I had trouble with the link in the OP but found story here: http://www.cjr.org/the_profile/the_irredeemable_chris_rose.php, look forward to reading.
Charter schools in many states aren't required to provide transportation or provide lunches. I wonder if that's true of these NOLA charters.
I'm suspicious of charter schools in general as just another grift. I'm open to the possibility that some charter schools somewhere do a good job, but the only ones I'm familiar with are the ones in Cleveland, which were/are a train wreck and a shameless scam.
What I would want to know is how it is determined which children go to which schools. Do the schools have a say in which students they take? In some systems, charter schools can elect to not offer things like ESL, or various kinds of support needed by, say, autistic children. That can artificially make a school look highly effective, but worse, it forces kids who need those services into fewer options. As long as charter schools have the same must-support-all expectations that other schools have, I'm not too worried about a system going largely charter.
I'm guessing the district was being run with the same competence other NOLA govt institutions are famous for and sending those kids to be supervised by racoons probably would have improved the numbers as well. Principals having some control over how their school is run and teachers being able to choose which schools in the district they can apply to isn't some magic only charter schools can implement. It is/was the norm at the districts in UT and CA where my various family members have taught.
You know what really improves a school's numbers? Getting rid of the poorest kids in a district by shipping them out of state, most likely to Houston or Chicago, and replacing those students with (possibly lower-) middle class kids, the children of people in the building trades who began moving into NOLA early in 2006 to help rebuild the city.
Huh, the tenth anniversary of Katrina is coming up this August, isn't it?
I can contribute at least anecdotal evidence, as my entire family still lives in New Orleans, and my youngest brother has two daughters, five and seven, now in the NO Public School system.
Like your source, my parents *claim* the storm had made the school system better. AND YET: when my brother and my parents talk about their actual experiences, getting my nieces into the school system, and keeping them there, yeah, not so much.
(1) Most schools are charter schools. This means they don't have to take any kids they don't want to take. So if you've got a kid, and you want to put your kid into the New Orleans public school system, you have to find a school that will take your child. Good luck. Schools are competing for funds, and funds (in New Orleans) are based on all sorts of metrics. A big one is test scores. No school is going to take your kid if they think your kid will hurt their test scores.
(2) Now my brother and SIL are both white and middle-class. He works at Tulane. You would *think* they would be okay, right? (Lucky them.) But they live in a poor neighborhood -- their house, that is, has a address which is in a low-rent neighborhood. Because of that, very few schools would even consider my older niece when it came time to enter her. Demographics! Demographics predicted this kid would hurt their scores! They rejected her out of hand! The school my brother & SIL wanted to put her in, right by Tulane & their house, ha, nope. The only school they could find that would even consider her was an open admissions, non-charter school in Algier, across the river, an hour's drive away. (And no, no buses anymore in New Orleans, that's right.)
(3) So my brother and SIL *rented* *out* their house, and moved in a tiny apartment in a better neighborhood. Now the schools would consider them. Now they at least got an admissions test.
(4) BUT: the schools are hip to this sort of gaming of the system. They sent agents around frequently to knock on the doors and making sure my brother & SIL were actually living in the apartment. One day no one was home. SO! The application got rejected! SO MUCH DRAMA.
(5) Anyway! Finally, my niece gets accepted into this neighborhood school. But now my SIL *must* volunteer 10 hours a week at the school, as a price for her acceptance. Fine, whatever.
(6) This year, the other kid has to apply for the same school. But the school thinks she might be LD -- and they reject her. (She's not, just willful about taking tests, and -- you know -- four.) Now the family has to take her to neurologists and doctors and so on to certify her as non-LD before the school will consider re-testing her for admission.
tl-dr OH YES, the school system in New Orleans is SO MUCH BETTER NOW.
Oh -- what I forgot to say -- I don't have to tell you what happens to kids who are poor or brown or actually LD, do I?
No journalism entity in town will hire him, he tells me, not even freelance.
This is easy enough to believe. New Orleans, even more than most cities, has seen its print media completely remade by creative destruction (or whatever the fuck you want to call an unnatural disaster that got repurposed by greeheads into a massive economic disruptution).
But this
If they do answer his calls, they say he's too much of a risk.
seems weird. I mean, maybe it's true. Maybe someone has told him that he's a risk. But it seems infinitely more likely that he wants to be paid a real wage to write -- like he was before the storm -- and there's an endless pool of twenty-sometimes who have moved to the city since 2006, and they're willing to work for nearly nothing. Welcome to the New Economy, Chris! It's great, isn't it?
Also, I can't remember if I liked 1 Dead in Attic. I probably reviewed it. I'll check.
I hadn't even considered 6 and holy shit to 8. Oh, so they were simultaneously able to strip some employee protections AND make the system a huge clusterfuck for the people it's supposed to serve? Awesome.
8 is appalling. Aren't school systems legally required to admit students and provide them transportation?
Thanks for 8, delagar.
Before I read your comment, I looked for what Diane Ravitch has had to say about the charter school movement in New Orleans, and sure enough, there's plenty of recent material. A woman named Mercedes Schneider seems to be doing a lot of analysis of test scores and such, showing that not just the cherry-picking of students that delagar relates, but also the jerry-rigging of test score calculations, accounts for the seeming increase in school (student) performance.
Maybe someone has told him that he's a risk. But it seems infinitely more likely that he wants to be paid a real wage to write -- like he was before the storm -- and there's an endless pool of twenty-sometimes who have moved to the city since 2006, and they're willing to work for nearly nothing.
I had the same thought, and almost made a comment about the "freelance economy" when I sent in the link. But, in his particular case he's both struggled with addiction and been to rehab twice since Katrina and may have burned bridges for other reasons as well
Rose theorizes that his TV career was actually ended by an unhappy Tom Benson, owner of Fox 8 and the New Orleans Saints football franchise: "He was hosting the Super Bowl and I questioned some of the city's spending on cosmetics when people in Gentilly still didn't have streetlights," he says, leaning back in his seat.
But the pull quote about the "new economy" is this,
Clean, sober, and again a free agent, Rose this time found himself deeply unemployed. Having been praised for understanding New Orleans in a special way, he suddenly, finally, also understood its smallness. "For seven months I was getting turned down. I kept thinking, 'Someone is gonna hire me. I'm Chris Rose.' It took a while for me to realize, all these unreturned phone calls ... I'm not gonna get a job here. And I had no other marketable skills. For 30 years there's never been any question of what I was gonna do."
I have a friend who tells me (very vigorously) that charter schools in LA are magically not bad news. He's a good guy, but can this possibly be true?
Semi-lengthy piece from an admittedly progressive writer outlining the history of the charter school movement in NOLA:
Truth be told, Teach For America is a teacher-union-busting machine, and a best friend of charter school operators, who care less about the teaching qualifications of those placed in classrooms and more about their bottom line. In 2005, only 10 percent of New Orleans' teachers were in their first or second year of teaching. Three years later, 33 percent were. In 2010-11, nearly 40 percent of the city's teachers had been teaching for three years or less, and the percentage of white teachers had nearly doubled....
But the performance of charter schools in the Recovery School District is dismal. In 2011, the state began issuing letter grades. All of the state-run Recovery School District schools received a "D" or "F" and 79 percent of charter schools in the district received a "D" or "F." In 2014, RSD-New Orleans is still performing below the vast majority of the state's other districts at the fourth and eighth grades in subjects tested by the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, including English language arts, math, and science. Charles Hatfield, a statistician with Research on Reforms, a New Orleans-based watchdog group, has been analyzing school performance data since 2005, he says. Results in the "newly reformed" schools of New Orleans have been perpetually disappointing.
It's hard to square that second paragraph with what heebie's acquaintance in the OP was saying.
"Aren't school systems legally required to admit students and provide them transportation?"
(1) There are, in fact, available schools in the New Orleans system. That is, your kid will *have* a school to go to. It's just that "available school" may well be a school across the river or in some other place an hour or two away.
(2) There is available transportation. It's the public transportation system -- New Orleans public transportation. I believe school kids even get free bus passes. What is that you say? It takes two or three hours to ride from your house in Gentilly to that school in Algiers? And you have to change buses three times? Wow. Sucks to be your kindergartner, I guess.
But of course if you're a rich parent, you're sending your kid to Sacred Heart or one of the Jesuit schools anyway, so.
The so-called rebuilding of New Orleans has basically been an exercise in privatizing an entire city, right? That's been my impression.
8 and 18 are unreal. And 6 makes so much sense.
18.last: seems like there should be a point at which the transportation provided is so crappy as to be effectively no transportation at all, and there should be some legal recourse to force admission to a closer school, doesn't it? In particular, if it takes two or three hours, it seems like depending on the time the buses start running and the time the school day starts it might not even be possible to arrive at school on time.
#23: I can see you are not a citizen of Louisiana / New Orleans.
Seriously, the public schools which are not charter schools may provide buses. I haven't lived down there for a while. But when I did live down there, I had friends who used public transportation to get to their schools and did, in fact, have bus rides that took -- routinely -- an hour and a half to two hours each way. (The bus rides themselves are not that long. New Orleans is not a big city. It's waiting for the transfer bus to show *up* that takes such a long time.)
It was just shrugged off as a poor tax, basically. That is, parents were *supposed* to be able to carpool their kids. Parents who couldn't, well, too bad for their kids.
I was under the impression that per-pupil spending had increased dramatically post-Katrina (in ways that aren't particularly reproducible--federal money etc). Was there something to this?
Wow. Fuck a bunch of Nola school system. That is awful.
Really, there are states where the law allows cherry picking of students? That's just the dumbest most foreseeably corrupt system you can think of. MA charter schools are a mixed bag but at least the admissions policy is any state resident can apply and students must be picked by lottery. There's some shenanigans about discouraging certain students from applying or accepting a slot but at least the rules aren't an invitation to fuck over five year olds for profit.
Oh, and once admitted can they expel students for poor test performance too? If they can fire teachers why not students too? Free market!
When I saw the OP, i thought it was going to be about the recent Atlantic article on post-Katrina schooling issues:
An untold number of kids--probably numbering in the tens of thousands--missed weeks, months, even years of school after Katrina. Only now, a decade later, are advocates and researchers beginning to grasp the lasting effects of this post-storm duress. Increasingly, they believe the same lower-income teens who waded through the city's floodwaters and spent several rootless years afterward may now be helping drive a surging need for GED programs and entry-level job-training programs in the city. It's no coincidence, they say, that Louisiana has the nation's highest rate of young adults not in school or working.
Many of the Americans who today lack both jobs and diplomas may have been Katrina-era adolescents, who often suffered such high levels of trauma and instability that learning became nearly impossible. It was "like throwing seeds at cement," said Lisa Celeste Green-Derry, a New Orleans-based education researcher.
It was "like throwing seeds at cement," said Lisa Celeste Green-Derry
...baffling everyone around her with her cryptic words.
Oh wait, somehow I was picturing wet cement, like trying to embed seeds for some strange reason. Now I get it. They won't grow.
I guess it's a derivative of the Parable of the Sower.
To 16, AFAICT the charter schools are pretty messed up here in many ways (either low standards, or good schools that only take from a rich neighborhood/have some kind of "founder status" that you can buy to get your kids in but that costs as much as fancy private school). Or, and this is totally predictable, they're used as engines for racial and class segregation -- there are some that are (effectively and obviously) only for striver Latinos, some only for Koreans, some predominantly SWPL, some African American, etc etc. woth that said there are some genuinely good and inclusive schools in the charter system that never could have existed outside of it (eg bilingual German schools for free). My local charter is Spanish-bilingual and seems to do a good job of combining gentrifiers and non-gentrifiers in a single school, but I don't know if that model is sustainable and I also don't know of it's an actually good school or just one that's atteactive to gentrifiers
On the other hand it's not like the non-charter system is problem-free, so we're starting from a baseline of everything is messed up and complicated.
I'm not using an Iphone, I just got a shitty education at a non-charter school and don't know how to spell.
It took me a while to see that the reason I was getting a 404 when clicking on the link in 1 was because the comma at the end got appended to the link. The link without the comma works fine.
I've written the admin of the linked site to get them to add the comma to the url.
15: I think the other pull quote which may explain the "risk" comment is this one:
Rose finally resumed work in 2011, still hazy on pills. "I came back to Gambit, I came back to Fox 8, and I faltered terribly at both. That's when I started missing deadlines and doing shit work."
Missing deadlines and turning in shit work burns a lot of bridges quickly in print journalism. I think a lot what may be perceived as risk may boil down to: we're not sure when the next health crisis may happen that takes you off work and sends you back into addiction/rehab after missing a bunch of deadlines, but that's more baggage than we want to take on right now, thank you very much. It doesn't necessarily explain why he can't sell the occasional freelance feature piece, but I understand editors being a bit leery of getting involved.
Yeah, I got a huge "I'm a big name so I should be allowed to be unreliable in a highly competitive struggling industry" vibe out of that article.
On the other hand it's not like the non-charter system is problem-free, so we're starting from a baseline of everything is messed up and complicated.
The non-charter system basically just has a poverty problem, not an actual quality-of-schools problem.
not an actual quality-of-schools people using poor kids as an excuse to steal money problem
that said there are some genuinely good and inclusive schools in the charter system that never could have existed outside of it (eg bilingual German schools for free).
The German one is where a niece goes. It seems like a good school. I have some liberal guilt about it being a charter even though where she gets schooled is none of my business at all.