Members of OPSB put their egos ahead students’ best interests
2nd May 2022 · 0 Comments
Four members of the Orleans Parish School Board did the unthinkable last Tuesday. They voted for a resolution that opposes state Senator Joseph Bouie Jr.’s SB 404. Senator Bouie’s legislation would restore the Board’s simple majority vote and authority over the NOLA-PS charter school district. Nolan Marshall Jr. was the lone dissenter.
The Board drew a standing-room-only crowd at its hastily-scheduled special meeting at 10 a.m. on April 26 and got an earful from citizens, parents and civil rights leaders who denounced them for failing to hold charter schools accountable.
Board members’ flimsy excuses for not supporting returning power to the elected OPSB are disingenuous at best and nonsensical at worst.
The OPSB’s vote against SB404 keeps charter schools in full control without accountability from parents, guardians, caregivers, and oversight from the OPSB. Here’s what autonomy means today for charter schools:
According to ACT 91: 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 texts, 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.
Bouie’s SB404 amends ACT 91 to give the OPSB the statutory authority to grant autonomy to each charter school through it’s charter contract. SB404 also gives the OPSB the power to grant approval to a Type 3B charter school to act as its own local educational agency.
In opposing SB404, the Board’s Resolution asks the Senate Education Committee to delay a vote until “all interested parties have been included in the dialogue,” and “potential unintended consequences have been examined.”
A rational person looking at the Board’s opposition and request to postpone the vote really amounts to “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied.”
The Board Resolution contends that the OPSB was not engaged directly in the details of Senate Bill 404. Senator Bouie disagrees. He told The Louisiana Weekly that he met with six of the seven board members to explain his bill and answer any questions about the legislation.
In the past, the now-defunct Recovery School District, charter operators, the Orleans Parish school superintendent, legislators, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE), and BESE members had a hand in crafting education legislation like ACT 91.
The BESE and LDOE have long interfered in the affairs of the Orleans Parish School Board. First, they put high-stakes tests on the children; then took power away from the OPSB and gave it to one individual, the school superintendent; and finally, they took over the schools, all through legislation. Never mind the will of the people who elected the OPSB.
Laws are created and passed in Baton Rouge with no input from the voters. But enough is enough. “Stakeholders (whoever the Board means) and the community of school leaders” don’t need to be at the table to craft legislation that gives back the lawful power and authority over the public schools to a school board empowered by and for the people.
The resolution clarifies that the Board’s majority doesn’t want the statutory power to selectively grant the charters autonomy, oversee them, hold them accountable, monitor charters, replicate and duplicate those that work, and eliminate those that don’t.
If the charter schools were doing a great job and Orleans Parish school students were succeeding academically and thriving, everyone would agree that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But that is not the case. The Board members know most charter schools have been failing students for the past 15 years.
No one can dispute that the “only primarily charter school district in Louisiana” is a failed “experiment.” Studies and data show that the NOLA-PS system and other charter operators, including BESE and the State Department of Education, fail to properly educate New Orleans’ economically disadvantaged students.
“After spending $6 billion of taxpayers’ money to become the only all-charter system in the state, a staggering 73 percent of our children are not functioning at grade level, compared to 67 percent in 2005 when the state took control of over 100 of our schools,” Bouie said.
OPSB members also know that our schools are highly stratified by race, class and educational advantage and operate very different schools for different types of children.
School Board members know that school closure has been the primary tool for addressing school quality, which causes our students to lose achievement when closing schools displace them.
They know 126,000 New Orleanians ages 16 to 24 are counted by the Census as “disconnected” because they are neither working nor in school. They know that our students perform below the national average in math, ELA, science, and social studies.
If board members don’t know these facts, they should check out the Stanford University report entitled “Whose Choice? Student Experiences and Outcomes in the New Orleans School experiment,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Louisiana Profile. It’s not hyperbole to say that New Orleans’ children, indeed, Louisiana youth are at-risk of failing, juvenile delinquency and crime, and dropping out of school. We see it every day.
In 2019, the Louisiana Department of Education reported a 3.2 percent dropout rate for high school students, translating to nearly 7,000 teenagers. Most dropouts came from the ninth grade and 12th grade, with 3.17 percent of dropouts and 3.69 percent of dropouts, respectively, according to a 2021 WalletHub study that claimed Louisiana has the most at-risk youth in the country.
Juveniles are committing felonies. The NOPD reports that children as young as 13 are committing crimes. These are facts.
The LDOE says the graduation rate is 81 percent, but what happened to the other 19 percent? According to the Federal Reserve Bank’s economic research, in 2020, the Census Bureau noted that 7.2 percent of Orleans Parish residents ages 16-19 “are disconnected,” meaning not in school and not working.
Failing grades, notwithstanding, the giant elephant in the system is racism. Orleans Parish is the only one of 64 parishes with an all-charter school system. New Orleans’ population is 60 percent Black and the NOLA-PS system is 80 percent Black. It’s doubtful that the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) would privatize all schools in any other parish.
Unfortunately, a paternalistic mindset, plantation politics, corporate greed, and, yes, racism have led to the sorry state of privatized public education in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, the planners of the education coup called the all-charter school district are white.
Race is definitely the gorilla in the room. Tulane’s Education Research Alliance for New Orleans report found “New Orleans schools were highly segregated prior to the city’s school reforms, especially in terms of race and income, and remain segregated now.”
The NOLA-PS system’s student body is 80 percent African American. There are 344,264 Black students in the school district and 3,543 white students. Yet, the student bodies are predominately white in the district’s top-performing charter schools (formerly known as magnet schools). Lusher is 58.9 percent white, Hynes, 53 percent white, and Lycee Francais, 52.5 percent white.
NOLA-PS is supposed to allow for school choice through its OneApp Enrollment system. But that’s a farce. The top-performing schools can select students by lottery and or admission requirements such as test scores, etc. They do not participate in the OneApp program. Also, what does it say about a school district when only 15 of 83 schools (18.7%) are operated by Black professionals?
The OPSB is failing Orleans Parish’s Black children by refusing to take back the statutory power that belongs to the people and use it to better New Orleans youth.
The OPSB should also uphold the law that created the charter school system. A 2021 Legislative Audit affirmed that schools are not being monitored to see what works and what doesn’t. According to Louisiana R.S.1739-72, charter schools should be replicated and duplicated at other charters when they work well. Those that don’t work should be eliminated. If the NOLA-PS is not doing that, they are violating the law.
Former Educator Debra Jones schooled the Board at the meeting. “I taught teachers to become teachers and I’m certified to teach in five states,” she said. “Now let me say this to you. I sat here and I listened. And more than just listening, I watched your faces. Some of you give less than a ding-dong. Some of you don’t have children getting up going across town when there’s a school across the street. Some of you don’t even care enough to find why these people are so upset and so offended. You are destroying children. … I attended 28 funerals and went to court with five of them. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to leave because it was taking my psyche away.”
OPSB members are doing New Orleans’ children a grave disservice.
This article originally published in the May 2, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
