New Orleans interview... How the destruction of the real public schools of New Orleans and Teach for America helped fill the school to prison pipeline
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 28, 2005, and life was never the same for the citizens of New Orleans who depended on the New Orleans Public Schools to educate their children. Many of the city's poor and working class citizens were forced to leave town, in many cases with their homes destroyed.
After Hurricane Katrina hit, the population came back to a school system quite different as a result of "Act 35." That law allowed the State of Louisiana to take over 107 school buildings out of 121 buildings. The ones taken over were labeled "failing" and the entire school staff was fired.
When I discovered my husband, Jim, was going to New Orleans for a Society of Environmental Journalists conference, I decided to go and find out what had happened to the everyday people after Katrina. I was given Ashana Bigard�s name by Mercedes Schneider, author of Chronicles of Echoes: Who�s Who in the Implosion of American Education.
We met at the Best Western Hotel and used the empty breakfast room to interview Bigard and her colleague Ruth Itakula.
Ashana Bigard, Public School Parent, Educational Advocate and New Orleans native.
�I got into the education fight through my own experience with my own children and trying to navigate the new public school system in New Orleans. Post- Katrina was very different from Pre-Katrina, and we knew after the storm that we were dealing with a traumatized population. At the time, I was working for Agenda for Children, which creates policy for early education children in day care centers. We were making sure that children from 0-8 got the things they needed. In order to receive state assistance, day care centers had to have 12 hours of training in child development, C.P.R and First Aid so the children would be in a safe environment and educated properly.
�Later, I worked for Family and Friends of Louisiana Incarcerated Children (FLIC). The parents there were initially working on changing the conditions of juvenile confinement to make them more rehabilitative. In Louisiana, as adults you don�t have the right to be rehabilitated, but as a child you do. But most of the jails were functioning the same way as adult prisons, which were punitive. Just looking at the juvenile justice record, we could see the amount of children who were being arrested were 2/3 more in New Orleans. It had more than doubled leaps and bounds over pre-Katrina records, and only 1/3 of the population was back. Just the overall policing of schools and money spent on security on 11 or 12 schools was $22 million. There were no counselors and therapists, no psychiatrists or psychologists, and we were dealing with a traumatized population.
�So parents said, 'We want to stop children from going into jail and being arrested in the
first place. We want to find out where the children going into jails and arrested are first coming into contact with the judicial system.' We were surprised that it was in the schools and not on the streets. That is how insidious the school to prison pipeline was. Initially, when people heard about school to prison, they thought that a child was suspended or kicked out of school and became part of the system on the streets.
�In New Orleans, we had an influx of brand new, inexperienced teachers with ridiculous rules, Teach for America, had only four weeks of training with an impoverished, traumatized population. They call the police for everything. If someone screams at them, two kids fight, or someone throws a pencil, they call the police who are often in the building. When two eight- year -olds get into a fight, that is two cases of battery. We were finding this more and more problematic.
�Then the restriction on how children were being treated. Tape lines in the hallways, no recess, quiet at lunch, so of course a child was going to explode and have an argument, so you don�t even get to be a child. So of course this leads to your induction into the system. If they are not arrested, we have a program called Families In Need of Services (FINS.) It is supposed to be court- ordered counseling, therapy or whatever. So now you have a child who is tardy a lot. The judge is going to court- order the child to get to school on time when he should court order the school to provide transportation. Louisiana law provides transportation if a child lives over one mile from school. We have a lot of schools that do not follow the law. That is the reason our justice system has so many children in it.
�Inside the Poverty Law Center, we have an on-going lawsuit because there have been schools denying children with special needs access to schools. It doesn�t matter how many they apply to, they don�t get into schools because the schools don�t want to spend extra money because the child requires a paraprofessional or a wheelchair ramp. They break the laws in so many ways. Part of the law says that you need certified teachers, especially credentialed teachers in high school. Instead of the state stopping schools from breaking the law and hiring certified teachers, they got legislation that said that alternative certification programs did prepare teachers. Teachers came from all over the state to protest, but it still did pass. It was the most heart breaking.
�We also had a civil lawsuit that said that what the state did was unconstitutional, and we won. Of course the state is appealing. They fired everyone after the storm, and they had the funding to continue paying the teachers. On September 4, the civil suit was heard in the Louisiana Supreme Court.
�The Charter System is insidious for three main reasons:
First is that it takes away our democratic process. I can�t vote and I can�t make the school board answerable to me even though I am a taxpayer. You have a group of people who plan what a school is going to be before they look at the landscape of the community or talk to teachers. They decide who they are going to hire or not hire before the person sets foot in the place.
�Scripted Curriculum doesn�t allow a teacher even to teach, even if they understood adolescent or early childhood development, which clearly wasn�t looked at when they created the curriculum, or purchased it from a friend. There are four learning styles you are taught in education: kinesthetic, verbal, auditory, and visual, but scripted learning styles don�t allow for that. So even if you are credentialed, you aren�t allowed to teach. Your children don�t get to be children to dance, sing and play. The teachers don�t allow children to do that because that makes the teacher a terrible teacher. It takes the humanity away from the child who isn�t allowed to dance and play. It takes the humanity away from the teachers. It takes away the dignity and humanity from students because they are not allowed to sing, dance and play. Some Teachers don�t have a lunch break because they have to eat with their students in a quiet lunchroom. I used to compare these schools with prisons until I talked with a friend who had been wrongly convicted of a crime and sent to prison. He said that it is not like prison, 'because you can talk at lunch civilly and go outside, so prison is much better than schools.'
�This is contrary to what we know about children. Children need social development: they develop social skills. We already know that children are using social media. They don�t go outside and play because of global warming and the heat, especially in New Orleans. The place they get to interact with each other, have discussions, come up with solutions, learn conflict resolutions, team- building skills, turn- taking and leadership skills is on the playground and in conversations with others. The schools teach that at lunch and outside at recess. They are not allowed to do that, so what kind of people is this system creating? We have to send our children to school because it is the law. Parents are asking which schools have one recess, or will let my child go to the restroom, or have inexpensive uniforms (some are as much as $45 a shirt). If you are eligible for free or reduced lunch, they do not help you pay for a uniform. That�s because you don�t learn without a uniform. Wait; there are some of the best schools in New Orleans that don�t require uniforms.
�We have only five traditional schools left in the city. They don�t have neighborhood schools because there are not enough of them but they can accept children from the neighborhood. They all have a waiting list of about 500. There is one app. That will help you register your child. You are supposed to be able to choose six to eight schools that you prefer for your children. It really is a sorting appt for charter schools so they can choose their students. A lot of parents applied to all eight schools, and their children were not accepted to any. There are parents with children under ten who have three or four children going to a different school. There is not much of a choice because 70%-74% of our charter schools are D-F schools. The scores are being blamed on pre-Katrina schools but the students have spent their whole education in the post-Katrina schools system.
�This is what they are doing to our children. John White, State Superintendent of Schools, a former Teach for America person who, when he became superintendent, did not have the qualifications to be an Assistant High School Principal and was working on his masters degree, just created a two- tiered system where a 13- year - old can chose a career track or a college bound track. The student is locked into their track and can�t change during high school. Suppose this student becomes a nurses� assistant (CNA) and then wants to go back to college to become a nurse. They will not have enough high school credits to do that with the system we now have. You may choose to use your vocational tech degree to work for two years, but you should have a degree that allows you to go to college.
�Most of the charter schools don�t have arts, music, or any of those fluffy riffraff things as they call them. Even though we are becoming Hollywood south, with more movies and TV series produced here, and are only second to Hollywood; our children are not being prepared for those fields, no art, drama or music. Our children are being prepared to fill out tests. There are no music, art and drama on tests. Our children access college through music programs. A lot of these people (from outside of New Orleans) go listen to Wynton Marsalis, and Trombone Shorty. A lot of famous people came out of schools like Bell Middle School and elementary schools that foster the love of music so they can become famous and can now support their families.
"New Orleans is built on music and arts. It is ironic that people get to come in here from New Jersey, New York and the Bay area and design our schools so we don�t have any of the arts. It�s because they know better, and we know, of course, that teaching our children not to talk to each other or comfort each other and not to be human is better than to teach them culture and the arts which could sustain them and help them go to college. It used to be easy to expel a student using a 'willful disobedience' rule. That could be anything -- if a student fails to track the teacher with his eyes or is wearing the wrong clothes or simply scoring low on tests. This was corrected by having a new expulsion process so it�s not so easy anymore.
"They do suspend students. One child was suspended for three months because he wore 15 � shoes and it was expensive to buy him a new pair in a different color because the mother had to have them special made. Another example, a seven �year- old child was suspended because for two weeks because he said 'Hi' to the Cafeteria lady and gave her a hug. I explained to Ben Kleban (CPO of Cohen College Prep) that it is part of New Orleans culture to be friendly but Ben Kleban stated that 'We don�t want your culture, we want a culture of success. Every morning each student is greeted at the door with a stern handshake and the Cafeteria woman was not one of the people that were to be greeted.'
�Ben Kleban has three charter schools in New Orleans, all D schools. Even though he runs failing schools, he was given one more. He wanted the building but not the students so he made the elementary school a 9-12 school. They often take over schools building but don�t want the students. That is not turnaround if you take the building and not the students. It is not the same school. This building was the Walter L. Cohen School. Kleban�s charter school shared the building with another school that had some of the older Cohen students . The roof over the lunch room was falling apart so Kleban repaired the side of the lunch room that was used by his students and let the other school students sit on the side that was falling apart. The students began to rally against Kleban and that is how Students for New Orleans started.
�Routinely charter schools fire the staff, even the ones they hired, especially if they speak out. Teach for America has a large turnover. One way a TFA teacher can get out of her contract is if a student attacks her and she files a police report." [End of first interview].
I also interviewed Ruth Itakula, also a parent and Education Advocate. Itakula was hired with Bigard as a consultant for Teach for America after Katrina.
�Our job was to run professional development workshops for the TFA on Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). We were to give the teachers the tools and methods to deal with it the classroom. We had to do a totally different workshop because the teachers were suffering from PTSD also. The teachers were being told to dehumanize the children in the schools and they did not know how to deal with it. We heard stories about not being able to deal with the children, their cultural relevancy and that New Orleans was just coming out of a flood. At first I was not very sympathetic with the young, white teachers teaching our children but as we worked with them, our hearts went out to the kids and their teachers. We found that the teachers were dealing with secondhand PTSD. After working with TFA we met two TFA alumni and formed Community Education Project and Resist TFA.�
