Battle of New Orleans

In New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina we can see what it takes to dislodge an entrenched educational bureaucracy and its companion teachers union from power—a natural disaster. “Seventy percent of New Orleans workers were laid off by the city,” U. S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., reported in a forum last week at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). “They had no income or sales tax revenue and no money from Washington.”

The Big Easy School Board was not immune from these after effects of Hurricane Katrina either. “Three months after Katrina, the state legislature deemed 107 of the 128 city-run public schools ‘failing’ and seized control of them for five years,” Amy Waldman writes in the current issue of The Atlantic. “(Before the storm the state had already placed five failing schools in what it called the Recovery School District then converted them to charter schools.)”

“Stripped of most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired all 7,500 of its teacher and support staff, effectively breaking the teachers’ union.” Waldman also spoke at the PPI event.

“On the last state achievement test before Katrina hit, 74 percent of eighth graders had failed to demonstrate ‘basic’ skills in English Language Arts, and 70 percent scored below ‘basic’ in math,” Waldman writes. “The Orleans Parish School Board, which ran the city’s schools, was $450 million in debt.”

“Yet these numbers did not begin to capture the day-to-day texture of the schools: when students held a press conference to express their post-Katrina wishes, they asked for textbooks, toilet paper, and teachers who liked them.”

Currently, more than half of the schools now open in New Orleans are chartered. David Grubb, a native of the city, runs one of them.

“When visitors from Washington, D. C., visited the school, a child said, ‘My teachers teach all day and expect me to learn,’ when they asked him what was different about the school he went to before Hurricane Katrina from the school he went to after Hurricane Katrina,” Grubb said.

Grubb’s Algiers Charter School Association educates children at a cost per pupil of $7,000. “You spend $13,000 per student here in Washington and you still can’t graduate more than half of all students,” Sen. Landrieu said.

“Their budget goes to teachers’ pay and wonderful facilities for the children,” Sen. Landrieu said of Grubb’s operation. “The central office does not sap it all up like they do everywhere else.”

“Not one single group is to blame for what has gone wrong in public schools,” Sen. Landrieu said at the outset of her talk. “Not the government, not the private sector, not the teachers’ unions.” She, nonetheless, later observed that “The beast begins feeding itself” in a centralized system.

At least one former teacher from New Orleans who was at the PPI event agreed that, “the school board needed purging.”

“It’s hard to find qualified teachers,” Sen. Landrieu admits, “but we didn’t have qualified teachers before Katrina.”

“We didn’t have certified teachers before Katrina.”

Charter school operators are trying to make the best of the freedom from central control that they now possess. “Instead of a principal or administrator telling a math teacher what to teach, the math teachers get together to decide,” Grubb said.

None of the panelists would deny the undeniably chaotic conditions that still mark life in the Crescent City more than a year after Hurricane Katrina washed out the fabled metropolis. “In St. Bernard parish, we’ve lost half of our doctors, half of our nurses,” Sen. Landrieu reveals.

Ironically, in New Orleans, the “cherry picking” that charter schools have frequently been accused of is being done by what is left of the public school system. “The New Orleans public school system is running the selective schools,” Sen. Landrieu stated. “The charter schools take everybody.”

At least, they may take everybody they can fit into the spaces they occupy. Standing structures are still in short supply.

Many students and teachers are still living in trailers or staying with family members, friends or neighbors. “Because the system is so Balkanized, students could fall out of the system without anyone knowing,” Waldman fears.

To address at least the construction problems, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has developed a mathematical formula for relief. “I want FEMA to give me one hundred million dollars and we will build a new school system,” Sen. Landrieu says.

“I don’t want to rebuild what we had before at one million per school as they now want to work it at FEMA.” Since New Orleans, as we have seen, had quite a bit more than 100 schools, the lady may be offering the Bush Administration the best bargain it is likely to get from Congress in the next two years.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.