Jindal bragged of using Katrina as an opportunity to push charter schools. This is something Naomi Klien discusses in "The Shock Doctrine", but Louisiana Charter schools like Charter Schools elsewhere in the country are a scam!
"When Katrina hit New Orleans, I was two weeks into my senior year at Frederick Douglass Senior High School," said Maria Hernandez. "So far, I've had to start my senior year three times at three different schools in three different cities."
"All of these changes happened within a month's time," she continued, "From Douglass in New Orleans to Telequa High outside of Muscogee, Oklahoma and from Telequa to Union High in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now after everything is said and done, I miss the high school that was my alma mater. I'm afraid to get my class ring because we might just move again, and I'd be stuck."
Hernandez was one of thousands of people displaced after Hurricane Katrina's violence crushed the Gulf coast August 29, 2005. While at Douglass public high school, she was a member of Students at the Center (SAC). An independent program initiated by Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C., it had been operating in two Orleans Parish public schools since 1996. Hernandez is one of five students and two New Orleans public school teachers whose essays are included in "Dismantling a Community," a short 40-page, excellent booklet published by the Center. In addition to the noteworthy African-American essays, it includes revealing time-lines focusing on the hurried dismantlement of the city's former public school system of 63,000 students (93% African American, 75% low-income) and 117 school buildings, half of them damaged beyond repair. "In the immediate chaos after the storm, many both in and outside New Orleans - people who were not searching for relatives, who had dry shoes and a place to lay their heads - seized on the disaster as an 'opportunity,'" the "Dismantling" booklet noted.
Although the No Child Left Behind education act (NCLB) has virtually expunged "history" via its high stakes testing in other subjects, Katrina's aftermath brought recent and past history onto center stage. Seizing on education "disasters" was one of them. A dictionary definition for "carpetbagger" is "U.S. history; a Northerner who went to the South after the Civil War and became active in Republican politics, esp., as to profiteer from the unsettled social and political conditions of the area during Reconstruction.(2) Any opportunistic or exploitive outsider (1865- 1870)." Welcome to new New Orleans.
Charter schools have such dismal records that I think Obama is making a mistake by putting more money into the Federal Charter School Program. Instead of wasting money on charters, we simply have to recognize the the problem with America's schools is one of poor schools being inadequately funded in poor communities, and middle class flight from those communities which exacerbates, both problems. We need to formulate solutions which discourage these trends. Why don't we give the top 10 or 20 percent of students from every high school graduating class and opportunity to go to a public University for free? This would discourage the middle class from leaving poor communities and poor schools, because their children would be more like to get a free University Education, and over time it would improve those schools.
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