"Unambiguous success"

Interesting word choice as Uptownmessenger lays out Ben Kleban's resume here. Kleban, who is the founder of New Orleans College Prep charter network, qualified to run for Orleans Parsish School Board this week.

New Orleans College Prep received the charter for Sylvanie Williams Elementary School in 2009, followed by Walter L. Cohen High School in 2011 and then Lawrence Crocker Elementary in 2012, and now is expecting a total of more than 1,500 students this year across its Uptown campuses. Cohen has been the network’s most unambiguous success, rising from one of the lowest-rated failing schools in the city to a B school performance score last year and boasting a 100-percent college-acceptance rate for graduates three years in a row.

The article doesn't mention that just a couple years ago the "unambiguous success" was the site of a student protest against the controversial firings of teachers and staff during the transition to College Prep's management. Maybe that alone doesn't throw a whole lot of ambiguity into Cohen's performance score. But it is a sign that such metrics may not provide us with the only gauge on a school's "success." This was the topic of Andre Perry's address to the Rising Tide conference a few short years back.

Standardized test scores may be rising in the city’s public schools, but those gains on paper do not translate into any meaningful improvements in the lives of the city’s poorest students, said former New Orleans education official and activist Dr. Andre Perry. Challenging school reformers’ beliefs that a wholesale restructuring of the education system will create a better society, Perry added that all social conditions that plague New Orleans’ poor and African-American neighborhoods still persist even after 10 years of school reforms.

The best first step the city can take to real improvements for the African-American community, Perry said, is to begin searching for a way to reconcile with the thousands of teachers who were wrongfully fired after Hurricane Katrina.

This fall's OPSB election is important. It happens just as the local school board prepares to accept control over the vast majority of the system back from the state run RSD. Here's who has qualified so far.  There are a lot of administrative voices in there. It would be nice to see more candidates who represent teachers and parents get involved too. 

Hey I met EduShyster today

Just sort of barged in on an interview she was conducting at a coffee shop. Sorry about that.  But that's what happens when there are celebs in NOLA.  For me, this was sort of like running into Solange at the empanada place.

Here is a different interview she did with Andre Perry this week I wanted to link to, anyway.

Berkshire: One of the things I've noticed during my travels here is that much of the *fierce urgency* seems to have abated. Now you hear calls for patience from reform leaders. What would you like to see them have a fiercer sense of urgency about?

Perry: The muckety mucks of New Orleans had better acknowledge that racism in their own institutions exists. Conscious or unconscious--whatever you choose, I don't care--the result is that there is a lack of inclusion. When we talk about quality, for example, somehow diversity is never included in that conception of quality. It's OK to do all these other things in the name of quality but not hold yourself accountable for being a diverse institution. That's hypocrisy. If this is about finding like-minded people all the time, things will never change. If we're teaching our children anything, it's to show the example of us working with members of other communities. Our example is teaching the children the wrong lesson. The reality is, you can't have quality without diversity. Even from a simplistic political perspective, you don't get buy-in if your schools aren't diverse. Folks ultimately despise you. We have a dearth of Black teachers in the pipeline, and so we have to build capacity. That's the problem. We're not going to erase 40-50 years of educational neglect in a year, even if we really believe and close our eyes real tight. But we can train future teachers now, and commit to building the capacity of local folks at all levels, not just in the classroom.

Of course, it might have been a good idea to not use a disaster as an excuse to fire 7,000 experienced and mostly black teachers.  But even though Perry often sounds like he would agree there, he more often prefers we focus on "moving forward" or whatever.  It can be frustrating. This is a good discussion, though. Read the rest.