The Recovery School District

With charter schools not accessible to all, and with too few organizations lining up to create or sponsor charter schools, enter the Recovery School District, headed until the end of May by a formerly cloistered education bureaucrat from Baton Rouge, Robin Jarvis. When the state realized that not enough outside chartering forces would arrive in time for the 2006—2007 school year, it created RSD for everyone who couldn't find or fit into a charter school.

RSD opened seventeen schools in the fall of 2006—schools that were inadequately staffed (many still have only a minority of certified teachers); that lacked books, food services, and other infrastructural necessities; and that started the year in school buildings that had either not been improved at all or were in the middle of reconstruction. RSD claimed that it could not begin its preparations until the summer of 2006. Officials cited Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) rules that required that the federal money necessary to fix the buildings be reimbursement money only, coupled with the state legislature's refusal to advance the money against the eventual reimbursement. Why didn't it begin trying to hire teachers earlier than that summer? The answer has to do with agreements RSD made with a private teacher-vetting organization that could not seem to do its work with any efficiency. By the time RSD decided to hire teachers, many of the best-qualified former NOPS teachers had gone to work in charter schools or in other districts, or, by the hundreds, they had simply retired rather than deal with the chaos of the coming school year.

As of this writing in spring 2007, RSD offices still lack a telephone landline; an RSD Web site search sends the searcher to the NOPS site. When hundreds of students showed up looking for a school during the Christmas/New Year break, RSD had to "waitlist" them due to overcrowding in its schools, but the wait-listing produced such an outcry that RSD reversed its position, cramming more students into the overcrowded rooms. The pattern is set—RSD's mistakes come about because no one knows how to steer the ship or because those who try to steer are tone-deaf to the needs of the community.

Waiting until summer to begin recruiting faculty and ordering supplies guaranteed that the school year would begin badly. Having waited and then marched applicants for the teaching positions through a testing and vetting process that many found tedious and insulting—devised by yet another private consulting entity—the RSD began the school year with as many as a third too few teachers to maintain even a very poor teacher-student ratio. And for all the ballyhoo about ascertaining teacher competence, it wound up with a large number of uncertified teachers and a significant number of new teachers from elsewhere who quit within weeks of the start-up, in no way prepared to deal with the children of the New Orleans underclass. The situation was not helped by the near absence of mental health services in New Orleans, especially within the schools.

But RSD had plenty of security guards to keep watch on its students (a population grown to more than 9,500 as people trickle back into the city still, trying to put their lives back together). Many of the guards are employed by the Guidry Group out of Texas, subcontracting to Day and Zimmerman from Philadelphia. Neither muscle firm had been in the school security guard business before arriving in New Orleans. One school, McDonogh Senior High, has more than thirty-two security guards (as well as a regular contingent of New Orleans police officers) and one social worker for a student population of about eight hundred; the number of security guards roughly matches the number of teachers. The current overall RSD ratio is one guard for every 37 students; prior to the state takeover, the ratio was one guard per 333 students. To enter McDonogh and most other RSD buildings, students have to pass through metal detectors, something new to most of us in the post-Katrina landscape. Even in the building where I taught, now converted to a regular middle school with about three hundred students aged ten to fourteen, there are eight security guards on duty. Prior to Katrina, I believe we had one guard who checked on us a couple of times a week.

RSD superintendent Robin Jarvis was in over her head from the beginning, poorly supported from within her own bureaucracy, and a stranger to the community—from which RSD sought no input about which schools to open or other neighborhood issues. After a year of more-or-less uncritical support, in early April our local daily, the Times Picayune, finally called for her to quit-already. The straw that broke that particular camel's back was the RSD's plan to make it nearly impossible for any student to fail, a rounding off of quarterly grades that would have allowed a student who failed three academic quarters to pass the subject if he or she made a D in the fourth. The rationale for this was a (not inhumane) realization that many of the students had been denied any education last year by the closing of all the schools, that many students remain traumatized and unfocused, and—though this was never said—that the RSD schools had largely failed in their teaching mission.

Within days of announcing this grading policy in early April, the RSD rescinded it, amid criticism from the media, from BESE, from the new state superintendent, and from others who recognized that the policy made a mockery of the mockery that RSD's creators (especially at the state level) had heaped upon the previous public school system because of its alleged failure to educate its kids.

Where We Are Now

New Orleans now has three "systems": NOPS, with a handful of previously pretty good schools still functioning reasonably well; RSD, with approximately twenty schools, mostly in distress, educating about a third of the city's public school students (and planning to open another six to ten campuses next year using modular buildings supplied by the private sector); and thirty-one charter schools. Of those, eight are confederated within something called the Algiers Charter School Association with its own superintendent; the rest operate under charters from either BESE or the Orleans Parish School Board, each with its own board of directors, financial plan, and sponsoring partners. Each of the three superintendents earns in the $150,000 range. There are significant variations among schools in teacher salary, benefits, and other financial and business arrangements. There are people maneuvering to consolidate services. There are even people, mostly within the traditional NOPS organization and board, who envision an eventual reunification of the schools. The president of the school board talks this talk; the BESE members who speak on the subject are more circumspect, and you get the impression that hell will freeze over before they embrace a unified public school system, given the possibility of unionization that unity implies.

The state education department has acknowledged that, for all its hand-wringing over facilities, the RSD has accessed only 10 percent of the FEMA money that has been earmarked toward its use—$24 million of $240 million available. Although RSD and Alvarez & Marsal have identified eight sites where renovation might begin, their list remains tentative as of May. Meanwhile, the plan is to spend more than $40 million on temporary classroom buildings, in an engineering task to be overseen by the Louisiana National Guard, to accommodate the expected increase in RSD's student population from 17,000 to 26,000. State education superintendent Pastorek has also engaged yet another outside facilities consultant, CSRS/The Facility Group out of Baton Rouge, to assist in that work, while grumblings about A&M finally have reached an almost discernable public level. No one will comment on whether its remaining $30 million in facility consulting contract work is in danger, though its staff have not missed a meal since they arrived in New Orleans.

When Alvarez and Marsal's top local managers acknowledged in early May that they had no one on their "team" who specialized in engineering, construction, or architecture issues, and that it was therefore not their fault that nothing had been done to really advance facility planning for the anticipated influx of 2007-2008 students, local critics were already so benumbed that little grousing was heard. So far, no one has even asked how A&M planned to fulfill its contract during the planning and construction phase that was clearly on its way.

Because the school board owns dozens of properties that will almost certainly never be schools again, A&M has turned its attention, and at least one of its $500-per-hour managers, to the task of how to offload the properties. This is an area of simmering political interest and soon, no doubt, will become the center of much more active attention from developers.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, there were about 64,000 public school students. Currently, there are a few more than 30,000, with expectations for another 6,000 to 9,000 next year. A&M held a public ceremony recently, announcing that the NOPS schools were in pretty good financial shape now (all five of them) and that A&M's services would be ending soon—though the RSD contract goes on, as does the real estate activity. Bill Roberti allowed as how he was phasing himself out, and would likely only be billing fifty hours a month from now until December (he bills at more than $500 per hour), reducing his personal earnings from the New Orleans project to only about a quarter of a million dollars for the remainder of 2007.

Although the numbers fascinate me, our local paper has taken a business-as-usual attitude and fails to highlight them for a local population still struggling to pay exorbitant rents and sky-high utility bills—or throwing away their new homeowners' insurance bills in disgust and despair.

Will the schools survive and improve? One has little reason to expect visible improvement anytime soon. Before Jarvis even submitted her resignation, Philadelphia's public school chief, Paul Vallas, had come to town as a $40,000 consultant to the RSD. He was about to end his stint as school chief in Philadelphia in a confrontation with that city's mayor over the schools' unexpected seventy million dollar budget shortfall.

In early May, after weeks of denying it, Paul Pastorek announced that Vallas would take over the RSD, a system with twenty-two schools and oversight of a slightly smaller number of charters. Though accustomed to running systems with ten times the number of students, Vallas's public comments have suggested an eagerness for a new challenge, as well as an acknowledgment of the necessity of leaving Philadelphia. Vallas has come to New Orleans with what is described as a year-to-year agreement, while his family has returned to their native Chicago. In his initial remarks, he told local citizens that if they weren't happy with his performance, he'd hit the road; one senses that he may well do that before a full year is up.

While it is possible to read his record different ways, among the facts is that he has no formal background in education, although he has run two large systems. He first became superintendent in Chicago in the mid-nineties, at the request of his boss, Mayor Richard Daley, whom he served as the city's finance director. He spent another five-plus years in Philadelphia. At the center of the mixed reviews of his record is his claim of success in raising standardized testing scores. There, as everywhere else, serious educators questioned whether test scores had become talismans rather than proof of actual learning. Vallas was also criticized in Philadelphia for bringing in Chicago cronies as upper management and consultants, a move he has indicated he will repeat in New Orleans, citing them as successful education reformers. Some critics have wondered whether cronyism might even have been a factor that led to the unbalanced budget in Philadelphia, where last year alone at least eighty million dollars went to outside entities to run schools and detention centers and design curricula. Edison Schools, which has a small presence in New Orleans, runs twenty-two for-profit schools in Philadelphia, where it receives an additional $750-per-pupil allotment above what regular public schools get. A champion of privatization, Vallas enters an arena already heavily weighted toward that goal.

What Vallas will be paid has yet to become part of the public record; his salary in Philadelphia was more than a quarter of a million dollars. Though he arrives with a reputation as one who embraces the charter school movement, some who have considered his record are concerned at what appeared to be a shift to "move power back to the home office" in Philadelphia. That shift seemed to reverse the decentralization movement of the previous decade, in which power had spread out to principals and school sites and away from the central office, the very rallying cry of the charteristas.

The people who gave us the free-enterprise version of public education, especially the ones who don't live here and can watch the experiment from the comfort and safety of elsewhere, will not give up easily, nor will they allow honest evaluations of their efforts anytime soon. They are already using New Orleans and its charter school revolution to revive a national voucher movement. It will be something like, again, Iraq, I think. Years will pass before the boosters begin to shy away from their work, pretending that they meant something different all along or just deciding that the population of this old whore of a city is simply too backward to be able to know what is good for her and her children. And meanwhile, big salaries will be paid to small numbers of people, contractors and vendors of all sorts will make handsome profits, kids without much hope for a better life will continue killing each other in the streets.

Is the old model of public education preferable? Certainly not as it was being practiced pre-Katrina. Was there another way? Unfortunately, given the large and widening class differential in this city, maybe not. There are simply too many people convinced that poverty is a stigma that marks the poor as deserving their distress, rather than an effect of an economic system that denies, derides, and deprives. Such people mean well as they go about their planning; they mean well even as they shift their efforts to the ideological rather than the practical task before them; they mean well even as they can't understand why their good intentions have not caused an oppressed people to realize how lucky they are.

For reform that embraces community-centeredness, and not the privileged individualism implicit in the national charter movement, New Orleans would have to be the location of a genuine debate about community goals and options. Instead, it is hostage to an invasion of school-snatchers and their dreams of privatization.

A Final Personal Note

For a year, I have been working on a book about this subject. For four years before Hurricane Katrina, I worked three days a week within the system as a creative writing teacher for a new middle school for the arts. Although my school had an entrance requirement—that the kids who came to us from throughout the city show some talent in one of the six art disciplines offered—it would be hard to classify it as elitist or exclusionary in any meaningful sense. Almost all of the students were children of the working poor, and most came to us from schools that had not prepared them well in basic subjects, much less developed their particular gifts. When we had parent meetings, the majority of our parents showed up, a rarity in the public schools, and many were still wearing the name tags they had worn all day at their jobs.

With others from our faculty, I tried to charter the school, once it became clear that it wouldn't open any other way. Our proposed charter, for all its earnestness, lacked a sound financial plan or a well-heeled (or at least well-connected) board, two elements that BESE absolutely required. When I pressed the matter further, seeking to have us open under RSD, I was told by Jarvis that no selective admission schools would be opened, even though our selectivity was based only on artistic criteria. We continued to disagree, though Jarvis dropped out of the conversation and turned the case over to an underling, who recited from a playbook.

My six-year-old son attends one of the charter schools that was once a public school; my daughter will begin attending a public school in the fall. My interest in the outcomes is not abstract. My hope, as I continue with the book I am writing, is to make a difference by joining the process by which we all take a hard look at what we are doing, and try to get it right.

Originally published in the summer of 2007 issue of Dissent. Copyright � 2007 Dissent. Reprinted with permission.