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The Louisiana Department Of Education just released the 2011 School Performance Data. As New Orleans has been hailed as a 'miracle' district, I was eager to see the results. As you might know, after Katrina the lowest performing schools were assembled into a district known as 'The Recovery District' (RSD) which has become a grand experiment in what would happen if an entire city was taken over by charter schools with a high number of Teach For America teachers. When I downloaded the data I learned that 87% of the 68 schools in the RSD got either a D or an F on their State Report Card. This did not seem very impressive.

It is an almost universal tribute offered about Michelle Rhee's 3 1/2 -year tenure of the Washington D.C. school district - that if she accomplished one thing, it was to instill a sense of urgency in the city about the need to fix broken schools that had failed children for decades. Actually, it was Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who hired Rhee and gave her carte blanche, who made school reform the city's top priority. Rhee got all the attention because Fenty wanted it that way.

The national media consensus is that New Orleans has discovered the miracle cure for urban education.  Their conclusion is largely drawn from data provided by the Louisiana Department of Education, which obviously has a vested interest in emphasizing the good and ignoring the bad in the post-Katrina education changes.  New Orleans is important in the national education debate, but not for the reasons we commonly hear; it is important because it is the beachhead for a national movement to remove schools from local democratic control and accountability.  The privatization trade-off is that the public sacrifices control of schools for a privatized system that delivers better education for the same tax dollar.  While the citizens of New Orleans certainly lost control of their schools, it cannot be said that they have received a better education, if that also means an equitable education, nor can it be said that it came at the same cost.

"Why are school districts paying millions in "finder's fees" to an organization that places people without education degrees to teach in urban schools-even where applications from veteran teachers abound?"

"There is growing evidence that the corporate-sponsored education reform project is on its last legs. The crazy patchwork of half-assed solutions on offer for the past decade have one by one failed to deliver, and one by one they are falling. Can the edifice survive once its pillars of support have crumbled?"