Why lie when the facts are bad enough

Every year Joe Bouie tries to nudge us ever so slightly in the direction of untangling the corrupt nightmare system that runs our public schools "like a business."  Every year it fails.  No reason to stop trying, though. 

A state legislator who has a history of criticizing the way New Orleans schools are governed is pushing a bill in the upcoming session that would strip NOLA Public Schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. of his power to close or renew charter schools without an Orleans Parish School Board vote.

State Senator Joseph Bouie Jr. spoke briefly with board members during their meeting Tuesday about the bill, which he has prefiled for the 2021 legislative session beginning next month. Bouie’s bill aims to undo the charter school renewal system established by a state law passed in 2016 that brought the city’s charter schools — most of which had been overseen by the state-run Recovery School District after Hurricane Katrina — back under local control. 

That law, Act 91, gives near unilateral power to the superintendent to decide which nonprofit-run charter schools up for contract renewal with the district will remain open and which ones will close. Under the current system, the board can only overturn Lewis’ recommendation with a two-thirds supermajority vote within one month of a recommendation’s presentation. 

Bouie’s proposal would require board votes on all charter renewals.

One of the principal authors of Act 91 is congressional candidate Karen Carter Peterson who, over the weekend, (just barely) slipped into a runoff against Troy Carter.  During the primary, Carter tried to make hay out of Peterson's relationship with the charter school movement. Those links do exist and voters should consider them during the runoff.  They should also, consider, however, that Troy Carter also supported Act 91 and does not appear to have taken a stand against the charter movement that meaningfully distinguishes him from Peterson. 

On the other hand, at least his attack ad acknowledged the devastating effect the charter movement has had on teachers. Leaving aside the question of his sincerity about that, it matters that it's something Peterson does not talk about unless she is refuting an opponent's accusations. Which is what happens in this article. 

Only days before Saturday’s primary, Karen Carter Peterson is calling foul on Troy Carter for a television ad that slams her and her husband on education matters.

“Troy Carter’s latest attack is a lie,” Peterson, who like Carter is a state senator from New Orleans, said in a statement.

She is correct.  Carter's ad does lie. It cherry picks certain events and compresses their timeline to imply a stronger causal relationship than the viewer would otherwise infer. I'll try to summarize this as clearly as I can.  

In 2004 Peterson sponsored a bill called Act 193 which empowered the state controlled Recovery School District (RSD) to take over so-called failing schools in Orleans Parish. Shortly after Katrina, a second bill (Act 35) enabled the RSD to take all of the schools in Orleans Parish. Peterson voted against this bill. RSD took over 102 of 117 schools and immediately fired 7000 teachers and support staff. This move effectively destroyed the teachers union and gutted what most people considered a core piece of the city's Black middle class at a critical moment. Those teachers, their union, and in many ways the whole city has never really recovered from that. The state then re-made the New Orleans Public Schools according to an experimental model of privatized autonomous charters working with largely non-union labor (although a very small number of charter school staffs have since been organized.) In 2016, Act 91, again, authored by Peterson, returned this reconfigured system to local school board's nominal control but locked the RSD's changes into place.  

Carter's ad presents this story as 1) Peterson voted for Act 193 and then 2) All of the teachers were fired. Obviously that isn't how it happened. In between those events there was a hurricane, a flood, and a thorough takeover of the schools that Peterson voted against. However, it does not get her off the hook for writing and supporting Act 91 which we can see as a validation of all of those events after the fact. She is further implicated by the close involvement of her husband and brother-in-law in the leadership of RSD and Orleans charter schools during this period although Carter's ad also fudges the facts on this so as to make it appear even more sinister. 

Which, again, causes us to question Carter's integrity as much as Peterson's.  The facts are bad enough.  But Carter is as culpable as Peterson for much of the situation being what it is so he has to lie to make it sound even worse. 

Anyway, I'm not sure when Bouie's bill is due up in the session or if Senators Carter and Peterson will be available to vote on it when it does.  The legislative session begins on April 12 and the runoff election is April 24 so it's a real tight window. Which is a shame because we might miss a key moment of truth for both of them.

Here's how you can tell which is not the serious candidate

At a recent Council At-Large forum, Keith Hardie asked candidates an interesting question about the city's "Balkanized" parks management system. 

Keith Hardie, a Carrollton neighborhood activist, reminded the candidates that a proposed property-tax to support the Audubon Institute had failed, in part because voters wanted their tax money to go to a wider range of recreation activities. The city, however, has no unified public parks system — it has individual boards that govern specific properties like Audubon Park, a recreation department, and even a Parks and Parkways department that handles other green spaces.

Would the candidates be in favor of uniting this “Balkanized” collection of agencies, Hardie asked, into a single public parks department like other cities? And would they then support a new property tax dedicated to funding it?

The worst of those individual boards serve as little semi-private fiefdoms people like Ron Foreman use to turn public subsidies into six figure salaries. The NORDC model introduced by Landrieu also engenders a kind of territorial jealousy over the best use of amenities that tends to favor friends wealthier interests and commercial partners. There are other concerns but Hardie's question was primarily about the most equitable use of public resources.  Judging from the answers only Joseph Bouie seemed to understand this.

What the parks and the schools have in common, said State Rep. Joe Bouie, is that both have suffered from the post-Katrina trend of “privatizing” governmental services — through chartering the local schools to individual nonprofit boards or outsourcing the parks to the New Orleans Recreation Department Commission.

“We are actually privatizing almost all of our public assets. I have serious concerns about that … to take the community’s voice out of their tax dollars,” Bouie said, noting that the school were open to more neighborhood events before charters took them over. “Prior to the privatization of our schools, that’s how we used the schools.”

Helena Moreno had actually brought up the schools first but in a slightly different sense than how Bouie means it.  She suggested more "partnerships" between schools and parks. That's fine if she means it the way Bouie does when he says school facilities can host community events sometimes. But, in her version, the school facilities and the "open to the public" parks facilities really ought to be the same thing. That's a less good thought. 

To be clear, though, her answer wasn't bad. It was just incomplete. Only Bouie talked about the privatization problem.  Which means, of course, he is not the serious candidate in this race.

And they're off

Qualifying ended just this past Friday. Candidates in municipal elections sure haven't wasted any time getting their signs up in time for your morning commute. These were all up along Broad St and St. Bernard Avenue Monday morning.







Not to be outdone by any of these people, Mitch Landrieu launched his first TV ad Sunday afternoon at the end of the first quarter of Saints-Rams game. The Saints at that point were trailing 0-14 thanks to two Drew Brees interceptions and some exceptionally poor tackling on defense.  Things would only go downhill from there. Not exactly the opportune moment to pop in with a, "This Quarter Of Saints Football Sponsored By Mitch Landrieu For Mayor" but it's a risk you run when you buy that slot. Well, that and the risk that voters will think you are running against Ronnie Lamarque.

It didn't help matters that Mitch's ad did something Saints fans have been screaming for the networks who carry Saints games to stop doing since before Landrieu even took office. It leaned heavily on imagery from the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans.

Set to a gospel version of the last stanza of Bob Dylan's "Pressing On," the one-minute ad juxtaposes photos of inundated landmarks and neighborhoods, shortly after Hurricane Katrina, with their stages of recovery today. There are no spoken words, but it ends with the words "Let's Keep It Going" and Landrieu's mantra of "One Team" flashing on the screen.

The good news about this spot is that it is ripe for parody. 

One can imagine an ad set to "Ain't Dere No More" where people hold up photos of what used to be wherever all the new Walgreens and Dollar Stores are. 

Or we could hold up a photo of some musicians on a corner in front of that same corner where a code enforcement officer waives a decibel meter at us.

Or we could stand on Jackson Avenue and hold up the asking price of the Da Fresh Seafood Market.

But late last week, The Lens found the store shuttered and posted with “for sale” signs. The 1,000 square-foot building is on the market for $339,000.

In August 2012, the Fresh Food Retail Initiative loaned Kariker $117,000 — $17,550 of which was forgivable, according to the mortgage — to open DaFresh Seafood.

The store was the first beneficiary of the program, which has since loaned more than $2 million for projects including a Whole Foods in Mid-City and the reopening of the Circle Food Store in the Seventh Ward.

FFRI is a grant program designed to bring grocers into so-called "food deserts"; poorer neighborhoods without ready access to fresh healthy groceries. In practice, it's turning out to be just seed money for real estate flipping.

Or maybe we could shoot one in the Quarter where we hold a photo of Brennan's in front of a photo of a shuttered Brennan's in front of another photo of Brennan's while unpaid Brennan's employees wait patiently in the background.

That one is my favorite. More than any of these other images, in illustrates the static economic, social and political hierarchy of the city despite its many celebrated but superficial "signs of progress."