This morning the Louisiana Supreme Court will hear arguments in the appeal of Eddy Oliver, et al. v. Orleans Parish School Board, the lawsuit brought on behalf of teachers terminated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In January, the Fourth Circuit of Court Appeal unanimously upheld an earlier ruling that teachers were wrongly terminated by […] 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
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
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
Update 01/27/14: Leslie Jacobs, former BESE/OPSB member and founder of EducateNow!, says claims that the teachers’ lawsuit could bankrupt the Orleans Parish School Board are unfounded: “School boards are ‘political subdivisions’ of the state, and both the Louisiana Constitution and the Governmental Claims Act protect political subdivisions from having their property or assets seized in execution […] 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
Following the Orleans Parish School Board these days is like watching the remake of a lousy movie: the actors are different, but the protagonists are still boorish, the plot is still clunky, and you already know that it’s going to end badly. For those of us who suffered through the slow-motion car wreck that was […] More
I generally refrain from challenging the absurd claims of the anti-progress Ravitchite fringe, since their pathological obsession with “proving” that education reform is part of a sinister corporate plot is clearly delusional, if not mildly amusing. However, now that long-time anti-edreform blogger and conspiracy theorist Jason “Crazy Crawfish” France has decided to smear Sci Academy – the highest-performing open-enrollment school in the Recovery School District and a […] More
Orleans Parish School Board President Ira Thomas is playing racially-charged, self-serving political games on the school board and the target of his machinations is once again OPSB Superintendent Stan Smith. On Thursday, the Times-Picayune reported that Thomas was trying to schedule an emergency meeting aimed at demoting Smith and possibly installing Armand Devezin as superintendent. However, Thomas was unable to secure the quorum […] More
Peter Cook