Experiments
Can’t Fail:
Why New Orleans Public School Children Will Need “Rescue” from
Post-Katrina Recovery School District
Public Education “Reform”
Presentation by
Tracie L. Washington, President – Louisiana Justice
Institute[i]
to the
Albert Shanker Institute
September 9, 2015
Ten Years After the Deluge:
The State of Public Education in New Orleans.
Good afternoon
and thank you for this invitation to the Conversation
Series on Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education. What an exceptional topic and space. I want to visit with you about MY
understanding of that Promise.
Just a little
about me and what brought me here. I am
the product of educators. In my family
my father, mother, and maternal grandfather; and 3 aunts, 2 first cousins, and
one cousin-in-law are/were educators. I
am entering my third year on faculty at Dillard University. I get educators and the work we are inspired
to do. Prior to Katrina, I practiced
employee side labor/employment law, and my docket was 75% representation of
educators. I was good.
I have written so
many drafts of this presentation, trying to stay focused and not fly off
topic. It’s not been easy. Here’s what you need to know up front. New Orleans education reform had very little
to do with educating the 90% African American student population that attended our
public schools prior to Hurricane Katrina. I’ll support this contention by giving you the
facts, by the numbers. Then, we’ll get
down to the real truths.
New Orleans
Public Schools – August 28, 2005
The Orleans Parish School Board operated 128 schools. The students are the poor. They are poor children in one of the poorest cities, and poorest states in the country. This school system, which has been consistently underfunded and whose infrastructure if woefully neglected (crumbling) is charged with educating these children. The district educates over 90% African-American students - a result of decades of white flight. At 25%, the City of New Orleans has one of the highest rates of private school attendance in the country. Prior to the storms, NOPS had been led by ten (10) superintendents in ten years; many left under controversy involving the mishandling of funds. And prior to Katrina, there wasn’t any real political will – particularly from the Nola Confederate Gentry – to reform public schools.
Hercules, Hercules:
It’s A Miracle – We’ve Educated These
Children!
We love a good story. Cinderella gets her Prince. Batman beats The Joker. Coyote catches Roadrunner. So why not “Broken School System Miraculously
Reformed.”
Here’s the story from the
Las Vegas Review Journal[1]. EDITORIAL: Public school reform bolsters
post-Katrina New Orleans, Posted September 7, 2015 - 5:10pm
“The last full school year before the storm, a mere 56 percent
of students in New Orleans graduated from high school, 10 points below the
national average. And the majority of those who graduated tested below average
in core subjects such as reading and math.
The school district was far more concerned with helping
grown-ups. In 2003, the school system issued checks to 4,000 people who weren't
supposed to get them and provided health benefits to 2,000 people who weren't
eligible for them.
Post-Katrina, the School Board had no choice but to hand over
four-fifths of the city's public school system to a new, all-charter Recovery
School District. Fast-forward 10 years, and things are much different — and
much better — for students in New Orleans.
At of the beginning of the 2013 school year, 76.5 percent of New
Orleans students were graduating on time. Not only was this figure equal to the
national average, but the city's black students were graduating at a rate 16.5
percentage points higher than their counterparts nationwide. According to a
2012 study by Tulane's Cowen Institute, ACT scores among the city's students
had increased 1.2 points. The college entry rate among New Orleans public
school students had gone up by 14 percentage points.”
Doesn’t that sound good? The end, right?
Here’s What
Really Happened:
The Takeover
At the end of the 2004-2005 school year,
eighty-eight (88) of the more than 120 public schools in Orleans Parish had met
or exceeded the state’s requirement for adequate yearly progress. These
schools were not failing. Ninety-three (93) of the schools showed academic
growth. The Orleans Parish School Board was making documented progress in
raising failing school scores in accordance with the federal No Child Left
Behind legislation prior to Hurricane Katrina. Thus, as of the 2005-06 school
year, the OPSB was working towards meeting the State’s growth target.
What happened at the first
OPSB meeting post-Katrina was startling to everyone. It was September 15, 2005 and OPSB met at the
State Department of Education in Baton Rouge. Immediately after the public
comment period, Louisiana’s Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard, tried
unsuccessfully to have a New York financial consultant replace the Acting NOPS Superintendent
Ora Watson. Picard was bent and
determined to wrestle away governance of NOPS from OPSB, and when the
Superintendent replacement maneuver didn’t work, Picard lobbied Governor Kathleen Blanco
to change the charter law. She acted
immediately and signed an Executive Order on October 15, 2005 allowing almost
any business to charter schools in New Orleans without community, faculty, or
parental support.
But
that wasn’t enough. Greed turned to
gluttony. Picard wanted immediate
control. Simply allowing charter
operators to apply for a school was not the avenue paved with gold. So he turned to his former colleagues in the
state legislature, who during an unprecedented 17 day special session called 66
days after the storm, created the post-Hurricane
Tsunami -- Act 35, which redefined the definition of what was a failing
school. The school performance score of
60 or below had been the standard by which schools were judged as failing. Now, a score less than the state average of
87.4 was considered failing, but only if the school district that school was in
was judged academically in crisis, a distinction that befell only the New
Orleans district. It took Picard only
three (3) months; on November 30, 2005 the
state took control over 102 of the 126 New Orleans public schools.
So
this was the take over New Orleans public schools, and with no buildings, no
students, and no money, there was no district.
“Tell Them What You’ve Got for them Johnny”
A
New School System
Here
are the numbers. NAEP 8th
grade reading and math scores don’t lie.
In 2003 Louisiana was 47th in the nation for math. 2013, we’re still 47th in the
nation. In 2003 Louisiana was 46th
in the nation for reading. 2013, we’re
47th. In 2004 the Louisiana
composite ACT score was 19.8 – 48th in the nation. In 2015, Louisiana is still 48th
in the nation, but now the ACT composite score is lower at 19.2.
But
that’s Louisiana, not New Orleans, right?
My bad. The Recovery School
System graduation rate is last in the state with 61.1% of 72 school
systems. RSD is the drop out, push out
factory, with students abandoning schools in 7th and 8th
grade. RSD said “no excuses, our kids
will be prepped for college.”
Really? In 2013, 79% of the RSD
charter schools received a “D” or “F” as a state school performance grade. Only 5.5% of students who actually take AP
courses score high enough on the tests to get credit. And that ACT composite index for the
RSD? In 2013 it was 16.3. Last year it was worse – 15.7
Okay,
Okay – The Experiment Failed, Right?
Nope!
I
was raised by a scientist. When Governor
Kathleen Blanco indicated there would be this great experiment in New Orleans
public school education, I told my Dad this experiment would fail, and I listed
all the reasons – no teachers, no public input, and disaster capitalism. My father told me – in his Professor Washington voice – “You know better. Experiments can’t fail. You’re either testing a hypothesis, or demonstrating a known fact. Regardless, even
if the outcome is unexpected it’s not a failure because you always learn
something useful.”
He
was so correct. What happened to New
Orleans’ public education system post-Katrina is not a failed experiment. To the contrary -- these jokers (state actors
& white philanthropy masking as lovers of all children African-American) demonstrated known facts: if (1) you permanently
exile 100,000 African Americans from a city, and (2) inject a corporate agenda
of white political power and economic dominance, then (3) you will shift the
balance of power from Black to White. The Promise of Public Education in New Orleans had always been that OPSB was more than just a public education system. OPSB was a community catalyst. It was this tremendous tool whose post civil rights era retrofit made OPSB the pipeline for black economic development and Black leadership. New Orleans public schools did not exist solely to train people to get jobs – they existed to train citizenry and to create Black leadership.
“Education
reform” Nola-style was all about
puncturing that pipeline. Educating
Black children was not the government’s priority. Instead, what Katrina gave way to was this
plan to transform the political power in the City of New Orleans and ensuring
generational wealth would remain predominantly in the hands of our city’s white
community. In 2005, the system’s budget
was $500million, and that money was controlled by African Americans who had the
voting majority on the school board. They
were extremely powerful political figures, and played a significant role in
local and state politics. In some
respects, even more powerful was the United Teachers of New Orleans. Under famed leaders Nat LaCour, and then
Brenda Mitchell, UTNO’s membership could sway elections and, therefore, the
balance of power state wide.
There was no way in Hell Kathleen Blanco
was going to allow the Orleans Parish School Board, i.e., Black folk have
control over $1.8 billion recovery dollars to distribute – to black folk.
It Was
All About a Racial Makeover
Better, Stronger, Whiter New Orleans
The charter schools in New Orleans are still predominately Black
attended, but governance has changed. Black
veteran teachers and administrators had served in the system for decades. No
longer. We suffered through a shift in
OPSB leadership, and almost all White leadership recruited to the city to run
charter schools. Inexperienced Teach for a Graduate Degree teachers, who get to
leave in 2-3 years debt free and with loads of beer drinking stories about
their time with the natives. This has
been a large part of the racial makeover of New Orleans as a whole.
The City’s gentrification began in earnest with the schools. Fire all the Black teachers and bring in new
ones, younger, from outside the city.
The first wave of charter operators saw very little value in the city’s
Black culture, and almost no respect for the community’s integrity. “You can’t recruit cultural and historical
understanding. That’s something that’s nurtured over time,
inter-generationally, and it comes out of the lived experience of being part of
a neighborhood. When that gets lost, not only is it tragic at a cultural level,
it has implications for students’ learning. They are taught that where they
come from is a liability rather than an asset.”
The Struggle Forward:
Nothing About Us,
Without Us, is For Us
We can’t let this happen again, anytime, anywhere. When you talk to black folk in New Orleans
the mantra is still, this was done to us not with us, and you can’t ignore us. It was not just about schools.
It was about the destruction of a community and a culture. Public housing was destroyed, and very little
affordable housing built in its place.
The public hospital was closed.
It was all the same agenda. It
was about remaking a city, and in the struggles forward, we have to dissect and
understand what happened in New Orleans.
Don’t call it a failure. These folks
(state actors & white
philanthropy masking as lovers of all children African-American) knew exactly what they were doing. We need to learn from this. Organize around this.
I like this quote from Howard L. Fuller:“When black people came out of slavery, we came out with a clear understanding of the connection between education and liberation. Two groups of white people descended upon us—the missionaries and the industrialists. They both had their view of what type of education we needed to make our new-born freedom realized. During this period there’s an analogy—I’ve said this to all my friends in Kipp And TFA. During this period two groups of white people descended on us the industrialists and the missionaries. And each one of them have their own view of what kind of education we need.”
He’s
right. I add the following: The
Promise of Public Education must be the Promise of Engagement, or else
there can be no Promise of Democracy.
Thank
you.
[i] Tracie
L. Washington is an attorney working in New Orleans, Louisiana. www.TracieWashington.com.
