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Lolis Eric Elie, my favorite op-ed columnist in Da Paper, does a great job of putting an article by Mr. Ben C. Toledano in Commentary into perspective.

Now, I don't know Mr. Toledano personally, so I'm loathe to call him a racist. Still, when someone writes things that smack of racism, well, it's the old smoke-and-fire thing. After all, being a member of a segregationist political party doesn't necessarily mean you still think poorly of the Eebil Coloreds.

It brings up an interesting point that we regularly see in urban areas where white flight leaves the city proper in control of African-Americans. It always seems like the outrage about local government corruption is greater when the white folks aren't the ones benefitting from government largesse.

Elie does a good job of taking care of Toledano's not-so-veiled racism, but there is one aspect of the issue that I'd like to develop a bit.

Mr. Toledano's thesis is that the rich WASP-types who are the backbone of social clubs like the Boston Club are responsible for the demise of New Orleans. According to Toledano, it's the Episcopalians' fault, not the Italians, Germans, Jews, and other white ethnic groups. The WASPs messed the place up until the Coloreds took over, and then they just totally trashed the place.

Such a view of the city's history is far too kind to the non-WASP white folks. The entire white community of New Orleans, both those who stayed in the city in the 1960s and 1970s as well as the white-flighters who bailed to the suburbs, must be held accountable for their refusal to support the Orleans Parish Public School system. The Italians and the Jews don't deserve the pass that Toledano wants to give them. The white ethnic groups and the suburbanites rejected public education in favor of Catholic and other private schools.

It's natural for families who are struggling to pay private school tuition to reject the notion of paying taxes to support schools that their kdis don't attend. Politicians responded to this demand from their white constituents and restructured public school financing so that the burden was shifted from homeowners to commercial property owners and renters. Commercial property owners have their own lobby, and there's only so much blood you can squeeze from renters. The net result was that the city's public schools were black and broke, and none of the white folks really gave a damn, Mr. Toledano included.

Just imagine someone from the local Chamber or other economic development group trying to explain our local schools to companies looking to set up shop in New Orleans. They can't say, "dont' worry about our horrid public schools. We have good Catholic, Jewish, and private schools, and what you don't pay in property tax you can use to cover the tuition."

The destruction of the city's public schools in the storm is an opportunity for the metro area to get it right this time. Hopefully more people will focus on that than will join Toledano in blaming the WASPs and the Eebil Coloreds for our problems.

That question is up there with the three made famous by Marcelle Bienvenu:

Who's Your Mama?
Are You Catholic?
Can You Make a Roux?

Those three are what a New Orleans mother will ask a girl who wants to date her son, but the son will simply ask, "where did you go to school?"

Earlier this year, I was sitting in the bar of a restaurant in suburban Atlanta. (I often eat at the bar in restaurants when I'm traveling, since it's easy to get seated as a single.) The bartender, asked me where I was from, and I said New Orleans. A guy down the bar chimes in, "Yeah? Me too," and a New Orleans conversation ensued.

After a couple of minutes, the guy asks me, "So, where did you go to school?" Now, he's got an Auburn University ring on his hand, but I know he's not interested in the fact that I went to the University of New Orleans. He wants to know where I went to high school, of course, because that's what really matters to a New Orleanian. Where your education took you after high school just isn't as important to us.

There are a couple of reasons where you went to high school is significant to New Orleanians. First it's a throwback to a time when not everyone went to university. While many of the "greatest generation" took advantage of GI Bill benefits, a lot of vets returning from WWII ddin't continue their education. For them, high school was it, and those guys are still proud of their Warren Easton, Jesuit, Francis T. Nicholls, and St. Aloysius class rings. They worked hard throughout their lives to make sure their sons and daughters could go to college, of course, and many of the boomers are just as proud of their schools as their dads were.

The other big reason why high school is more important here is because there are so many of them. In cities and towns where public education dominates, everyone goes to the same high school. New Orleans has a 150 year tradition of Catholic education in addition to the public school system. Catholic schools were founded by the various orders of priests and nuns who came to America to preach the gospel. The Spanish brought the Jesuits with them, the French brought the Redemptorist Fathers, Ursuline nuns and the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. The Holy Cross Fathers came through New Orleans on their way up to South Bend, Indiana, and founded their school in the Ninth Ward. The School Sisters of Notre Dame attracted young Irish women who educated the boys and girls of the Irish Channel for generations at St. Alphonsus.

Neighborhood and ethnicity played a significant part in where kids went to school as well. There's a paragraph on the website of the Academy of the Sacred Heart that's telling:

In the late 19th century, the French Quarter was in decline. Most importantly, the established French, Catholic families from the Quarter and Esplanade Ridge, whose daughters were the mainstay of the student body, were moving across town into what was the American sector. In addition, second generation English and Irish families, who were already uptown, were seeking for their daughters a school that provided the same type of education that the religious had been providing downtown.

It was therefore no surprise that the religious sought refuge from their deteriorating urban environment and turned their attention upriver. Demographically, the nuns and the city were moving in the same direction.

Hmmm...the "decline" mentioned here was that Italian immigrants were moving into Da Quarters and Da Ninth so fast that the "established" folks bailed out for Uptown. I'm sure the families who sent their boys to St. Aloysius and their daughters to Holy Angels would consider it a surprise that they weren't considered "religious" by the uptown folk.

Not everyone sent their kids to catlick school, of course. Warren Easton on Canal Street, Nicholls on St. Claude, John McDonough on Esplanade, and McDonough #35 on Pauger Street in Treme are just some of the Orleans Parish schools attended by the greatest generation. Others popped up in the 1950s and 1960s as the city grew. Integration changed the public school landscape dramatically, though. White families whose kids had always attended public school were now focusing their efforts on opening Catholic elementary schools in the various church parishes. White flight was happening so fast that parish governments couldn't keep up, so the archdiocese filled in the gap. Prior to the storm, the church administered over 70 elementary schools in a four-parish area. By the 1980s, public schools in the city proper had a student population of 98% black, 2% white, this in a city that was 60% black, 40% white.

At face value, one might accuse the Catholic church of facilitating de facto segregation by running mostly-white private schools literally around the corner in some instances from mostly-black public schools, but the black community of New Orleans also has a strong tradition of sending their kids to catlick school. The Josephite Fathers have educated young black men at St. Augustine High School in Gentilly since 1951. St. Mary's Academy, for black girls, dates back to 1878. Xavier University Prep, founded by St. Katharine Drexel for black girls, opened its doors in 1915. St. Mary's Academy's campus on Chef Menteur Highway, as well as St. Aug's in Gentilly, were heavily damaged by the storm. Those two schools and Xavier Prep banded together to form the MAX School at the (relatively) undamaged XUP campus uptown. The boys have since moved back to Gentilly and SMA has re-opened in the old St. James Major school facility on Gentilly Road near Franklin Avenue.

All this about the public and catlick schools, and I haven't even gotten into the other private schools, such as Isidore Newman School uptown (primarily Jewish), St. Martin's Episcopal, and Metairie Park Country Day, both out in the burbs. There are two dozen or so other high schools I haven't even mentioned, and all this in a metro area of 1.2 million (pre-storm).

The various orders of priests and nuns still maintain ownership and control of their respective high schools. The catholic elementary schools are nominally administered by the archdiocese, but each parish has its own school board which makes specific policy and handles personnel matters. The private schools, of course, are administered by their own boards of directors. All this community involvement has been an important factor in the acceptance of charter schools in the wake of the storm. The storm has given the city the opportunity to fix the dismal failure that had become our public schools, and community leaders, parents, and others are stepping up to serve on the boards of charter schools to get public education moving once again.

So, with all these schools, it's no wonder that everyone wants to know where you went to high school.

Oh, and by the way, the guy in the bar? He went to De La Salle High School, uptown, and I went to Brother Martin High School, in Gentilly. That worked out just fine as far as I'm concerned, since he didn't go to Jesuit. :-)

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.

On the way home from taking Kevin to Brother Martin High School to get him registered for 8th grade there next year, wife wanted to drive past St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church and School on Paris Avenue. The church, school, and surrounding neighborhood was flooded with over ten feet of water when the storm broke the floodwall of the London Avenue Canal. Helen grew up on Chamberlin Drive, just across the street from Cabrini, and we were married in the church.

The exterior of the building doesn't look all that bad, other than the cross at the top of the high white tower still hangs broken at a 90-degree angle. That's the story of most of Gentilly, of course, the interior damage tells the tale, not the exterior.

The Cabrini campus, along with that of Redeemer-Seton High School next door is slated to be demolished to make room for the relocation of Holy Cross School. The process of moving the Ninth Ward school to Gentilly is moving forward:

The draft memorandum of agreement was circulated late Monday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been trying to balance a move to preserve the storm-damaged Gentilly church, built in the 1960s and celebrated for its modern design, against desires for a successful school in a neighborhood struggling to rebound post-Katrina.

Bill Chauvin, chairman of Holy Cross School's governing board, said the draft indicates that the church will be removed to make way for the Holy Cross campus: a middle school, high school, administration buildings and a sports complex.

According to the draft, the church's stained glass, altar and baptistery will be saved, he said. And the Holy Cross governing board will spend about $15,000 to hire a crane operator to remove the large cross from the top of the church, he said.

Where the church's altar is now will be the space where the church is commemorated, Chauvin said. Ideas include a garden with a statue of St. Frances Cabrini or a garden that includes the church's large cross, he said.

There are neighborhood activists who still hold out hope that the church can be saved, but that's looking less and less likely.

I'm not surprised that Holy Cross chose to re-locate their Ninth Ward school to Gentilly rather than to out in Kenner, for several reasons:

They're a New Orleans tradition. Holy Cross' roots are in Da Nint'. The school's board had been considering a move from that neighborhood even before the storm, and the amount it will cost to re-build the existing campus made staying even more untenable.

It's cheaper. The site HC had been considering in Kenner is owned by the Jefferson Parish School Board, who wanted $2.5million for the 20-acre parcel of land. The Gentilly site is the former campus of Redeemer-Seton High School, combined with the site of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church/School. Both schools and the church were totalled in the storm, when the London Avenue Canal flooded the area with 10+ feet of water. The Gentilly site is owned by the Archdiocese of New Orleans. While the terms of the deal between HC and the Archdiocese were not made public, it's a sure bet that they're much more advantageous to Holy Cross.

The alumni didn't want Holy Cross to be "Another Rummel." While HC started out as a neighborhood Catholic school for Da Nint', it expanded its base down into Arabi and Chalmette over the years. As white flight sent many of the school's families to Metairie and Kenner, HC was one of the first Catholic high schools to offer school bus service from Jefferson Parish back to the city. While they didn't want to live in the city for a multitude of reasons, they recognized that sending their boys back to Holy Cross had a lot of benefits. Moving the school to Kenner would totally sever that connection and turn their families into total suburbanites. That may fly in Sugar Land, TX, or in Alpharetta, GA, but it's not acceptable to many New Orleanians.

Politics. The money was just one aspect of the deal with the Jefferson Parish School Board. The politics of this deal were dicey as well. The board approved the sale on a 5-4 vote. The west bank members of the JPSB were opposed to the deal, arguing that they should hold onto the property and sell it when it becomes more valuable. Both the public school administration and the teacher's union were adamantly opposed to the sale. In spite of the fact that almost every pol in Kenner supported the deal, HC would have to do business with the school system on this, and that would be an uphill battle every step of the way.

Congrats to Holy Cross and best wishes for the future. I'll save some of my thoughts on the impact of the move on Gentilly and high schools in the city for tomorrow.

(note: I'm cross-posting this to my DailyKos diary, so I'm back-tracking a bit in the story...)

A story in the Times-Picayune today focuses on the discussion surrounding the potential sale of land in Kenner owned by the Jefferson Parish School Board to Holy Cross School, the Catholic school for boys (grades 5-12) located in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. The school was badly damaged by the storm, and students completed the 2005-06 school year in portable classroom buildings on the campus.

Holy Cross is seeking to leave the 9th Ward. Their board's first overture was to the State of Louisiana, making an offer for the former site of John F. Kennedy High School, a public school located in the city close to Lake Pontchartrain. When that deal fell through (there were issues concerning disposal of hazardous waste on the site), Holy Cross began pursuing a two-track course. The first possible site is that of the former Redeemer-Seton High School, combined with the buildings of St. Frances Cabrini parish. The Archdiocese of New Orleans owns the property, making this sale a private transaction. The second possible location is Kenner tract. Because it's public land, the JP School Board would have to approve the sale, and the members aren't all convinced it's a good idea.

The quest of Holy Cross School to find a new location presents an excellent overview of the status of education, public and private, in metro New Orleans since the storm. Immediately after Katrina, the Orleans Parish Public School system simply ceased to exist. It had no money, no students, and no employees, as most of the city evacuated and had not returned. Almost a year later, the school system exists only as a handful of charter schools operating in Algiers, the New Orleans neighborhood located on the west bank of the Mississippi. The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) has control of most of the public education assets in the city. There is little hope for returning the city's school system to its pre-storm structure, and that's not a bad thing--the OPSS was an unmitigated disaster. What made it so easy for BESE to take over city assets was legislation passed in 2005 enabling the state to take over schools that were performing so badly that there was little hope of improving them while under local control. Public education in the city will continue in populated neighborhoods using the charter-school model.

One of the things that makes education in New Orleans complicated is that Catholic schools in the area are not merely a private option to residents. Catholic schools are an entire parallel school system, and one of the primary contributing factors in the de facto segregation of education in the city. Prior to the storm, there over 120 elementary schools and over 20 high schools in the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. This extensive system enabled white-flight suburbanites as well as whites remaining in the city to avoid sending their kids to school with black children. In spite of the tribulations involved with restoring public education, Catholic schools were back in session in the city in January of 2006.

This is why Holy Cross School is worthy of note. That the school's board of directors is abandoning the 9th Ward is no surprise--the campus took a terrible hit from the storm, and the neighborhood still looks like a war zone. Moving to the Redeemer-Seton site in Gentilly is attractive to the school because it's still in New Orleans, and acquiring the property from the Archdiocese will be easier than deaing with government entities. The site will require a lot of work, however, since it was flooded with over twelve feet of water from the London Avenue Canal.

The Kenner location is attractive to Holy Cross because Jefferson Parish is where the students are. The City of Kenner has already passed a resolution welcoming the school. There's only one boys Catholic high school in Jefferson Parish, Archbishop Rummel High in Metairie. Relocating the school to Kenner would essentially be a continuation of the white-flight that began in the 1960s, accelerated by the storm.

Not everyone in Jefferson Parish shares Kenner's excitement over Holy Cross, particularly the Jefferson Parish School Board. Studies indicate that the parish's population will grow to between 425K-451K, which is a serious increase over the Census Bureau's 411K guesstimate. An additional 40K residents means between potentially 7K-8K new public school students. Several of the board's members are concerned about from where the money to expand their schools to accomodate new students will come, and are hesitant to sell valuable property to a private entity. There is a bit of classic Jefferson Parish political squabbling at work here as well--the board members against or on the fence about the Holy Cross sale are from the west bank; Kenner is on the east bank.

The future of education in metro New Orleans is critical to the rebuilding of the city. Any New Orleans family that had children in Orleans Parish public schools prior to the storm has little to no motivation to return home. Parents would be doing their families such a huge disservice to pull them out of schools that are by far leaps and bounds better than anything in New Orleans. It's going to take several years to determine whether or not the charter schools on the west bank will be a success. That leaves Catholic schools and suburban public schools to carry the bulk of the burden of educating the metro area's children. Both systems must be nurtured and funded to keep the city alive.

Da Paper put a big photo of my old school on the front page today, as part of an article on private schools in the post-K world. Their thesis is that the competition for students is more intense this year because of the region's drop in population:

The four parishes that suffered the most from Katrina -- Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines and St. Bernard -- were home to 154 private schools with 52,527 students last year, helping put Louisiana, in percentage of all students, among the top in the United States for private school enrollment.

Several private schools are reporting diminished attendance at their open houses this winter, although Brother Martin officials were heartened at their Jan. 26 event to greet about 1,000 families, which they said was in line with previous years.

Orleans Parish has suffered a huge drop in population, but did the families with kids in private schools really leave the metro area? Brother Martin, Mt. Carmel, Dominican, Jesuit, and De La Salle all had 85% or better of their students return. The schools that feed the majority of the students to these high schools, Catholic elementary schools in Jefferson Parish, are all back at the same levels.

I wonder even if the smaller schools will have that hard a time. Sacred Heart Academy, Isidore Newman and St. Martin's Episcopal all have high pricetags. The folks who left New Orleans for the Astrodome weren't sending their kids to these schools anyway. Northshore private schools expect to see a boom, because so many St. Bernard and Lakeview residents relocated across the lake.

It's clear from the disastrous situation of the Orleans Parish Public Schools that the folks who didn't come back are the ones who used the public schools.

The grand debate over public school reform did not pass New Orleans by, but the demand for alternatives to public education, "school choice," and tax relief were not as strong as other cities in the US. Let's look at some of this by way of background to the current "charter school" debate.

Parents demand "school choice" when their public school system reaches a point where they feel like fixing or changing it is completely out of their control. Usually the trigger points are an eroding school infrastructure, an increase in school violence, and decreasing numbers of qualified teachers (which leads to higher pupil-to-teacher classroom ratios). Race also enters this equation, but those with racial motivations often are disguised and code-worded within complaints about other school deficiencies, e.g., violence would be reduced if there were fewer black or latin students in a school. Religious concerns, such as the lack of prayer in schools, also popus up from time-to-time, but the most vocal of families on the religious front are more willing to split from the public system and start their own school(s) or to home school.

There are three common ways to offer "choice" to parents of public school children. Pro status-quo forces, such as teachers unions, have so far been able to beat back most forms of "voucher" programs. The idea behind vouchers is to give a parent a coupon good for the value of a public school education. The family chooses a school for the child. It can be a public or private school, down the block or across town, if that's the family's choice. If the choice is a public school, the voucher is turned in and instruction commences. If it's a private school, the family pays the difference between the value of the voucher and the annual tuition, and they get to business.

Voucher plans have never developed any traction with New Orleanians, for two reasons. First, there's no real way to give the taxpayer his/her money back, since they put so little into the education system in the first place. With the first $75K of of the value of a home exampt from property tax, and the bulk of sales taxes being paid by tourists and convention-goers, the typical family in the city doesn't make much of a financial contribution to schools. Additionally, supplemental funding from the state government, both direct cash payments and in-kind payments such as school textbooks contributes to lowering the taxpayer's financial burden. The State of Louisiana has historically contributed a lot more money to education than many states because of mineral royalties. Prior to the oil bust of the 1980s, the state was flush in oil/gas revenue. It was determined that having the state disburse that money to parish school boards was the fairest solution.

The second reason vouchers aren't pushed very hard is that parents have a viable and competing education system in New Orleans. Catholic schools offer families a viable and relatively inexpensive alternative to public schools. With the state picking up the tab for textbooks and bus transportation even for private school students, the argument that taxpayers who pay tuition should get back some of what they pay for public schools rings pretty hollow.

That leaves unhappy public school parents demanding "school choice." They're not as interested in vouchers as they are in solutions. The parish school systems recognize that and many have implemented "magnet" school programs to quiet the activists. The idea behind "magnet" schools is to establish district-wide schools that specialize and attract a particular type of student. Musicians, actors, and artists find a home at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA), for example. Other schools have been established for top-level students (Benjamin Franklin High), and others for non-college prep students. These programs are often quite good, they present a problem for the Orleans Parish system: the rest of the schools are so poor that parents are clamoring for more and more alternatives, to the point where the "magnet" schools would actually be in more demand than the neighborhood schools. The lack of funding means that many families are turned away at the doors, fostering accusations of favoritism, racism, and economic elitism.

But there's no more money to improve the neighborhood schools to make them more attractive than their city-wide competiton. Still, the parents demand improvements. The school board tries to raise revenue, but meets oppostion from renters and businesses. Removing the property tax homestead exemption would require an amendment to the state's constitution. Everyone thinks the school system should work smarter with the money they have, but few think the existing structure works at all.

Enter the concept of "charter" schools. The idea here is to essentially sub-contract school operations to outside entities. The holders of "charters" can be for-profit education providers or community groups. The theory is to have the entity holding the charter come to the school board with a proposal and operating budget. If the charter holder can operate the school on less money than the school system can, that money can be paid to the charter holder as profit. In the case of a not-for-profit entity, they can pump the savings back into the school and make it that much better.

Naturally, those who have the most vested in the status quo, administrators, central office employees, and union teachers, vehemently oppose charter schools. But they're not alone; many other interests opposed this level of school privatization of public schools. Many who believe in strong protection of church-state separation see charters as a threat, because some districts might grant a charter to a church. Disability activists worry that corporate-run schools will cut corners and offer less opportunities for special-ed students. The list goes on.

Of course the arguments for and against "school choice" assumed that the school system had some sort of revenue base and operating budget. Hurricane Katrina changed that dynamic dramatically.

(Tomorrow: Charters in the post-Katrina city.)

There are usually two types of folks who run for a school board position. One is the ambitious, up-and-coming politician. school boards are often a great place to get started. The districts are often relatively small, and a big media campaign is generally not necessary. The pol will usually serve one term, stand for re-election, then run for different/higher office in their second term. The second type of school board member is the activist-parent. This is the parent who is very vocal at PTA meetings, speaks often at board meetings, is encouraged by everyone else in the neighborhood to run, and can become a quite effective board member.

Orleans Parish has had its share of both of these types over the years, but a third type began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s: the parasite.

The parasite sometimes starts out as an up-and-coming politician who loses their shot at higher office. Sometimes they start out as a community activist or even a parent. There comes a point when they realize their political career has hit its zenith at the school board, they settle in and carve a niche from themselves in the school system. They like the deference they receive from school personnel because of their position. They like to be recoginized as elected officials at public events.

They also like controlling the millions of dollars in public money that flows through the school system annually.

By the late 1980s, there were more parasites on the OPSB than any other type of politician. System business came to a complete crawl. Board meetings that started at 6pm or 7pm would extend past midnight because members were micro-managing contracts and bid procedures. With all their concern devoted to who was getting this or that contract, the board abandoned their oversight duties. School administrators had wide latitude and no supervision. With nobody minding the store, corruption trickled all the way down to school janitors and secretaries. Millions of dollars went missing from payroll accounts, employees were arrested for stealing and cashing others' checks, and timecards were forged. For all the corruption in the system, surprisingly none of it was ever traced back to members of the School Board. (Ironically, only one member of the OPSB has been indicted in the last 20 years, Dr. Dwight McKenna. He was convicted on tax-evasion charges related to his medical practice and totally unrelated to the school system.)

This leads to the obvious question: have members of the OPSB been smart enough to avoid getting caught, or are they so incompetent that they allowed this level of corruption under their noses? My money is on the latter. Some members of the OPSB in the last twenty years have barely had command of the English language, much less the ability to monitor the activities of a multi-million-dollar enterprise. In the 2004 election cycle, then-incumbent member Carolyn Green-Ford was fined $8,600 in penalties and late fees for filing campaign reports late. The job only pays $10,000 annuall. Invariably, criticism of board policies and procedures have broken along racial lines, with white members being accused of being racists, "plantation masters," and other choice labels. Clearly the problems weren't so much black-versus-white as they were the overwhelming need to remove incompetent people from the board.

It wasn't until after a string of inept superintendents were hired and fired that the white minority on the board finally took a stand in support of former Superintendent Anthony Amato. In 2004, Amato ran afoul of two of the most influential black members of the board, Gail Glapion and Ellenese Brooks-Simms. The incident ended up in federal court, with white board members obtaining an injunction against the board as a whole, to prevent Glapion and Brooks-Simms from moving to fire Amato.

Coming on the heels of indictments stemming from the US Attorney's investigation, the attempt to fire Amato backfired days before qualifying opened for elections. Of the black members of the board in 2004, Glapion and Carolyn Green-Ford did not stand for re-election, Brooks-Simms Cheryl Mills, and Elliot Willard were defeated. The two white members of the board, Una Anderson and Jimmy Fahrenholtz, were re-elected. Newcomers Heidi Lovett Daniels, Phyllis Landrieu, Cynthia Cade, Torin Sanders, and Lourdes Moran took office as well.

The board was not only shaken up by the departure of five of the seven incumbents, but also in terms of racial makeup. Where the pre-election board was 5/2 black/white, the new board now consisted of three black members (Sanders, Cade, Daniels), three white members (Anderson, Fahrenholtz, Landrieu), and one hispanic member (Moran).

The new school board immediately indicated its willingness to try new approaches to solving problems in the system, turning financial management of the system over to an outside accounting/consulting company prior to the storm. In the post-Katrina world, OPSB reacted as slowly to the situation as did FEMA and the Bush Administration, all but stating that it would be impossible to re-open schools this year. Clearly this stance was unacceptable, so now the board has been forced to come up with new plans. So far, the cornerstone of the re-building plan is the concept of "charter schools."

Tomorrow: Charter Schools in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The decision to re-open schools in Orleans Parish post-Katrina is all about money, but that wasn't the case prior to the storm. In a city that was 60% black/40% white, the public school system's racial make-up was 95% black/5% white. Every city has families who make the decision to not use public education, some for religious reasons, others because they don't view the public schools as adequate, and yes, some for racial reasons. New Orleans hit the trifecta in the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. The Catholic school system in New Orleans is one of the most extensive in the country, with over 70 elementary schools four high schools in their direct control (the other Catholic high schools in the area are owned/operated by various religious orders), Catholics in New Orleans, through their priests, bishops and archbishops, are the one groups most responsible for the decay of public education in New Orleans.

In spite of the fact that Archbishop Joseph F. Rummel excommunicated Judge Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish for encouraging Catholics to resist desegregation of Catholic schools in 1962, the Archdiocese was the local leader in encouraging de facto segration of local schools. The neighborhood parish school was just the alternative white residents of the city needed. White residents of the city could enroll their children in neighborhood Catholic schools rather than join in white-flight to the suburbs.

As the Catholic school system grew through the 1960s and 1970s, white homeowners were less and less motivated to provide financial support for public education. While no city has an easy time levying property taxes, New Orleans faced a number of obstacles. The state's "homestead exemption" assured that residents whose houses were valued at $50,000 (later $75,000) or less paid no property tax at all. White voters with children enrolled in Catholic schools were not interested in taxing themselves because they were already paying tuition. That left the burden of financing public education on renters (rental property was not covered by the homestead exemption) and businesses.

Of course, landlords and business owners pass their tax burdens onto their customers. This created the ironic situation where those who made the most use of public education (low-income families who rent) were forced to provide the bulk of the system's financial support. Attempts to use other revenue sources, such as the sales tax, were also problematic. Sales tax is one of the most regressive revenue sources a municipality can use, but the school board had the power to levy sales taxes approved by the voters.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the combination of suburban expansion, white flight and institutionalized de facto segregation took its toll on Orleans Parish Public Schools. The rise of the black middle class at this time wasn't enough to stop the schools' decline. Many black families in New Orleans are Catholic; continuing the tradition of the neighborhood parish school was the path of least resistance for them. Just before Hurricane Katrina turned the city into a ghost town for weeks, the Orleans Parish Public School System really only serviced that segment of the community who could find no other option for their children.

Then Katrina forced that segment of the population out of town.

(Tomorrow: Middle class interest in public education returns.)