Our Christmas Education Wish List
14th December 2020 · 0 Comments
The Louisiana Weekly, parents and students, education activists and several state legislators have high expectations for the newly constituted Orleans Parish School Board. Four new members will take the oath of office in January and three incumbents will renew their vow to serve public school children.
Newcomers Olin Parker, Jancarlo “J.C.” Romero, Katherine Baudouin and Carlos Zervigon won in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th districts. They are joining incumbents John Brown Sr., Ethan Ashley and Nolan Marshall Jr., who represent the 1st, 2nd, and 7th districts respectively.
We hope the new blood on the OPSB brings a new vision to what has become an impotent, political body with no substantive powers.
Unlike the previous Board, the new Board is predominately white, with only one female member and three Black men. This is not to say that whites are incapable of doing excellent work, but they will have to steer a school system that serves an 87 percent African-American student body with specific cultural and educational needs.
We hope that the white board members will understand and identify with the challenges Black students and parents face – in and out of schools. We hope Board members will acknowledge and address the systemic racism that permeates students’ lives, our public and private sectors, and the school system. We also hope that board members will re-assess the current charter school system, recognize that a grave injustice occurred, and support a centralized system that provides the same education to all students.
Our fervent wish for the good of all public school students is that incoming school board members do some homework before they are sworn in and make a commitment to do what’s best for the children they represent. During this Christmas season of giving, we are giving the Orleans Parish School Board a wish list of activities to aid it in its journey to educational justice:
The Louisiana Weekly’s Education Christmas Wish List:
• Contract with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond to conduct anti-racism training for the Board and systemwide;
• Contract with agencies that provide trauma-informed and cultural sensitivity education models and hold training sessions for school operators;
• Support an amendment to ACT 91 or new legislation that gives back full control of the Orleans Parish Public School District to the elected School Board;
• The implementation of a centralized public school system that provides a high standard of education across the board;
• Provide a uniform curriculum, materials, school schedules, arts programming, sports and STEM education in the same manner for all students;
• Support the restoration of the Orleans Parish School Board’s simple majority for decision-making relative to charter school openings and closures;
• Provide certified, experienced teachers and principals to all schools.
This wish list is not asking for anything that the state’s other 63 school districts don’t already have. While it is true that the New Orleans Public School system is the only all-charter school district statewide and nationally, it remains a mystery as to why New Orleans’ predominately Black school system was singled out for this disparate treatment.
In 2016, the Louisiana Legislature orchestrated a coup to take control of the Orleans Parish Public Schools’ multi-million dollar budget and funnel the money into private hands.
It was a discriminatory act perpetrated on a public school district with an 87 percent Black student body. The excuse was that the Orleans Parish schools were failing. However, data shows that many schools across the state’s 63 parishes were failing to pass the state’s high stakes tests.
The state forced the takeover of Orleans Parish, in spite of opposition for parents, teachers and board members.
Leslie Jacobs, a former insurance saleswoman turned education proponent and the self-anointed “architect of accountability,” her former BESE Board colleague, Paul Pastorek, an attorney and now charter school system consultant, and State Senator Karen Carter Peterson, hatched the plan to use dedicated public school dollars to create a pseudo-private school entity.
Peterson’s Senate Bill 432, which became ACT 91 in 2016, was a slap in the faces to New Orleans’ Black public school students and their parents.
ACT 91 called for an education “experiment”– the nation’s first all-charter school system – to replace the 103 public schools that were operational pre-Katrina.
After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of New Orleans teachers were dismissed, and the schools were turned over to the state-run Recovery School District. The move crippled the teachers’ union and destroyed any semblance of accountability and oversight by the elected School Board.
Prior to ACT 91, charter school supporters were saying the Orleans Parish Public School system had failed the children. Implicit in the propaganda used to justify the take over was the belief that our teachers and administrators were incompetent and ineffective.
They harked school choice via charter schools as the solution. Fast forward to 2020 and there is no school choice but rather a farce called One-App. Under One-App, parents can list three schools of their choice. Every parent wants his or her child to attend the best school available, but in New Orleans, the top-performing schools are either always full or exempt from the One-App process. So, school choice doesn’t exist here.
And while ACT 91 was said to be a ‘school return bill,’ it didn’t really transfer the schools to the OPSB. The law left the charter school system wholly intact but the renewal of charter operators’ contracts to the superintendent.
According to ACT 91:
“The local school board shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction in the areas of school programming, instruction, curriculum, materials and tests, yearly school calendars and daily schedules, hiring and firing of personnel, employee performance management and evaluation, terms and conditions of employment, teacher or administrator certification, salaries and benefits, retirement, collective bargaining, budgeting, purchasing, procurement, and contracting for services other than capital repairs and facilities construction.”
The main problems with ACT 91 and the reason it should be repealed is the resultant voter nullification and the power shift from the elected Board to the unelected superintendent.
Prior to ACT 91, the OPSB needed a simple majority to reject the superintendent’s decision to renew a charter (the state grants the charters). ACT 91 changed that by mandating a supermajority (a two-thirds vote of the seven-member board) to override Supt. Henderson Lewis Jr.’s renewal recommendation. The effect of this portion of ACT 91, was to transfer the elected Board’s statutory authority to the unelected superintendent.
State Senator Joseph Bouie’s Senate Bill 42 would have restored the simple majority vote to the OPSB. The State Senate unanimously passed SB 42, but the House Education Committee tabled the bill.
Testifying before the House Education Committee last October, Bouie told members, “This bill is about the governance of the elected school board. There is no other parish where a school board votes by a two-thirds supermajority. We only want equity and fairness for our school board. We want the same democracy as [the] other 63 parishes.”
He explained how four out of six OPSB members voted to renew Coghill Elementary School’s charter but because one board member was absent, Lewis went on to revoke the charter, even after parents and teachers testified in support of keeping the charter school operator.
State Representative Gary Carter Jr., a member of the House Education Committee, criticized fellow legislators who saw nothing wrong with the takeover legislation.
“We shouldn’t say the people of New Orleans are incapable of governing themselves. This is a matter of whether or not we’re going to let the people of New Orleans govern themselves; the same way the people in your parishes govern themselves. That’s a right we should have. We should not water down our Democracy. I’m trying not to be frustrated when someone from another parish is saying we can’t govern ourselves.”
Several committee members said they felt uncomfortable with voting on SB42 because neither Board members nor Supt Lewis expressed support or opposition to the bill.
For Carter, parental rights are the main reason for passing SB42. “It’s a parents’ right to hold an elected official accountable.” Other parishes have a simple majority vote and if parents have to lobby Board members for a two-thirds vote (to keep the school of their choice open), Carter said, “that disfranchisement.”
It remains to be seen if the Board will muster the integrity and courage to demand the return of the Board’s statutory authority. To do less is to sanction voter nullification and to allow an undemocratic, discriminatory charter school system to persist.
We can only wish.
This article originally published in the December 14, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
