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Saturday, June 3, 2006
Dispatch from NOLA: Andrea Wants To Teach
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New Orleans – Teachers displaced in the school system re-do wanted a chance to give their side of the story. About a dozen have come to our hotel. First I talk to a Montessori public preschool teacher with 27 years of experience. She says she couldn’t get a job in New Orleans. She thinks the schools, especially the charters, didn’t want her because she is experienced and commands a higher salary than a young teacher. Also, she says her union background hurt her. She was forced to retire earlier than she had planned so she can keep her health insurance.
Next, I meet a teacher named Andrea. She is young, just five or six years out of college. She teaches physical science at a charter school called Science and Math High.
An interesting sidenote: Before Katrina, Science and Math High was a choice school that worked with students for half a day. The other half-day, students attended a traditional school. This is a new one on me, but that’s what you find in urban districts.
Anyway, Andrea Spreter has concerns about the charter schools. She is leaving Science and Math, in hopes of teaching in the state-run district. She says the charter schools opened fast with mostly young teachers, many froom Teach for America. She believes her school is missing out on the experience veteran teachers bring. She said there are no discipline guidelines, so some infractions go unpunished and then a similar infraction leads to the kid getting kicked out. With no alternative schools, that leaves such kids with no school to attend.
Let me back up a bit. Andrea did not start out at Science and Math. She previously taught at Marion Abramson High School, one of the damaged schools we visited earlier. (She said her classroom survived Katrina, but later it was looted.) This school was not a choice school. It was the school that served the kids who did not seek our or get into magnet schools throughout the city. Andrea loved teaching there. She loved those students. She does not believe in admissions criteria for public schools.
So she is leaving Science and Math and speaking out about problems she sees with charter schools, such as lack of consistent policies, lack of oversight, absence of veteran teachers. She also craves the kind of professional development a school district can offer. I find this interesting, as so many teachers seem to roll their eyes at professional development. For Andrea to take such a view, you might think she went through a traditional teacher’s college, where tradition is often favored over the idea of independently run schools.
She didn’t. Here’s how she says she got into teaching. She is from Ohio and graduated from college, I didn’t catch where. She worked in some sort of nonprofit related to India, which she says was her passion. She didn’t like D.C. though so she moved to New Orleans and got a job bartending.
During a slow shift, she pulled out a book. A patron asked her if she was a book-learnin’ type. He asked her for tutoring and before long she was tutoring many neighborhood residents. She decided to teach. She got a job as a physics teacher on a provisional basis and worked toward her certification. She taught in a school many teachers shun, and she loved it. After Katrina, she went to Texas and worked with Katrina students who were having trouble adapting. She said she spent a lot of time breaking up fights between Katrina and Texas kids.
She returned to New Orleans and got a job at one of the few schools open. The job is just shy of full time, though. She teaches three physical science classes and runs the robotics program. She has no health insurance and no retirement.
Andrea wants to teach physics at a New Orleans high school that is open to all kids. She wants to get paid and she wants benefits. Shouldn’t be too much to ask, should it?
P.S. Thanks to a blog called Quick and the Ed via another one called Let’s Get It Right for alerting me that I had the school name wrong. It is Science and Math, not Math and Science. Also, I changed the word “selective” to “choice” in describing Science and Math in its previous life as it did not require certain test scores or grades for entry. Gomen ne! (And how can we get such a school in metro Atlanta? )
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Dispatch from NOLA: The Big Do-Over
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New Orleans – The spin officials are putting on the New Orleans school rebuilding effort is that it’s an opportunity to right a wrong that hindered the city for a long time. They talk of turning a school district that was an embarrassment of corruption and incompetence into a model of urban education. They’re starting off with a peculiar set of circumstances.
There will be 60 schools in New Orleans this fall. Forty-six will be part of a state-run district known as the Recovery School District or RSD. These are schools that were failing prior to Katrina, and probably would have been surrendered to the state anyway. The New Orleans Parish school district, with its acknowledged dysfunctional school board, will have 14 schools. Here’s where it gets complicated. Of the 60 schools, dozens are expected to be charters; several charters will be RSD schools and at least 10 charters will be New Orleans Parish schools.
During a panel discussion with several people involved in rebuilding New Orleans schools, board member Jimmy Farhenholtz gleefully said two of the four remaining New Orleans Parish schools may become charters, leaving the board with just two schools to run.
All the schools will be open enrollment. Some public schools may have admissions criteria, but charter schools cannot. Money will follow the student whether it’s to a traditional public or charter school, officials say.
What will parents – many of whom are struggling to find suitable housing and get back in the workforce – make of the complex network of public schools in New Orleans?
As many as 34,000 kids are expected to show up. New Orleans’ enrollment before Katrina was 65,000 students. Officials don’t know how many of next fall’s students will be elementary, middle or high school.
And will it really be a totally different scenario in New Orleans schools? The district is unique in that the city has historically had thousands of students in private and parochial schools, many of which will reopen.
The rebirth has also served as an opportunity for administrators to bust up teacher unions, by rehiring only nonunion teachers. But that has left thousands of teachers bitter that after decades of service in a poorly run system they are unwelcome and without health insurance. Many say they were forced to retire before they were ready. They say administration was largely responsible for the deplorable conditions in New Orleans schools and that they should have been included in the rebuilding effort.
The schools are trying to plan, reopen and rebuild without knowing what the future holds for neighborhoods that sustained the most damage. Plans to rebuild are stalled for the usual reasons: power struggles, infighting and absence of a process for putting plans into action.
Officials are so optimistic about New Orleans public schools and the opportunity to remake them from the ground up. It’s easy to predict that the schools won’t improve some, just because they were so bad to begin with. But it’s hard to buy into the idea that a new culture of high expectations for poor, black students can emerge citywide given the added stress of the problems Katrina left behind.
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Dispatch from NOLA: Opening Ben Franklin
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New Orleans – So our bus tour is winding down, and we are all exhausted and overwhelmed. But wait! One more stop. We’re going to a charter school to listen to a principal and school board member. Ugh. Just take me back to the hotel please.
Well, the visit turns out to be worthwhile. We hear from a principal from Ben Franklin High School, which she says was rated the top high school in the state. Needless to say, it’s a choice school with admissions requirements. She tells the whole story about what happened before and after Katrina. The upshot is she heard after the storm that New Orleans schools were going to be closed for the whole year. (This news swiftly reached Atlanta.) She says no official sought her opinion when making this decision. (It’s unclear exactly who decided this, whether it was New Orleans’ new superintendent or a state official.)
The principal knew her school was usable. The first floor was in bad shape, but it was a three-story building. She had to find the kids, who were in contact with each other through the Internet. She had to write a charter petition and become a charter school, so she could function independently from the New Orleans Parish district. She had to find her teachers. (She says she was able to not invite back six unwanted teachers.) She needed the power restored in her school, which happened in January. And in mid-January, Ben Franklin opened. She is for the first time principal of a Title 1 school and gosh those feds don’t come through with the promised funds. Dealing with them has been a nightmare, she says. But, hey, school is open.
The school board member talks about the hideous school board politics and the nightmare of getting funds in place to open schools so families could return to New Orleans. The longer families stay away, the less likely they are to return.
Like Ben Franklin’s principal, she did not want the schools to remain shut down for a full year, so she supported charter schools, as did a majority of board members. The timing was such that the schools were eligible for federal funds for new charter schools, and it appears at least some of these schools would have pursued charter status even if Katrina hadn’t happened. But if I hear correctly, these funds have yet to come through.
