Just in time for Christmas, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) released 2015 school letter grades and School Performance Scores (SPS) earlier today. Schools were assigned grades on a curve again this year, based on a temporary policy adopted to ease the transition to the higher demands of the Common Core standards. LDOE calculates elementary […] More
Dear Lusher Parents: No, the sky is not falling. Contrary to what you might have read on Saturday in the Uptown Messenger, Lusher is not about to be pushed off the edge of a $1.2 million fiscal cliff. Lawmakers in Baton Rouge have not conspired to punish New Orleans with a law all its own. […] More
When the Democratic candidate for Governor, John Bel Edwards, met with the Editorial Board of Lafayette’s Daily Advertiser on Tuesday to explain how “things would be different in an Edwards administration,” the two-term State Representative had a lot to say about the state of public education in Louisiana. Some of the points he made were […] 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
In case you missed it, on Monday Salon published a lopsided piece (In Salon? No kidding.) by Jennifer “Edushyster” Berkshire on New Orleans’ school reforms that painted a very misleading portrait of things on the ground in the Big Easy. I thought I would add much needed clarifications and context to the piece (which I’ve […] More
On Wednesday, the Recovery School District (RSD) released data showing that expulsions fell 14% across the city’s schools between the 2013-14 and 2014-15 school years. In total, 199 students were expelled last year out of 45,803 enrolled in New Orleans schools; in S.Y. 2013-14, 231 students out of 44,306 were expelled. In 2012, the RSD […] More
A couple weeks ago, I had the honor of sitting down with blogger, activist, and New Orleans native Chris Stewart (a.k.a., Citizen Stewart) in an interview for his podcast, Rock The Schools. Over the course of our conversation, we reflected on the progress New Orleans has made in public education since Hurricane Katrina and the challenges we encountered along […] More
Last week, the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a virulently anti-education reform “research organization” at the University of Colorado, released issued a press release that called into question the significant academic improvement seen in New Orleans schools since Hurricane Katrina. While it’s not necessarily newsworthy that NEPC (a beneficiary of AFT & NEA funding and […] More
The question of whether eligible Recovery School District (RSD) charters should be returned to the control of the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks, thanks to House Bill 166, a proposal from Rep. Joseph Bouie, which would have forced eligible RSD charters to return to OPSB within […] More
The Education Research Alliance (ERA) at Tulane University released a new study last week that attempted to gauge how New Orleans principals responded to competition in the city’s supposedly “market-based” public education system. The report – “How Do School Leaders Respond To Competition?” – was authored by Huriya Jabbar, an assistant professor of education policy […] More
On Tuesday, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) released a scathing report detailing the findings from an investigation into Lagniappe Academies by LDOE and Recovery School District (RSD) officials. The accusations in the report [see full report below] include: Failing to provide legally-mandated services to special education students, then doctoring forms to make it appear […] More
St. Tammany Parish teacher, blogger, and inveterate pessimist Mercedes Schneider desperately wants to believe New Orleans’ Recovery School District – and by extension, its students – have failed. For years, she has taken to her blog to malign the district at every available opportunity, dismissing evidence of the RSD’s progress as either smoke-and-mirrors or outright […] More
Peter Cook