A pig wearing lipstick is still a pig
20th March 2023 · 0 Comments
Colorful balloons and flowers carried by family members making their way into an auditorium is a traditional sight during late May. Soon-to-be graduates wearing caps and gowns line up to receive their hard-earned diplomas – except when they don’t.
In 2019, researchers found that Louisiana public high schools have among the highest dropout rates in the nation each year. Between 2014 and 2017, Louisiana’s dropout rate was 9.6 percent compared to the national average of 6.0 percent.
The Louisiana Department of Education’s statistics show that 16.5 percent of 9th-grade students dropped out in Orleans Parish; 23.6 percent of 10th-graders, 20.27 percent of 11th-graders, and 17.4 percent of 12th-graders dropped out in 2020.
Fast forward to 2022, and a WalletHub report, which ranks the best and worst school systems in America, listed Louisiana as the third-worst in the personal-finance website’s analysis of test scores, teacher certification, bullying rates, and more; the Daily Advertiser reported.
According to the school district’s website, during the 2022-2023 school year, there are 79 public schools in the city, of which 72 are overseen by NOLA-PS.
Of the schools under NOLA-PS, there are five independently operated schools within the NOLA-PS LEA – Benjamin Franklin Mathematics and Science School, Delores T. Arthur School for Young Men, Élan Academy, Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School of Literature and Technology, and Travis Hill School.
The rest of the schools governed by NOLA-PS are operated by independent CMOs (Charter Management Organizations).
Really? Reading that statement on the NOLA-PS, it’s clear the administration doesn’t oversee any schools.
Independently operated schools mean just that. Also, when the CMOs were returned to the Orleans Parish School District in 2018, a new law allowed the charters to remain autonomous and independent of the administration and school board.
The education coup of the predominantly Black school district started in 2000 when state officials and BESE (Board of Elementary and Secondary Education) members conspired to have the state take over the Orleans Parish Public School System and its money.
At the time, the Orleans Parish Public School District encompassed 112 schools, and the District’s General Fund revenues totaled $399,216,002.
To justify the takeover, BESE mandated administering a punitive test in March 2000. LEAP (Louisiana Education Assessment Program) test scores determined whether 4th and 8th graders would move to the next grade.
If students failed, they would be held back. The same policy was in place for high school students who had to take the GEE (Graduate Exit Exam).
BESE knew students would fail because the test was based on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) framework with benchmarks that should have started in kindergarten, not 4th, 8th, or 12th grades.
Shortly afterward, thousands of students failed LEAP.
BESE members Leslie Jacobs and Paul Pastorek, an insurance executive and an attorney, respectively, threw their weight behind a law that took power from the duly elected school board and vested the power in one person, the school superintendent. Voter nullification, anyone?
Millions were invested in the takeover.
Tulane’s Walter Isaacson and Wendy Koop, founder of Teach for America, called the effort to make Orleans Parish School District the nation’s first all-charter school district is wildly successful. (Read about the plan here: www.con-tent.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1659767,00.html)
Isaacson is a New Orleans native, author and Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values at Tulane University. He was also president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Koop founded Teach for America, initially seeding the charter schools with mostly white inexperienced teachers.
Isaacson has a vested interest in the charter school experiment. He and Stephen Rosenthal, Leslie Jacobs’ brother, are founding board members of New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO). The non-profit was developed in 2006 to accelerate the school reform effort.
Isaacson has raised millions of dollars for NSNO and secured investments from the Aspen Group and the U.S. Department of Education.
With the backing of donors, New Schools for New Orleans was created to serve as a combined guide dog/watchdog, Philanthropy Roundtable reports.
The dismantling of the school system in a predominantly Black city whose student body and teaching corps were Black (before more than 7,000 teachers were fired after Hurri-cane Katrina and replaced with Teach for America folk) is a travesty of justice.
The closing and selling of school sites and busing Black children outside their neighborhoods is no less a tragedy.
They had help.
Former State Senators Karen Carter Peterson and Ann sponsored the legislation that created the charter school behemoth and Peterson sponsored the legislation that returned the charter schools to the Orleans Parish School District while ensuring charter schools remained autonomous, with no oversight or accountability from the locally elected School Board or superintendent.
Only when a contract comes up for renewal can the School Board decide whether to renew or not renew the charter. But even that takes a super-majority vote to shutter a charter school.
Interestingly, Peterson’s husband, Dana Peterson, was named CEO of NSNO last year. He had been assistant superintendent of education at the LDOE.
The propaganda pushed by the charter school enthusiasts that the charters are doing well is just a reflection of a handful of schools – formerly magnet schools – that have consistently scored high on tests.
But reality and propaganda are not mutually exclusive.
So many Louisiana students dropped out of school or were held back based on LEAP test scores over the past 23 years that the BESE last year created a loophole in its retention and promotion policies.
As of 2022, the LEA (Local Education Authority aka charter school) will decide to retain or promote a student (due to their failure to achieve the standard on the LEAP test) based on an individual pupil progression plan. Then there’s the myth of school choice. The OneApp system was exposed as a lie: no school choice existed. Parents thought their children would attend one of the three schools of their choice. One stat posted by NOLA-PS says 80 percent of parents got their kids into schools of their choice.
OneApp is now called the New Orleans Common Application Process (NCAP). Under NCAP, parents can choose eight schools of their choice.
The jury is out on the “New Orleans Miracle,” but many questions remain: Why are so many Orleans Parish children dropping out of school? Why are 25 percent of Orleans Parish students attending private schools? Why does BESE still have the audacity to allow the possibility of children being retained based on one test? Why are the schools still segregated, with white children attending the highest-scoring schools?
The reality is Black children and their families who can’t afford private school are guinea pigs in a charter school system that the legislation that creates the nation’s first all-charter system called an “experiment.” Many are also subjected to fewer certified teachers.
Last year, the number of certified teachers in Orleans Parish varied from 18 percent to 81 percent depending on the school, and 55 percent overall were certified, according to a NOLA.com article, which questioned whether certification really mattered.
According to WWNO, 3,400 seats were empty as of 2021. The most significant number of empty seats – 400 – were in grades K-4. High school grades have between 100 and 200 extra seats.
One BESE committee recently adopted an emergency consideration to waive the standardized LEAP test requirement for 2023 high school seniors in Louisiana to graduate. If approved by the entire Board in April, the waiver would only apply to immigrant students who have lived in the U.S. for less than seven years and are still learning English, according to WDSU-TV.
Blogger Mercedes Schneider, a St. Bernard native, former educator, and author of several books, has a lot to say about the state of education in Louisiana:
The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) has contracted with Data Recognition Corporation (DRC) for the state’s PARCC-modeled LEAP 2025 assessment portfolio to the tune of $61.5M for five school years (2016-17 to 2020-21). The complete DRC contract can be found here and here.
Must read: www.deutsch29.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/do-not-follow-new-orleans-lead-on-charter-school-education/Mercedes Schneider
Too many of our Black children in New Orleans are not even receiving the minimum education foundation the law requires. Remember that the next time the BESE election comes around.
This article originally published in the March 20, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
