last 50 years that is even greater that the gaps created by race. In fact one of the advantages the military seems to enjoy is the ability to press down those gaps in their classrooms where the differences are a matter of grade, not of class. Ladd and Fiske note that nothing in Leave No Child Behind recognizes this reality, which is another reason for its abysmal failure under both the Bush and now the Obama Administrations, which continue to pretend to be income and color blind while children suffer without remediation.

Interestingly, the United States military has no choice. They have to produce the kind of citizens they want to fill uniforms in the future, and keep happy the ones that are wearing them now, none of which seems to matter much to too many administrators in their flight to fashion and away from the children. That’s their business.

The experts argue that it’s a question of morality for the country and past time citizens and their leaders faced up to the challenge.

Good luck with that. The military seems to know that it has a job to do and there are consequences to failure. For the rest of us, morality might be the question, but that turns out to be one of the easies questions American citizens have to ignore.

Anna Hazare and the Gandhian Moment

dine — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:48:11 +0000

New Orleans Walking downstairs in the predawn there was the smell of smoke in the air. It smelled exactly like a Delhi morning where the acrid dawn is a daily greeting. Something must be burning on the bayous. It was enough of a sign that it must be time to talk about Anna Hazare and his widely watched hunger strike now on its 9^th day as he and his followers, supported no doubt by millions, press for their version of an anti-corruption bill now pending before the Indian Parliament.

We’ve talked about this before, but to refresh less than religious readers, Hazare several months ago in a similar maneuver managed to break a logjam in the Parliament with such Gandhian tactics campaigning for the Lokpal, a special appointive commission (where he won a determined veto on many members) that was designed to root out corruption, which is universally acknowledged as epidemic at all levels of Indian society. The government has drug its feet, as governments tend to do, and the final form of the measure is still up for grabs. Hazare and his people have seized the moment by trying to expand the scope of the Lokpal to include the judiciary and other executive branches and to make the body even more autonomous, creating a vast national bureaucracy, which would have full scope to pursue corruption with accountability to no one.

Regardless of the merits of Hazare’s proposal, much of which is avowedly undemocratic and reeks of the same kind of blue-ribbon “goo-goo” reformist efforts we see rise from time (and even now) where self-proclaimed reformers try to seize powers from elected leaders and citizens on the arrogant presumption of their greater “expertise,” education, investment or whatever, both the old and new tactics Hazare and Team Anna, as they call themselves, are bringing to the fight are worth a good, hard look. Hazare has also had a huge ally in a fumbling government that has done him the great favor of being even more autocratic and undemocratic than his proposal and preemptively arrested him, igniting the current crisis, fearing the unrest that his early announcement of a hunger strike until death would bring.

No small amount of Hazare’s appeal has come from his and others self-identification with Mahatma Gandhi or what the Hindustan Times calls “Gandhi Lite” arguing that Hazare is Gandhi in style (dressing, fasting, speaking), but otherwise off the game. Regardless, he has the government in a pickle, which no amount of disparagement can conceal. They already lost the initiative with his original arrest. They cannot allow him to die without concession, so Parliamentary and governmental leaders are going to have to make some kind of deal now, whether they like it or not, and likely will have to do in another week or so as the prospect of a “fast to the death” becomes more likely to be fatal.

All of this is also even more interesting since I have currently been reading Joseph Lelyveld’s incisive recent book about Gandhi, Great Soul, which ironically is also “banned in India” not because it is different from the usual, hagiography but reportedly for the passages that raise questions about Gandhi’s sexuality and relationships with men. Actually reading the book, those sections are the least interesting parts of Lelyveld’s analysis especially compared to the discussions of Gandhi’s challenges as an organizer and leader with his dramatic feints to the front and his sudden almost inexplicable retreats to the rear of the movement and his tactical strengths and often strategic weaknesses coupled with his tendency to negotiate agreements that were often fatally weak in substance and detail. All of this pales compared to his strengths which were transcendent as a pure politician commanding, usually autocratically, the majority of Indians with a power that was popular because it was moral and transforming. The fragility of the vessel was nothing compared to the pure clarity and sweetness of the water, quenching the thirst of the people.

Reading Great Soul at the same time as I track the current campaign in India, it often seems to me that perhaps Hazare is more Gandhian that his supporters and his critics would want to concede. Both seem to be astute tacticians with a razor sharp sense of the moment. Both are untroubled by any pretense of accountability, democracy, or anything less than their own superior sense of the “rightness” of their position. Both had negotiated agreements with power that were often inadequate, which is one of the reasons Hazare is once more fasting, and both were not immune from making wildly impractical proposals often more symbolic than that substantial. Gandhi’s sense of the symbol and his range of issues, campaigns, targets, and ambitions both personally and politically, make anyone else, and certainly Hazare, dwarfs in comparison.

Nonetheless, taken all together, it would be crazy to bet against them on the final outcome of any campaign.

Money Giving Charters a Leg Up on Public Schools

dine — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:14:34 +0000

New Orleans Ideologues with chips on their shoulders about the nation’s public school systems seem committed to doing everything possible to make sure there’s no level playing field to allow comparison of charter school performance as opposed to regular school district performances.

Reading the hometown paper in New Orleans, there was an item a week ago about $28 Million over the next 5 years going largely to the KIPP and First Line charter networks with $2.5 Million the first year. This means something in New Orleans since the Katrina disaster allowed policy makers and public school system haters to use our city as ground zero in the remaking of a school system with charters. KIPP is taking over Fredrick Douglass High School across the street from me, one grade at a time. I watched some Saturday’s ago as they held a “fair” in the yard past the McCarty Square Arch to try to juice up recruitment with games, pizza, and whatnot. You can really do some nice things, if you have the money and no limits on how to use it. The folks giving the money to the charters claimed that they did so because the “test scores” seem to be improving more rapidly in the KIPP charters than in the Recovery School District. The reports I have seen often contradicted this claim, but hey….

A national study by Western Michigan University researchers found that KIPP received significantly “more taxpayer dollars per student than regular public schools…” and “also noted that KIPP receives substantial amounts of private philanthropic money.” I’ve met some of the founders of the KIPP network. We invited one from Houston to come over and speak to the entire assembled family of ACORN organizers four or five years ago. People were skeptical, pushed him hard on their anti-unionism, but no one questioned his passion or his sincerity. I think he would be the first to admit that it’s a world easier to run 99 schools in 20 states from here and there than the tens of thousands of schools that make up the public charge of free education in America.

It also helps if you can spend more money. The Western Michigan researchers found a 10% difference per pupil at the KIPP schools with a spread of $12,000 to $11,000 over public and a $3000 spread over other charters and when they estimated the private donor largesse then it bumped up another $5000 over that which meant that a KIPP school would have almost 50% more to spend per pupil that a regular public school. Wow! The KIPP people denied all of that, though reading the Times-Picayune, I had trouble believing them frankly, and furthermore, it’s not as if the KIPP network or any charter operation is as transparent as elected school board having to account for the millage are required to be.

Charters are getting a big bounce in resources and promo, but despite the unfair competition in resources and even performance, they still have a lot more to prove to establish that they are worth the money and are producing 50% better with their 50% advantage. We need to be careful before buying this bridge across the Mississippi.

Korogocho, Education, and the Bursary Campaign

dine — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:05:48 +0000

Raising the ACORN flag in the office

Nairobi The ACORN Kenya community organizers, Sammy Ndirangu and David Musungu, met Judy Duncan, head organizer of ACORN Canada, Drummond Pike formerly of Tides and now colleague at Paladin Partners, and me just outside of the Korogocho mega-slum at 350,000 people, the 2^nd largest in Nairobi after the more famous Kibera. We were to meet a number of the officers and committee members representing the three or four of the “villages” where we had organized 700 family members over the last almost two years. They wanted to show us their new office for ACORN Kenya and had a good day planned out for us to see the changes in the community and to more thoroughly understand the crisis in education they faced and the progress of the Bursary Campaign we had designed to impact it when we were all last together.

children at the formal, public primary school

Quickly with formalities over and the flag “raised” in the new office, our swelling numbers (eventually we were joined by 23 of the ACORN members on our rounds during the day) started walking the dusty streets. Something was immediately new even before we made it to the first stop, one of the two grade 1 through 8 public primary schools in the area, and that was that the road paving had been completed and expanded through a joint project of the Italian and Kenyan governments. It made a difference though the downside was hard to avoid since several hundred families had been displaced in the process with only four days notice.

The school’s attendance was only 100 students. Meeting with the assistant principal there was a long and excellent discussion of the bursary campaign. It had made a difference and where forms for the governmental funds that paid the school fees to secondary school from the bursary fund were formerly a closed and opaque process governed by favouritism, politics, and special deals, the campaign had forced openness and free distribution of the forms which led to 40 children winning the scholarships to secondary schools. Even so, the principal noted many children even in the free primary school were hard press to come up with books, uniforms, and the money for the required meals. One door was opening, while others were closing.

classroom at one of the informal school

We also visited two “informal” primary schools where children were sent by the parents when the “interviews” did not successfully get their children into one of the two public primary schools for a population of 350,000!?! Where the young seemed everywhere?!? These were good spirited and well meaning affairs where many of our members were also very active, but the conditions were rudimentary at best, if not haphazard. There were some 40 odd informal primary schools in Korogocho, so this was the “normal” for education, and after that nothing.

One of the highlights was meeting the mother of one of the campaign “winners,” as she sold rice along the road in Kusuvu village. She proudly took us to her home. Her daughter had stayed out of school for a year and now with the bursary funds was attending secondary school at 18 years old, and very happy.

We were winning and victory was sweet for the leaders, but as much as the road was paved, it seemed it stretch on as one rough patch after another for miles into the future with many holes to fill and rough spots to smooth before one could really feel that the children of Korogocho had a real chance at education.

Education is Not Reducing Poverty

dine — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:17:29 +0000

New Orleans Anytime there’s an article with a headline that claims there is “hope for the world’s poorest” and the author is someone as sturdy as New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, my fingers are crossed and my eyes are flying. In this case he was touting a new book and argument by a British economist based in the US:

“In a new book called “Getting Better,” Charles Kenny — a British development economist based in Washington — argues that the answer is absolutely not. Life in much of Africa and in most of the impoverished world has improved at an unprecedented clip in recent decades, even if economic growth hasn’t.

“The biggest success of development,” he writes, “has not been making people richer but, rather, has been making the things that really matter — things like health and education — cheaper and more widely available.””

Kenny buttresses his argument by looking country-by-country at the dramatically increased life expectancy and literacy rates throughout Africa and other areas. Indeed this is very good news.

Unfortunately the other side of the coin that cannot be ignored is how frightfully poor the vast majority of these people are and the lack of dramatic progress in these areas.

Leonhardt and Kenny are both hopeful, but as I have often quoted, “hope is not a plan,” and the truth seems to be that the liberal arguments for example that education will translate into both poverty reduction and increased democracy seem based on nothing that might resemble the facts and figures. Leonhardt quotes Kenny directly:

“The most hopeful part of Mr. Kenny’s hopeful message is that progress in health, education and human rights may ultimately bring economic progress as well. He is cautious on this point, noting that economists have failed time and time again to come up with consistent explanations for economic growth.”

It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that it is time (past time?) to more directly address the severe economic plight of the poor in terms of jobs and income, rather than continuing to pretend that hope, prayer, and time alone will do enough. It’s good news that people are living longer and smarter, but it is time for us to get wise about giving people enough resources to really make progress for themselves and their family.

Rave Reviews for ACORN International in Dharavi

dine — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:55:03 +0000

From the National Geographic article featuring ACORN International ragpickers.

From National Geographic Article

Mumbai Vinod Shetty, ACORN India’s Director, and I had been meeting for hours along Juhu Road at the Sip ‘N Munch going through our work list of what needed to be done on campaigns around remittances, the Commonwealth Games, and multi-national food contractors and their labor law violations. We had discussed the great progress of our Dharavi recycling center. He had told me the good news that Joseph Campana’s project for us of producing a book that would support our Dharavi work finally had a publisher in Harper-Collins-India. We had talked about the prospects for acquiring a set of scales and a crushing machine to be able to raise the prices for our plastic recycling and increase our waste pickers wages. We had checked the dates and filings on our paperwork for the ACORN Foundation (India). We had discussed our efforts to repackage and sell products being produced in Dharavi for Diwali and other festival dates to our school recycling partners like Eco-Mundial and the American School. We had taken notes for reports owed to our friends at BCGEU and SEIU. There were a lot of items ticked off the list.

Finally at that point Vinod pulled out a staff of glossy magazines and newspapers with almost a blush. The magazines ran the gamut. One was the Clean India Journal which focused on environmental progress for companies, contractors, and others in India and featured our work in September in a piece called, “Waste Matters for Green Workers” about our ragpicker organization in Dharavi. Another in a the “green” issue of an upscale fashion monthly called Jade and style magazine was entitled “Green Heroes: Ragpickers or City Savers?” (Access both on our website at www.acorninternational.org) Later he forwarded me another piece published on several websites by a Londoner which was not quite as gushing but referred to our ragpickers as “invisbile heroes” in http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/3790-Invisible-heroes-of-Dharavi. An article distributed for school children in a “weekly reader” style publication called Robin Age also contained a recent feature.

Looking quickly, the Jade piece by Sugatha Menon ended with the lines:

Ragpickers in the Dharvi Project

As I write this story, a message pops
in my mailbox, the US ambassador
to India is visiting Acorn’s waste
segregation center today… paucity of
time doesn’t permit me to go for the
event, but I sincerely wish for many more
mighty oaks for this Acorn.

Wow! Feeling the love in Bombay! What a pleasure to read for a beaten down veteran of the USA based searches like me which are dominated by right wing zealots, conspiratorialists, and general haterators. Why doesn’t Google search worldwide for me?!?

Reading the Clean India Journal, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. A straightforward and accurate overview caught my eye:

Laxmi and several others form the recycling clan of Dharavi. And, they are all part of Acorn Foundation (India), Mumbai, a registered charity trust affiliated to Acorn International or the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now. Acorn International is a community based NGO working in 12 countries across the world. It has been fighting on issues like right to affordable housing, living wages, water, sanitation, education and healthcare in India. One of their projects – the Dharavi Project – Acorn aims to organise and train the ragpickers in scientific methods of waste handling, segregation and recycling. Besides Mumbai, the organisation also works to improve the lives of the ragpickers in cities like Delhi and Bangalore.

In the “Invisible Heroes” piece the last paragraphs are equally powerful by Delhi based Anna da Costa:

like many countries, especially in the developed world, India already has a skilled recycling and sorting workforce in place. “India’s recycling industry has the expertise and capacity to scale massively, but it needs to be properly valued, formalised and supported,” said Shetty as we sat in his Mumbai office. There are signs of change, “But these need to be magnified.”
I looked down at Shetty’s desk where a series of small ID cards were carefully laid out, identifying recyclers as members of the “Dharavi project”. An image of a young boy, who could not have been more than nine years old, gazed back at me, accompanied by a name in bold type: “Sameer”. For Sameer, this card is the difference between invisibility and visibility, anonymity and belonging. For India, it is a step on the long road to tackling the enormous waste challenge, and creating dignified, green jobs.

One article had such a “crush” line about Vinod that he would have to be careful showing his wife the piece.

It was great praise and a long way from building power, but as we rose it felt like progress in Mumbai for our rag pickers in this huge world capital of the poor.

The $100,000 Plus Head Start Teacher?

jstuart — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:17:51 +0000

New Orleans I admit a hot headline on the front page of the New York Times about paying kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year absolutely caught my eye!

The back story was straightforward. A huge study under Project Star in Tennessee tracked 12,000 children in that state. The study was trying to determine whether or not class size effected a series of educational and life outcomes. A bunch of Harvard economists analyzed the results and came up with some unexpected conclusions. The main determining factor in significantly improving adult prospects for citizen wealth was whether or not the child had a good kindergarten experience. If they did: cha-ching! By 27 years old they would be making another $100 per month, $1200 a year, and so forth.

The “money shot” in the article is below:

“Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.”

Since I’m obsessed (as we all should be!) with what it takes to create citizen wealth for lower income families, my first thought was simple. If we now know what a kindergarten teacher might be worth, then what is a Head Start teacher worth for lower income families?!?

Admittedly, we have lots of horses in this race since Local 100 United Labor Unions represents Head Start teachers with several companies in Houston, Shreveport, and Little Rock, but if kindergarten teachers make that big a difference, logically it seems that early childhood education in programs like Head Start may be more powerful than we had imagined.

Study that, professors, and let’s see if we can’t make a difference for low-and-moderate income families!

And their beleaguered and underpaid teachers!!

Democratic Accountability in School Boards

jstuart — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:13:44 +0000

New Orleans In New Orleans we have seen the future of schools under a district-wide “choice” system and a charter school dominated program, and it is blatantly undemocratic and unaccountable. That’s bad news. Add to that the fact that the schools don’t perform better either by most measures, and we are talking about a school “reform” tragedy in the making.

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!