Press reporter asks if Michigan Schools should follow New Orleans model

This morning Grand Rapids Press reporter Dave Murray posted a story on MLive suggestion that Michigan schools ought to consider adopting the model of education restructuring that has taken place in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

The article cites three sources – Paul Vallas, head of what is called the Recovery District in New Orleans, Aesha Rasheed, director of the New Orleans Parent Organizing Network and Margaret Raymond of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.

Vallas makes the claim that the new educational system is working well and for the schools that do not meet the standards after three years the funding is pulled. Rasheed is quoted as being critical over the lack of parental input and local control, but her remarks are countered by Margaret Raymond from Standford who says parents seem to prefer local control at the expense of performance. What the Press reporter fails to tell readers is that the Center for Research on Education Outcomes is a pro-Charter school entity.

However, an even larger problem exists in this story in that there is no background information on who was behind the shift from public schools to charter schools after Hurricane Katrina.

According to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, the New Orleans disaster provided a perfect opportunity for those who sought to privatize education or al least redirect how public funds would be used for education. Just a few months after the hurricane free-market prophet Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal essentially calling for a vouchers system for education in New Orleans.

Two years after Hurricane Katrina investigative journalist Bill Quigley wrote an interesting report on the status of the so-called educational reforms that took place in New Orleans. What Quigley found was that this new system that Paul Vallas gushes about is that it has created a two-tiered educational system. Students must apply to the new charter school system and will not be accepted if they do not meet certain standards. Those that are not accepted go to another program that gets less funding and has an outrageous student to security guard ratio.

How would readers negotiate Dave Murray’s MLive article had any of this information been included? Instead of this kind of information Murray ends the article by stating that GRPS Superintendent Taylor is open to working with charter schools and that the Detroit’s new emergency manager hired “the National Association of Charter School Authorizers to help evaluate potential operators as part of a plan to transform 45 city schools into charters.”

It seems that the question raised by the Press article is already being answered by the push for a New Orleans style education shock doctrine. This is certainly what the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has been advocating, as well as two of their largest donors Dick and Betsy DeVos who have a long history of funding an education voucher system that will re-direct public funds away from local control and create an even more race & class divided school system.