The plantation system is alive in New Orleans
5th August 2019 · 0 Comments
By C. C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Columnist
All the bravado, spin, and puffed-up reports about New Orleans’ wonderful charter schools can’t hide the fact that in the nation’s first all-charter school district, the discombobulated matrix of charter schools in the New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD) is nothing more than a plantation run predominately by white overseers, who are the primary beneficiaries of the taxpayers’ $450 million public school budget.
New Orleanians must ignore the razzle-dazzle fanfare of the RSD being absorbed back into the Orleans Parish School Board’s domain. It’s a sham; a cheap, sleight-of-hand trick. ACT 91, which mandated the return of the RSD schools “preserves charter school autonomy in critical areas, such as: programming, curriculum, materials, HR decisions, and budgeting.” The law effectively removed the possibility of much needed oversight, transparency, accountability and fairness needed for real education reform.
Why? So, the overseers of these business entities can continue to profit off the backs of poor New Orleans’ students whose parents can’t afford to send them to elite private schools, unlike those attended by the children of the architects of this 21st Century Plantation system.
Leslie Rosenthal Jacobs, the self-proclaimed architect of accountability, who served on the Orleans Parish School Board (for a predominately white district) and served twelve years on BESE, was the biggest advocate of high stakes testing. The wealthy former insurance business executive used the results from these tests, which thousands of students were ill prepared to take and failed, as the justification for the state takeover of the Orleans Parish Public Schools and the emasculation of the duly elected OPSB.
For all her contrived interest in education, though, it’s notable that Jacobs’ children attended private schools.
For Jacobs, education is the gold standard of the 21st Century, a new market and cottage industry for siphoning off federal, state, and local dollars. And like the plantations of old, the charter school plantation she started is a family affair.
Stephen Rosenthal, Leslie’s brother, is the divisional president of Strategic Comp, a worker’s compensation insurer. Like Leslie, he apparently didn’t have to be an educator or qualified to operate charter schools to manage these educational entities.
Rosenthal is a founding board member of New Schools for New Orleans, which invests in schools, consults on curriculum, and recruits teachers. NSNO and partners were awarded a U.S. Department of Education Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant to recruit, prepare, and develop nearly 900 teachers by 2020.
He is also a founding board member of KIPP New Orleans and chairperson of the ReNEW Schools Board and the Collegiate Academies Board, both operate charter schools. Rosenthal expanded Collegiate Academies to Baton Rouge, and he applied in 2016, to start Collegiate Academies in Mississippi.
Jacobs didn’t invent the charter school plantation system. Former Republican President George H.W. Bush did that. In his plan for a “new world order,” he envisioned privatizing public education. His son, former President George W. Bush’s 2001 “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), provided public funding for these quasi-public private schools.
Among the first overseers to take advantage of the taxpayer-funded NCLB, was Neil Bush, George W.’s brother. Bush’s company, Ignite! Learning sold curriculum products to 40 U.S. school districts.
The New Orleans Public School system was wholly controlled by the Orleans Parish School Board before Hurricane Katrina. Ten years before Katrina, the OPSB operated 128 school buildings with 82,100 students.
In 2000, BESE led by Jacobs, implemented a high-stakes testing program. The tests were unvalidated, secret, commissioned tests, especially made for Louisiana. So many students failed and were kept back, that some were 16 years old in 8th grade. To push out aging 8th graders, lawmakers passed a law allowing students to drop out of school, at 16, without parents’ permission.
By the 2004-05, school year, the number of students in Orleans Parish’s public schools had dropped to 64,900.
Today, the Orleans Parish School Board controls three schools and one contract school. The rest, 74 schools, are operated by private, non-transparent, non-accountable chartered organizations. The student population is 82 percent Black, seven percent white, two percent Asian, 0.2 percent Native American and 0.1 percent Hawaiian, and the rest of the 44,631 students are “Mixed.” Blacks are involved at the management level of some of these charter organizations, but those numbers are not aligned proportionately with the student body population.
Most charter schools continue to fail to meet state achievement standards. Over 70 percent of the schools in the New Orleans RSD (network charter schools) saw test scores drop.
Schools that have always performed well, the former magnet schools-turned-non-network charter schools continue to operate like private schools and are exempt from normal enrollment requirements, accountability and oversight.
At one point, the Southern Poverty Law Center brought a lawsuit against the RSD because so many special education students were rejected from all the charter schools they applied to.
In the wake of Trump’s promise to expand privatization of public schools, the NAACP in 2016 called for a moratorium on charter schools; formed a Task Force on Charter Schools; and held hearings in seven cities. The NAACP’s report cited several concerns about charter school operations, including issues around access and retention, instructional quality, accountability and transparency, transportation challenges, and issues involving for-profit charters.
Among those who testified at the task force’s New Orleans’ hearing was Dr. Bill Quigley, civil rights lawyer and professor at Loyola Law School. Quigley was the first attorney in the U.S. to file suit against a state for using high stakes testing. Always one to keep it real, Quigley said:
“What we have is a very small group of selective schools… that are reserved for the wealthy. They are reserved overwhelmingly for white children of the city of New Orleans. They have their own special, nontransparent process. They do not participate in the application process that the rest of the city of New Orleans uses….”
Charter schools are failing statewide. Curved grades, school performance scores; growth measures, and extended learning programs, and other machinations by the state Department of Education have not changed the reality that the charter school system is a failed experiment.
When the OPSB was led by Black elected officials, Jacobs and her fellow BESE members about set the stage for a takeover of OPSB. After Katrina, 8,000 teachers lost their jobs. They were replaced by Teach For America (TFA) recruits from all over the U.S., with Jacobs’ help. They came here with few, if any, teaching credentials and even less classroom experience than those who spent a lifetime in the classroom and looked like the students they educated.
The OPSB did have problems. Ellenese Brooks-Simms and Ira Thomas, both former board presidents, went to jail for bribery and corruption, respectively. But those isolated incidences pale in comparison to the level of corruption, malfeasance, and scandal that is now taking place.
Suspicious test scores at Landry-Walker High School; suspected financial mismanagement at Edgar P. Harney Spirit of Excellence Academy; grade-changing scandal, management problems, and lack of credits for seniors at John F. Kennedy High School; Einstein Group’s failure to give middle school students required standardized tests; Coghill Charter School’s acceptance of a resignation from a board member over reimbursements and a directive to teachers not to give students F’s; allegations of student abuse, and incidents too numerous to list here.
These are huge red flags; signals that oversight, transparency, and accountability are sorely needed. Surely, this doesn’t make a damn bit of sense… except to the profiteers. Opportunists are coming from outside of the state; gentrifying the city, bringing cold-blooded attitudes, ruining the city’s reputation for southern hospitality, and they couldn’t care less about Black children.
Josh Densen, founder of Bricolage Academy is leaving Bricolage. Denson began his career as a TFA member in Oakland, California in 2000; before coming to New Orleans. He going to be CEO of High Resolves North America. High Resolves is an Australian-based nonprofit that teaches high school civics. Its program expanded to New Orleans and two other cities in the U.S. and Canada in 2018.
What does High Resolves know about U.S. Civics or New Orleans culture?
Professor Quigley said it best about the need for real school reform in New Orleans:
“Successful reform is needed, successful reform is wanted. We all want it, but that system has not been created in New Orleans. And if you’re going to look at schools, we cannot look just at these schools at the top and keep everybody else out and cater to a very special few. We should look at the system as the NAACP has always done, from the point of the most vulnerable, from the point of the most disadvantaged, from the point of the people with the most need, and from that perspective, unfortunately, the charter school system in New Orleans does not receive a passing grade.”
The state is failing to properly educate Black children. New Orleanians are known for telling it like it is… and fighting back. We don’t play. Everyone concerned about the education, or lack thereof of Black students in New Orleans may want to get involved in the grassroots effort for real school reform. Follow Erase the Board @ErasetheBoardNola and contact the Erasetheboardcoalition@gmail.com.
This article originally published in the August 5, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
