The error that keeps on erring

They're going to have to tell us what this NOLA Public Schools "accouting error" actually is eventually, right?  Last month they tried to say an accountant forgot what a fiscal year is.  But that story didn't stick.  Now we're nowhere nearer to understanding what happened. But we do know that whatever it is, it's worse now.  

Because of the city’s all-charter school system, school closures have become one of the city’s ongoing winter traditions. This week, students, families and staff at four New Orleans charters were anxiously awaiting word on whether their schools will remain open beyond May.

This year’s closures are complicated by a surprise budget shortfall and declining enrollment.

Enrollment has steadily fallen over the last decade, leaving empty seats and strained budgets at under-enrolled schools across the city. There’s no way to resolve this problem without shuttering or merging some city schools, school officials have said.

The growing budget shortfall for the district is also at the top of officials’ minds.

The projected budget gap started at $20 million and rose last month to $36 million. This week, officials warned it could top $49 million.

While hired accountants are scouring the district’s books to get to the bottom of the budget shortfall, top district staff is focused on charter contracts — with renewals for schools with passing grades and closures for those with failing grades.

Meanwhile, about those charter contracts, they're closing schools again.  Here is how that is going to work this time.  

Separately, district officials want Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School for Sci Tech to close its high school grades at the end of the school year due to chronically low enrollment and poor academic performance. The district would allow the school to continue operating kindergarten through eighth grade.

If the high school closes, it will leave the Lower 9th Ward without any high schools.

There is an alternate history where we rebuilt stable communities after Katrina by investing in the social infrastructure that supports families and children instead of the chaotic "experiment" in privatization we have now.  That project has all but ensured the destruction of the neighborhoods.  Two decades after the floods, New Orleans feels like a poor shadow of what it once was. In addition to the mass displacement of people from the city, those who do live here now experience a disorienting alienation. The rooted sense of space felt by previous generations is gone. That's not all because of the annual school shuffling but certainly this does not help. 

This year, only 185 students were enrolled in the high school, reflecting a steep drop-off over the last five years.

More than 85% of its students live outside the Lower 9th Ward. Most high-school age students in the neighborhood attend other high schools, largely Frederick Douglass, Warren Easton, G. W. Carver and McDonogh 35.

Maybe the system shouldn't be set up this way. Maybe a more holistic and supportive investment in all of the city's schoolchildren is a better way to do things than playing an "accountability" Squid Game with everyone every year. Maybe someone in position to make policy should do something about that.  

Or they could just shrug their shoulders. They do like to do that too. 

Dale Simeon, the high school's counselor, warned against closing the school.

"When children are a part of the community and they are disrupted," she said. "Sometimes they never recover."

She argued King isn't "failing" and that data used to assess the school, including graduation rates and the rigor of classes, isn't accurate. She made the same claims at the school's renewal hearing but didn't present any evidence.

Other community members criticized the fidelity of the renewal process. They said they believed that no matter what the high school did, the board would close it, reflecting a lingering mistrust between some New Orleanians and the school district since Hurricane Katrina.

Parents from King and The Arthur School said they wished the board would intervene to help schools get back on track rather than shut them down.

(Olin) Parker, the board member, reminded them that's not how a charter model works.

"Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, the way our system is set up is schools are granted additional autonomy in exchange for accountability," he said.

"Unfortunately or fortunately."  It could be bad or good. We aren't really here to say. We're just the school board.  Stop asking us. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting accountants who can resolve a budget too.

UPDATE: I guess there's no way to know whether the accounting errors have anything to do secret payouts to departing executives.  

Both parties agreed not to tell the public about the settlement, unless legally required to do so.

"Unless required by law, the Employee and School Board agree not to disclose the terms, amount, or existence of this Agreement to anyone other than the Employee's attorney or financial advisor," according to the settlement, which Fox8 posted online. The news outlet said it obtained the agreement through a public records request.

The agreement was signed by Williams and board President Katie Baudouin. It was dated Nov. 14, the day the district announced Williams' departure. The agreement says both parties signed off on the language of the press release announcing her resignation, a copy of which is included in the agreement.

Maybe don't run your smash and grab privatization scheme through a nesting doll of pass through grifters

Nevermind. Actually, if you're already stripping the public education system for parts, it's only natural to have as many trucks hauling it off in as many different directions as possible.

The Louisiana Legislature has agreed to pay a private company $910,000 to oversee the rollout of the state’s new school-choice program, which is set to launch next year. 

The Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget voted overwhelmingly Friday to approve a one-year contract with Odyssey, a company founded in 2021 to help states manage grant programs like the one Louisiana lawmakers approved last spring that will give households tax money to put toward private-school tuition.

The tech start-up picking up this contract is pretty much your typical middleman arbitrage operation. Back in August, we learned, that it also comes with the typical... uh.. glitches? Let's call them that for now. 

During Tuesday’s board meeting, BESE members asked about reports of problems with Odyssey-operated grant programs in other states.

For example, in Missouri, parents have complained about delays in receiving grants and problems purchasing items through the company’s platform, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In Idaho, a state review found that Odyssey approved about $180,000 in ineligible purchases by families, according to Idaho Education News. And in Iowa, the state auditor found that the education department had improperly amended Odyssey’s contract to increase payments to the company.

Not that it matters at this point.  The "smash" part of this already occurred when the legislature approved the ESA scheme to drain all the money out of public schools.  The "grab" part is just.. the grabbing.

I can't believe Taylor Swift didn't fix it

Just yesterday, we were speculating about this "accounting error" committed by someone in the Orleans Parish School District. The original T-P report we cited there claimed that staff overshot their sales tax revenue projection by $36 million "because district staffers calculated tax revenue based on a full calendar year, rather than aligning it to the fiscal year, which begins in July." * That might be exactly what happened. But it feels unlikely. At the very least, it's got to be embarrassing for professional accountants to not understand when the fiscal year begins. Let alone, that they would look at a jump in revenue of that size and not suspect something was off. 

On the other hand, lay readers of the Times-Picayune might be forgiven for their confusion. Last week,  when we read that the board had announced a damage control plan to gradually pay back the deficit out of its (fortunately robust) fund balance, this item suggested that maybe the problem was already solved.

Schools would repay the $15 million over the next few years, hopefully bolstered by increased sales tax revenue from major events in New Orleans like Taylor Swift’s recent concert series, which generated an estimated $500 million for the city, and next year’s Super Bowl, Parker said.

Oh dear, here we go again trying to shoehorn an "economic impact of tourism" promo into a serious news story. Look, by all accounts, Swiftie weekend in New Orleans was a much welcomed success for the city's service industry and tourism facing retail.  Anecdotally, we've all heard the crowd was nice. They tipped well. And unlike some of the mega-corporate events, like the Superbowl, they spent money with local small businesses.  But mentioning the $500 number in a throwaway line about the school system's budget problems creates a false impression of whatever eventual benefit may occur.

The article doesn't link to it but they're referring to GNO Inc's estimate of how much money was spent overall by visitors during the weekend. The number is likely exaggerated to begin with, because that's what GNO Inc. does. But also it appears to include the money spent on airfare, lodging, and the concert tickets themselves. The schools do realize a portion of the sales tax on hotel rooms, but they split that money with several other entities. But we're already talking there about a fraction of a fraction of that marquee $500 million number which, again, isn't even itself a figure that reflects actual sales tax revenue.  It's fun to write "Taylor Swift might help with the budget problem" but it's important to be more specific than this. 

Anyway, as of today, none of this is Avis Williams's problem anymore. She is resigning effective December 1. Frankly, who can blame her.  The $300,000 salary must have been nice for a couple of years. But, ultimately, who wants to have to deal with this job?

After a national search to replace Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr., the board hired Williams in April of 2022. This fall, Williams opened the district’s first intentional direct-run school in the modern charter era — The Leah Chase School, a win for traditional-education advocates in the city. But the decision to create the new school within the Lafayette Academy building came amid a chaotic charter renewal process. Lafayette Academy families were first promised their school would remain open, then told it would close, then received a third message, one week later, that the school would remain open, but would be managed by the district.

But critics say that Williams has made little progress in one of the key assignments she was given when she arrived. When she arrived, she was charged with downsizing the all-charter district because local schools, mirroring national trends, face shrinking enrollment. The district asked her to create a “right-sizing” plan.  

Other district superintendents, facing similar declines, have closed schools. But in New Orleans, Williams faced a particularly unique challenge, because the city’s charter schools operate on multi-year contracts and revoking them — to close schools — is only done in serious situations. Schools only come under high-stakes scrutiny at the end of their contracts.

One could argue that a cascading budget crisis is one way to cut through all the piecemeal charter renewals and force more closures and consolidations on an accelerated timeline.   But whatever the excuse, it's no fun when you are the one swinging the ax.  

Meanwhile, there's also an open seat on the School Board that needs to be resolved by a runoff election December 7.  One of the candidates there has articulated support for having the district take more schools back from under-performing charters and run them directly. The other was once on a charter board involved in a grade inflation scandal.  Those sound like serious issues for voters to consider. Unfortunately it may all be overshadowed by the accounting issue. That is, unless we can get another 10 or 20 Eras Tours to swing through the city by the time the next tax receipts are in. 

*Additional note: Today's Lens article about the Williams resignation says the "accounting error" is still unexplained. So the, "whoops we forgot what year it is" bit from the initial reports, seems to have gone away.  According to today's article, 

Some sources say the city, which is responsible for collecting taxes and remitting them to the district, contributed to the district’s poor forecasting. It’s unclear how often the city communicates tax collection estimates with the district.

So we're moving from shady and/or incompetent accounting at the School District to shady and/or incompetent accounting at City Hall.  That's more credible, I guess, given.. (gestures broadly).. but still a mystery.

Maybe don't run your schools through a nesting doll of scam bureaucracies

You have to read past this headline about layoffs at the Rooted School. It just conveys management's side of the dispute, saying they're just forced to downsize due to a school board accounting error. Read several paragraphs into the story until you arrive at something closer to the actual issue. 

Teachers and staff at The Rooted School have been bargaining for a contract since forming a union in 2022. The four staff members who were let go were union members and UTNO has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board related to their firings.

The charge accused Karpinski of letting the employees go before bargaining with them and offering them a severance agreement directly rather than going through the union. The complaint also says that the school violated employees' rights because the severance agreement includes a confidentiality clause and a non-disparagement clause.

And, of course, due to recent events in national politics, the Biden NLRB is in lame duck status now.  (Senate Democrats still have a chance to do something about that!  But, rest assured, they simply do not care enough to try.) So, in all likelihood, the laid off workers are at the mercy of dueling bureaucracies and their suspect administrators. Today's update in that dispute finds the School Board firing back, (mostly) on the correct side for now. 

The Orleans Parish School Board on Tuesday pushed back on claims by a New Orleans charter school that it was forced to lay off teachers due to an accounting error by the district.

Board members said Rooted School used the district’s miscalculation as an excuse to lay off four employees when in fact the school is grappling with its own financial problems. The main source of the school’s troubles is that it erroneously collected $600,000 over three years by keeping students on their rolls who had left, and now the school must pay back that money, the board members said.

Which brings us to that "accounting error."  Are we sure that's what this is? 

New Orleans public schools are getting millions of dollars less in local tax revenue this year than district officials projected, and schools across the city are bracing for the fallout from the apparent accounting gaffe. 

Typically, the district tells schools in March how much money they will have to spend for the upcoming school year, based on property and sales taxes it expects schools will receive. Schools then budget accordingly, and receive payment in piecemeal from the school district each month.

But three months into the school year, district officials said their projections were likely inflated. That was because district staffers calculated tax revenue based on a full calendar year, rather than aligning it to the fiscal year, which begins in July.

What sort of accountant actually does this?  On accident?  Maybe that's really what is going on there. But, remember, the district, under this superintendent, is under various pressures to downsize schools and divest from its facilities.  

Overall, the 2024 premium increased from $7.9 million to $12.3 million. The district’s total insured value (TIV) also increased from $1.9 billion to $2.4 billion, due to building upgrades and the increased costs of repairs, Story wrote in an email.

The exact per-pupil costs are still being finalized, Story wrote. “But based on the premium increase amount you can estimate it to be near $280, he said. This of course depends on system-wide enrollment,” Story wrote, noting the current market is “a mess.”

The district’s Total Insured Value cited by Story in his email appears to include vacant buildings in the total policy cost. To save money, the district is already looking at ways to reduce total value for vacant buildings and to shed vacant swing space that won’t be utilized.

“We are already looking at ways to modify our program for FY25 to reduce TIV for vacant buildings, swing space that won’t be utilized and other opportunities in an effort to mitigate large increases in premiums,” Story wrote.

As of the beginning of this month, only one school appeared to be on a path toward closure this year. But that was before the "error" was discovered. 

The last thing our public schools need now is another hole in the money bucket. But it does appear as though leaks are starting to spurt out from all sides.

Seems bad

I don't really know what else we're supposed to say about the legislative session.  Every week is just gonna be a new load of very bad ideas cruising right on through.  Today, the latest scheme for de-funding public education passed out of committee without objection. 

Elected school board members also are starting to speak out against ESAs. On Thursday, just hours after the pro-ESA rally in Baton Rouge, the Livingston Parish school board discussed the bills at a special meeting.

One board member warned that a reduction in state funding could force the district to close schools and lay off teachers. Superintendent Joe Murphy said that an ESA program open to all families could guzzle up tax dollars, leaving less money for the “minimum foundation program,” or MFP, the state’s public school funding formula.

“I think this absolutely has the potential to devastate our schools from an MFP standpoint,” Murphy told the board. After all, money for the ESA program “has got to come from somewhere.”

The money coming out of the public schools' MFP will be at least half a billion dollars a year, in fact. But that's far from the only way in which our "fiscally conservative" legislature has determined to bankrupt the state this year.  Keeping in mind the already much talked about half billion dollar "fiscal cliff" that approaches in 2025, lawmakers spent the special session on "crime" adding tens (growing perhaps to hundreds) of millions of dollars to the budget for throwing people in prison and keeping them there. And the current session may expand that further. Bills are advancing that would jail people for panhandling on the streets or perhaps attending professional conferences. Maybe those are the same thing. Or at least one leads to the other. I haven't quite worked it out. 

Anyway, the legislature has the big checkbook out. But we know how much these fiscal hawks like to talk about prudent budgeting. So they must have some pretty great expectations of future revenues. Wonder where that's going to come from.  One things for sure, it won't come from the oil companies. 

The state House on Monday passed a bill that would cut the oil severance tax rate by 4 percentage points, a measure that aims to revitalize Louisiana’s oil industry but could leave an $80 million gap in state tax revenue.

House Bill 259, sponsored by Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, faced virtually no pushback on the House floor, passing the chamber 86-13. It now heads to the state Senate.

With a vote of 96-6, the House also overwhelmingly passed a second Beaullieu bill, House Bill 418, which would halve the tax currently levied on oil and gas produced by wells that have been orphaned and inactive.

The Louisiana Budget Project.. or whatever the hell they call themselves now.. these NGOs "re-brand" themselves all the time for no reason..  estimates the severance tax cut could end up costing the state $80 million year.  Seems bad. 

The year of worst fears

Mardi Gras is over.* Time to start facing up to the realities of 2024, most of which will be bad.  Get used to it.  Here they come. 

Gov. Jeff Landry doesn’t want to make a public school teacher pay hike from last year permanent, frustrating teachers who have been pushing for the pay bump since early 2023.

“Of course, our worst fear came through,” said Cynthia Posey, legislative director for the Louisiana Federation of Teachers. “It’s really devastating to a profession where people are paid so much less than others with college degrees.” 

Landry’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year includes $198 million for a second round of stipends for teacher and school support staff, instead of permanent salary increases.

*Yes, I know there hasn't been the usual Mardi Gras posting on this site this year. It's coming. I've got a bunch of stuff to say about it before JP Morrell's promised April review of the Carnival ordinances, though. Coming soon. 

Island hopping

The insidious thing about charterization is that it not only destroyed the union but it also set workers on a long struggle to claw it back independent school by independent school.  Nearly twenty years have passed and so far they've won 6 out of 71 schools back. 

Living School joins Rooted School, International High School, Bricolage Academy, Morris Jeff Community School and Ben Franklin High School as organized collective bargaining units. Teachers in New Orleans who do not work at a unionized school can join United Teachers of New Orleans.

A small percentage of New Orleans' 71 charter schools are unionized. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of public school teachers were fired and schools were taken over by the Recovery School District or transformed into charters, ending the contract between the city and the union.

And, of course, in the meantime, there have been thousands of lives uprooted and communities destroyed by the charter project that will never come back. Also one of the primary villains in this plot is about to be elected mayor of Chicago today.  

When Vallas went to New Orleans in 2007, the city was still reeling from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which had made landfall two years earlier. In 2003, a Democrat-controlled Louisiana legislature had taken control of schools across the state by establishing the Recovery School District (RSD), which took over “underperforming” schools, the majority of which were initially in New Orleans.

The RSD fired the district’s teachers, who were unionized and mostly Black, middle-aged professionals, and replaced them with younger, whiter, out-of-town TFA recruits. Dix Moore-Broussard, a longtime arts teacher in New Orleans, told the TRiiBE that after Katrina, the district laid everyone off. (In 2010 Duncan, who was then secretary of education, said Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”)

“We got notice that they weren’t opening the schools and we could go pick up our last check,” she said. “Everybody just got $2,000, and it was the most insulting thing ever.”

But hey 6 of the 71 privatized schools now have their own little unions. Celebrate the little victories, I guess, but there's no justice here.

Give it another fifteen years, I guess

Joseph Bouie's very mild attempt at giving the Orleans Parish School Board a little bit more of a direct legislative instruction to do its ostensible job overseeing public schools in New Orleans has failed. 

Senate Bill 404 by state Sen. Joe Bouie, D-New Orleans, would have amended Act 91 — the law that returned the charter schools in the Recovery School District to the Orleans Parish School Board — to give the School Board the power to decide what freedoms charter operators should have. As it stands, decisions such as faculty and staff hires, what students learn and how they learn it are all left to individual charter operators. 

Despite its death, the bill and surrounding debate lay bare the tensions that still exist between pro-charter groups and those who see the system as an experiment that worsens inequalities in public education. 

In an interview this week, Bouie said he senses momentum building among residents and families for a change to the public school system, despite the bill's failure. 

“It was a hard sell legislatively, but the community’s response is getting stronger and stronger,” Bouie said. “All that support was really the result of the last 15 years, and what our communities know as the state-sponsored educational experiment.

Not sure we've got another 15 years to "build momentum."   The very idea that all children have a right to public education is fading. It's not clear there how much longer there will even be a school system here.  

Applications to enroll in NOLA Public Schools district charter schools — including new students and those seeking transfers — dropped by nearly 30 percent between the 2019-2020 school year and the 2021-2022 school year, according to a report presented to the Orleans Public School Board on Thursday. While some of that can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the upcoming school year has seen a slight recovery, officials and experts believe the overall trend will be downward in the coming years, following a slow-down in the city’s population growth over the past decade, and a more recent decline in the past few years. 

School board members heard the report on declining enrollment at their Thursday night meeting, part of a process NOLA Public Schools officials have called “right-sizing” the district, which could include more closures and consolidations of city charter schools.

It's easy to say that enrollment is declining because nobody actually lives here anymore.  

Declining public school enrollment comes as the city has experienced slower population growth over the past several years. 

After New Orleans’ massive post-Katrina loss of residents, the population grew quickly in the early part of the last decade. Yearly Census estimates put the city at well over 390,000 residents, up from 343,000 in the 2010 Census. But that growth slowed as the city approached the 2020 Census. And New Orleans’ official 2020 Census count was about 384,000, 

Reid noted that a slower rate of people moving to New Orleans and lower birth rates have come as the city has become significantly less affordable for families, noting that housing prices have “increased incredibly” in the last five years.

But, then, it's just as important to understand the denial of core public services, such as a functioning school system, is a key contributor to that phenomenon.  No doubt the "right sizing" of the district will provide opportunities to sell off property to real estate investors. So we can build more nice things for rich people. Where nobody actually lives.  

Been watching them play this game for.. well, for over 15 years now. We know how it goes.

Dismissed

Really brilliant way to word the legislature's bid to completely de-fund public education in Louisiana.  They're "allowing" students to leave. 

Louisiana children would be allowed to leave public schools and take the state aid with them under a bill that won approval Wednesday in the House Education Committee.

The measure, House Bill 824, was one of a series, but easily the most sweeping, that would create education savings accounts that could be used to attend private schools or for tutoring, supplemental materials and other education services.

"I am doing this for our schools and our students," said Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Metairie and sponsor of the measure.

They are doing a lot "for our schools" by removing funds, see.  There are quotes in the article from the usual right wing lobbying groups. LABI is in here. So is the Pelican Institute with this especially poisonous bit.

In a statement, The Pelican Institute said the bills "give kids in Louisiana the ability to receive a tailored education that best fits his or her needs regardless of what zip code they live in."

When they come to replace your socially provided free service with a stipend to go get a "tailored" one to "fit your needs" you know you are in trouble. 

There's a kind of hedged statement of opposition from Aimee Freeman who only says she is "nervous" that there isn't enough "accountability" in the scheme.  The more obvious point comes from Louisiana Association of School Superintendents executive director Mike Faulk.

Faulk said DeVillier's bill would be unfair to students in low-income families because the $5,500 would not be enough to provide alternatives to traditional classes.

In other words, no, this is not about "allowing" students a "tailored" education. For the majority of Louisiana's poor, it is about depriving them of school altogether. 

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.

50 failed states

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had an op-ed published in the New York Times yesterday.  He says he wants us to run the dang money printer.

States and localities are in desperate need of additional federal intervention before the bulk of the CARES Act funding expires this summer. Budget gaps like the one in New Jersey cannot be closed by austerity alone. Multiply New Jersey’s problems to reflect the experiences of 50 state governments and thousands of local governments and the result, without more help from Congress, could be a significantly worse and protracted recession.

The CARES Act allocated $150 billion to state and local governments. This new aid package must be significantly larger and provide not only assistance for state and local governments but also continued support for the unemployed, investments in public health and aid as needed to stabilize aggregate demand and restore full employment.

As it stands right now, unfortunately, there isn't much to suggest that we're actually going to see the kind of action Bernanke is calling for.  If anything the Trump administration is leaning toward more austerity. Consider the sabotage going on at the Post Office, for example.

The Trump administration has consolidated control over the Postal Service, traditionally an apolitical institution, during the pandemic by making a financial lifeline for the nation’s mail service contingent upon the White House political agenda. President Trump in April called the agency “a joke” and demanded it quadruple package rates before he’d authorize any emergency aid or loans.

The Postal Service’s future needs to be as a low-cost package carrier, industry analysts contend, as parcels make up a growing portion of the agency’s volume and profits, and paper mail volumes continue to decline as coupons and bills increasingly move online. Postal leaders project the agency could run out of money between March and October 2021.

“If this is true, it would be a real concern to customers if service were slowed, especially in light of the fact that the Postal Service may get more rate authority, meaning higher rates, later this year or early next year,” said Art Sackler, manager of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, an industry group whose members include Amazon, eBay, Hallmark and other commercial mailers.

“This is framing the U.S. Postal Service, a 245-year-old government agency, and comparing it to its competitors that could conceivably go bankrupt,” said Philip Rubio, a professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University and a former postal worker. “Comparing it to U.S. Steel says exactly that ‘We are a business, not service.’ That’s troubling.”

There are no such thing as public services in the hellworld we've built.  Everything that isn't an all-out grift, just isn't viable.  We've already seen the hostility with which conservatives are attacking public education. This week's threatening demands that schools reopen under dangerous circumstances is only the latest round of that particular gaslighting operation.  Yesterday, Senator Kennedy responded to the pleas for the safety of teachers and students from education professionals by inviting them to "kiss my ass."   Meanwhile, Stephanie Grace picked up on another startling comment from the Vice President during his visit yesterday.

And between congratulating the state for having flattened the curve (before it unflattened) and offering the obligatory paean to LSU football (Coach O was in the house), Pence offered this genuinely shocking statement: “We don’t want CDC guidance to be a reason why people don’t reopen their schools.”

Even if the Centers for Disease Control’s guidance suggests they can’t be reopened safely just yet in some places, and under some circumstances? Really, Mr. VP?

Yes, really, according to the administration’s push to get localities to fall in line with President Donald Trump’s insistence that all is basically well, despite an alarming increase in coronavirus cases in Louisiana and many other states. Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and others said that of course schools would have to be opened safely, but avoided getting into the specifics.

Those specifics, of course, are at the heart of what federal agencies such as the CDC do; assessing risk is a key part of their mission. Does Pence also think we should ignore warnings from the National Hurricane Center if we’d rather not evacuate? Take unproven medications without worrying about side effects? Start smoking, because the Surgeon General can’t tell us what to do?

Apparently, yes, that is precisely the point.  Not only does the Trump administration mean to ignore the advice of CDC, it wants to cut the agency out of the loop entirely.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.

The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

Under the same sort of logic that brought us, "If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases,” we now have, if CDC can't give us any advice, then we won't have to follow it.

Yesterday, John Barry wrote that, as cases spike, we are now facing a "second chance" to get the shutdown right.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, almost every city closed down much of its activity. Fear and caring for sick family members did the rest; absenteeism even in war industries exceeded 50 percent and eviscerated the economy. Many cities reopened too soon and had to close a second time — sometimes a third time — and faced intense resistance. But lives were saved.

Had we done it right the first time, we’d be operating at near 100 percent now, schools would be preparing for a nearly normal school year, football teams would be preparing to practice — and tens of thousands of Americans would not have died.

But getting the response "right" this time would require our leaders to take seriously their roles as stewards of public health and safety.  It would mean extending public services rather than gutting them. It would mean protecting teachers rather than bullying them. And it would mean listening to doctors rather than silencing them. The Trump administration is doing none of that.

Worst of all, despite Benrnake's plea, the Congress is no nearer to offering the states the support they will need to see their people through the economic consequences of a second shutdown. In fact, this week, Republicans there are demanding even more austerity measures as unemployment benefits are set to expire. All the conditions are in place to leave us with 50 failed states grappling with an even bigger pandemic come the end of the year.  Barry closes out his article about the second chance by writing, "we won't get a third."  But from the looks of things, we're going to have to at least hope there is a chance number two and half in there somewhere.

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.

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.

Why is John Bel soft on vouchers?

Good news! John Bel says he's finally ready to do something about Bobby Jindal's disastrous school voucher scheme.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said he will call for an overhaul of the state’s scholarship voucher program, saying the structure that uses public money to pay for private school tuition for nearly 6,900 underprivileged students was poorly conceived.

In an interview just weeks after an in-depth examination by a consortium of local and national news organizations highlighted flaws, Edwards said he will call on state leaders to reform the $40-million-a-year Louisiana Scholarship Program. The governor did not specify what changes he will seek, but said the goal should be for schools in the program to perform better.

He doesn't say what he's going to do.  But he definitely is not interested in abolishing the voucher program.  Which raises the question from us, why on Earth not?

Last month, WVUE, WWNO, Reveal, and what's left of NOLAdotcom collaborated on a damning series of reports confirming what most of us already knew about the voucher scheme. The plan was always more about siphoning money away from public education regardless of whether Louisiana students realized any benefit, which, of course, they did not.

Seven years later, however, the $40-million-a-year Louisiana Scholarship Program has failed to live up to its billing. The nearly 6,900 students who’ve left public schools have instead been placed into a system with numerous failing private schools that receive little oversight, a months-long examination by a coalition of local and national media organizations has found.

And this was always at least part of the intent. We've known pretty much since the beginning that the voucher scheme was a direct attack on the concept of public education, an avenue for Bobby Jindal's cheap pandering to science denying evolutionists, and an obvious opportunity for the sort of corruption described in these reports.

 It's even worse than you might think, though. As the Bayou Brief points out, the vouchers aren't merely a means of diverting public money into unaccountable private hands. They're also a vehicle for ultra-wealthy individuals like Eddie Rispone, for example, to set up very large tax loopholes for themselves.

In December of 2014, he donated $1 million to ACE Scholarships Louisiana, a Student Tuition Organization, and according to an audit of ACE, 100% of his donation was rebate eligible.

While we do not know Rispone’s income or how much of his donation was used toward scholarships, it’s possible to estimate how much Rispone could have profited off his $1 million donation.

If Rispone’s entire donation was used for scholarships in 2015, assuming Rispone did not donate more than 50% of his annual gross income and that he was in the highest income bracket (36.9% marginal tax rate), Rispone’s donation qualified him for up to a $950,000 rebate from the State of Louisiana and a federal tax savings of $369,000.

Therefore, his $1 million donation had a potential return of $1,319,000 ($950,000 + $369,000) for a profit of $319,000.

So, given all of this, since we know the voucher program is a disaster for Louisiana education,  and since we know criminally wealthy oligarchs like Rispone are benefiting from it. Why does John Bel say we should merely "reform" (he doesn't specify how) rather than abolish it?  Rispone is even applying a significant portion of his ill-gotten and protected wealth to challenge John Bel in this year's election.  Why would he let him get away with that?

Could make for a real hot summer

Well these are some fightin' words right here.

The key details of a teacher pay raise remained unresolved Tuesday with nine days left in the session, sparking questions on whether a controversial end to the debate could spark a walkout or other job action by teachers.

Education leaders and some lawmakers say that, if the pay raises are for one year only, action by already restive public school teachers is all but certain.

"If it doesn't happen the way it needs to will teachers even come back to school?" asked Shane Riddle, legislative and political director of the Louisiana Association of Educators, one of the state's two teacher unions.

Right now there are two versions of the teacher pay raise.  The details are a little bit technical.  The Senate version boosts salaries by $1000 for teachers and $500 for support staff baked into a $39 million increase in the Minimum Foundation Plan formula for public school funding recommended by BESE. The House version is a one time gimmick that raises teacher pay by $1200 and support staff by $600. The critical difference is, without the MFP increase, the salary bump is not a guaranteed recurring raise.

The tea leaves I've been looking at this month suggest that the Senate version is going to be what eventually comes out of the process.  Maybe there will be some nail biting during conference but even so it sounds like that's where we're headed.  Otherwise, the teachers had better be ready to back up their fightin' words when the new school year comes around.  If something goes haywire during this last week in the legislature, it's going to be a scramble trying to organize a strike over the summer.

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.

Any day now the self-driving college will come along and solve this

One of Loyola's accredidations is on probation due to fiscal problems. That's not a huge surprise given the school's well-publicized struggles with cuts and layoffs in recent years.  This article suggests things are going a bit better with regard to enrollment and fundraising, though we really have no idea what sort of bar they need to hit in order to be comfortable.

In any case, this isn't as reassuring as it is meant to be.

Moreover, the university has committed to finding new revenue by investing in more online degrees, she said, expanding continuing education and adding innovative programming that is more likely to appeal to newer generations of incoming freshmen

It's hard to read "investing in online degrees," without concluding that means faculty layoffs but I could be wrong about that. As for "innovative programming," I have no idea what that means.  What new degrees are all the kids dying to take on piles of debt in order to acquire these days?  Even in the "innovative" fields, there's not much wage growth to speak of. 

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.

Puerto Rico is a state now?

Seems to be what this says.

The report, which cites a report from Metro in Puerto Rico, says Paul Pastorek, a New Orleans native, agreed to a contract with Puerto Rico’s Department of Education to help with various tasks, including assisting the island’s school system in getting hurricane recovery funds to implement a plan under the state’s Every Student Succeeds Act. The contract reportedly runs until June 2019 and is worth up to $155,000, at $250 an hour, Education Week reports.

Can't be right.

Oh also this says that the man who paved the way for the mass firing of New Orleans teachers and the privatization of public education after Katrina is all set to bestow the same blessings on another storm-ravaged population.  What an odd specialty to have developed.