Dear Secretary Arne Duncan

§ February 3rd, 2010 § Filed under Educate, NO Schools § Tagged § 3 Comments

Since I do not use Facebook and cannot find an email address online that goes to you, sir, you will have to read this letter at a blog with the word “bitch” in the title.

Your pronouncement that the destruction post-Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system” in NO is too deeply insulting and blithely ignorant of the facts for your half-apology to suffice. Success? At dismantling a public school system? At underserving special-needs students? At creating a system that is so fractured and capricious that even parents with solid resources have trouble navigating the system? At creating a situation where we are told “good schools” are there for the picking but where there are still only a handful of known-to-be-”good” schools and many start-ups whose results or success has yet to surface, and where there’s a slush pile of last-resort schools? If that’s the model you want to reproduce around the country, we are all in deep trouble that will take generations to undo.

And who told you that NO communities were not concerned about the public schools? And you believed it? You really think parents, black parents, enjoyed sending their kids to shitty schools or racing and scheming to get into a decent school? Are you serious? You are, aren’t you?

And that’s the damn problem.

You seem to either ignore, forget, or not know that the “reforms” enacted in NO post-Katrina were not driven by the public, by parents or teachers, but by the politically connected who saw an opportunity to impose their vision of education upon a traumatized and scattered population. Aside from a few of the charter schools created post-Katrina, parents were minimally involved in the changes. Look at the boards of these schools now. How many parents are on them? And which schools have parents on their boards and who are those parents? You can keep turning a blind eye but that is neither reform nor leadership.

You believe in team playing, in working together. That has not been represented in the NO area or the state of LA in terms of education. Key players were left out until the last 5 minutes of the game then told to go win it for the team. When this “reform” is successful, will it be for “the team” or for the satisfaction of a few whose only connection to public education is taking it apart?

Has it occurred to you that your comments echo those heard and published right after the flooding, when well-off and -connected whites called the flooding a blessing that cleared out all the “trash” and gave the city “a fresh start”? Is that what you want us, especially black New Orleanians who are most affected by school “reform,” to think? The reform is good because it discarded students, schools, parents, teachers, especially and most certainly the brown ones? Really?

I do not accept your apology. No one with any stake in or concern about public education should.

G Bitch
New Orleans, USA

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