Four out of 80

Years of organizing work to get to point where there would be four schools out of the 80 charters in New Orleans where the staff are unionized. That is, if BAE is successful. 

The vote is set for May 28, according to the release issued by United Teachers of New Orleans, a citywide union and local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers that has helped the charter school educators organize.

Bricolage Academy Educators, collectively known as BAE-United, spent weeks petitioning the school's governing charter board to voluntarily recognize their union. 

Bricolage organizers have said 80% of eligible teachers and staff signed a petition in favor of organizing, and they submitted the request to the school's board of directors in late February.

Eighty percent of the staff signed up in advance of the vote is a good sign. It's only in the last few years that teachers have gained something like momentum in the long effort to overcome structural barriers to organizing imposed by the depowering and isolating nature of the charter arrangements. When New Orleans Public Schools made the big move to charters, it not only immediately fired 7,000 people, it set back the work of reclaiming power by at least a decade.  Four out of 80 would be better than three.  But there is so much left beyond that.

Doing it the hard way

 Looks like the Bricolage board is choosing the way of pain. 

Bricolage Academy Educators United, a group of Bricolage educators seeking union recognition from the Esplanade Avenue charter school’s board, has filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board after the charter’s nonprofit board failed to respond to the group’s February request for voluntary union recognition.

Since receiving the group’s Feb. 24 letter, the board has only met once. At that meeting, on March 10, the board met in a closed door session with its lawyers for advice on the union drive. After the private discussion, board president Yvette Jones said the board must do its “due diligence” before it would take a vote on whether to recognize the union. She could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Well it's April now and they still haven't finished the "due diligence" delaying so the teachers have to ask for an NLRB election which is an arduous process that is more or less designed to prevent an organizing campaign from succeeding. That doesn't mean the teachers can't win.  The International School staff unionized via an election in 2016 but not without a fight. And the Lusher board actually beat back a similar effort.

Of course, the PRO Act legislation waiting for action in the US Congress would make things easier. Call or text your Senator.

Why lie when the facts are bad enough

Every year Joe Bouie tries to nudge us ever so slightly in the direction of untangling the corrupt nightmare system that runs our public schools "like a business."  Every year it fails.  No reason to stop trying, though. 

A state legislator who has a history of criticizing the way New Orleans schools are governed is pushing a bill in the upcoming session that would strip NOLA Public Schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. of his power to close or renew charter schools without an Orleans Parish School Board vote.

State Senator Joseph Bouie Jr. spoke briefly with board members during their meeting Tuesday about the bill, which he has prefiled for the 2021 legislative session beginning next month. Bouie’s bill aims to undo the charter school renewal system established by a state law passed in 2016 that brought the city’s charter schools — most of which had been overseen by the state-run Recovery School District after Hurricane Katrina — back under local control. 

That law, Act 91, gives near unilateral power to the superintendent to decide which nonprofit-run charter schools up for contract renewal with the district will remain open and which ones will close. Under the current system, the board can only overturn Lewis’ recommendation with a two-thirds supermajority vote within one month of a recommendation’s presentation. 

Bouie’s proposal would require board votes on all charter renewals.

One of the principal authors of Act 91 is congressional candidate Karen Carter Peterson who, over the weekend, (just barely) slipped into a runoff against Troy Carter.  During the primary, Carter tried to make hay out of Peterson's relationship with the charter school movement. Those links do exist and voters should consider them during the runoff.  They should also, consider, however, that Troy Carter also supported Act 91 and does not appear to have taken a stand against the charter movement that meaningfully distinguishes him from Peterson. 

On the other hand, at least his attack ad acknowledged the devastating effect the charter movement has had on teachers. Leaving aside the question of his sincerity about that, it matters that it's something Peterson does not talk about unless she is refuting an opponent's accusations. Which is what happens in this article. 

Only days before Saturday’s primary, Karen Carter Peterson is calling foul on Troy Carter for a television ad that slams her and her husband on education matters.

“Troy Carter’s latest attack is a lie,” Peterson, who like Carter is a state senator from New Orleans, said in a statement.

She is correct.  Carter's ad does lie. It cherry picks certain events and compresses their timeline to imply a stronger causal relationship than the viewer would otherwise infer. I'll try to summarize this as clearly as I can.  

In 2004 Peterson sponsored a bill called Act 193 which empowered the state controlled Recovery School District (RSD) to take over so-called failing schools in Orleans Parish. Shortly after Katrina, a second bill (Act 35) enabled the RSD to take all of the schools in Orleans Parish. Peterson voted against this bill. RSD took over 102 of 117 schools and immediately fired 7000 teachers and support staff. This move effectively destroyed the teachers union and gutted what most people considered a core piece of the city's Black middle class at a critical moment. Those teachers, their union, and in many ways the whole city has never really recovered from that. The state then re-made the New Orleans Public Schools according to an experimental model of privatized autonomous charters working with largely non-union labor (although a very small number of charter school staffs have since been organized.) In 2016, Act 91, again, authored by Peterson, returned this reconfigured system to local school board's nominal control but locked the RSD's changes into place.  

Carter's ad presents this story as 1) Peterson voted for Act 193 and then 2) All of the teachers were fired. Obviously that isn't how it happened. In between those events there was a hurricane, a flood, and a thorough takeover of the schools that Peterson voted against. However, it does not get her off the hook for writing and supporting Act 91 which we can see as a validation of all of those events after the fact. She is further implicated by the close involvement of her husband and brother-in-law in the leadership of RSD and Orleans charter schools during this period although Carter's ad also fudges the facts on this so as to make it appear even more sinister. 

Which, again, causes us to question Carter's integrity as much as Peterson's.  The facts are bad enough.  But Carter is as culpable as Peterson for much of the situation being what it is so he has to lie to make it sound even worse. 

Anyway, I'm not sure when Bouie's bill is due up in the session or if Senators Carter and Peterson will be available to vote on it when it does.  The legislative session begins on April 12 and the runoff election is April 24 so it's a real tight window. Which is a shame because we might miss a key moment of truth for both of them.

Seperate but equal grifting

Imagine your critique of the New Orleans Public Schools is that our balkanized model dependent on private fundraising through shady non-profits results in systemic racial inequity.

The campaign seeks in part to bring attention to a report, "Black Brilliance: Field Notes on Black Education in New Orleans," that spans topics ranging from the history of New Orleans public schools to systemic racism, which authors say is perpetuated in the charter school system.

This is all correct, by the way. So, pretty good so far.  The charterization con has not only deliberately established a school system segregated by race and class. It also just as deliberately ripped the heart out of the city's pre-Katrina Black middle class through the mass firing of teachers. The legacy of this is also acknowledged by the group in this article. 

Black educators make up 53% of the teacher workforce in NOLA Public Schools, down significantly from the 71% proportion in place prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a study by another nonprofit, New Schools for New Orleans, found. African American students comprise nearly 80% of the system's enrollment, according to the Louisiana Department of Education.

So the problem is pretty clear.  New Orleans's post-Katrina educational landscape is unfair, elitist, and racist because it is controlled by undemocratic private "philanthropy" networks.  If you are someone who has correctly identified this problem, then why is your proposed solution just to create a different undemocratic private philanthropy network? 

The report concluded that more resources should go to Black-governed and Black-led schools, and more CEO, principal or other leadership roles should be filled by Black men and women. It demands district and school leaders address a "standardization of whiteness" in curricula and hiring and promotion practices, and asks for an audit of charter school grants and other funding to ensure more equity.

"The truth of the matter is no school here in New Orleans is doing an excellent job educating children off MFP alone -- it’s just not enough money," Adrinda Kelly, the executive director of BE NOLA, said about the state's per-pupil funding system.

New Orleans is a unique district because it gives a lot of autonomy to the individual charters, which have their own leadership structures, are in charge of their own curricula, and have the ability to collect grants and fundraise to bolster budgets outside of the per-pupil funding received from the state and local tax dollars.

The MFP is not enough. In other words, Louisiana's political leaders have deliberately left the schools underfunded and therefore open to predation by the non-profit industrial complex.  A truly equitable and democratic response to that would be to fix that problem in particular and demand the universal public education that every child in the state is entitled to.  Instead, these individuals have decided to just go off and create their own separate privatized model.  That's no way to deliver a just and equitable school system. But, really, is that so important as long as we have a few "Black-led" charter organizations to point to in consolation?  The corporate sponsors seem to think so.