A RESOLUTION OPPOSING ASININE RESOLUTIONS FROM THE CONSTITUENTS OF THE ORLEANS PARISH SCHOOL BOARD WHEREAS, generations of young New Orleanians were denied an adequate education in the city’s public schools prior to Hurricane Katrina as a result of chronic mismanagement by Orleans Parish School Board; and WHEREAS, the State of Louisiana, as duly authorized by […] More
UPDATE – 10/10/14: On Friday, October 10th, John Ayers, Executive Director of the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives announced they were retracting their report, “Beating the Odds: Academic Performance and Vulnerable Student Populations in New Orleans Public High Schools,” because it was determined the study’s methodology was flawed. Ayers released the following statement announcing […] More
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
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
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
Dear Steve, I was catching up on New Orleans education news yesterday, when I came across an article in the Times-Picayune focusing on Tuesday’s board meeting at John McDonogh Senior High School. I was surprised to read that you spent most of the meeting trying to deflect blame for John Mac’s poor performance since your […] 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
The one thing that is clear to anyone who’s attempted to read Mercedes Schneider’s blog is that she’s angry: angry at John Merrow, angry about Common Core, angry about evolution, and angry at Teach For America, along with a whole host of other things. However, she reserves her greatest fury for the Recovery School District’s effort to improve […] 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