Charters on the shelf

The New Orleans quasi-privatized charter school system is often rationalized on the premise that it is "giving parents choices."  Charter advocates argue that introducing a kind of "free market" competition scheme to the school system will improve the overall quality of results.   Like a lot of right wing nonsense, this silly argument is absurd enough on its face that we shouldn't have to waste our time refuting it. So we won't. There are enough professional journalists around now to disingenuously "both sides" all manner of bad faith assertions as it is. We're content just to let bullshit be bullshit.

Especially when the bullshitters don't actually put their own bullshit into practice.  Take the Orleans Parish School Board "NOLA Public Schools" for example. Increasingly it looks like they are offering parents a chance to choose KIPP, or KIPP, or maybe even KIPP.

It’s no secret KIPP New Orleans Schools enrolls a significant portion of the city’s public school students. The charter school network currently manages seven schools at eight campuses. And with the addition of John F. Kennedy High School next summer, KIPP is poised to enroll nearly 14 percent of NOLA Public Schools students, just below the district’s enrollment cap.

Even that "cap" is a bit of a fudge considering that this story also tells us four largest charter operators (KIPP, InspireNOLA Charter Schools and FirstLine Schools) enroll 29 percent of K-12 public school students.  Also it sounds like the school board might be fine with lifting it whenever they see fit.

Even with an expanded Booker T. Washington and the soon-to-be-added Kennedy, both KIPP and the district say KIPP is not projected to exceed 15 percent this year or next. But if it did, the policy provides a rather simple remedy: Two-thirds of the school board must vote to change the limit. The district superintendent may also suspend the limit — for one year — “when it is determined that emergency or exigent conditions exist which necessitate the creation of additional capacity in the system.”

The question is how big the district and the Orleans Parish School Board will allow a single network to become.

In fact, there's even a fast-track mechanism for helping operators expand their territory. It's even got a catchy name.

KIPP New Orleans, the local arm of the national charter school nonprofit group, is the biggest of all of them. It’s about to add hundreds of Kennedy students, and it’s doing that without having had to apply for a new charter to run the school. KIPP is one of several operators who have been given preapproved, but unassigned, charter contracts that can be used any time a school site becomes available.

“We called them ‘charters on the shelf,’ ” former Recover School District Superintendent Patrick Dobard said in a phone interview.

The other accelerating factor has to do with the Superintendent's authority to grant new charters in the first place.  Even when he isn't pulling something "off the shelf" for a sitting operator, Henderson Lewis is almost entirely unchecked in his power to decide who gets what.

The board doesn’t have to take a vote on charter approvals or renewals anymore. NOLA Public Schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. makes a recommendation to the board. If after one month the board doesn’t override him with a two-thirds vote, it stands. (That was a result of Act 91, the law that ushered in the return of RSD schools back to NOLA Public Schools’ control in the summer of 2018.)

That law applies to shelf charters as well as charter applicants applying to run a specific school. And placing an operator with a shelf charter into a building is not subject to a board vote.

Activist groups, such as the Erase The Board Coalition,  seeking to scrap the charter system and restore public education in New Orleans have identified repealing Act 91 as a major priority.  That issue has become a key distinguishing factor between candidates for BESE and for seats in the Louisiana Legislature on your October 12 ballot. (Early voting continues today and tomorrow.)  You can read up on many of those candidates and their positions here.  Unfortunately, in more than a few of those races, the selection still comes down to one pro-charter candidate or another.  But anyone observing the Orleans Parish schools will already be familiar with that kind of "choice" by now.