The push for privatizing K-12 public schools in America through converting them to charter schools took a big leap after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005. The storm destroyed many of the city’s schools, and shattered the school district’s tax base. Wealthy private foundations that backed charter schools and high-stakes testing swooped in to take advantage of the crisis. They offered to help fund new schools. Over a relatively short period, nearly all the New Orleans public schools became charter schools. Today there are only two non-charter schools left in the city, one of which is a former independent charter that was just taken over by the local school district this year.
New Orleans became the model for the charter school movement. Champions of privatization claim that charters have yielded improvement in test scores and graduation rates among New Orleans students. But critics say the statistics are produced in such a way as to give misleading results, and that by more objective measures, public school students in Louisiana are doing better than charter school students in New Orleans. Critics also say the charters operate at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who are often effectively forced out of school altogether and thus are no longer included in the data.
Maria Harmon is among those fighting on behalf of New Orleans’ students. She is a co-founder and co-director of Step Up Louisiana, an organization that advocates for education and economic justice. In an interview, she told the People’s Tribune that the most recent state evaluation of school performance showed “at least 30 ‘D’ and ‘F’ schools in New Orleans. All these schools are charters. They found that many failing schools in New Orleans are about 95 percent African American and 93 percent low-income, so we see a correlation between socioeconomic status and race and the quality of the school. Many of the failing schools don’t have the resources invested into them that the affluent schools that have the ‘A’ and ‘B’ performance scores have.”
She added: “Some of these unfortunate circumstances are by design. You’ll have people who run these charter schools like slumlords; they don’t want parent or community input, they have their own agenda.” Harmon said the charter organizations “use a corporate management model” to run their schools to guarantee profits. “They hoard money at the top. The CEO of a charter management organization might pay themselves $300,000 a year, and top administrative staff $90,000 to $100,000 a year, and then all you have left is maybe a couple million for teacher salaries, programs, textbooks, and supplies. And they don’t care if the teachers are certified, because they can pay them less if they’re not certified.”
She said Step Up Louisiana strives to let parents know what is going on in their public school system and what their rights are. They also promote education justice through advocating such measures as a universal academic calendar for the schools; an audit of the city’s “OneApp” open enrollment program, which they think may discriminate against certain families; implementation of the sustainable community schools model, which starts with each community evaluating its needs; opposition to high-stakes testing; restorative justice instead of punitive measures as a means of discipline; and transformational parent and community engagement programs.
To bring about change, “we are going to have to pick apart the laws that are already in place,” said Harmon. “Long-term, we want democratic, local, direct control of schools and we want full-blown accountability from schools, school leadership, and the parents and community.”
Fighting for education justice in New Orleans
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