School choice or no choice?
13th May 2019 · 0 Comments
Another school year is coming to a close. And what have we learned, again? The experiment to switch from public schools, under the guidance of the publicly elected Orleans Parish School Board, to independent owned and operated schools by private and non-profit entities is a bust, as proven by failing test scores, failing school performance scores, and a revolving system of grading on the curve, changes to performance indicators, and national education rankings.
According to U.S. News & World Report and Education Week, in 2017, Louisiana ranked 49th in the list of best states for education. New Mexico was 50th. The lowest performing schools have been shuttered, community-based schools are a thing of the past, and busing students to fill charter school enrollment needs is the norm.
This travesty began in 1999, with the LEAP test, a high stakes test, pushed by Orleans Parish School Board member and then-state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education member Leslie Jacobs. Jacob was a principal in her father’s insurance company, the Rosenthal Agency, which later merged with Hibernia National Bank.
A self-proclaimed architect of accountability reform, Jacobs “was instrumental in the creation of the Recovery School District and has been very involved in efforts to build successful schools in New Orleans post-Katrina,” according to the Educate Now website, a non-profit Jacob founded and continues to operate.
A member of the BESE Board, Jacobs oversaw the dismantling of the Orleans Parish Public School system, using the punitive LEAP test as a hammer to prove how terrible the schools were and how badly reform was needed.
She promoted, and several Louisiana legislators passed a state law that stripped the Orleans Parish School Board of its administrative power and vested it in one person: the superintendent. The law reduced board members to figureheads and nullified voters’ power to hold those elected to the board accountable for educating the children of Orleans Parish.
“She decided that Louisiana should create a special school district to take over failed schools, a brand-new idea in education circles, drawn from her business experience,” David Osborne wrote in a profile of Jacobs that published in the Washington Monthly in 2015.
“It was really modeled after bankruptcy law,” she says. “When a business is bankrupt, a judge will make the decisions about what drastic changes he will allow so the business can remain a viable entity. In essence, a business gets to start over, and that’s what we meant the RSD to be. We would take the failing school, strip it of the district’s policies—which in New Orleans could easily stack up to be two feet high—strip away any contracts, including the collective bargaining agreement, and take the building, the students, and the money out of the district, so the school could start over.”
After all, a predominately African-American led school board, in a city with a predominately African-American population couldn’t possibly know how to achieve educational excellence.
Then, somewhere along the line, the One App system was created. It is an enrollment system that portends to be the Holy Grail of school choice. Parents can choose three schools for their children to attend.
“Instead of assigning students to schools based on the neighborhoods they lived in, the new system (One App) allowed families to choose schools from across the city,” according to one news report.
The Orleans Parish School District praises the success of One App. The district claimed that 75 percent of applicants were assigned to a ‘preferred school’ and nearly 70 percent were assigned to one of their top three choices.”
What exactly is a preferred school?
And where is the school choice, when most charter schools and public schools are “D” or “F” letter grade schools; when the schools themselves are failing to make passing grades?
Interestingly, the former magnet schools turned charter schools, can opt out of the One App system. When you show up to the One App Center, their names are not among the available schools. They remain a striking example of public school dollars used for schools that, under any other circumstances, would be deemed private schools. Those schools have lottery systems and entrance tests.
It’s up to all of us who care about this city’s children to demand that school board members and those who represent parents and children, including legislators, have a real agenda for educational excellence and a real education reform that invests the money and resources into the children.
Just how many schools don’t have gymnasiums, arts, music, organized sports, vocational education programs (everyone is not going to college) and activities that use a holistic approach to learning?
We must stop experimenting with our children. We have to stop failing them.
This article originally published in the May 13, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
