Public Schools and Racism
My children attend public school in New Orleans, consistently one of the worst public school districts in the nation. It has now gotten so bad that news of the horror is spreading across the Atlantic:

Guardian: New Orleans' School System in Disarray

ADAM NOSSITER, Associated Press Writer

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Dozens of employees indicted or convicted on corruption charges. Tens of millions of dollars unaccounted for. Eight superintendents in seven years. Rock-bottom test scores. Shootings, sirens and police uniforms, often. The threat of bankruptcy and bounced checks, constantly.

In the dismal gallery of failing urban school systems, New Orleans' may be the biggest horror of them all. [snip]

The latest crisis in the 64,000-student system broke two weeks ago. First, teachers nearly missed a paycheck, the system was so broke. Then, the state threatened a takeover. Finally, the superintendent, a reformer from New York who, like many before him, entered with grand plans, was forced out by a school board disenchanted with his reform ideas.

Superintendent Anthony Amato's fate was sealed last week at a board meeting crackling with racial hostility. Much of the hooting was directed at him and his white supporters in the school system, which is almost 94 percent black.

Financially, the school system is a "train wreck," Louisiana's top government watchdog, legislative auditor Steve Theriot, told lawmakers in Baton Rouge. No one knows for certain how much money it has, or how much money it owes.

At the glass-and-steel school administration complex across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans, FBI agents and other federal and state investigators have opened an office to pick through the evidence of graft.

Just last week, a payroll clerk was sent to jail for stealing $250,000 - she had kept her job with the New Orleans schools, even after being indicted on charges of stealing from a bank. A year ago the district's insurance manager pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks. One of the bribe-givers was former Mayor Marc Morial's aunt.

In February, the U.S. Education Department said nearly $70 million in federal money for low-income children was either not properly accounted for or misspent. State officials said one reason is that for years, teachers and principals wanting promotions to more lucrative central office positions have been put into accounting jobs for which they are not qualified.

"There is not one accountant working in the accounting department," Theriot said. "There's not one in the trenches."

State and federal officials are demanding that every aspect of the district's finances be turned over to an outside accounting firm. The locals are balking, but they probably cannot resist much longer: Washington and Baton Rouge, which give New Orleans over half its $577 million budget, have the upper hand.

Meanwhile, morale in the beleaguered teaching corps is sagging.

"We're constantly hit by these disasters," said Leo Laventhal, a French and Spanish teacher at one of the city's magnet schools. Often, colleagues at his school never receive their paychecks. And it is no use complaining: "We call the central office, and nobody answers the phone," Laventhal said.

Long ago abandoned by this city's middle class, the schools in New Orleans are in sad shape academically. New Orleans accounts for 55 of Louisiana's 78 worst schools. More than two-thirds of the school system's fourth-graders do not have basic competence in math.

In the sagging old neighborhoods of New Orleans, the schools are dilapidated cinder-block buildings ringed by barbed wire. Outside one earlier this month, a student was shot in the neck. Afterward, his schoolmates at Lawless High mugged for the TV cameras and walked nonchalantly over the medical debris left behind by paramedics.

At last Monday's raucous school board meeting, a plan pushed by whites to expand an academically successful magnet school was shouted down amid cries of racism.

Yet one scholar said the plan - advanced by the latest superintendent to be forced out - could have led to the salvation of the district.

"That may be the one thing that could draw the middle class back in to New Orleans," said sociologist Carl Bankston of Tulane University. "The root of the problem isn't the superintendent, or the school board. It's a school district without much of a middle class at all. I would say that's at the heart of why the school system is so bad."

My older son already matriculated from the magnet school discussed in the article, and my younger son is a current student there. I can attest to the fact that the school system is on the brink of collapse. Students at most public schools lack textbooks and there are schools that actually lack working restrooms and copy machines. Although the sociologist quoted in the article is absolutely correct that the lack of a viable middle class in Orleans Parish is destroying the system, he ignores the fact that white flight to the racist suburbs of Metairie and Covington (home of David Duke) is what caused the death of the middle class in New Orleans.

I can understand both sides of the debate--those parents desperate for alternatives who are trying to fix the system one magnet school at a time, and the largely poor black parents who seek equality of education throughout the system, not just at a few elite schools in the tony (white) areas of uptown New Orleans. Unfortunately, advocates of the magnet high school tried to fix the symptoms without dealing with the larger class and race issues at the root of the problem.

Yes, the school system's finances are in shambles. Yes, it is part and parcel of the political corruption endemic to Louisiana. But there is also no question that racism is alive and well throughout the city, and indeed throughout the South. (For a recent concrete example, read Rubicon's excellent post here.) As long as racism pervades the hearts and minds of the people of New Orleans, its schools will never improve.
- posted by TJ @ 1:52 PM