Missing school in the Big Easy

Feb. 13, 2006 | NEW ORLEANS -- Asta Levene, an artist and interior decorator from New Orleans' French Quarter, has high cheekbones, black hair with funky blond streaks and a Lithuanian accent. She also has a 10-year-old son who hasn't been in school for months. "Every day he's saying, 'I want my life back, I want my school back,'" she says. But his school, like many in this tattered city, remains closed, and every other school she's tried to enroll him in says there's no room. When she calls city government officials, they give her a list of schools to try. "Then you go there and you hear the same answer," she says. She has a former science teacher come over several times a week to tutor her son, and she's trying to teach him herself, but she worries he's falling behind. "He's in fourth grade and he's going to have to be tested," Levene says.

There are other children in similar situations in New Orleans, though how many is unclear. Members of the local teachers union, civil rights lawyers and neighborhood activists speak of neighborhoods overrun with involuntarily truant students. "At the very least, 200 to 250 parents of school-age kids have been denied access to schools here in New Orleans for no other reason than that the schools are saying there's no room," says Tracie Washington, one of New Orleans' leading civil rights lawyers. As reports of children being turned away from schools pile up, anger is building in the community. Two lawsuits have been filed to force New Orleans to reopen its public schools.

Before the storm, New Orleans operated 117 public schools for 65,000 kids -- over 90 percent of them African-American. Today, only 20 schools are open. School officials say that by August, as families, now scattered across the country, begin to return to New Orleans, the district will open more schools and be able to handle a total of 25,000 kids. But the current lack of available schools is about more than the physical destruction wrought by Katrina. To many activists, it points to serious inequities in the massive transformation of the New Orleans public school system. Long one of the nation's worst, the school system is being re-created as a laboratory for charter schools, a type of reform often favored by conservatives and opposed by teachers unions and others who see it as a gateway to privatization. Nearly 90 percent, or 102 schools, could ultimately be run as charters. Nothing on this scale has ever been tried before.

Brenda Mitchell, president of United Teachers of New Orleans, says she is not a conspiracy theorist, but when she considers the new charter system, she is not sure how else to think. "It's all part of the privatization and social engineering of the city, limiting the return of poor people and African-Americans," she says. "If you're not providing housing for them, if you don't want to provide schools to educate them, how are they going to come back to rebuild the city?"

Yet this isn't simply a battle between callous privatizers and righteous locals. Plenty of residents are desperate for a school system that works, and they're eager for a restructuring. New Orleans public schools were a disaster well before Katrina hit, and some of the city's education experts see a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rebuild them free of the stifling, often corrupt bureaucracy that's impeded progress in the past. "For a long time before the storm, the Louisiana public schools have been in the bottom 10 percent of national performance scores, and New Orleans has been at the bottom of that," says Michael Cowan, executive director of the Lindy Boggs Literacy Center at Loyola University, and an advisor to the education committee of Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission.

"Public education in New Orleans for a long time has been about everything but the well-being of children," he says. "It's about who controls contracts. It's about the union agreement. It's been tremendously racially polarized. By and large, our public school system has been one of the big limitations on quality of life in the city for a long time."

Cowan describes himself as a political liberal, but he's behind the city's current school reforms. "Forty percent of adults in the city of New Orleans read below the sixth-grade level," he says. "Another 30 percent read below the eighth-grade level. The public schools have been a gross failure for a long time. There has been a strong movement to try and do something about that for quite a while, and when the storm hit, it did present the city with an extraordinary opportunity to do something about our schools within a period of time that would have been utterly impossible if we had continued to try and chip away at it."

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