Separate but equal grifting

Imagine your critique of the New Orleans Public Schools is that our balkanized model dependent on private fundraising through shady non-profits results in systemic racial inequity.

The campaign seeks in part to bring attention to a report, "Black Brilliance: Field Notes on Black Education in New Orleans," that spans topics ranging from the history of New Orleans public schools to systemic racism, which authors say is perpetuated in the charter school system.

This is all correct, by the way. So, pretty good so far.  The charterization con has not only deliberately established a school system segregated by race and class. It also just as deliberately ripped the heart out of the city's pre-Katrina Black middle class through the mass firing of teachers. The legacy of this is also acknowledged by the group in this article. 

Black educators make up 53% of the teacher workforce in NOLA Public Schools, down significantly from the 71% proportion in place prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a study by another nonprofit, New Schools for New Orleans, found. African American students comprise nearly 80% of the system's enrollment, according to the Louisiana Department of Education.

So the problem is pretty clear.  New Orleans's post-Katrina educational landscape is unfair, elitist, and racist because it is controlled by undemocratic private "philanthropy" networks.  If you are someone who has correctly identified this problem, then why is your proposed solution just to create a different undemocratic private philanthropy network? 

The report concluded that more resources should go to Black-governed and Black-led schools, and more CEO, principal or other leadership roles should be filled by Black men and women. It demands district and school leaders address a "standardization of whiteness" in curricula and hiring and promotion practices, and asks for an audit of charter school grants and other funding to ensure more equity.

"The truth of the matter is no school here in New Orleans is doing an excellent job educating children off MFP alone -- it’s just not enough money," Adrinda Kelly, the executive director of BE NOLA, said about the state's per-pupil funding system.

New Orleans is a unique district because it gives a lot of autonomy to the individual charters, which have their own leadership structures, are in charge of their own curricula, and have the ability to collect grants and fundraise to bolster budgets outside of the per-pupil funding received from the state and local tax dollars.

The MFP is not enough. In other words, Louisiana's political leaders have deliberately left the schools underfunded and therefore open to predation by the non-profit industrial complex.  A truly equitable and democratic response to that would be to fix that problem in particular and demand the universal public education that every child in the state is entitled to.  Instead, these individuals have decided to just go off and create their own separate privatized model.  That's no way to deliver a just and equitable school system. But, really, is that so important as long as we have a few "Black-led" charter organizations to point to in consolation?  The corporate sponsors seem to think so.

So far behind we're ahead or vice versa

Congratulations to New Orleans on becoming the first city in the US to have zero public education anymore.

July 1 is important for the school district. It’s the day charter school contracts begin and also marks the start of the fiscal year. One year ago, the city’s RSD charters all transferred back to the local school district’s oversight. That nearly doubled the size of the district. 

Last year, the district was on track to have only one traditional school: McDonogh 35. But it ended up taking over two struggling elementary charter schools and running them directly instead.

So remember back in 2016 when we were talking about how important the OPSB election would be that year specifically because the RSD hand over and the selection of a new superintendent would be  a major pivot point in the direction of the school system?  And remember also how nobody gave enough of a shit to run for hardly any of those seats besides pro-charter grifters?

Well, here is what happened. Nobody could have predicted it.

And as usual New Orleans is well behind the curve. We've gone all in on the privatization model at precisely the time the political winds have finally begun to blow in the other direction. With some notable exceptions, the Democratic Presidential candidates this year, led by Bernie Sanders, have taken on a decidedly more anti-charter stance this year than in their recent past. 

But this is a hard-headed city in a lot of ways and there are few better examples of its hard-headedness is its commitment to segregated schools via any means possible. And make no mistake about it charter schools are segregated schools.  If it seemed to the rest of the country that our city lay for a time at the cutting edge of "school reform," it is only because our hard-headedness happened to align with the fad for a while.  

Anyway there is another OPSB election coming next year.  Will New Orleans take that opportunity to shift direction away from its long standing tradition just because the national politics have changed a bit? Don't bet on it.

Maybe stop calling the cops on your students

One could argue this is all part of preparing kids for life in the over-policed future they're graduating into but let's maybe not lean into that if we can help it.  Here's Jarvis Deberry last week.

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping revelation in the press release is the claim that the students were not only warned not to go through with their planned prank, but that they were specifically warned that the police had been made aware of their plans.

What?

Some adult from Sophie B. Wright better step forward to say that they thought the students were planning something more nefarious because any adult who warns an understaffed New Orleans Police Department that teenagers are about to have a water fight isn’t mature enough to be watching children.

Over the last year, social media feeds have been full of stories of busybodies who got stuck with alliterative nicknames after summoning the police for trifling reasons. In most, if not all, of those cases, the tattletale has been white. Barbecue Becky reported a black man using a charcoal grill in a restricted area in a park. Permit Patty reported an 8-year-old black girl selling bottled water on the sidewalk without a permit. Coupon Carl accused a black woman, wrongly, of trying to use a counterfeit coupon at the drugstore. 

Clark is black, as are 91 percent of Sophie B. Wright’s students, but if she called the police to say that this particular prank was imminent, we might have to call her Water Fight Wanda, Super Soaker Sally or Water Balloon Beulah.

Jarvis also points out Clark has a history of bullying students in particularly cruel ways.  Here is a story from a few years back where she held homeless students out of class because their uniforms weren't monogrammed.

Anyway, yesterday the school rescinded the suspensions after a week or so of bad publicity. It looks like they don't get to go to graduation, though. That's harsh but it's not unheard of in the context of most school disciplinary policies regarding stuff like this. What is disturbing is the impulse to call the cops on students. They really have no place in any of this.  But we do love to be policed more and more so it's hard to be surprised when something like this happens.

Oh also here is something else to note.

Wright school attorney Tracie Washington Tuesday told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune that the administration Monday night received notice via a third party email that attorneys with the Southern Poverty Law Center had been engaged as counsel for the students to contest the validity of Tuesday’s proceedings.

When Tracie Washington isn't vigorously lobbying to turn the city's housing stock into Airbnbs, she's defending a charter school that calls the cops on kids.  Makes sense.

Will we ever sophisticate up the corruption?

I feel like we're never gonna live up to Robert Cerasoli's one time aspirations.  In fact, the rest of the country is doing stupider and stupider corruption to catch up with us. It was supposed to be the other way around. Anyway, our home grown grifters are as dumb as they ever were.

Auditors were also not given five requested contracts to see whether the nonprofit had followed the Louisiana Public Bid Law, nor did they receive board meeting minutes to show if the contracts were approved by the board.

The group’s board president, Rev. Charles Southall III spent $1,514 on meals at restaurants in New Orleans and Baton Rouge in six months starting in July 2016. This year, auditors wrote that the school’s accounting policies and procedures manual “does not contain any policies on credit card control, allowable business use, documentation requirements, required approvers or monitoring credit card usage.”

Southall did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

When it came to federal funding, auditors found the group “incurred significant operating losses” last school year. That wasn’t because those grants were cut but because the school wasn’t keeping up with its federal reimbursement paperwork.

“The school was not sending in budget revisions so their federal reimbursements were delayed,” Cryer said. “But because there is no 2019 year then that amount is going to be in question whether they’d get the reimbursement.”

The school was allowed to carry over approximately $164,000 in unused federal reimbursements from last year to this year, but it’s unclear how much of that was used.

Choices for some but no choice for most

Among the many positives to come out of the LA teachers' victory last week is it shows we're finally moving into a phase where the pushback against school privatization is organized, is able to articulate what's at stake, and is learning how to win even when all the money in the world is aligned in the other direction.

L.A. is the biggest U.S. school district with an elected school board. (The biggest district, New York City, and third-biggest, Chicago, are both governed by mayoral appointees.)

Year after year, its school board elections have broken spending records. Corporate education reformers spent $13 million in the last election, most of it coming from the foundations of the Walton family (the owners of Walmart) and Eli Broad, two of the biggest spenders nationally in support of charter schools, vouchers, and privatization.

That money was enough to win them a majority of the seats on the school board. And after the previous superintendent resigned early last year for health reasons, that majority handpicked a superintendent, Beutner.

But as it turned out, a bought and paid for board and superintendent weren’t as powerful as a good old-fashioned strike.

Right leaning capitalist megadonors have been pouring more money into local politics, and particularly into local school board races across the country at record levels.  And the money has had a tangible  impact on policy formation.

In 2016, the Orleans Parish School Board election was of major consequence.  This would be the board to take full control of the schools back from the state and choose a new superintendent.  Everyone was aware going in that major policy choices were on the table at this time.   It was the perfect moment to have a public debate about the effects of charterizaton and put it to voters to determine the philosophy going forward.

But, strangely, very few people stepped up to run for the board that year.  In fact, four of the seven seats were uncontested.   People in New Orleans care a great deal about the school system.  Why so little energy behind these crucial elections?  Well, huge piles  of money have a way of squashing grass roots campaigns.

But Karran Harper Royal, an education activist who ran against Usdin and lost in 2012, said critics of Usdin, at least, might have been scared off by her fundraising muscle. Along with Jacobs, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and former Time magazine editor and author Walter Isaacson were among a lengthy list of contributors to Usdin’s unprecedented $150,000 campaign haul four years ago.

Royal raised close to $13,000.

“Those folks who were in power, the charter school movement, they have lined their ducks up in a row,” said Royal, who has been critical of charters. “For the everyday person, that’s an insurmountable hill to climb, particularly because of the amount of money in the race.”

This is how oligarchic systems run, unfortunately.  The billionaires just need to push a few buttons and they set the parameters of accepted policy debate in public forums all across the country.   It takes a lot of organizing and base building work to overcome that.  It has taken the teachers a very long time to get  to where they are now.  And, keep in mind, where they are is they're still badly outgunned.  But they're starting to make their case. The charter movement is an attack on the very notion of education as a public good. 

Latona teachers I spoke with described competition from surrounding charter schools as an existential threat to their school and an undermining influence on the public system.

“Charter schools are popping up everywhere and siphoning money and taking away students from our public school,” said King.

“I’ve had a lot of friends teach at charters,” said Linda Butala, an English language and Title I coordinator. “These schools often mean well. But charters have become another level of haves and have-nots in our system.”

The “haves” these teachers referred to are the “more savvy” parents who take advantage of what many charters offer, including smaller class sizes and newer resources and technology.

The disparity is especially acute when the charter is co-located on the same campus as an existing public school. Traci Rustin, a second-grade teacher, recalled that at a previous school where she worked, the charter co-located on the campus “had much fewer teachers and students of color.” The charter students had more abundant and newer technology, the school lunches were more nutritious, and the classroom supplies were up-to-date. And when students returned to the public school when the charter “didn’t work out,” the new technology and resources, along with the funding that had left her school, didn’t transfer back.

“In neighborhoods that are more racially homogeneous,” explained Rustin, “you see more well-abled children in the charter. You see a two-tier system going on.”

"School choice" is really about offering those with means to navigate the choices, a chance to opt into a higher tier all the while bleeding resources away from those left behind. It is an institutional reification of privileges a true public education system should be working to level out. The billionaires have spent a lot of money trying to convince people to buy in to a school system that is segregated by design.  

Teachers and parents in New Orleans may be starting to make their case against privatized education as well.  Here is a story about the Hynes Charter school's preferred enrollment "partnership" with UNO. The scheme would bake in a special privilege for families of UNO employees.

"We don't have enough well performing schools that don't have selective admission," Kevin Griffin-Clark said.

Kevn Griffin-Clark is a member of "Erase the Board," a group of parents and community members who want the Orleans Parish School Board to run schools directly and not as charters.

"It's a huge travesty where you say that kids-parents have 'school choice,' but there's no choice whatsoever when I'm choosing five failing schools and then there's politicians or someone that works for a University that can just say 'Hey I work here. Get my child in this school,'" Griffin-Clark said.

I keep hearing about this "Erase the Board" movement but I have no idea what kind of reach it has. Maybe we'll find out if they field any OPSB candidates next year.  

"The war to keep education public"

30,000 teachers in Los Angeles are trying to draw a line.

But here in the nation’s second-largest school district, where an incredible 98 percent of UTLA voting members voted to authorize a strike last August, the issues are not limited to wages and benefits, as they were in West Virginia, Arizona and Oklahoma. “I feel like this is part of the war to keep public education public,” said Mize, a UTLA chapter chair at the NOW Academy, which is built on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.

Many of the striking teachers see the battle in Los Angeles as a front-line action to put an end to starvation of public school funding on one end, and corporate-fueled privatization on the other. And while that debate has been playing out in Los Angeles and across the country for years, union leaders and teachers believe this could be a last stand. “If this doesn’t work there may not be a union left,” said Mize.

In New Orleans, we've already lost this war. But Mitch Landrieu and Walter Isaacson can take all the victory laps around the country they want to. It's not going to slow the resistance steadily building among teachers, parents and community activists as the devastating effects of the mass privatization become more and more apparent.

Karen Marshall, the Executive Director with Rethink New Orleans, a group that organizes black youth, says, “I think there is an entire system of privatization to undercut specifically poor black youth in our communities. It’s the practice of giving public spaces to private organizations…it’s how you undercut the power in the community. It’s specific and it’s targeted.”

Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, who recently ran for Congress under the banner of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Poor People’s” campaign was blunter. “There’s a money thing, and I want to say the prisoner pipeline because if they don’t educate our children, our children can go into the world, and nine out of ten go to prison.” Adding that by sending them to prison, it’s, “…inexpensive labor, and they’re sending them to jail. To me, the charter system and the jail work together…” He added, “If you listen, the children are crying out, the community’s crying out, telling these school board members what they want. The school board is elected by them…they’re not concerned with what the kids want. They’re concerned with the contracts.”

A representative of the local branch of the New Orleans Chapter of the NAACP stated, “We’re asking the present school board to feel the pulse of the people. Just feel the pulse to understand, we’re just not happy with them at all in terms of the charter schools…first we allowed you guys to take our schools during Katrina to help out for a minute and then afterward, this was a failed education system, so now…it’s just a money grab…this money grab has got to stop.” Later adding, “We’re asking that the state put a moratorium on charter schools.”

This week the League of Women Voters added their voice to these criticisms saying they will call on the State Legislature to reevaluate the proliferation of charters this year.  There is also talk about the best way to bring about change at the Orleans Parish School Board. The old "Erase the Board" refrain has been making the rounds more frequently. But I don't think there's a formal effort to recall members afoot at the moment. 

Meanwhile the board is set to name a new President... that is if they can ever stop trying to decide if some of them are more homophobic than others are racist. So stay tuned for that.

Post-Christmas grab bag

It's been a long and exhausting holiday weekend. Here are a few items that may have slipped out of the Santa sack this week.

• The Sewerage and Water Board 2019 budgets are approved.  I'd like to know more about this item.
  

  The operating budget calls for the elimination of more than 130 positions, for a total of 1,581 positions, including 210 that are now vacant. But it includes 21 new jobs dealing with customer service issues.
  
  Korban has said that the positions being cut are ones that were never filled or are not necessary and that the reductions will not impact the utility's frontline operations. The S&WB has consistently struggled to hire the workers it needs to fill all its vacant positions, and staffing shortages have contributed to the problems that led to widespread flooding in August 2017.

  The staffing shortages are a chronic problem and a reason the utility does not function the way it should. But also the 130 unfilled positions are not necessary? Okay.
  
  Meanwhile millions of dollars worth of "critical" and "urgent" projects are going unfunded.
  

  Meanwhile, the S&WB has estimated it will need about $3 billion over the next 10 years to meet imminent and future capital needs. 
  
  Of that amount, 185 projects totaling $582 million were recommended for 2019, significantly higher than the $384 million the agency budgeted in 2018 and far more than it was actually able to spend.
  
  The board instead expects to fund 34 projects next year at a cost of $167 million, leaving dozens of projects labeled "critical," "urgent" and "necessary" on the table.

  The Advocate story refers here to the ongoing dispute between the mayor, the state, and "tourism leaders" over the prospect of using more tourism-generated revenue to fund infrastructure.  As it turns out, the Washington Post is covering that this week for some reason.
  

  Much of the money goes to major state-owned tourism draws: the Superdome and its neighboring arena as well as the massive Ernest N. Morial Convention Center beside the Mississippi River. Changing the flow of money would require legislative action. But so far the mayor’s call for a “fair share” for the city has gotten a cool reception from Gov. John Bel Edwards and the president of the state Senate — as well as from one of the top spokesmen for the tourism industry.

  
  

  “Over time, the city of New Orleans has not put one dollar into the building of the Superdome, the building of the convention center; has not put one dollar into the operations of the Superdome or the Convention Center; has not put one dollar into the average, every-year renewal and refurbishment that has to take place,” said Steve Perry, one tourism booster.

  "Not one dollar.." other than every single cent raised in New Orleans off the backs of chronically exploited tourism labor, I guess. It's our money.  Give us our money, Steve.
  
  
  
• Here is a can't-miss Katy Reckdahl article about the post-Katrina destruction of New Orleans's neighborhoods written for The Weather Channel, of all possible outlets. Because, as we are well aware here, gentrification in our city is, at least in part, a climate change story.




After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last year, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, saw the early stages of a housing grab and described it as “disaster gentrification.” Similar buyouts and land-flipping happened in New York after Hurricane Sandy and in Houston after Hurricane Harvey. 

In every city, storm damage and flooding initially displaced people of every ethnicity and income level, though in New Orleans, like elsewhere, communities of color were harder hit because of historically segregated housing patterns that pushed African American households to lower-lying areas. One analysis of black and white households found that black residents were more than twice as likely to live in flooded areas.  

In New Orleans, the disparities were exacerbated during rebuilding, as higher-income people moved into city cores, displacing lower-income families. Similar “back to the city” dynamics are playing out in every urban area across the country. But in disaster-ravaged cities like New Orleans, they’re playing out at fast-forward speed.


Watching this process happen on a daily basis for the past 13 years is why I always have headaches now. The animating ethic of our city's recovery has been about attracting investment and "putting properties back into commerce" with little or no regard for consequences. 


“There’s so much history here,” Bowman said, as he filed through the box. He is feeling worried about his future here on North Galvez. He was blindsided a few years ago when a suburban land investor bought the house from beneath him through a municipal tax sale. At first, Bowman paid rent to stay in his family home. Then, a second buyer appeared earlier this year, giving him a five-day eviction notice. That’s when he consulted a legal-aid lawyer. 

Bowman is hard on himself about the situation. He scraped the house so that it’s ready for painting and has made some repairs on his own, out of an obligation he feels to his great-grandfather’s work. But he doesn’t want to sink more money into the house until he’s certain it belongs to him. So he’s embarrassed that needed repairs have gone undone. He’s ashamed that he and his family didn’t figure out that no one was paying taxes. And he’s worried sick about what the future could bring.

His lawyer, Hannah Adams, of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, is concerned that other generational owners like Bowman may also have lost houses, because of new municipal ordinances and policies intended to move Katrina-damaged properties into the hands of new owners. 

In 2015, Bowman discovered that, in 1997, a city treasury official had adjudicated the property for back taxes of $577.91, sending certified mail notices to his grandmother, Marie Camille, who had been dead for nine years, and to DeDe Pierce, who had been dead for 23 years. There’s no record of whether certified mail notices were sent and no records of any notices being returned undeliverable.
Had he known, he would have simply paid the taxes, Bowman said.

A process that worked to push multi-generational New Orleanians out of their family homes has also greatly benefited "investors" who can pick up a properties at auction prices and turn them into cash cows on Airbnb. In January, the City Council will discuss a motion that may limit some of these abuses. Naturally, the investors are whining to the Advocate.  


My wife Andrea and I have operated a licensed “temporary” short-term rental in our 7th Ward New Orleans home since February of this year. Under New Orleans Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer’s proposed changes to the STR ordinance, we will lose this much-needed revenue, and likely be forced to sell our home and leave the area. We bought the double lot on Franklin Avenue at a NORA auction in December 2015 with the stipulation that we would build a new house on the previously blighted property within one year of the auction. Neither of us are professional builders, but over the course of the following year, we managed to complete a modest 900 square-foot home, fulfilling our obligations to NORA. Like many working people, we sought creative ways to finance our project, ultimately receiving the assistance of my in-laws, who obtained a mortgage on our behalf.

It kind of sounds like he's upset that he could lose his STR license because the house isn't technically in his name?  He doesn't say whether or not he and his wife actually live in the "home," though.  The signature on the letter gives his location as Metairie. Anyway, this is only one in a string of confused and/or disingenuous pro-STR letters and op-eds the Advocate has published since basically the day Palmer's motion was publicized.  The "pro" side seems like they were ready to roll.



• I haven't had a chance to watch this WDSU segment on the Orleans Parish school system yet. Is it any good?  Do they talk at all about the Board's decision to charter out McDonogh 35?  



The board heard about two hours’ worth of impassioned commentary before that vote at the evening meeting, mostly from parents and alumni who wanted the school to remain run directly by the OPSB, as nearly all public schools in the city once were.

As they spoke, protesters with the group Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children cheered them on, sang chants with biblical references and shouted, “Erase the board!”

“These are the alumni of McDonogh 35, these are the parents, these are the children. This is the community,” resident Walter Goodwin told the board. “We did not elect you to be a rubber stamp. Do not rubber-stamp this. We elected you to represent us.”

Several audience members began crying and screaming after the vote.

I watched this meeting on the live stream and, while this Advocate reporter's description is technically accurate, it reads a little cartoonish to me, like she is almost making light of the protest. But "Erase The Board" is likely the beginning of something.   It's something well overdue, of course. Remember all of this was still in front of us in 2016 when the Board was up for election.  Almost nobody ran.



• Are the 2018 Saints the "most complete" team in the history of the franchise? Probably.  Of course we'll have to wait and see how it all ends but, assuming they manage to at least advance a little in the playoffs,  it's really not going very far at all to ask if this is the greatest Saints team.  


The season has had a little bit of everything. It had spin moves. It had dance moves. It had a blowout win against a defending champ. It had a sweep of Atlanta. Drew Brees broke an NFL record. Mark Ingram and Wil Lutz broke team records. Michael Thomas and Alvin Kamara set some early career benchmarks that indicate they'll break records of their own one day.

But the most impressive thing to me has been the way Saints have consistently won tough games against physical opponents at Baltimore, at Minnesota, and at home against Pittsburgh. The key here is the Saints aren't doing any of this with smoke and mirrors. They've gone toe to toe with every heavyweight this year and come out on top.  Anything can happen in the playoffs, but there's nothing we've seen this season to give us any cause not to be confident seeing them matched up with anybody.  That's not often how this goes, even in the better years.



• Finally, hey look, more things go boom on Monday night.



City and tourism leaders have revealed there will be not one, but four fireworks displays launched at different points around New Orleans on Tuesday (Jan. 1) for New Year’s Eve. The shows will start in New Orleans East and follow at City Park and then Uptown before culminating with the traditional downtown display.

Take the celebration out into the neighborhoods a little bit.  I like this idea.  I don't know how much I understand the timing, though.  


The fireworks are scheduled for:




· 8:30 p.m., at Read Boulevard near Interstate 10




· 9:30 p.m., at City Park’s Big Lake near the New Orleans Museum of Art




· 10:30 p.m., from barges on the Mississippi River between Napoleon and Jefferson avenues




· Midnight, downtown from river barges between the French Quarter and Algiers.

The whole point of the fireworks is to mark the coming of the new year, right?   And the point of having them in far flung locations is to bring them to people who probably aren't going to the Quarter anyway. So there's no reason to believe any of these displays conflicts with the others. Why not just do them all at midnight?

Are the schools right?

Hey look Mitch Landrieu was on a panel about cities and "leadership" with Dean Bacquet and Walter Isaacson and... *yawn*....

What? Oh yeah, here's the thing.  I'm always amused at the way Mitch defenders are quick tell you to STFU about the mass charterization of our public schools that happened during his time as a "leader" here. "#Actually the mayor doesn't control the schools!" they will tell you. This is technically true. But we all understand that the mayor is a powerful figure and a policy thought  leader in his own right. It matters which side he takes on a question like that.  Mitch was always a vocal supporter of the charter movement. To this day he still touts it as a success story.

Anyway the thing that gets me here is the minute his fans find themselves in front of a friendly audience, they're all too happy to throw him some credit for this thing he supposedly doesn't control.

Walter Isaacson, a former Time editor and best-selling author, credited many of the improvements in New Orleans to progress during the last eight years, saying that Landrieu took over a city “so financially messed up.” A friend of Landrieu, Isaacson called Landrieu “the best mayor we had probably in the history of New Orleans.”

“He got the budget right, he got the schools right and what we need in this country is people who solve problems the way mayors do,” Isaacson said.

Are the schools right? A lot of parents, students and teachers who don't happen to be extremely wealthy media figures would disagree.  More specifically, did Mitch Landrieu get the schools right, himself? His own defenders might not even agree that this is possible... if they listen to their own arguments.

"Erase the board"

Like we said last week, it's painfully difficult to figure out, if everyone is this riled up now, just what the heck has taken so long.

But one thing hasn't seemed to change: despite Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr.'s repeated messages of unity, the community remains deeply divided about how the city's collection of more than 70 public schools should be run.

Ken Ducote, a consultant who worked for OPSB for 34 years as a teacher, school administrator and planning director, said one phrase community organizers kept repeating Thursday -- "erase the board" -- had been borrowed the from meetings in the 1990s.

And arguments between supporters of the charter movement and those wanting to return to a more traditional public schools system are again being waged.

"That kind of topic is just going to bring out big crowds," Ducote said. "It's an emotional thing."

The immediate topic at hand at Thursday's meeting was Lewis' announcement that he would be closing five schools at the end of the year, igniting protests from parents who argued that such decisions fracture communities, harm student morale and displace worthy teachers.

But even more telling was the underlying message for Lewis, whose district mostly authorizes schools rather than operates them day-to-day: Many parents don't like the new OPSB at all.

The way that's written, you might get the idea that the folks have been vigorously engaged for decades.  But the 2016 school board election was just yesterday. And nobody showed up to run.

Aren't they all fired, though?

Looks like the Harney charter board violated open meetings laws when they moved to fire their principal for questioning the board's (highly questionable, btw) financial practices and for picking a fight with Juan LaFonta or something. But, isn't the whole question moot? I mean if the board itself is already fired, how do they get to fire anybody?

Harney has been under intense scrutiny from the Orleans Parish school district for mounting administrative problems, board composition, finances and other matters.

Days after Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. told parents the school would close at the end of the school year because he would not renew its contract, he said he would revoke the embattled charter school’s contract mid-year. If that happens, the district will run Harney directly until it closes at the end of the year.

The public is not entitled to comment

Looks like the parents and teachers' advocates in the audience were upset with some of the decisions made at the Orleans Parish School Board meeting this week.

Thursday’s Orleans Parish School Board meeting devolved into shouting at times, as frustrated citizens struggled to conform to the district’s public comment policy following school closure and relocation announcements.

Orleans schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr.’s biggest news included five school closure recommendations, a few school relocations and several charter approvals. Lewis’ recommendations — presented as a report — take effect unless the board overrides them with a two-thirds vote. If the board does not formally move for a vote on them, however, they are not considered “action items.” And the public is not entitled to comment on them.

Lona Hankins, a parent and former district employee, implored the board to hold its committee meetings — where board members discuss most of their policy decisions — at times and in places that are accessible to the public. They are often held early on Tuesday afternoons at the district’s Algiers headquarters.

“Parents and the public can’t participate in that,” Hankins said. “You’re leaving parents out. You’re leaving the community out.”

Yeah so we've got this situation where the board doesn't run any of its schools directly (unless something has gone very wrong) and the Superintendent has near unilateral authority to approve charters and relocate schools with almost no public input. It does seem like a bad idea now. Too bad nobody said anything at the time those rules were written... well... almost nobody.

And hey too bad nobody said anything way way waaay back in 2016 when it was time to elect the board that would approve these rules.... well.. almost nobody.  In any case, nobody cared enough to even contest 4 of the seven seats.  At least there were more than a few people, even then, talking about the fact that the incoming board would be all but bought and paid for.

Another explanation for the lack of opponents this time might be that people like Brown's and Usdin's work, Jacobs said.

But Karran Harper Royal, an education activist who ran against Usdin and lost in 2012, said critics of Usdin, at least, might have been scared off by her fundraising muscle. Along with Jacobs, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and former Time magazine editor and author Walter Isaacson were among a lengthy list of contributors to Usdin’s unprecedented $150,000 campaign haul four years ago. 

Royal raised close to $13,000.

“Those folks who were in power, the charter school movement, they have lined their ducks up in a row,” said Royal, who has been critical of charters. “For the everyday person, that’s an insurmountable hill to climb, particularly because of the amount of money in the race.”

Too bad nobody remembers any of this when the consequences become obvious. Well, almost nobody, anyway.  Otherwise, we might figure out how to keep it from happening again.

Maybe they need to rethink the Zuckerberg method of school admissions

One-App is a killer app.

Under the OneApp, which was launched in 2011 to give families an easier way to apply to the city’s numerous autonomous charter schools, parents rank their top choices among dozens of public and some private schools on a single application that has one deadline.

A computer then attempts to match them to their selections. This year, nearly 17,000 families submitted applications, up from 15,000 families last year.

As a result, only 67 percent of families received either their first, second or third school choice. That’s the lowest match rate in seven years; the system usually has matched around 75 percent of families to one of their top three choices.

Are there any Russian charter schools operating in New Orleans?  It was bad enough that we had that Gulenist one.  We do know that foreign operatives love to hack our algorithms. I'd hate to find out that One App turns out to be what got Trump elected.

Anyway I am pretty sure I see what the problem is here.

On the other hand, the school officials in charge of the process, commonly known as the OneApp, said the low match rate was simply the result of high demand for the city's most well-regarded schools.

"In New Orleans, students are assigned to schools through a process that ensures every student has a fair shot at any open seat at any school citywide,” said Kunjan Narechania, head of the state Recovery School District, which manages the OneApp.

“Every year, the number of students seeking seats at our most sought-after schools far exceeds the number of available seats.”

Maybe if we didn't waste so much time on this bizarre shell game that divides the school system among balkanized "competing" companies in order to provide parents with the illusion of choice, we could get the actual mission of providing universal free public education. Ideally, all of the seats in all of the schools would be worth seeking after.  But we'd rather play with our app so here we are.

But how will they get paid?

So many things Democrats "should" do that they really don't want to do on account of the way their party funds itself. Often, they fundraise themselves.. and all of us.. into a corner on critical matters such as the very existence of public education.

There are plenty of reasons that Democrats should steer clear of the charter industry. Charter corporations have been repeatedly charged with fraud, nepotism, self-dealing, and conflicts of interest. Many charters make money on complex real-estate deals. Worst of all are the “cybercharters”: mega-corporations that offer virtual schools, with high attrition, low test scores, and abysmal graduation rates. The biggest cybercharter chain is K12 Inc., started by former junk-bond king Michael Milken and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

But it’s more than a matter of sleeping with the enemy. School choice doesn’t work, and “evidence-based” Democrats ought to acknowledge it. Charter schools are a failed experiment. Study after study has shown that they do not get better test scores than public schools unless they screen out English-language learners and students with profound disabilities. It’s well-established that school choice increases segregation, rather than giving low-income students better opportunities. And kids using vouchers actually lose ground in private schools. Support for charters is paving the way for a dual school system—one that is allowed to choose the students it wants, and another that is required to accept all who enroll.

This is what Democrats should be yelling about. And if there’s ever a moment for them to reclaim their mantle as the party of public education, it’s now. The misguided push for “reform” is currently being led not by Obama and Duncan, but by Trump and DeVos, giving Democrats an opening to shift gears on education—though they’ll lose some of that hedge-fund money. But if 2016 taught Democrats anything, it’s how unwise it was to allow the demolition of organized labor—including teachers’ unions, once a great source of money and grassroots energy. The party needs strong teachers’ unions and it needs their enthusiasm.

Right now they're really hoping they can keep after the Russia thing, though. That way they never have to address any of this. 

Of course because this was the whole point

The charter school movement was always about re-institutionalizing segregation by re-branding it in progressive sounding rhetoric.  This isn't a big secret. No one should be surprised at the results.

The earth-shaking overhaul of New Orleans education after Hurricane Katrina has not fixed one of the city's enduring problems: public school segregation. That's according to a study Tulane's Education Research Alliance for New Orleans released Tuesday (April 4).

"New Orleans schools were highly segregated prior to the city's school reforms, especially in terms of race and income, and remain segregated now," the authors wrote.

Before the mass charterization, the schools were divided into separate and unequal public and (mostly Catholic) private schools. The "reform" was a means by which white and wealthy families could reclaim their very own public schools without forfeiting the benefits of segregation. Again, not a big secret. Inevitably will be denied by hordes of screeching yuppies, though. 

A little bit of pretty good news

I missed this the other day. The National Labor Relations Board ruled that the charter companies operating Lusher and the International School have to recognize recently formed unions. The little dance these private employers do didn't fool anyone this time.

Charter schools are neither fish nor fowl, publicly funded but run by independent nonprofits. The National Labor Relations Board treats them as private employers, which under federal law must bargain with unionized workers. Elected Louisiana school boards don't.

Both schools argued that they should be considered public agencies. International High said it was subject to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education; Lusher says it operates only with the approval of the Orleans Parish School Board.

Moreover, the labor board should treat Lusher as a public school because "the State of Louisiana has specifically called for the creation of charter schools as an integral part of its overall public education system," the school's lawyers wrote. That's especially true locally: "Without charter schools, there simply would be no public education in the City of New Orleans."

Um... "without charter schools," there would be a public school system with an elected board and a union contract. That's what we had before the charter school "experiment" took advantage of the Katrina emergency to fire all of the teachers working under that structure.  Basically the charter operators want us to consider them public or private depending on whatever makes it harder for people to organize. They didn't get away with this. Now, once Trump shakes up NLRB, this might be a different story. But we aren't there yet. 

The charter school con

There are multiple reasons people have gotten on board with "school reform" over the years. Most of them are bad. For many it is an end run around integration. For others it is an ideological experiment with "market princilples." For others, still, it is a desire to use public institutions as a vehicle for promoting and enforcing  their religious practices.   For Donald Trump's incoming Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos it is a little bit of all three.

DeVos is married to Amway scion Dick DeVos (whose father, Richard DeVos, is worth more than $5 billion, according to Forbes) and is seen as a controversial choice due to her track record of supporting vouchers for private, religious schools; right-wing Christian groups like the Foundation for Traditional Values, which has pushed to soften the separation of church and state; and organizations like Michigan's Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which has championed the privatization of the education system.

This week, Bobby Jindal praised Trump's choice of DeVos  calling her, "the breath of fresh air we needed."

Beyond the larger politics of it, the internal impetus behind the charter movement is economic.  Its implementation has meant a direct transfer of income away from teachers and toward administrators.

That's according to a report the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans released Tuesday (Jan. 17) that's sure to make waves.

New Orleans public schools now spend $1,358 more per student than a 17-district comparison group. But they spend $706 per student less on instruction, including teacher salaries and benefits

There are more administrators, and they typically earn higher salaries than they would have without the reforms," authors Christian Buerger and Doug Harris write.

New Orleanians apprehensive about the coming vicissitudes of Trump's America at least have the advantage of familiarity as they are already living a lot of it.

Trump's America

We're privatizing education anyway. Might as well get ahead of the curve.

New Orleans may soon be the first city to have an all-charter school system -- a landmark in U.S. history.

Orleans Parish Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. announced Friday (Dec. 9) he had "received informal expressions of interest from current school and charter leaders to convert some or all of our remaining five network elementary and high schools to charter schools authorized by OPSB."

Remember voters in New Orleans could have had a say in this via the recent OPSB elections but nobody ran for those seats. 

Having it both ways

The Lusher Charter School board could have just accepted the results of a petition drive with the support of 60 percent of its teachers and chosen to recognize them a bargaining unit. Instead, they opted to force an NLRB administered election.

Some of you may recall that way back in 2009, some of us were pushing for the Employee Free Choice Act. This legislation would have, among other things, ended the unfair advantage held my management in setting the terms under which a union is formed. You can read more about that here. But President Obama and the Democrats who held large majorities in congress at the time sold out labor yet again and failed to advance EFCA. And so here we are.

Which is why the Lusher board was able to declare itself "neutral" and state that it would not countenance administrative coercion of teachers while simultaneously ensuring that such coercion would inevitably occur. Which it did.

The National Labor Relations Act prohibits employers from interfering with their employees' right to unionize. That includes limiting the extent to which employers may coerce workers or poll them on how they plan to vote.

But six members of the United Teachers of Lusher spread fistfuls of anti-union letters and postcards onto a coffee house table Saturday. Some came to their homes; they have received emails and calls at their personal addresses and numbers as well, they said.

One letter was signed by the organization's six top leaders, including Riedlinger and all three principals. Several came from the director of a competing, dues-based teacher support group. Some were anonymous, giving the return address of a mailbox and shipping center on Magazine Street, but spoke of "our" community and school, using Lusher's colors, logo and school principles.

The pressure came in person as well, said high school teachers Terry Marek, Beth Rota, Julie Sanders and Jerome White, and second-grade teachers Gigi Boesch and Bonnie Bowler. They said Riedlinger had pulled teachers into her office and asked them to vote no. Administrators stood up at faculty meetings and said they personally felt a union would be bad for Lusher, they said.

It's hard to go against what your boss says, Rota said: "It's intimidating, it's not comfortable and it's not fair."

The Lusher board and administration took full advantage of an NLRB process they knew would be weighted in their favor.  And then today they're turning around and saying the whole thing is illegitimate anyway. Just in case anybody gets any ideas about complaining.

In an effort to stave off any future attempts by teachers to unionize, Lusher Charter School administrators on Tuesday fired off an appeal of a recent ruling that the National Labor Relations Board has the right to oversee union elections at the Uptown school.

Meanwhile, an effort by International High School of New Orleans teachers to unionize has been decried by leaders at that school, who also have questioned the federal agency’s jurisdiction and have criticized the union in emails to teachers.

Lusher attorneys on Tuesday filed a request for review with the national office of the National Labor Relations Board, challenging a regional director’s decision that the agency has the right to oversee union elections at the school.

International High, which also was found to be under the agency’s jurisdiction, has not yet decided whether to file its own appeal.

The dogged resistance to union organizing showcases the divide between unions and charter schools in New Orleans. Only two charters in the city — Benjamin Franklin High School and Morris Jeff Community School — have approved teachers unions thus far.

This issue isn't going away. It's only going to become more important as the state run Recovery School District turns oversight of local charters back over to the Orleans Parish School Board.  By the way, do we know who is running for OSPB seats this year, yet?

Who is planning to run for OPSB?

Every day this looks more like something we need to keep track of.

The vice president of the board that governs the Choice Foundation, a three-school charter network in New Orleans, urged Lusher Charter School teachers last week to vote against forming a union, highlighting long-standing tensions between unions and charter schools.

Lusher is not among the schools run by the Choice Foundation.

Robbie Evans, who also is chief executive officer of the trading company Con-Tech International, said he decried unions in an email to dozens of Lusher teachers because he sees unions as an impediment to charter schools’ progress.

Ha ha the anti union charter school guy works for something called "con-tech." That's almost too good.

Anyway it will be worth watching who is running for the school board this fall (as well as who those candidates' friends are) as we get closer to turning a measure of power back over to that body. Still not sure how much power, though.

What’s made the Peterson bill particularly controversial, though, are the provisions aimed at making sure schools don’t face meddling from board members.

In a way, the bill — the product of long, intense negotiations — creates a new kind of school system. It says explicitly that “the local school board shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction” in the areas of curriculum, hiring and firing of personnel or collective bargaining, among a raft of others.

The bill also shifts the balance of power in favor of the local superintendent, who can only be removed by a supermajority of the seven-member board.

Well that's one way to put the Superintendent in position to make a lot of money anyway. Maybe we need to keep track of who his friends are too.

Bye, RSD

Mission Accomplished, I guess. It's all over but for the troop draw down.

The Louisiana Legislature is ready to close a chapter in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina history. Both the Senate and House have voted to reverse the 2005 state takeover of most of the city's public schools.

By July 1, 2018 -- or 2019, at the latest -- 52 Recovery School District charters will move back to the oversight of the Orleans Parish School Board, unifying the school system once more, emptying out the Recovery system in New Orleans and symbolically healing a wound torn open after the hurricane

This is a big deal. I don't even want to try and condense the amount of background in that article for you. Instead let's just highlight this one bit.

Clear, too, has been the change in the race of those in charge. The Legislature's 2005 vote shattered an almost entirely African American workforce, a point not lost on black critics of the takeover. New Orleans' teaching force was just 50 percent African American last year, according to New Schools for New Orleans. The takeover, and the subsequent closure or chartering of every single Recovery school, vaulted New Orleans into the spotlight of national education circles. Other states continue to create their own "recovery" systems; one is pending in Georgia now.

The RSD takeover began before Katrina. But the post-K mass firings and charterization was a swift deliberate blow to the "backbone of the city's middle class."

Shortly after the storm hit, the Louisiana State Legislature voted to take over the New Orleans school district and fire all 4,600 teachers, along with hundreds of other staffers. The effect of that decision on the schools has been the subject of an intense and still unresolved debate. But one effect is clear: Thousands of mostly black school employees lost their jobs, and although some were rehired, many more were not.
 
“When you fire all of the New Orleans public school teachers and its personnel, you’ve given a big whack to the middle class, because teaching was one of the professions where African-Americans knew they could go to school and come out with a job,” said Beverly Wright, a Dillard University sociologist. “Teachers were a treasured possession of the middle-class black community.”

The damage there is mostly done. But lately we've seen teachers in the charterized system begin to organize and assert themselves anew.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Unionization efforts continue at some charter schools in New Orleans. United Teachers of New Orleans says in a Wednesday (April 27) statement that International High School in New Orleans has become the fourth New Orleans charter school where staff has decided to join the union. They want the school's board to consider recognizing the union May 18.

Expect this to become a fairly important point of controversy once the school system comes back under direct control of a locally elected board. The pushback is already beginning. And, unsurprisingly it comes from administration at one of the city's whitest charter schools. 

Three board members at Lusher Charter School have denounced a move this week by CEO Kathy Riedlinger to challenge an upcoming teachers union election at the school, saying the move is in direct conflict with the board’s recent directive urging employees to remain neutral.

Board chairman Blaine LeCesne and members Chunlin Leonhard and Carol Whelan said Riedlinger and her top deputies overstepped their bounds when they challenged the National Labor Relations Board’s authority to oversee a local union election.

“I found it very disconcerting that this is being engineered by the administration, which is directly against our policy,” LeCesne said. “The administration is bound to follow the directive and policy of the board.”

It's already a problem for the Lusher Charter board. What happens when it becomes a citywide OPSB issue? And could that start to matter as early as this fall?  Who is going to run for these seats, anyway?