Suchergebnisse

When hurricane Katrina (or, more accurately, the failure of the levees) washed away the New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) at the end of August 2005, there was relief in many quarters. Within days of the storm, the acting public school superintendent, Ora Watson, declared that the "fiscal crisis of the New Orleans Public Schools" was now over. In hastily assembled meetings, members of the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), state and local politicians, and leaders of the state's education bureaucracy convened to examine the situation. Representatives of the charter school movement, as well as providers of ancillary education services and materials, also convened. The chance to recreate public education in New Orleans from the ground up was an irresistible consequence of Katrina, as well as a dream come true. Before the first waves of refugees began returning to the drowned city, these newly energized social engineers had decided that no public school would reopen (though public schools did open relatively quickly in the neighboring parishes of Jefferson and St. Bernard); that all 7,500 employees of the system (the majority of them teachers) would be terminated; and that whatever schools did open would be charter schools, operating under the aegis of either BESE or NOPS, depending on the type or timing of the charter application.

Draws on personal involvement in the New Orleans (LA) School District to examine the origins & development of the Recovery School District (RSD), wherein the state took responsibility for running the New Orleans schools tagged as failing at the end of the last testing period before Hurricane Katrina. Background to the crisis of New Orleans public education is provided, & the US government's Katrina response is compared to certain of its actions in Iraq, highlighting problems engendered by the ideological conviction that the private sector outperforms the public sector. How a market-based approach was applied to the New Orleans public education crisis is explained, identifying the problem with market-driven education as chiefly one of unequal market access. The arrival of the RSD in the wake of Katrina & the struggling market-based charter school experiment is then discussed, highlighting problems stemming from the lack of administrative leadership. The current state of the New Orleans education system is described, giving attention to the arrival of Paul Vallas from the Philadelphia, PA, school system to take over RSD. D. Edelman