New Orleans: The start of the school year

Orleans Parish Public Schools have traditionally started on the day after Labor Day. Private, parochial, and suburban schools have been back in session. I wrote two articles here, one offering some background and perspective on the Orleans Parish School Board, the other on the various proposals which were immediately floated to change how public education works in New Orleans.

On The Day Before The World Changed, the Orleans Parish Public School System was an absolute mess. The destruction of 100 of 180 school buildings owned and maintatined by the OPSB was the equivalent leaving a junk car out in the storm in the hopes that the flood waters trash it so bad that the adjustor won't notice how bad it was in the first place. The storm merely accelerated an inevitible process. The state legislature was already moving to force the OPSB to give up control of the worst of the city's schools. The US Attorney's office was moving forward with investigations into OPSB employees, which eventually led to the guilty plea and resignation of a long-time board member for bribery.

Specifically, the storm did three things: First, it destroyed 60% of the school buildings. This is the junk car analogy come to life. Second, the storm removed any serious accusation of racism from the process of re-building the schools. Efforts to wrest control of the school system from an incompetent and corrupt school board were painted in terms of black and white, because the mostly-white legislature worked in concert with the 3-person white minority on the board. The storm left the corrupt and incompetent school board without schools, students, and money. Neither the school administrators nor the black-majority of the board had any clue where to start with the mess the system had become. Broke and out of ideas, they were forced to yield to those who had the money.

Thirdly, the storm forced the majority of the students of the system to get their education somewhere else. When Barbara "Beautiful Mind" Bush made her remark about storm evacuees being better off in the Astrodome than back home in New Orleans, she wasn't completely talking out of her obnoxious New England ass. Forcing families to leave the floodwaters of New Orleans meant that kids had to enroll in schools in cities such as Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Houston, and Dallas. Any place those kids ended up would offer them an education leaps and bounds better than what New Orleans had to offer prior to the storm.

The people who remained in the city after the storm were aware of this last fact as well, and were not about to let the system sink that far down again. In particular, the Algiers neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi River organized so they could re-open their schools by January of 2006. A special session of the state legislature created a "Recovery School District" to take control of the bulk of school operations in Orleans Parish away from the elected school board. The RSD granted chartering authority to the Algiers Charter Schools Association, who began to re-open west bank schools. Today, seven ACSA elementary/middle (K-8) and two high (9-12) schools open their doors to students.

On the east bank (the main part of the city), re-opening schools has been a slower process. For openers, most of the students weren't back. The reason for this was that, even though the population of New Orleans was 60/40 black/white pre-storm, the population of the parish's public schools was 98/2 black/white. The overwhelming majority of white families in the city send their kids to private schools, and a number of black families do as well. Two years after the storm, there are four all-boys, five all-girls, and one co-ed Catholic high schools open in the city. Of those ten schools, three, St. Augustine High (boys), Xavier University Prep (girls), and St. Mary's Academy (girls) are historically black. Catholic elementary and secondary schools have siphoned off a significant portion of the potential public school student body for decades. This meant that the 2005-2006 school year was essentially a write-off for the city's public schools, with the exception of those in Algiers.

The majority of funding for public education in Louisiana has always come from the state rather than local governments. There are two reasons for this. First, the primary local revenue generator, property taxes, doesn't produce a lot of money for schools. Most homeowners are eligible for a "homestead exemption," which means they don't pay taxes on the first $75K value of their houses. Schools in Louisiana have relied on mineral revenue (oil/gas royalties) since the days of Huey P. Long's governorship. It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise in the post-storm world, since the state is still able to pony up money for New Orleans.

With the OPSB essentially reduced to total ineffectiveness at this point, the state followed the lead of the Algiers neighborhood and granted various entities "charters" to run schools. Some of these entities are for-profit corporations or non-profit charter school advocates eager to show that their way works. Others are universities like the University of New Orleans and Tulane University, eager to do what they can to improve the system. Still other chartering organizations are non-profit and community-based.

Additionally, the Recovery School District has moved to re-open schools under their direct supervision. Last year, 13 elementary/middle (K-8) and 15 high schools operated by the RSD reopened. This year, those schools, as well as 10 elementary and 6 high schools open today. On the east bank, 34 schools (including the Wilson School, featured in an NPR piece this morning), begin classes today.

The number of privately-operated charter schools in New Orleans is an experiment on a grand scale. Whether these schools will be success or failures remains to be seen. One thing is for certain, though. Compared to the pre-storm school system, they can only go up.

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