[DEBATE] : New Orleans' Failed Education Experiment: Privatization Runs Amok" by Ralph Adamo

Fri Sep 7 12:57:26 BST 2007

Dear friends

I thought this article on the privatization of education in New Orleans
after Katrina could be of interest

Best

Corinna

---------------------------

blackagendareport.com,
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&
id=335&Itemid=33 ( for a better formated pdf version)

New Orleans' Failed Education Experiment: Privatization Runs Amok 

Wednesday, 29 August 2007 

by Ralph Adamo 

Almost as soon as the levees were breached, the

predators that infest American business and government structures
smelled a new

opportunity: to reshape the educational system of New Orleans according
to

their own diabolical, profit-oriented, non-union, sink or swim vision.
They have

visited yet another horror on the city, putting the poor and unorganized
beyond

the reach of quality education. New Orleans has become the laboratory
for

privatization of education - an obscene experiment by the mad social
scientists

of Big Capital. That the experiment has failed is no problem for the

privatizers, since massive failure is an expectation of the hellish
system.

Only the profitable survive.

New Orleans' Failed Education Experiment: Privatization Runs Amok 
by Ralph Adamo 

"Black people might be sensitive to the idea that they

were subjects of an "experiment."

This article first appeared in The American Prospect.

At his first public meeting before becoming the new

superintendent of Louisiana's Recovery School District (RSD) in late
spring

2007, Paul Vallas took questions alongside his sponsor, state Department
of

Education Superintendent Paul Pastorek ("the two Pauls," as they have

become known). At one point, Vallas was scolded by a member of the
audience for

referring, as nearly everyone has, to the current state of public
education in

New Orleans as "an experiment." The scolder was a white teacher, who

reminded the two Pauls that black people might be sensitive to the idea
that

they were subjects of an "experiment," what with the memory of the

Tuskegee syphilis protocols and other past unpleasantness not yet
entirely

forgotten. 

Mismanaged and undersupplied, the Recovery School

District resembled, at the end of the 2006-2007 school year, nothing as
much as

a failed experiment. It consisted of 22 schools, enrolling perhaps 9,500

students, nearly all of them African American. The other 20,000 public
school

students in the city of New Orleans (my son among them) in the second
year

after Katrina were scattered among five officially "public" schools,

supervised by the elected Orleans Parish Public School Board (NOPS), and
31

charter schools, answerable either to the local school board or to the
state

Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). 

"Teachers serve

without the protections once afforded by a union; they can be punished
for

public speech, fired without review, and, in general, serve without

protection."

Before Katrina, NOPS had been responsible for 130 schools

and 65,000 students. Now, each charter school, operating under an
agreement

with either BESE or NOPS, maintains significant independence under its
own

board to hire and fire faculty, select curricula, engage vendors, and
determine

whether current students are meeting criteria to remain in the school,
once

admitted. For the most part, schools chartered by NOPS have some leeway
to

establish admission policies; most chartered by BESE do not, being
officially

"open admission," though wiggle room for selectivity remains. One

significant common denominator between NOPS and BESE charter schools is
that

teachers serve without the protections once afforded by a union; they
can be

punished for public speech, fired without review, and, in general, serve

without protection from capricious administrative actions or the limited

security they enjoyed when tenure rules were in place. 

As state legislators wrote the statutes in the fall of

2005 that allowed the state to take over "failing" New Orleans

schools following Katrina, there was a widespread notion that every
school that

reopened in the city would reopen as a charter school. This was an
intention

expressed publicly by the ailing superintendent of education (Cecil
Picard,

since deceased and replaced in March by Paul Pastorek), and one widely
embraced

by the same crowd that had promoted school vouchers and had been
historically

hostile to the "public" part of public education. But with too few

chartering entities stepping forward, a significant number of students
remained

unable to locate and enroll in either a charter school or any of the
five

schools remaining under the control of Orleans Parish. (Those five were
schools

that had not been designated "failing" and also were not swept up by

chartering entities. They do have selective admission criteria.) Those
students

became the responsibility of the Recovery School District that the state

legislature devised in 2005, as did the several thousand students who
migrated

back into the city after the beginning of the 2006-07 school year. 

"There was a

widespread notion that every school that reopened in the city would
reopen as a

charter school."

The story of the RSD is, in part, a story of how the idea

that public entities (either systems or individuals) were not fit or
competent

to run public schools came to dominate the reconfiguration of public
education

in New Orleans. That narrative was combined, of course, with the
narrative that

only private, market-driven forces can effectively improve school
performance

and carry on the tasks of public education. 

To be sure, the failures of public education in pre-Katrina

New Orleans are well-documented and constantly reiterated in forum after
forum.

Even given the inherent problems of a teach-the-test national
environment where

broad learning is consistently narrowed and critical thinking is less
revered

than memorization, it can be said clearly that the public schools in New

Orleans were not doing a good enough job. In New Orleans, moreover -
perhaps

even more than in most other cities - education had become, for a few

politicians, little more than a way to generate graft. 

But even conceding all this, one has to ask where on earth

the proponents of a "market-driven" approach to public education got

the idea that anything the public sector could do, the private sector
could do

better. Did they get it from the sterling job private hospital
corporations and

insurance companies have done to assure that all Americans have access
to

adequate medical care? Did they get it watching the delivery of
privately

contracted services in Iraq or in post-Katrina New Orleans - two places
where

any goods or services might cost a hundred times their actual value
(sold by the

private sector to government) and still not function correctly?  

As New Orleans readies itself for another school year, there

is a tendency to act as though the first year of the Recovery School
District

(2006-2007) never really happened, or that it was, at best, a dress
rehearsal

for the really real beginning for which we are now preparing.
Unembarrassed by

its dogged support for pretty much every wrong turn and the pardon it
granted

most of the missteps taken by the RSD under its initial superintendent
Robin

Jarvis, The Times Picayune has once again emerged as chief cheerleader

for the next RSD leader, willing to excuse any number of misspent
millions and

failed opportunities from the RSD's first year as it anticipates the
correction

of these problems in the coming year.  

"One has to ask

where on earth the proponents of a &lsquo;market-driven' approach to
public education

got the idea that anything the public sector could do, the private
sector could

do better."

Misspent? Well, there was the $20 million the RSD managed to

spend on security for its 22 campuses, altering the ratio of students to

security guards from a pre-Katrina 333-to-one to a post-Katrina
37-to-one,

while employing the services of out-of-state security firms with no
background

in school security and a tendency to hire inappropriately young and

inexperienced personnel. There were the problems the private firm
Sodexho had

providing warm (much less hot) meals to the 22 schools, many of which in
nine

months never saw a single hot food delivery. (Frequently, Sodexho's cold
food

offerings arrived still frozen.) 

There was the failure to secure the perimeters of the scores

of damaged, unopened public schools under the RSD's stewardship,
resulting in

gross vandalism, theft of building materials, and dangers to the
surrounding

communities. There was RSD's consistent inability to provide text books,

curriculum guidance, and other teaching materials to virtually every
campus for

most of the school year, its inability to hire enough qualified teachers
to staff

at even a less-than-ideal student-teacher ratio, and its tendency to
hire

young, inexperienced teachers who quit without notice once they
encountered the

reality of the mission. 

In fact, these and other problems with RSD had begun to

break through to the public consciousness, and the beginnings of a call
for

returning to a genuine unified public school system were being
tentatively

voiced this past spring and early summer. The president of the Orleans
Parish

School Board, among others, had kept this idea alive. State legislators,

including some of those who helped initiate the state takeover following

Katrina, had begun to respond to public anger over the RSD's clear
failure to

provide public education in a manner even reaching the poor standards of
the

pre-Katrina public schools. 

The relatively gargantuan salaries of many of the

consultants who appeared to rule the new system was another factor in
the

public's general unease. Functionaries of the accounting firm Alvarez &

Marsal, for example, which will have taken more than $50 million out of
its New

Orleans public schools' operation by year's end, were earning in the
multiple

hundreds of thousands, billing at anywhere from $150 to more than $500
per

hour. The firm's contracts continued unchallenged, despite the fact that
one of

its chief assignments - the disposition of left-over NOPS real estate -
was

being handled without the services of a single architect, engineer, or

construction expert. This omission cost the city a year of progress in
determining

how and where to rebuild broken schools, and endangered hundreds of
millions of

dollars in FEMA money. It only came to light when the two Pauls were
forced to

hire yet more consultants for real estate duty, and to bring in the
National

Guard to oversee the engineering operations.  

"State

legislators, including some of those who helped initiate the state
takeover

following Katrina, had begun to respond to public anger over the RSD's
clear

failure to provide public education"

But just as the public mood concerning the competence and

honesty of the contractors and their ideologically driven political
supporters

had begun to turn, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten announced the guilty plea of
a

former NOPS school board member who had lost her seat in a bruising 2004

election. Ellenese Brooks-Simms, a former teacher and ex-principal and a

politician who made a career out of being holier than thou, had admitted
to

taking $140,000 in bribes from lobbyist Mose Jefferson, brother of
embattled

(and now indicted) Congressman William Jefferson. Mose's client, JRL

Enterprises, had paid him $900,000 in lobbying fees to promote its

math-teaching software. Mose used some of the money, presumably, to have

Jefferson insert millions of dollars worth of business for JRL in
earmarks;

Brook-Simms' $140,000 was supposed to buy her support for adopting the
software

for NOPS schools, and, in fact, expensive JRL software was purchased by
NOPS

during her term. 

Brooks-Simms' acknowledged culpability was roundly condemned

by all local media. The fact that she is an aging African American woman
also

lead to a lot of ad hominem racist blogging against her in local forums.

She was a ripe target; sticking pins in her pomposity and hypocrisy was
easy.

Everyone realized that the timing of her plea was almost certainly tied
to the

higher-profile William Jefferson case, to which her crime appeared to be

nothing more than a small emendation. But the timing also coincided with
the

closing days of a volatile state legislative session this summer, in
which

legislators who had originally opposed the state take over of the NOPS
schools,

and who had exposed the failures of the RSD, were maneuvering toward
some sort

of plan to return the RSD schools to the newly refurbished NOPS
administration.

Such a shift almost certainly would have also revived calls for
collective

bargaining as well, and ultimately brought back to life the moribund
union

(United Teachers of New Orleans), killed by Katrina, or possibly a new
union.  

Brooks-Simms' guilty plea cut that talk short, as if her

crime somehow "proved" that public officials were less likely to

conduct the public's business honestly than privatizers and their
consultants

would. On this point, Gambit Weekly editor Clancy DuBos was explicit:

"...the conviction of former Orleans School Board President Ellenese

Brooks-Simms on federal bribery charges, while occurring totally outside
the

legislative process, reminded everyone why the RSD was created in the
first

place and probably cemented the district's future viability." 

Over the course of nine years, JRL - a New Orleans-based

company - was the beneficiary of $38 million in congressional earmarks.
But,

while William and Mose Jefferson and Brooks-Simms are all under
investigation

or found guilty, the company and its president have faced no charges

whatsoever. That is a snapshot of how privatization works. These
politicians

will almost certainly do time for their alleged crimes. But the owner of
JRL,

the one who thought he should put $900,000 in Mose Jefferson's hands for
lobbying

fees, is barely tarred by this scandal, despite being its enabler and

ultimately its architect. 

"Fewer than 30

percent of its eighth graders even approached &lsquo;basic' on
Louisiana's version of

high-stakes testing."

Meanwhile, the security firm that billed RSD more than $20

million defends its profiteering by noting that no student was killed
during

the previous school year - thin proof given that no student was killed
on

campus in the previous 60 years either (with one sad, anomalous
exception). That

company, the Guidry Group from Texas, will keep its contract in the
coming

school year. Sodexho has never explained why it could not deliver hot
food to

those 22 campuses, and no public or media entity ever held its feet to
the fire

for that explanation. Its contract, too, continues. Alvarez & Marsal,
for

its part, merely said "whoops" when its lack of competence in the

field for which it held a $30 million contract was exposed. 

Meanwhile, the RSD scores were abysmal even by the old NOPS

standard. Fewer than 30 percent of its eighth graders even approached

"basic" on Louisiana's version of high-stakes testing called LEAP.

Technically, all those who failed to reach that relatively low mark must
repeat

the grade. 

The new RSD superintendent, who comes to town with a nearly

$300,000 compensation package (average teacher salary hovers in the

mid-to-upper $30,000 range), has vowed to do better. He has brought with
him a

team of people who worked with him in his previous assignments in
Philadelphia

and Chicago, and has, in just a few weeks, increased the size of RSD's

administration by scores of people and millions in new payroll. Plans
are being

developed hurriedly to fix long-broken amenities, such as bathrooms, and
to

enhance the appearance of the RSD schools. A great deal of money has
been spent

on teacher recruitment as well, and many new, young teachers are
arriving via

Teach for America, among other routes. Whether any of them will stay or
succeed

in their mission remains to be seen. 

What is already clear, however, is that the news media in

New Orleans, focused as always on leading the cheer for the next savior,
has

allowed the failures of an entire year of public education at the
expense of

thousands of children to be forgotten, to quietly disappear as though it
just

takes a year of abject incompetence and remorseless failure to get the
engine

of public education re-started.. For education to work here for the
least

prepared, the least motivated, and the most impoverished children, the
entire

community has to stand together in one place and agree on some basic
human

concerns. So far, all the privatizers and their enablers and accomplices
have

managed to do is create the illusion of the "buy-in," their telling

phrase for such community-building. Many have been paid handsomely for
their

service in this cause; little or no difference has been made by their
efforts.  

"The schools

have to be returned to the community in a manner that re-establishes

accountability."

The greed and guilt of a few public officials (easily

matched by the legal and sanctioned greed of many private vendors and

contractors) have been used as a whip against the legitimate aspirations
of

community organizing, unionization, and the building of a level playing
field.

The city must encourage such aspirations if it is to survive as a place
for

human beings to live lives of growth and fulfillment. 

The state has to do several things in order to legitimize

its actions. The schools have to be returned to the community in a
manner that

re-establishes accountability, not run by consultants for the short term
and

the quick profit. If that means a return to being run by publicly
elected

officials, that is the price we pay for living in a democracy.
Curriculum and

services such as security and hot meals should derive from the local
population

and economy, not be imported via giant education and service
corporations. The

right of teachers and other school workers to organize and to bargain

collectively cannot be denied indefinitely, nor those who attempt to
organize

such basic rights punished for their crimes. 

The market drives only to one location: profit. That is a

legitimate destination in business. But education, like medicine, ought
not

operate under the rules and expectations of business.

Ralph Adamo is a poet and journalist in New Orleans. He was awarded an
OSI Katrina Media Fellowship in

2006. 
<http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view
&id=335&Itemid=33> 

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