“What the privatizers are doing is they keep selling the same snake oil, school choice, as the answer to the problem. School choice doesn’t answer any problem. The biggest correlation in education is between poverty and test scores. If you think the test scores are too low, go to the root causes.” That’s what Diane […] More
Charlie Pierce was once an insightful – and often funny – political commentator and sportswriter. For years, his columns appeared in the pages of the Boston Herald and Boston Globe, and he’s written for such publications as the New York Times, GQ, and Slate. Loyal NPR listeners also know him as a fixture on the popular game show, Wait, […] More
Well, Andrea Gabor is at it again. A few years ago, Andrea Gabor wrote an article for Newsweek that maligned the transformation of New Orleans’ public schools since Hurricane Katrina. At the time, I wrote a response that exposed the “inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and glaring omissions of fact” in her Newsweek piece – issues that made […] More
Michel Martin, host of NPR’s Tell Me More, is in New Orleans today to host Chartered Waters, a discussion on the changes that have taken place in the city’s school system since Hurricane Katrina, that NPR will stream live on its website tonight. A press release for the event quotes Martin as saying: “We hope this will be […] More
Directions: Below are three examples of controversial education issues in New Orleans. Each issue includes two statements that describe the same scenario, albeit in slightly different ways. Read each statement and then answer the question that follows. Issue 1: Standardized Testing Statement A: “More than a third of the city’s schools were flagged by the […] More
For most of New Orleans’ 45,000 public school students, Monday marked the first day of a new school year and NPR education correspondent Claudio Sanchez was in town reporting for a new series of nprEd Team stories focusing on the city’s school reform efforts since Hurricane Katrina. When I initially heard NPR was planning to […] More
On Tuesday, The Root, the online magazine of African-American culture originally founded by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., published an article from Jordan Flaherty entitled, “New Orleans Teachers and Students Wrestle With Racial Tension.” Flaherty’s piece paints a highly distorted and deceptive picture of post-Katrina New Orleans public schools, in what was clearly an effort to […] More
Recently Newsweek, the once-lauded news magazine that is now a shell of its former self, cast aside any lingering shred of respectability it still had with the publication of a highly distorted appraisal of New Orleans’ post-Katrina education system. The piece, entitled, The Great Charter Tryout: Are New Orleans’ schools a model for the nation – […] More
Peter Cook