In response to three months of requests from The Lens, a surprisingly large number of New Orleans charter school boards failed to comply with even basic requests for information. Many didn’t respond at all. Of the officials who did answer, some provided only partial information – and still others claimed they aren’t public officials or required to do their work in public, even though state law says otherwise.
About a month ago, Jarvis DeBerry presented this column where he addressed the confusion New Orleans parents seemed to be having as to whether or not the charter schools were in fact public entities.
The way some people talking about schools after Hurricane Katrina use “charter” as an antonym of “public.”
Perhaps you’ve heard people make that distinction and found yourself puzzled by it. After all, there isn’t a single charter school in New Orleans that charges tuition, so how is it that so many people speak about them in a way that suggests they’re in the same class as private and parochial campuses?
At this point in DeBerry's column, I was with him. I thought, well yes, the strange configuration of public schools in New Orleans presents a bizarre and confusing obstacle for parents to navigate. The opaque nature of this system is evident in the confused language people use to describe it. Shouldn't the public schools make every effort to provide accessible services to all students and to inform parents of the services available to them? The charter system seems designed specifically to do the opposite.
This Newsweek article focuses on the charters' exclusion of special needs students, for example, but in fact the charters' selective admissions policies and confusing overall structure end up doing more than just that. What the charter system does is segregate students according to their families' ability to navigate the application process. More often than not, such divisions occur along the same lines as class, social status, and race. The result is a system where the best performing charters draw the most privileged students while the most needy are shunted off into a separate but equally "public" educational ghetto.
I was waiting for DeBerry to make this point, but instead, he took an unexpected turn.
There was a fear right after Hurricane Katrina that New Orleans would become increasingly hostile toward the poor. With much higher rents, it has become more difficult for people with low incomes to make it here. But some of the changes in the city, charter schools in particular, don’t require money to navigate as much as they require a certain sophistication.
It takes knowing that the Orleans Parish School Board still exists but that many of the schools under its control are magnets or have selective admissions. There’s also the Recovery School District, which took over the city’s worst schools. And there are charter schools, some of which are overseen by either the OPSB or the RSD. The application required to get into one school might not be the same application used at another.
And that regrettable tradition of waiting till after Labor Day to enroll a child? Parents who tarry are sure to be disappointed.
If you’re accustomed to simplicity, the new system of systems can be dizzying in its complexity.
If you haven’t adjusted to the new complexity, you might decide that public can’t be used to describe a school that won’t enroll your child.
What Jarvis appears to be saying, in so many words, is that the byzantine system isn't failing Orleans Parish parents, it's the unsophisticated parents "accustomed to simplicity" whose children, I guess, deserve inferior schools due to their failure to "adjust to the new complexity".
This struck me as a little cruel if not an altogether snobbish argument for DeBerry to make, so I (politely) attempted to Twitter @ him the case that apportioning public education resources according to caste seems inherently unfair. DeBerry is actually very good about responding to readers via online comments so we had an extended back-and-forth about it. And I think he agreed with or had sympathy for some of my argument. But when the conversation reached this point, I figured we were at an impasse.
Sequential DeBerry tweets:
1) My mother was an English teacher. That gave me all sorts of advantages that other kids were without. No, it's not exactly fair.
2) By the time I reached 5th grade I had read almost every book in that school's library. Again, not exactly fair.
After going round and round, Jarvis' point is that students who come from more supportive and stable families have an advantage anyway. Again, I don't see why the public school system should compound this inequity but that's where we ended up. I suppose Jarvis' other point is that he was a bright, well-read kid but I always figured as much.
On the other hand, it's getting more difficult to have much patience with DeBerry's attempt to blame parents for their inability to apprehend the fact that charter schools are public schools when even the charters' own boards are missing out on the concept. Perhaps they lack the requisite sophistication.
For now, at least, the school boards have managed to avoid the Sandra Hester problem by virtue of being too numerous and difficult for just one open-meetings advocate to track down, even one as tenacious and sophisticated as Ms Hester.
The Orleans Parish School Board used to have a budget rivaling that of the city – close to half a billion dollars – but it now shares its state allocation with the Recovery School District and myriad charters. For citizens to follow the money allotted to public schools – $7,995 per child in state money – they need to know when and where the boards meet.
No longer can activists or interested taxpayers plan on attending just regular meetings of the School Board. They also need to travel to Baton Rouge sometimes to hear about Recovery School District schools, and try to track down the meetings of the nearly three dozen charter school boards. (see calendar of charter board meetings here, in Excel)
The Lens attended a handful of charter board meetings recently, and they were lonely affairs. At some, the only other audience members were employed by the school.
Maybe we should have her cloned.
Update: Newsweek has taken their article down for some reason. I hope it's temporary.
Upperdate: Story is still missing. Gambit is on the case.
Uppestdate: FTW, Leigh has the article preserved here.
Also more on the stupid elitist American discourse about schools in today's Daily Howler
As these bozos pretend to proceed, they rarely fail to help us see their own exquisite moral greatness. (Waiting For Superman director Davis) Guggenheim has crafted a destructive, simple-minded thesis—a thesis which advances the teacher-bashing and union-bashing preferred by current elites. But his interviews—and apparently, his film—are built around his own moral greatness. Poor Guggenheim! He feels so bad as he drives his kids to private school in Los Angeles! As these people make jokes of our discourse, could they at least refrain from making us marvel at their personal greatness?
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