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.