The G Bitch Spotat which a mad black woman rants about New Orleans, insomnia, teaching, education and "education," various -isms and anything involving a bitch, a spot or the letter g
A blast from the past that states the truth about school “reform” in Orleans parish [emphasis---in blue---added; comments in italics]
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October 25, 2005, Tuesday
Charter schools urged for N.O. district; La. education chief cites system’s woes
BYLINE: By Steve Ritea, Staff writer
SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 761 words
New Orleans should not open any public schools this academic year unless they become charter schools, state Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard said Monday, because of the district’s tenuous finances and what he called problems with the current leadership.
Picard also warned that national education associations and philanthropic groups willing to offer money and time to help rebuild the district could shrink if the district’s recent power struggles continue, a sentiment echoed by Mayor Ray Nagin and the leaders of some of those groups.
New Orleans interim Superintendent Ora Watson, who announced a plan to open four West Bank schools to students across the city Nov. 14, and School Board President Torin Sanders, who supports that effort, declined comment.
Watson’s plan flies in the face of a 4-2 board decision earlier this month to charter all 13 schools in Algiers and open as many as to eight of them in November. That plan was temporarily put on hold by a restraining order obtained Oct. 14 and set to expire this week if it is not extended.
Picard said the decision to charter those schools was “wise.”
“They don’t have any money to open four, five, six or eight schools,” he said. “I think at this point and time, until everyone can get their act together, I think that’s the best approach. I think you’re probably going to (also) see some charters on the east bank very soon.” [No one asked, or asks, why only charter schools got outside support. If you care about education, don't you care about educating kids and not just imposing free-market "methods"?]
Nagin agreed.
He said that in an Oct. 5 letter to Gov. Kathleen Blanco, he wrote, ” ‘Give me the charter schools I’ve been asking for — 20 charter schools, a citywide charter school district.’ ” [Nagin had been asking for charter schools? Since when?]
School Board Vice President Lourdes Moran and supporters of the charter effort have said it is primarily designed to take advantage of a $20.9 million federal grant to expand and create new charter schools. [The set-up---only privatized schools would get funding to open up post-Floods. How is that reform? Sounds like extortion to me.]
Alvarez & Marsal, the financial turnaround firm working with the city’s school system, has said the district can afford to open schools only if they win concessions from the federal government and if the state preserves the district’s current per-student financing levels: a questionable assumption, Picard and others have said. Other districts around the state and country have absorbed most of the district’s students and are clamoring for that money.
Reopening schools under those circumstances is a gamble, Picard said.
“Because of the current leadership and the financial situation, I don’t think they’re capable of doing that,” he said.
The decision by Watson and Sanders to announce a school reopening independent of the board’s majority decision to charter those same schools also is destructive, he said.
“Four members voted to do something else,” Picard said. “All that does is continue to send shock waves across the state and nation that they’re disjointed.” [There is never a hint of possibility that these school board members were thinking about anything other than messing up Picard et al's chance to privatize all of Orleans parish's schools. Some charter school supporters---very vague term but bear with me--- scream bloody murder when anyone raises objections to the way the reforms were imposed. The key word is "imposed"---there was no support at any level, local, state or federal, for traditional public schools to open. Suddenly, everyone is in a tizzy about how "bad" "all" the schools "are." In the past 40 years, dozens of things could have been done to improve schools. But only privatization got approval. Few people question why private industry is so hot to get its hands on federal education dollars. Millions and millions of dollars.]
That message is getting out to the district’s would-be benefactors and could scare them away, Nagin said.
“I’ve been getting calls from (former CNN News Group executive and current Aspen Institute CEO) Walter Isaacson, the (Bill and Melinda) Gates Foundation and all of these folks. They said, ‘Look, you set up the right environment, we will fund, totally fund, brand-new schools for the city of New Orleans. But we don’t want to go through what you’ve been,’ ” he said. ” ’All that struggle you’ve been having with that School Board. We don’t want to do that. We want to come in clean.’ “
Tulane University President Scott Cowen, chairman of the education committee of Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans Commission, said the philanthropic Gates Foundation, named for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, and the Broad Foundation, a nonprofit education reform group, will be active on that panel.
“I think if those foundations were asked to give money to the school system as it exists right now, it would be unlikely to be forthcoming,” he said. [No one questions why the schools have to get funding from private organizations like the Gates Foundation, which is not an advocate for public education. Why was it necessary, or the only way, to solicit from private funds interested not in school reform but transferring the management of schools, and all the state and federal fuinds they receive, into private hands.]
Isaacson, a New Orleans native, said the Aspen Institute is “willing to come in if we can all rise above politics.” He also said the board has “shown some good leadership in wanting some charters.” [Privatization is a sign of "good leadership"? The current privatization movement is not "above politics." It's all about politics because few if any in this movement talk about pedagogy, child development, the latest in research on brain development and learning. No talk of best practices. Have you seen that phrase used anywhere? Challenge me. I want to be wrong on this one.]
Henry Duvall, a spokesman for the Council of the Great City Schools, which has already begun helping the district assess the conditions of some schools, said the board and the district superintendent need to be working in tandem. Otherwise, “you’re going to have disarray,” he said, which is “a turnoff” to organizations willing to help.
“I can’t disagree with them,” Picard said. “They said, ‘We’re not going to come in and do it under the auspices of the present governance.’ ” [The juxtaposition of these quotes implies that the only way to avoid disarray is for OPSB to agree to whatever the superintendent says. Was OPSB a great board? No. Were the schools overall in great condition? No, no matter what definition of "condition" you use. Does that mean that privatization was the only alternative? No. Did these organizations geared toward privatization have to be appealed to? No. Was there any effort by anyone on the state level to find reforms or help other than privatization? No. And you can see that there was and is no plan other than privatizing this urban district---Pastorek is all over the place about teachers and the classroom and actual students and their learning and whether suburban districts have to accept whatever he says and that is because there is no plan, no road map. When the problem is reduced to a nail, only hammers are the solution.]
Just like the whole issue, this series has been a throbbing ache that makes me feel gloomy about the world at large. But the paper tries to end the series on a high note, on a Look! The school “systems” does work because look! This kid got into—wait for it, wait for it, get your grin prepped—LUSHER! Gasp! Grin! Applaud! Give thanks for the fracturing of K-12 education in Orleans parish! He never would’ve had that chance before the fracturing, right? WTMF?
Carr ends the series with an ambitious teen and mother and their spot of luck in this “systems”—a super-dedicated counselor whose daily focus is students on their way up and out of KIPP Mc 15:
More than six months earlier, Jamal [Encalade], an eighth-grader at KIPP McDonogh 15, had enthusiastically, if a bit nervously, embarked on his high school search. For many families, a great deal is at stake in the process. A yawning gulf seems to separate the top-performing high schools, like Franklin, Lusher and Warren Easton, from the bottom-dwellers, with not much in the middle.
How subtly understated. There’s even a gap in that short list.
Luckily, Jamal had a not-so-secret weapon on his side: [advisor Nicole] Cummins, working full-time for KIPP, helped the eighth-graders through the admissions maze, and continued to support them after they graduated. She kept students abreast of admission deadlines and requirements at high schools and regularly brought them on tours. She even showed up with Nutri-Grain bars for students taking early-morning admissions test to the city’s most competitive high schools.
Cummins has a lovely, working-from-the-heart story but what is more than likely missed here is that this is an individual effort and without her or her energy level or laser focus, the results would be very different.
Plus, it makes KIPP look good to get its kids in good schools. And deflects the public from any real scrutiny—It works, doesn’t it? Then shut up, ‘kay?
But the letter that finally arrived at his home with the Warren Easton return address last spring brought unexpected news.
Rejection.
“Even Warren Easton turned him down?” his mother said. “He’s had good grades since kindergarten, since forever. And he just can’t get into the schools he wants.”
Warren Easton officials said recently that they had no record of a rejection letter in Jamal’s folder, but sent a notice out in January indicating the family’s application was incomplete.
Regardless, the confusion dismayed Jamal.
“At this point,” he said late last spring, “I’m not really excited about high school.”
Think this is rare? Think so if you want. This “confusion” at schools has been common in this series, if not appearing in each and every installment. It is to be expected when each school is its own system, when each admission is a long process of weeding or quality checking or just plain multiple places and steps where it can all fall apart. I know no one wants his or her child’s health or education to rest on a piece of paper, an intern, or a single person’s understanding or misunderstanding.
Both Miller-McCoy and Sci Academy eventually accepted Jamal. But while he liked their ideas and plans, he wasn’t sure either would provide the best fit for him.
Like many schools, they are close-to-brand-new, untested [pardon the pun], unknown. And high school really is too important, especially for Jamal, to gamble. No one should be gambling. Some have no choice.
Cummins, who says she has a good working relationship with Warren Easton, ultimately called the school to inquire about the student’s case. Jamal, she learned, was actually in.
He was so miffed over the confusion, though, that he crossed Warren Easton off his list.
Only Cummins and her relationships with folks at Easton and her perseverance make it [almost] work out. And who can blame Jamal’s reaction? OK, I know someone will but that’s a knee-jerk, thoughtless reaction. High school students, including public school ones, are humans, too, with human emotions, egos, hurts, joys, needs and wants just like a student from Old Metairie who goes to a private school. Jamal is not the only middle schooler, high schooler, even grade schooler experiencing this roller coaster of acceptance v. confusion, misunderstandings and rejection. They are children, children forming self-images, human children with needs, tender places, and talents that can be all-too-easily discouraged or snuffed by some process, events or glitch an adult thinks hardly anything of.
I know many well-meaning, good people who would plotz if such a thing happened to their child but who might read this article, if they bother, and see nothing problematic with Jamal’s struggle. That as-long-as-it’s-not-me shit is pandemic around here. Also, the Bush family people-not-like-me-are-supposed-to-have-a-hard-ass-time belief/conviction/ideology.
Jamal wondered, after the grueling search was over, what would have happened without Cummins.
Yeah, what would’ve happened?
Also understated:
For decades, families have gone to great lengths to get their children into Lusher, even moving to the neighborhood to gain preference at the elementary school. After Katrina, Lusher became a charter and added a high school.
Whole lot glossed over there. “Moving” into Lusher’s neighborhood is not like standing in line for an application, driving to school meetings after work, or taking afternoons off to tour schools. In a city plagued by segregated housing patterns, low wages, and a hard-to-believe-something-so-big-can-grow education gap, only certain people can afford to even consider buying or renting in Lusher’s district. Even though there are always bargains and good-luck-finds, it makes Lusher out of reach for most folks in the city. [The tiers are not in the Parents Guide. Are they gone or tucked inside the black box of charter school/former magnet school admissions?]
Then Jamal reassesses:
“Now there’s this choice of great schools,” he said.
“It takes a lot of perseverance, and it can be discouraging at times. But when a last-minute miracle like this happens, it makes it all worth it.”
No, Jamal, it does not. Education should not be left to a “last-minute miracle.” If that is our collective belief, then this is not a democracy and we should send all the working-class and middle-class kids home so the resources can be left to those who are lucky enough to be able to pay, lucky enough to live in x neighborhood, lucky enough to be part of y family that has owned q for t number of years and given f number of thousands to something or someone. That’s also not a meritocracy. If you are born into it, you didn’t earn it. And if you didn’t earn it, how can you say with a straight face that you believe in hard work, perseverance, and intelligence?
I’m making myself sick saying this: public education should not be hard to access. That is why it is PUBLIC. In other places, it’s not perfect but not nearly so hard.
Why do we here so admire the extraordinary, over-the-top efforts of parents to get a decent education for their kids? Why does this irritate so few? Or seemingly so? Does anyone realize, or believe, that education is not a privilege, a game you have to be lucky enough to win? That parents should not have to fight or bargain with any number of devils just for a school? Why is this so radical in LA?
There should be a few competitive, harder-to-get-into schools for the hard-core scholar or artist. But that shouldn’t be the only chance to get out alive.
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“High school search frustrates ambitious student.” Sarah Carr. 11/12/2009. A1, A8. Print. [Web version is only available through paid archives at nola.com.]
It’s not a surprise that there are stumbles along the new road of School Choice to our difficult and deceptively “improved” status quo.
While the New Orleans community has successfully created an unprecedented number of school choices, scores of families still struggle to take advantage of them. *
From the beginning, I felt and said the kind of shopping around, school visits and research School Choice here requires is directly in opposition to a large targeted population, its resources and needs. Just because there are computers at the public library doesn’t mean they are instantly and perfectly accessible when this or that particular parent can get there. And should you have to be computer literate to get your child into a decent–not good but decent—school? I still assert that as US citizens in a democracy the answer to that question has to be, cannot be anything but, No.
Yet one of the greatest challenges moving forward will be to ensure that the best schools do not simply go to the families with the connections, knowledge and time to navigate the complicated new landscape; that, in other words, parental wherewithal does not control destiny.
And even this intro article hints that this “new landscape” isn’t really all that new, that those with the most get the most and those with the least end up somewhere that’s more like limbo than school. From what I’ve personally seen anyway.
That paragraph should reappear at every section break and at the head of every article in the series. Because that is the challenge, the dilemma, the moral imperative. To improve a school system means to work on and work to eradicate injustices, biases, inequities, not to reproduce them and then throw up hands and say, We gave you the CHOICE!
“Right now, choice is more like a land run than an open house,” said Aesha Rasheed, director of the New Orleans Parent Organizing Network. “It’s each man for himself, desperately trying to get the best you can get your hands on.”
The best schools fill up quickly. And despite the creation of a streamlined application process, several schools still require different paperwork, accept applications at different times of the day, and make parents jump through different hoops to gain admission.
As a result, parents with flexible daytime schedules, access to the Internet, reliable transportation, and savvy still hold a distinct advantage.
Many educators, including Rasheed, note that creating equitable choice is a work in progress. Although more work remains to be done, the city has come a long way toward the more standard application form and deadline for its public schools. About 4,000 students submitted the “common application” by the deadline last spring, up significantly from the previous year. [emphasis added]
Out of how many students in the systems? Where are my damninterns?
Cowen Institute
And why did the streamlined application come LAST? No one really thought through the process of School Choice. Or just figured it was such a great idea it just had to work.
“We’ve gone so quickly from a system where parents opened their doors and just sent their children to the closest schools to one that requires an active decision by parents,” said Caroline Roemer Shirley, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools. “People get worked up that it’s not 100 percent working, but please remember that it’s only been four years.”
A radical change was made, things emptied out and renamed overnight without our consent or consultation, but now we, and our children, are told to be patient and wait while it rights itself. I ask why it was so important to throw parents and children, and teachers, into this kind of chaos to enact “change.” It’s a great idea to get parents “more involved with their children’s education” but Ms. Roemer Shirley misses a few things, and oozes, like many who speak in favor of the “reforms” and privatization here, contempt for parents and some lightly sketched idea about how bad 100% of the schools were before and how 100% of parents and people involved at whatever level just didn’t give a damn, those evil, lazy bastards. No one will argue the schools weren’t in serious trouble and were not serving children well, and making things worse in some cases, but the fact that there was poor performance and negligence [don't deceive yourself into thinking the children ruined NOPS] and some crazy shit going on does not prove that parents didn’t care, parents weren’t trying, children were hopeless and needed to be put in new uniforms and desk row formations to get higher test scores [I almost wrote "to learn"---silly me]. I doubt if the heat on LAPCS and others involved in the privatization of the system is over the new status quo not being perfect; the unreasonableness in the 100% is meant to make any and all who ask questions or complain or analyze privatization look like absolutist, extremist fools who just need to sit the hell down. Roemer Shirley, and I do not think she is alone, associates neighborhood schools with a lack of love, concern and intelligence on the part of the parent. Is it okay in the suburbs to bring your children to the neighborhood school? And does she really think that the majority of parents in the previous system just let their kids out like a dog or cat to roam their way to school? There’s a meanness in her brief statements that shows contempt for parents, a contempt I’ve seen ooze out of other supporters of School Choice, often laced with defensiveness. Like this later comment of Roemer Shirley’s:
“We’re requiring more on the part of parents,” said Roemer Shirley of the state charter school association, “but that also means that individual schools and the (districts) need to do a better job informing parents that you can’t just show up on the first day.” [emphasis added]
Such contempt—Can you believe, Charla, that there are These People who think They can just Show Up to a School and put Their Children in it, how APPALling, how GAUCHE. Ms. Roemer Shirley, it’s SCHOOL. A school should be able to educate whoever walks in the door. That’s the point of having a public system, resources shared, pooled, allocated where needed, best practices shared and disseminated, everyone taken care of as best as is possible.
I also say if you are elbow deep in changing education and school systems, should you be so contemptuous of those you serve and whose lives you alter and, in small or not-so-small ways, direct and therefore determine?
The defensiveness is understandable. When you rip my clothes off you will have to tolerate some verbal and physical abuse while you take 3 days to make underwear, much less the rest of what I need. That could make everyone involved touchy. If you take out the floor of the house, you should give the residents something to stand on or a motel room until there’s a walkway at least. And hand out hard hats. And steel-toed boots.
But I digress….
And after all this parents-need-to-make-an-active-choice, the next 3 paragraphs note the heavy door-to-door and in-neighborhood recruiting some schools do to fill their desks. Which is needed. It’s unreasonable to say that only kids with the right kind of parent can go to a decent or good school.
Virtually no one disagrees that parents should work hard on behalf of their children, setting aside substantial time for a school search if necessary. On the plus side, such requirements could very well spur increased parent engagement citywide.
“We want schools to press parents to be more responsible, engaged and involved,” said Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.
But there’s a fine line in some cases between promoting parent engagement and setting up unnecessary hurdles before a student is admitted. To a school, requiring families to interview before granting admission helps ensure that the parents and students understand expectations. To a parent, it can come off as a screening mechanism, particularly if not fully explained.
Also, some parents have significantly more time and resources to devote to the search than others. For one family dropping off an application during a work day might mean a quick errand in the car. For another family, it could mean a long bus ride, a missed work shift, lost income and late bill payments.
Carr has a light touch here. I’m not sure how an interview can’t be seen as a screening. A one-on-one interview—when you go for a job interview, isn’t it also a screening mechanism? A parent meeting can answer questions about and emphasize important aspects of a program through handouts, lecture, discussion, role-playing, videos, etc. And again, Carr brings in, to her credit, and I look forward to this as I finally get to this series, the reality of the parents we have and the world in which we actually live. You don’t have to be a resident of Iberville to have resource or time issues. We collectively must, not ‘be able to’ but, DO better.
Moreover, every city, including New Orleans, has some parents who are addicted to drugs, mentally or intellectually incapacitated, or who simply don’t care. Should their children — who could reap the greatest benefit from a strong school — be relegated to the weakest schools, victims of their parent’s incompetence?
“If we are about equitable choice, then we don’t want to create a Darwinian system where only the people who can figure out how to get through the maze get into the best schools,” Rasheed said.
Which is the system we had before, where those with the most resources and time got their kids into the betters schools. I’m not seeing a great deal of difference or more-than-superficial change yet. Part of why not is that, as Henry Levin, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education said,
“…(Choice) doesn’t solve the problem of families who are just behind the eight ball.
“You are dealing with people who are worried about putting food on the table and whether they are going to have to move in the middle of the night. … They are not sitting down at the breakfast table every morning and saying, ‘Oh, let me read through the parent handbook and figure out where to send my child to school.’ “
Which brings us back to the sad formula, and not new, that if your parents aren’t up to a particular standard, you are screwed. And that’s antithetical to the idea of public education.
Most people are just worried about their own kid or yet-to-be kid. I know mine will be fine regardless because she has me and Mister. I worry about those kids who do not have. And that shouldn’t be dismissed or seen as irrelevant to the issue of our public schools and kids. It’s not sprinkles; it’s the cake.
And I’m not seeing and haven’t been seeing how this School Choice is changing what happens in classrooms.
“The solution is that every school is a good school,” said Jay Altman, chief executive officer of FirstLine Schools, which runs Arthur Ashe and Green charter schools. “That is the end game to all this.”
And that happens because of parents who can scramble and hustle and cross town 4 times to get their kids in x school? Huh? Am I missing something here? Does he not know that it’s money, resources, teacher training and support and education that makes a good school? NO had choice before—people who could chose to send their kids to anything-but-a-public school, or to a hard-to-get-into handful of public schools, or to move to the north shore–which gave us the schools we now are trying to reform via School Choice. What a finale.
Next: the article from the 9th and a child with possible autism.
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*I link to the online version but am reading and commenting on the print version, which may have slight variations.
A new committee will look for ways the Recovery School District, the Orleans Parish School Board and the city’s network of charters can consolidate their services, work together to cut costs and plot out the education landscape of the future.
You mean, like a school system? What a radical idea. Maybe Pastorek et al should’ve thought of that before they pulverized the school system we had. Tearing down buildings gets rid of (in a bulldozer kind of way) the flaws but the same cannot be done to a school system. The flaws are still here. Those who are “better off” in the new “system” were better off before in the old, bad, flawed system.
With Scott Cowen as co-chair–didn’t Tulane effectively remove Lusher from the pool by making it a Tulane school rather than a NO charter school (see Ashley’sblog)?
Not an all-in-one application but one form you can use to apply to “most” RSD, OPSB and various charter schools. Unless the school you want to apply to has a different idea about the form, process and deadlines and you make the right decision (as pointed out by Jeffrey and many others):
More than 33,000 children attend 79 New Orleans public schools, a mix of charter and traditional campuses. Officials characterize the common application process as a way to give parents more choice and access to schools, providing that parents are familiar with the choices.
The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education passed a resolution that charter and noncharter schools in the Recovery District take part in the common application process. BESE also approved the original timeline but did not establish consequences for noncompliance.
Most of the 26 charter schools in the Recovery District, 33 traditional district-operated schools and five schools run by the Orleans Parish School Board signed onto the common application process. The dozen charters overseen by the School Board indicated they would take part next year if the deadlines were timelier. [emphasis added]
Addressing about 30 people Saturday during an event designed to help parents begin signing up their children for the 2008-09 school year, Recovery School District superintendent Paul Vallas bemoaned what he described as a poor outreach effort to make parents aware of a new streamlined application process that covers most of New Orleans’ public schools.
With the registration period set to end Wednesday, Vallas said that based on attendance at the event, education officials, including those under his command, have not done enough to inform parents about the new process. He suggested several times that the registration deadline should be pushed back.
“If you provide choices, but nobody knows there’s choices, is it really a choice?” Vallas said. “Freedom is information.”
Organized by the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, the Schools Fair 2008 was intended to provide parents of more than 32,000 New Orleans public school students with a one-stop shop to learn about the dozens of schools that will be open next fall, including charter schools and schools run by the Recovery School District and the Orleans Parish School Board. The event was held at the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art.
Sixty-nine schools set up booths in the museum’s main atrium and exhibit rooms, passing out candy and proffering information about their institutions.
As Mister pointed out, few in any of the administrations in charge of local schools acknowledge the complexity of the “system” and the difficulty of knowing which administration or disseminator of information to listen to about which school or schools or process or deadline. There are three administrations involved and each has its own set of charter schools: OPSB, RSD and the state.
And parents were expected to browse Saturday and put in applications by Wednesday? There’s problem in that timing, too. What if you work? What if a child gets sick and this is the one chance you have to check out anything in any kind of detail (if possible)? The key to high attendance is to reduce as many obstacles as possible so it’s stupid-easy to be there. Unlike Mr. Vallas and those working for him, parents do not have the school “system,” or a part of it, as their full-time jobs.
Choices, choices, choices–makes me want to spit acid and nails. As if “choices” is all there is to it, as if THAT were the single systemic problem in the school system we had before. For example, if OPSB no longer has a full slate of schools, why in the hell does it take 2-3 months for any goddamn thing to get done? Or filled out? And what can you know about a brand-new charter school or even one only a year old? How can you tell without doing the process part-time, or having teaching experience and/or an education degree, if a charter or non-charter school is experiencing growing/start-up pains or failing? How do you know what the mission statement comes down to in practice? Why are uniforms so universal in this “choice-filled” system?
The common application was touted as a one-size-fits-all, one-page form that parents could use to apply at once to all but a few of the city’s public schools, all under the same deadline. Released in January, it promised to greatly simplify the registration process that had befuddled and frustrated parents in 2006 and 2007, with varying applications, requirements and deadlines for the bevy of schools.
The deadline for the new common application was set for Feb. 27, five months earlier than last year’s deadlines. Education officials said students would learn where they were accepted within three weeks, and would they have until the end of March to register.
Five months earlier than last year’s deadlines? March registration? That seems convenient for the administration but what about parents with jobs, multiple kids, post-flood issues of all varieties? And was this for all RSD schools or also OPSB schools? What about the charter schools? And which charters? One application to apply to how many of the 82 schools in the city limits? Are there elementary and high school applications? No, I didn’t go because I didn’t know about it either.
Vallas, however, worried aloud that Saturday’s turnout was an indication that the school districts, charters and education nonprofits had not done enough to inform parents about the streamlined application process and the earlier deadline.
“We should have standing room only . . . because there are more choices than this district has ever offered in the past. Before this window closes, we need to get the word out. People should be begging for those common application forms,” Vallas said.
“Should be begging” is an unfortunate turn of phrase in this situation. Again, we have a school administration waiting for parents to kiss their feet and cry with gratitude, it seems, before offering any results or really simplifying a complicated and bewildering “system.”
In addition, the 2008 New Orleans Parents’ Guide to Public Schools, compiled by the New Orleans Parent Organizing Network, was just released Saturday, giving parents fewer than five days to peruse the book of more than 100 pages for information on schools.
Urban League representative Deirdre Johnson Burel acknowledged that there was “a bit of a delay” in releasing the Parents’ Guide. Aesha Rasheed, with the Parent Organizing Network, said work on the guide “ramped up really fast” at the start of the year, adding that the 2008 guide made significant improvements upon the previous version, released in last August. [emphasis added]
I’m sure all involved mean well but this really looks like callous indifference to very serious, complex decisions people need to make for their fucking children.
2. Looking for details on the community meeting about the schools master plan, I found PDFs for each meeting and area full of pages on the schools like this:
The narrative about the master plan, the site considerations and the citywide meeting results are repeated with each school, verbatim. It is a waste of space and makes it look like there’s information here. (I’d flunk a student for that.) There’s some information but not what you’d expect after clicking on Community Meetings.
Notice the “meeet”–it pops up again and again.
What will Hardin, or any of the others slated for “complete replacement,” be replaced with? When? For what purpose? Hardin’s second page has the Google map and same “information” again.
What will be renovated? When? Will this school or another reopen in the newly-renovated building?
None of the currently open schools have statistics more recent than 2002. What “moderate renovation”? Am I really asking for too much information from something listed as “Meeting #2“? Are all site issues exactly the same?
And why did I spend my unpaid, untrained time sifting through this (and more) instead of a reporter who is paid to monitor our community and what does and doesn’t fucking work? Dumbass pictures of Nagin and Riley are infinitely easier, I know. (pic link from Ashley Morris: the blog)
"G Bitch" is a persona-pseudonym brought to you by a person with a "real" life, job, family, friends, etc. And nothing on this blog has anything to do with the views, practices, needs, or pet peeves of any employer, association, profession, clan, family member, or BFF.
Bitches are aggressive, assertive, domineering, overbearing, strong-minded, spiteful, hostile, direct, blunt, candid, obnoxious, thick-skinned, hard-headed, vicious, dogmatic, competent, competitive, pushy, loud-mouthed, independent, stubborn, demanding, manipulative, egoistic, driven, achieving, overwhelming, threatening, scary, ambitious, tough, brassy, masculine, boisterous and turbulent. A Bitch takes shit from no one. You may not like her, but you cannot ignore her.
ATTRIBUTION: Joreen, U.S. feminist and author. From “The Bitch Manifesto,” originally published in Ms. magazine in 1969. As quoted in The Decade of Women, by Suzanne Levine and Harriet Lyons (1980). link
