New Orleans In the time of tight public budgets at every level in the uneven recovery from the recession, especially in distressed communities, little is more contentious than the funding formula and the allocation of scarce resources in public schools. There may be few areas in the country where the issue is more weighted than …
Tag: Recovery School District
Euphemisms and Rationalizations are No Substitute for School Board Elections
New Orleans Years ago New Orleans and many parts of Louisiana were referred to by various observers as “banana republics,” meaning corrupt empires run by demagogues, contemptuous of their citizens and normal democratic process. Some would argue those were just the days of Huey Long, Leander Perez, and their ilk, bigger and badder than life. …
Steve Barr’s Charter School “Fake” Reality Show Outrages New Orleans Community
New Orleans This New Orleans high school on elegant Esplanade Avenue is called “John Mac,” short for John McDonogh High School. This was my “district” high school as a teenager in New Orleans. The imposing building isn’t two miles from Fair Grinds Coffeehouse, City Park, and Bayou St. John. But, somehow in the televised …
Democracy and Revenue: Where the New Orleans Autonomous Charter School Model Breaks Down
New Orleans New Orleans continues, past any notion of reality, to be touted as a model example of educational reform because of the huge number of charter schools, mostly run by separate and independent operators. There are many problems with this so-called model, but a huge, glaring deficiency has been the usurpation of any democratic, …
Charter Schools “Experiment” Still at Odds with Law and Democracy
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 …