In the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, corporate education reformers saw and seized the opportunity to speed the charter school and voucher takeover of New Orleans education begun a few years before. Now, the
Washington Post reports that the opportunity seizure has been fully realized: the "Recovery School District" that controls most New Orleans schools has closed its
last remaining traditional public schools.
Large numbers of the city's largely African-American public school teachers have been fired and replaced with a much more white population of Teach for America teachers. Charter boosters claim dramatic successes, but critics have documented a variety of ways these alleged successes result from cooking the books. Suspension rates are out of control, and a University of Minnesota Law School study concluded that:
The increasingly charterized public school system has seriously undermined equality of opportunity among public school students, sorting white students and a small minority of students of color into better performing OPSB and BESE schools, while confining the majority of low-income students of color to the lower-performing RSN sector.
Segregation, harsh discipline, the firing of African-American teachers, kids removed from neighborhood schools and dispersed around the city ... the privatization of New Orleans schools is going pretty much according to plan.