A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford Arne Duncan said Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans schools, and his successor, John B. King, doubtless feels the same. But “it’s all propaganda and phony numbers.” Even with more than a third of its poor Black students in exile, the New Orleans all-charter system ranks significantly lower than Louisiana public schools – and that’s after controlling for factors of race, class and qualifications for special education.
Tell the New Education Secretary: Charter Schools Flunk Out in New Orleans A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford “The gap between Louisiana charter schools – meaning, mainly, New Orleans – and public schools was the biggest in the country.”
Arne Duncan, the outgoing U.S. secretary of education, will be succeeded by an even more rabid professional privatizer of public education. John B. King, a Black and Puerto Rican native of Brooklyn, New York – and, like President Obama, a product of Harvard and Columbia universities – has spent his entire teaching career in the charter school business. King is a hit man for school privatization – the perfect credentials to take over from presidential buddy Arne Duncan, the ghoul who obscenely declared that “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.”
Corporations stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars from privatization of education, so it pays to tell lies about what happened when Katrina provided the opportunity to illegally fire 7,000 New Orleans teachers, the majority of them Black, replacing them with young, largely white, non-union and ultimately temporary staff, and then converting all of the city’s schools to charters. The privatizers claim that test scores are way up in New Orleans, but studies show that it’s all propaganda and phony numbers. Charter schools do what they have always done: they select and retain students that tend to do well on tests, and discard the rest. That’s called “creaming” – taking the better-performing students right off the top. But, in New Orleans, the creaming preceded the charter school coup. One-third of the Black population was driven from the city, never to return. The schoolchildren among these displaced Black persons were disproportionately poor – precisely the demographic that does relatively worse on standardized tests. They never showed up for class in New Orleans newly charterized schools, leaving a more affluent mass of students to take the standardized tests. But, the charter schools continued the creaming students, in an attempt to boost the test numbers, especially at selected schools – all the while claiming that underperforming students were not being displaced.
That was a lie
“New Orleans’ charter school system flunks.”
Most of Louisiana’s charter schools are located in New Orleans. A study by the Network for Public Education effusive praise more effective educational evil than his outgoing boss, the obscene Mr. Duncan.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
This week, BAR's poet-in-residence discusses his work, we learn why Bill Clinton, the CIA director and Tony Blair recently visited Guyana. First, the Black vote and election year politics in Michigan.
Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of Pan-African News Wire joins to discuss Michigan's Black voters, the Abandon Biden campaign, and the prospects for the swing state in the 2024 presidential election.
BAR Poet-in-Residence, Raymond Nat Turner, joins us from New York City to talk about his work and an upcoming performance with his group, Upsurge New York City.
Gerald Perreira of Organization for the Victory of the People in Guyana joins us to discuss the long running territorial dispute with neighboring Venezuela and the increasing activity of U.S. in the…
Any sign of even tiny opposition is enough to send Israel into a frenzy of bloodletting. Hospital attacks, murders of aid workers, violations of the sovereignty of embassies, are all par for the…
