NOLA: Charter Nirvana

Rick Hess took the week off and left the keys to his blog with Neerav Kingsland, the chief strategy officer for New Schools for New Orleans. His posts this week - here, here, here, and here - are both astonishing and infuriating.

Astonishing because they call for a radical upending of public education through the entire country. Infuriating because Kingsland simply ignores the primary issue with charter school expansion:

In the following letter I aim to convince you of this: the single most important reform strategy you can undertake is to increase charter school quality and market share in your city--with the ultimate aim of turning your district into a charter school district.

In other words: rid yourself of the notion that your current opinions on curriculum, teacher evaluation, technology, or anything else will be the foundation for dramatic gains in student achievement. If history tells us anything, they will not be:

Dismissing this letter--and the idea of charter districts--would have been easier five years ago. But over the past five years, educators and policymakers in New Orleans created the nation's first charter school district.

This transformation of the New Orleans educational system may turn out to be the most significant national development in education since desegregation. Desegregation righted the morality of government in schooling. New Orleans may well right the role of government in schooling. [emphasis mine]

You know what's astonishing about that sentence? The blatant refusal to acknowledge that the most significant transformation in NOLA's schools has been the reintroduction of segregation. For example:

Along with the academy supported by Oprah’s Angel Network - - which the entertainer used to raise money from the public -- New Orleans charter schools accused of discrimination include those that are favored charities of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)’s Walton family and New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees.

Shunning special-education students helps school budgets since the average disabled child costs twice as much to serve as a nondisabled one, said Thomas Hehir, who oversaw federal special-education programs under President Bill Clinton. The practice also improves the reported academic results of schools because children with disabilities often have lower scores on standardized tests, he said.

‘No Incentive’

“There’s no incentive to take these kids,” Hehir, now a Harvard University professor, said in an interview. “If you can avoid educating them, there are other things you can do with the money. You can pay people more or reduce class size.”

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans turned to charters as a way to rebuild schools and overhaul public education. Its charter schools now enroll more than 70 percent of students, a larger share than in any other U.S. district, making it a flash point for concerns about special education. 

One New Orleans charter school recommended the expulsion of a girl with depression for cutting herself in class, records show. An administrator and an aide at another carried a distraught third-grade boy into an empty room, restraining him until he urinated on himself, according to their written accounts. A former special-education coordinator at a third school said administrators told her to stop talking to parents after she counseled them that their children were entitled to more services.

[...]

Last October, 10 families, including Lawrence’s, filed a federal special-education discrimination suit against the state of Louisiana. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group in Montgomery, Alabama, represents the families. Charter schools aren’t named as defendants, and the allegations include complaints about services at conventional schools, as well.

Lawrence’s great uncle, Joseph, 57, lives in New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. Unemployed and recovering from a heart attack and stroke, he became guardian four years ago after the child’s grandmother died.

Army Dream

New Orleans Charter Science and Math, with its polo shirt and khaki uniforms and mission to send kids to college, promised special-education services and hope for Lawrence, Joseph said in an interview.

A lanky teenager who dreams of joining the Army, Lawrence reads and does math at roughly the third-grade level. Along with attention deficit disorder, he has language-related disabilities that make his speech difficult to understand.

In a 2009 evaluation at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, doctors said Lawrence could become “a productive member of society.” They said his fighting resulted from frustration at his difficulty in communicating, and recommended special- education services “at the highest level possible,” including speech therapy, tailored assignments and extended time on tests.

Rather than provide all the services he needed, the charter school excluded him by suspending him repeatedly and keeping him from going to the Oprah celebration, according to the lawsuit.

“He needed a place that would work with him as an individual,” Joseph said. “What they gave him was the opportunity to get out.”

‘Beloved Member’

Lawrence and some other students didn’t attend the ceremony to protect children’s safety,Benjamin Marcovitz, the school’s founder and principal, said in a phone interview. Angela De Paul, an Oprah Winfrey spokeswoman, declined to comment.

And you've really got to embarrass Oprah badly to shut her up about schools; I mean...

This is aside from the equally relevant issue of the change in NOLA's demographics post-Katrina. We know that there is credible evidence that charters may be increasing racial segregation; put this all together with the potential for political favoritism and there is more than enough evidence to voice a real concern for Kingland's charter conversion plan.

So what is Kingland's response? Surely he's thought about this? Surely, in his position, he's gathered data to address this all-important issue? So what does he say about charters and segregation?

Nothing. Seriously - and I've read every post twice - he says nothing about charter schools segregating on the basis of race, creed, language, or disability.

Instead, he cites India - India! - as a model for success. Hey, America, ready to put a caste system in place? And he comes up with a timetable to convert the Newark district into charters (sorry, but Eli Broad will have to sign off on that first, thank you very much).

In fairness, he has a day left; maybe he'll get around to this tomorrow. We'll see...

ADDING: It's worth saying yet again that this "reformer" judges the success of a school solely on its standardized test scores. Swell.