Community at odds over Act 91
13th September 2016 · 0 Comments
By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer
For some, Act 91 and the reunification of public schools in New Orleans is hailed as a triumphant and long overdue step in returning the state-seized schools to local control.
The legislation calls for the 49 schools currently under the jurisdiction of the Recovery School District (RSD) to be absorbed by the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) by July of 2018.
“The Orleans Parish School Board is ready to unify our schools,” said OPSB Superin-tendent Henderson Lewis, Jr., calling the “Unification Plan” a “historic opportunity for public education in our city.”
Lewis spoke at the board’s Aug. 30 meeting, prior to the unanimous approval of the plan by board members, describing a “rare and unique opportunity to build something that is the first of it’s kind in the nation. We are building a unified district made up of nearly all charter schools.”
Lewis promised a lean and efficient central office, running on a budget of $20 million.
He emphasized the five guiding principals of the plan: High Standards, Continued Progress, Choices for Families, Ensuring Equity, and Empowering Schools and their Communities.
However for critics and skeptics, the legislation and the plan changes nothing, and only continues to push forward the “reform” agenda of privatization, leaving virtually all authority in the hands of individual charter operators and their un-elected, self-appointed boards.
Dr. Raynard Sanders, who has over thirty years of experience in teaching, educational administration, and economic and community development in New Orleans, calls the return of schools “a return in name only.”
While Lewis framed the unprecedented autonomy granted to charters as “empowering educators to run schools,” others view it as handing over vast amounts of public dollars with virtually no oversight on how it is spent.
It’s the ideal government contract to win, Sanders said, from the contractor’s point of view. The OPSB still has “no say so in the operations of the charter schools.”
Speaking before the board, Wilfred Norris, retired educator and vice-president of Community Legion, questioned the constitutionality of such a system of “taxation without representation.”
Norris also noted that many charter school leaders have no experience as educators, and that many of the teachers are uncertified. “All principals should be instructional leaders, not business leaders,” he said.
Act 91 keeps virtually every single power in the hands of private charter operators, without any specific mechanisms for oversight: “Unless mutually agreed to by both the charter school’s governing authority and the local school board pursuant to a duly authorized resolution adopted by each governing entity, the local school board shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction in the areas of school programming, instruction, curriculum, materials and tests, yearly school calendars and daily schedules, hiring and firing of personnel, employee performance management and evaluation, terms and conditions of employment, teacher or administrator certification, salaries and benefits, retirement, collective bargaining, budgeting, purchasing, procurement, and contracting for services other than capital repairs and facilities construction.”
“Under a local board, schools have to answer to a local board,” Sanders said. However under Act 91, “They [charter operators] are only interested in a system in which they answer to no one.”
Act 91 does direct the creation of a “Unification Advisory Commit-tee,” however that committee is made up almost entirely of pro-privatization appointees.
Sanders points out the committee actually has the authority and power to halt the unification process.
But Lewis will have the authority on authorization, renewals and revocations of charter contracts, as Act 91 shifts power from the school board to the superintendent, requiring a two-thirds vote by the school board, to override “all decisions related to school opening, renewal and closure,” according to the plan. He said he is ready to make those difficult decisions.
But critics see very little in the legislation or the plan to hold charter operators to higher standards, verify their self-reported data, and fix some of the failures and fiascos of the past decade of experimentation on New Orleans’ children.
Those failures include the mass push-out and mistreatment of students who either cost too much to educate because of special needs or disabilities, or because they are not likely to boost the school’s performance score (on which the school’s continued existence relies.)
Other failures includes jaw-dropping out of school suspension rates and discipline policies which send kids home for wearing the wrong color socks, give them demerits for not smiling when they pass adults in the hallway, for raising their hand with their arm in the incorrect position, and for stepping off the taped line running down the hallways.
It does nothing to address the system’s reliance on unqualified, uncertified, inexperienced teachers.
Asked specifically whether there would now be in-school monitoring with unannounced visits (the RSD stopped in 2008, citing a lack of resources), a spokesman for the OPSB gave the following answer (Lewis was unavailable for an interview, according to the spokesman): “The Unification Plan does call for the enhancement of OPSB’s Portfolio Management function, and specifically calls for the hiring of additional School Performance staff members to support the district’s obligation to hold schools accountable to legal, contractual, and other performance standards. OPSB has already hired a new Executive Director for this team, and plans to begin hiring for the rest of this team in the near future, utilizing funds allocated for this specific purpose by the School Board in July.”
It would appear this is a “yes,” there will be on-the-ground monitoring, however the answer, and the entire plan lacks specifics on precisely how charter operators will be monitored.
The legislation and the unification plan also do nothing to address sky-rocketing six-figure salaries on the taxpayer’s dime, and top heavy administrations that often include a team of vice-principals for only a few hundred kids, and an alphabet soup of administrators including CEO’s, CAO’s, COO’s, and CFO’s for each relatively tiny district.
The OPSB verified there is no mechanism to regulate compensation: “Nonprofit charter school operators are granted the operational autonomy to determine the compensation packages for those educators, administrators, and other support staff they employ or contract with. This operational autonomy is unimpacted by the Unification Plan, and is protected under existing state laws.”
While Lewis constantly promised to engage the community, a majority of the “key themes” from the community meetings held over the summer are cited in the plan not in the category of “Addressed in the scope of the unification plan,” but rather as “To be discussed through other community processes.”
Those key themes cited as important to the community but not addressed in the plan include “curriculum, teacher training, discipline and culture, open community schools, career education, holistic education, mental health, translation services, and local teachers.”
Beyond that, however, is the concern that Act 91 and the Unification Plan are based on an entirely false premise: that the past decade of privatization has been an unquestionable success, and that the all-charter model should not only continue but expanded.
By allowing everything to simply continue as is, “They are bringing back these schools like rock stars, and successful entities,” Sanders said, when in fact they have serious inherent problems.”
There are some charter schools doing well by their students and families, Sanders readily acknowledges, but not all. And, he argues the systemic problems are not being addressed.
Nationally, there is no evidence to suggest that charter schools are performing any better than traditional schools. Some studies provide evidence they are actually doing worse in some areas, and increasing segregation.
A 2015 study of National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores by The Network for Public Education showed that “Louisiana charter schools perform worse than any other state when compared to traditional schools.”
Led by Superintendent John White, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) has become highly skilled at spinning the data, whether by constantly changing the benchmarks and grading systems, or always including the high-performing OPSB with the RSD to artificially boost the RSD’s numbers.
The LDOE has also become notorious for their lack of transparency, and refusal to adhere to public records requests.
Some of the data shows genuine improvement, and gives good reason to give accolades where due, and reason to replicate and expand best practices.
However while there are some real improvements, for now the RSD remains at the very bottom of the very bottom – with Louisiana consistently ranking as one of the worst states in education in the country, and showing very little signs of moving up.
“The state and RSD place last and nearly last in national and federal data,” according to the Network for Public Education report. “These results do not deserve accolades.”
There is very little variety in New Orleans charter schools—most based on a “zero tolerance” discipline model with an intense focus on standardized test preparation. The vocational education opportunities for students in the city have been reduced as compared to pre-Katrina.
While higher graduation rates and college acceptance are touted as a sure sign of success, there is concern about how those students are doing once in college, and whether or not they are able to attain a degree and find a job once in the workforce.
Educator and blogger Michael Deshotels pointed out in a 2015 analysis that “83 percent of the other public school systems in the state still produce better test results than the RSD,” and “94 percent of the other public systems produce better ACT results than the RSD.”
So much of the charter school data is self-reported and unverified at best, and intentionally manipulated at worst, that to consume every shining statistic spit out by the LDOE without additional analysis would be irresponsible.
Act 91 does require independent test monitoring in all schools, a much-needed stipulation amid recent cheating scandals.
With statistics including test scores and graduation rates, one inherent problem is this: far too many children in the city are simply not included in the data.
While the original intent of charter schools was to bring innovation and reach the hardest to reach kids, “Similar schools for similar students could be the catch phrase for the takeover,” writes Barbara Ferguson, in a report by local independent think tank Research on Reforms.
“Well-behaved, motivated students get to attend schools with other well-behaved, motivated students. Those with behavior problems are not allowed in these schools.”
Positively, there are a number of programs created just in the past few years to reach those students, and programs which will be continued under the OPSB, including the New Orleans Therapeutic Day Program, the Youth Opportunity Center, the Youth Study Center and Alternative Learning Institute, and the Citywide Exceptional Needs Fund.
However there are also many students who have been pushed into the juvenile justice system, or are simply unaccounted for in the first place.
In a 2015 article in the International Business Times, Owen Davis writes of New Orleans, “Evidence of broader progress is shot through with signs that the district’s most vulnerable students were rebuffed, expelled, pushed out or lost altogether.
Critics worry that many children, particularly those with behavioral needs, fell through the cracks. And newly available data from independent researchers, corroborated by former district employees, suggest that due to misreporting, official graduation rates may be overstated by several percentage points.”
There is growing evidence that a significant number of students who dropped out, and should be categorized as drop outs, (which would impact graduation rates) are instead being classified as having moved out of state – with zero verification.
Davis continued: “In relinquishing oversight to independent charter operators, former employees say, district authorities lost sight of at-risk students. Under stiff pressure to improve numbers or face closure, schools culled students and depressed dropout rates. And as families muddled through a complex and decentralized system, a sizable contingent of at-risk students may have left the system unrecorded.”
Even the state’s own data shows “The RSD is very near the bottom among the 70 Louisiana systems in the percentage of students graduating,” writes Deshotels, and “The RSD has the highest percentage of students leaving school before 9th grade.”
Another issue is the misleading historical framing of the past decade, and privatization as the “white knight” that saved New Orleans from itself. The 68-page, jargon-saturated Unification Plan begins with a “Historical Context” section without a single mention of Act 35, which was passed not long after the floodwaters receded from the city’s streets, while most of the population was still displaced. Act 35 effectively fired all 7,000 OPSB employees, and changed the state’s definition of a “failing” school in order to take over as many of the city’s schools as possible.
It was the epitome of “Disaster Capitalism,” as laid out in Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine.”
The main mission of reform, said Sanders, was to “give away public services to the private sector.”
He sees it, and only continued under Act 91, as a removal of democracy and disenfranchisement of an entire community.
Sanders calls Act 91 “Act 35 II,” only instead making the changes instituted in the 2005 takeover permanent, as opposed to only temporary as it was under Act 35.
Sanders also questions the constitutionality of allowing a set of governmental restrictions that applies only to New Orleans, and nowhere else in the state.
“We want you to hold us accountable,” Lewis said, at the Aug. 30 meeting.
It’s a vital call for voters and taxpayers and parents and families, but Act 91 and the Unification Plan do very little to show exactly how any elected officials will be able to exert much authority or genuine oversight over charter operators, or meaningfully address the problems that plagued the system over the past decade.
Steps in the right direction have been made, especially in the past few years and as the result of lawsuits and civil rights complaints, but Act 91 the Unification Plan represent very change in how the system operates.
That lack of change is a victory for reformers and charter operators, but a disappointment for those who don’t believe that charter schools are public education’s silver bullet.
One thing agreed upon by all sides, and that Lewis repeated, is that the work to improve educational outcomes for students in New Orleans has only just begun, and there is still a very long way to go to ensure a high quality education and equity for every child.
This article originally published in the September 12, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
