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
The expression “market-based reform” (or some variation thereof) gets thrown about by folks on both sides of the education reform debate. Opponents use it as a term of derision, intended to describe what they feel is an impersonal, metrics-obsessed approach to teaching and learning. Among supporters, it has a positive connotation, with advocates incessantly touting […] More
On Wednesday, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal opened a new front in his one-man war on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Jindal filed a lawsuit [see complaint below] in federal court that accuses the U.S. Department of Education of violating the Tenth Amendment by essentially forcing states to adopt the standards. Yesterday’s lawsuit comes just […] More
The website of the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) went down Monday morning after the state Department of Administration (DOA) failed to pay the site’s annual $280 domain fee. By midday, LDOE’s website was back online after DOA officials scrambled to make payment on the past-due bill. While DOA Communications Director Meghan Parrish attributed 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
I recently came upon an article attacking New Orleans’ public schools in New York Teacher, the official magazine of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents over 200,000 educators in New York City’s public school system. The piece, written by Micah Landau, a “staff reporter” for the union (“staff reporter” apparently being UFT newspeak for […] More
In May, a national coalition that includes the Journey For Justice Alliance (J4J), the Advancement Project, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the National Education Association (NEA), filed a civil rights complaint [see full text of complaint below] alleging that the Recovery School District’s school closure policy “provides circumstantial evidence of intentional discrimination” against […] More
Members of the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) are embroiled in bitter infighting once again and (surprise!) the issue at the center of the dispute is the allocation of district construction contracts. The recent strife began after the district announced its plan to award a $51 million contract to Woodward Design + Build for the […] More
This post was originally published on PE+CO: Louisiana Education Legislation Update While the inimitable Huey P. Long has gone down in history as “The Kingfish,” to his political opponents he was known by another, less flattering name, “The Dictator of Louisiana,” a reference to his unrelenting pursuit of power as governor, and subsequently as a […] 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
Peter Cook