Since the levees broke, independently run New Orleans charter schools educate more than 60 percent of the students compared to about three percent nationally.
To help pay the bills, New Orleans will receive a $1.8 billion reimbursement for schools that were damaged or destroyed in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina.
It's "good news out of bad," says NBC's Brian Williams. Five years post-Katrina, what can school officials, educators, policy analysts and parents learn about how to best educate the nation's children ? (Newsweek, The New York Times, GOOD, The [New Orleans] Times-Picayuneand MSNBC Nightly News)
Follow Susan Sawyers on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SuSaw
NCLB is a push for privatization. Katrina became a perfect excuse for leveling our public schools and inviting entrepreneurs in to try their hand. There are now only FOUR public schools in NOLA. It was done silently - little news coverage at the time. This is an experiment on our children - there is NO PROOF that this will help our students.
This was the first massive infiltration of business into our school system. Each child comes with federal dollars to be used for profit. It is now happening in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, Baltimore, and other urban areas where poverty and language barriers affect learning outcomes and scores. Students are expected to perform on a single test, most at a higher level than they can read. When miracles occur and students do reach the goals, the standards are raised. When students, and therefore, schools, do not meet these standards, they are taken over by the state. The state then "repurposes" them into charter schools (most for profit). Often the charter schools are outright given access to resources - buildings, computers, etc - at very little or no charge.
Our
extract:
"Yet even with these academic disadvantages to which may be added the fact that the regular publics must absorb ELL students and the behavioral and academic casualties from the charter schools, these “schools of last resort,” are, nonetheless, out-performing the charters in terms of student growth in 8 categories, compared to 4 for the charters. We may safely conclude, I think, that the charterites and the charter industry have much better public relations than they do pedagogy."
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/08/nola-regular-public-schools-outgain.html
If the government is responsible for a child's education, just to make things faiir let's hold principals, administrators and teachers legally responsible for a positive outcome and jail them if the child does not graduate high school without either a guaranteed and fully paid-for slot in a higher educational institution or a job.
My guess is that responsible parents would go for either of the above solutions. They just want their kids successfully educated without having their family's values undercut. Absent those draconian measures, lets go with success. If kids in N. O. are passing the government mandated tests after security has been enhanced so that no teacher can have access to the test prior to the children taking it, and the test facility is fully proctored, that pretty much says their system works and should be tried elsewhere.
This post is not a success story. It's yet another disaster story. When children's education is controlled, not by public interest and public values, but by for-profit entrepreneurs or special religious/political interests, then democracy is at risk.
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And please don't talk about "test scores." He/she who creates the test controls the curriculum. He/she who teaches to the test becomes a co-conspirator. The kids wear parochial school uniforms? The kid says that failing to do her homework is not an option? What punishment, by whom, terrorizes her?
This is a system to create robots, not independent, self-affirming, conformity-resistant individuals. It's horrifying.
So ~ here we are...... and the majority of the kids suffer from loss of the tax base while a minority (many who could afford private school) milk it to the hilt.
I have not been impressed.