The Problem with New Orleans’ Charter Schools
New Orleans, where more than 70 percent of public schools will be independently chartered after this school year, has been placed on a pedestal as a shining model by education reformers.
The new documentary Waiting for “Superman”, which hopes to serve as a call to arms for education reform, devotes a page of its Web site to touting New Orleans’s new citywide school-choice system.
Charter-school advocates such as Caroline Roemer Shirley, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools (LAPCS), are boasting of the success they’ve had in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when much of the population of New Orleans that might have opposed those policies was displaced from the city.
“I don’t think we need to wait for Superman,” says Shirley. “It is happening today.” National media outlets have similarly gushed over New Orleans, some going so far as to suggest that Katrina saved the public-education system in the city.
But is this supposed revolution really helping the most-disadvantaged students in New Orleans, those with special needs such as physical, behavioral, or mental disabilities?
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