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...the purpose of this critique is to present another perspective on the achievement progress made by the RSD after 6 years of direct control by the LDOE. This critique counters the major achievement conclusions presented in the report...

"The event, called "Organizing Resistance to Teach for America and its Role in Privatization," took place during the Free Minds, Free People conference from July 11-14, in Chicago. It aimed "to help attendees identify the resources they have as activists and educators to advocate for real, just reform in their communities." Namely, resisting TFA. The summit didn't drop from the sky fully formed. A group of New Orleans-based parent-activists, former students, non-TFA teachers and TFA alumni collaborated for months to arrange it. Complementing their critique is a small but growing group of TFA dissidents and apostates who've taken their concerns to the press. Even as TFA marches into more and more classrooms throughout the country and world, a burgeoning group of heretics is nailing its theses to the door. But why are they speaking up just now?"

"Joel Klein is a hoot. Klein, who served as Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools from 2002 to 2010, recently took to the opinion pages of The Washington Post to crown his friends and cronies the champions of education reform. Several alumni from the New York City Department of Education who presumably learned how to promote reform under Klein's direction have assumed prominent leadership positions: John White is the superintendent in New Orleans, Cami Anderson in Newark, Jean-Claude Brizard in Chicago, Andres Alonso in Baltimore, and Marcia Lyles in Delaware's Christina School District; similarly, Chris Cerf is the state commissioner of education in New Jersey. These names join others around the country, many trained by the Broad Superintendents Academy. "

A legislative oversight committee Friday ordered state auditors to review the finances and performances of the state's charter schools. State Sen. Ed Murray said recent state investigations launched at Kenilworth Science and Technology Charter School in Baton Rouge and Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans are only the latest issues raised about charter schools.

A group of executives who represent around 300 of America's largest corporations has labored in the shadows since the early 1970s to promote free market policies to state legislators. The cabal met this week in New Orleans' Mariott hotel and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was the luncheon speaker at the mid-week gathering. The influence which the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has demonstrated includes virtual destruction of public employee collective bargaining rights, voter identification requirements that appear to be aimed at restrictive voting, and most importantly a frontal attack on public education.

Three fired public school principals claim a state-run school district is "arbitrarily and capriciously convert(ing) an indefinite number of public schools to charter schools to be controlled by quasi-private boards without protecting the statutory employment rights of public school employees."      The complaint involves the Recovery School District, a special district administered by the Louisiana Department of Education. According to the district's website, "the RSD is designed to take underperforming schools and transform them into successful places for children to learn." It was created by legislation in 2003.

The premise of this story is that the disaster of Hurricane Katrina was the weather event and that 5-year old children are unaffected today. Not surprisingly they use the example of an uptown resident who now works for the RSD. But for the 118,000 blacks who never made it back, and the tens of thousands who could never find affordable housing or work, the Katrina disaster never stopped and its emotional impact on children is as strong as ever; the same is true for those who did return only to encounter a second disaster in healthcare, housing, employment, and political dispossession.  It is inconceivable that the emotional trauma and stress on parents does not affect children; that the child does not know the origins of their own emotional stress does not mean they are unaffected.

Are we seeing the beginnings of the "New Orleanization" of the D.C. public school system?

Kelly Fischer, one of the plaintiffs in a special-education discrimination lawsuit against the state of Louisiana, says last year she was discouraged by a number of charter schools from enrolling her now 10-year-old son Noah, who is blind, autistic and eats from a tube. While charters are free from many of the bureaucratic constraints of traditional districts, such as union contracts and limits on the length of school days, they must follow U.S. antidiscrimination laws, just like other public schools.

The legislative mandate was simple - keep kids in school if at all possible, suspension and expulsion having been identified as a point of entry for the school-to-prison pipeline. Passed in 2003, the Juvenile Justice Reform Act endorsed a wide variety of measures to reduce rates of juvenile incarceration. One such measure was support for in-school programs that reward students for good behavior rather than simply punishing them for acting out. It identified the state's higher than average suspension and expulsion rates as a cause for concern.

When talk-show host Oprah Winfrey handed a $1 million check last September to the principal of New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, 200 students watched the broadcast from a church and celebrated with a brass band.

Full RAND study by Jennifer L. Steele, Georges Vernez, Michael A. Gottfried, Michael Schwam-Baird

Ever since Congress and President George W. Bush reauthorized the Early and Secondary Education Act in 2002 to become No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools have been under the gun to up state-mandated student test scores or face financial and structural consequences. Results from those exams are notoriously inflated or teased with public relations precision, not out of the malfeasance of school administrators but as a function of what happens when students are taught to a series of exams that determine a great portion of the state's education funding.

New Orleans is one of the best examples of what national experts increasingly describe as a school "portfolio management model": a structure where schools that do not meet standards get closed or new management, much like an investor might drop or sell underperforming stocks.

Things are bad everywhere but nowhere is it worse than in Louisiana, where Gov. Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent John White threaten to annihilate the state's public schools with budget cuts, vouchers, the expansion of virtual charters, the erosion of teacher rights, and other forms of noxious corporate reform.  The following is by  Don Whittinghill , a consultant to the Louisiana School Boards Association (LSBA), a non-profit service organization representing local school board members in 69 local systems.

Former state superintendent Paul Pastorek at least gave lip service to the idea that some traditional schools could be acceptable to the State Department of Education. Incoming superintendent White by contrast is a "one trick pony". He plans to tell the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board ( I suggest educators read this revealing Advocate article very carefully) that the one solution to improving schools is to convert as many low performing schools as possible into charters. Charters in White's mind are the be all and end all for improving schools.

Superintendents, in recommending that you become Relinquishers and transition your school systems to charter districts, I hope to recommend great change with a sufficient amount of humility--especially given the potential pitfalls discussed yesterday. So let me introduce you to two rules that may mitigate the many risks in developing charter school districts.

There is a paucity of high-quality studies on urban charter markets. In my review of the research, I found rigorous studies on twelve cities (I only used studies included in this 2011 meta study or in the CREDO 16 state study). This limited sample size makes the results more illustrative than definitive. But, for what it's worth, here's the headline: charter schools outperformed traditional schools in every urban city except for Washington, DC; Chicago; and Philadelphia--and in all three of these cities results were similar across charter and traditional schools. Superintendents--especially those of you who are Reformers--this research, admittedly limited, should give you pause. In 75 percent of cities studied, Relinquisher strategies proved effective. And in the other 25 percent of cities, results were no worse.

Teachers in Louisiana have found themselves on the frontlines of austerity. First, in an unprecedented vote, the Jefferson Parish School Board voted 8-1 to close seven campuses, four of them traditional elementary schools and the rest alternative programs for students struggling academically. The board issued more bad news when it announced it was dropping plans to add an art instruction wing at Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts due to cost concerns. Construction of the wing is a hot-button issue in the area because the proposal to convert Lincoln into a magnet school that would draw students from across the parish was a result of the deliberations leading up to the system's settling a forty-seven-year-old desegregation lawsuit last year.