The Oprah Winfrey Network
reality show,
Blackboard Wars, filmed at John McDonogh Hi School in
New Orleans this school year reveals some rather shocking details
about how charter schools operate in Louisiana. State Board president,
Chas Roemer has often bragged that charter operators have the freedom to
operate their schools without the usual bothersome red tape required of traditional schools. But we were always told that charters
must comply with basic accountability and school reporting rules.
Apparently they are exempt from much more than we were led to
believe.
John White and his Recovery School District
administrators are always quite anxious to attract “quality”
charter school operators to take over any low performing school that
has been designated as 'failing" by the state accountability system.
This low achieving category includes all of the direct run
RSD (Recovery School District) schools. So John White and Patrick Dobard (Superintendent of RSD)
were just thrilled when Steve Barr who runs the highly touted Green
Dot charter system in Los Angeles agreed to take over John McDonogh
High School in New Orleans.
Note: I have just been informed that Steve Barr is no longer affiliated with Green Dot. Also, he has no education credentials.
Steve Barr was basically
given free rein to do anything he wanted that may turn around John
McDonogh. I'm sure Chas Roemer must have been ecstatic because he has
recently advocated shutting down most of the DOE in favor of a system
that lets anyone run a public school by any rules they choose as long
as they can produce passing results on the accountability system. But
meanwhile all the traditional public schools continue to be held to
such mundane rules as strict student attendance reporting, reporting
dropouts, complex discipline rules that require hearings before
student suspensions (even for criminals), and student expulsion rules so
strict that most educators agree that regular public school students
can no longer be expelled no matter what they do. One principal told
me that in the EBR school system, the special master appointed by the DOE to rule over
school discipline even requires hearings before extremely disruptive
or dangerous students are transferred to the alternative school.
Steve Barr, the savior of
John McDonogh, was welcomed to New Orleans with much fanfare by the
LDOE but not so much by the local citizens and parents of the John
McDonogh community. Barr got off on the wrong foot by
being quoted in NOLA dot com describing problems with poor student performance by
saying, “This is what seven generations of crap looks like.”
To further demonstrate his
arrogance, Barr approved a contract with the OWN network to produce a
reality series on the turnaround effort at John McDonogh this year. He
did not bother to inform his own Board of Directors of the deal and
no one knows where the money paid by OWN to broadcast the reality
show goes. Needless to say Barr has had a few contentious meetings
with his own hand picked Board of Directors for the John McDonogh
charter.
The reality series titled
Blackboard Wars has been broadcast on the OWN network
for about six weeks on Saturday nights and has revealed a lot of very
unorthodox practices tolerated by our DOE at charter schools. None of
these practices would be allowed by the LDOE in traditional public
schools which are managed by a locally “elected” rather than
appointed school boards.
The series started off by
concentrating on the trials and tribulations of one of the young TFA
teachers with the usual 5 week training/indoctrination course: “TFA will show you how to save these
inner city children who have been so neglected by traditional
teachers because you are so brilliant and you care so much more about
children than they do.”
It turns out this young person had no understanding about the
lifestyle of a poverty stricken inner city kid and also had no clue
about how to teach Geometry to these kids. She got hit in the face
while trying to break up a fight, could not even get any of the
students to stop talking while she tried to lecture, and kept
breaking down and crying in each of the episodes.
Secret #1:
Charters save a lot of money on teaching staff by hiring a core of
these compliant low pay teachers who can easily be replaced by a new
batch of fresh recruits paid partially by large grants from rich
charitable organizations like the Gates foundation and by LDOE
grants. (Our tax dollars)
Dr Marvin Thompson, the
principal for John McDonogh brought in by Steve Barr is depicted in
the OWN series as a top notch education professional but nothing is said about whether he possesses the basic certification requirements
for a Louisiana school principal.
Secret #2: Charter
schools regularly ignore certification requirements for their
administrators because Louisiana can "trust" the
charter operators to bring in great talent from all over the country
and pay them top salaries without regard to “paper”
qualifications. Look at how we got John White.
In a recent episode of
Blackboard Wars Dr Thompson threw out a student who had been involved
in a shootout off campus because he may become the target of
retaliation which could be a danger to the other students at McDonogh.
Secret #3: Charter schools seldom suspend or expel
troublesome students. They just “counsel them out”. This keeps
their official records clean while getting rid of discipline problems
and low performers. In contrast, traditional public schools are
encouraged by the DOE to keep all students and to even accept rejects
from the charters. Last year, a convicted rapist was assigned to a
Baton Rouge high school, yet neither the principal nor the guidance
counselor were notified of his rap sheet. Later in the year he raped
a young student on campus. Only then when the news media publicized
the rape and blamed the administration for a lack of security at the
school did the principal learn that the offender had been previously
convicted for rape. At the end of the year the principal resigned. In
a public school in Lafayette last week, a student teacher was thrown
out of his practice teaching position because he attended a school
board meeting and repeated some of the bad language being directed at
teachers by students. Another teacher in St. Landry was hit in the
face by a student last week with minimal consequences for the
student. But Dr Thompson held an assembly program with faculty and
students at John McDonogh and informed them that he had thrown out
all the trouble makers so now they could expect a better school
environment. We can only wonder how many of these were official
expulsions and how many were just “counseled out”.
The most recent episode of
Blackboard Wars featured a raucous community meeting held by Steve
Bar and Dr Thompson to report on the progress of the school. Dr
Thompson proudly announced to parents and community members that the
school had improved student attendance from about 35% the previous
year to approximately 80% this school year. But according to school
statistics accessed on the DOE web site before White purged all the
data links, none of the schools in the RSD have had attendance rates
below 80% in recent years.
Secret #4. Just report
anything to the public that makes it look like charters have made
dramatic progress compared to the dismal past. Two years ago, the
DOE reported to the Legislature that the RSD had reduced its high
school dropout rate to only 5% per year. This would have translated
into approximately an 80% graduation rate, yet the real data showed
that more than half the students starting the 9
th grade
had disappeared by their senior year. Back at McDonogh, Barr's
community meeting ended in chaos with community members calling for
Barr to go back to California.
Here's just one more
secret. Also in the last episode, OWN filmed an interview by Dr
Thompson with a 20 year old young man who wanted to re enroll at
McDonogh. In the conversation, the young man emphasized that he wanted
to get a high school diploma because his father and most of his
relatives had not gotten that far. But then he tells
Dr Thompson: “That GED (program) is hard, so I came here.” Dr
Thompson responds: “Well, we have a credit recovery program here and we can
help you get that diploma.”
Secret #5: Credit
recovery can be manipulated to give students credits toward
graduation that they do not really have to earn. In credit recovery a
student is supposed to get extra instruction to allow him to pass
a required course that he previously failed. But one of the
TFAers who transferred to another parish said that when RSD teachers
warn a student that he is failing a course he often laughs and informs
the teacher that the school administration will still give him credit
for the course using credit recovery. Also, at a recent community
meeting in New Orleans, one of the parents approached BESE member
Lottie Beebie and confessed that her child had received credit for
courses she had not ever taken!
Observation: A common
gimmick used by most of the charters is to sell pie in the sky to the
community and news media. Plastered on the walls at John McDonogh are
slogans like: WHAT COLLEGE WILL YOU ATTEND (I noticed that the large
question mark was missing from the end of the slogan but none of the
students or producers of Blackboard Wars seemed to notice) This is an
empty promise because the great majority of the students there will
not in any way be prepared for college. These schools never seem to
teach their students that most adults have to work at real jobs to
earn a living. Most of the courses at this school do not relate to
the real world nor prepare students for real world jobs. These kids
are facing a dead end when they get their fake diplomas. But of
course this fake college prep for all is being pushed by the top
administrators in our LDOE.
Chas Roemer, the new BESE
president, believes that BESE can do away with most of the rules
governing our public schools. Just let them do whatever it takes to
get students to graduate college and career ready. If you cut out the
last 4 words of that statement you will have a good description how the
RSD charters are getting the job done.
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