Brian Hubble
Here in New Orleans, several schools are choosing to shift back under the control of the Orleans Parish school board—even before being legally required to do so. The return of the schools to local control is an extraordinary reversal for the Orleans Parish School Board. The state took over many schools after Hurricane Katrina, saying local officials had failed the students. Now, the Orleans Parish school Board is taking control back, and will be in charge of fifty-two state-run charter schools in the city by summer 2018.
Some parents and community see the shift to local control as a sign of progress and a victory for democratically run public schools. Finally, it seems, school administrators are listening to what parents, students, teachers, and the community have been saying for years: We want a unified system, transparency, and accountability. But that may be wishful thinking.
“We do not think that parents and teachers know what's best,” a lead administrator of one of the schools told me. He will be heading back home to New York at the end of this school year. “We know what's best for children. That's why parents send them to us. Parents in this city do have choice, and so do teachers.”
This attitude pretty much sums up everything public-school advocates in New Orleans despise about the takeover of our schools by the state and outside operators. But now this administrator supports the move back to local school board governance.
Many parents and students imagine that they are getting their public schools back. They think there will now be accountability, transparency, and clear regulations around discipline, and that children will be freed from the school to prison pipeline. But the new laws governing public schools in Louisiana do not actually provide any new accountability to parents, students, teachers, and the community.
In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana took over 120 public schools in New Orleans, creating a “Recovery School District,” announcing that the schools were failing. 7,500 employees of the New Orleans education system were fired. It was a huge blow to the city’s black middle class, and purged the schools of veteran black teachers. The state takeover, in many ways, was unsuccessful. Schools were starved for resources, employee turnover was staggering, some schools fired and hired whole staffs every year, sometimes twice a year. But if the ultimate goal was to turn over New Orleans schools to the charter school industry, it was very successful. In New Orleans we now have a 97 percent charter school system. There are only five traditional public schools left.
Families, students, teachers, and community members in New Orleans have been fighting ever since the takeover for a decent education, and a voice in determining what that looks like.
Reform advocate said they did what they did for the children, as if children live underground and only pop up to go to school, as if their parents’ employment status and ability to live, eat, and survive in the city in which they are being educated does not affect them at all. The connection between student success and their family’s wellbeing is why the fight for control over public schools and our school board control is so crucial to this community. One of the last five public schools is the highest performing open admissions school in the city.
A lot of parents are hoping that schools that go back under the Orleans Parish School Board will allow them more oversight in helping the schools create healthy, holistic environments that better represent the demographics of the city and the students they service. But it’s not clear yet how the process will work. The law is impressively vague about which schools, when and how. And there is a lot of lingering distrust. Will the “opportunity school board” allow schools autonomy?
Bottom line, no school board should allow children’s social, emotional, and physical well-being to become a bargaining chip in educational experiments on vulnerable populations. And when a school board listens to parents, children, communities, and experts on best practices, culturally appropriate pedagogy, trauma informed curriculum, and basic early childhood and adolescent brain development, the harm to children in schools will stop and the real learning can begin.