New AZ anti-tenure laws and New Orleans

by David Safier

I've written posts on BfA condemning the new law that cut the heart out of teacher tenure in Arizona. My most recent column in the Explorer is on the same topic. A number of newspaper editorials and op eds have chimed in as well.

But I haven't seen anyone looking beyond the anti-tenure law itself to predict the next move for the Republican legislature whose conservatives have been hoping to eliminate traditional public education for years. That's a serious mistake. If you're not thinking a step ahead, you'll always be 2 steps behind.

Here's where I think the Rs want to take us: to a version of Louisiana's Recovery School District (RSD), a state-wide grouping of "failing schools," with the majority of its schools in New Orleans. Under the guise of "fixing" those schools, Louisiana is moving toward more privatization in the form of charter schools and private school vouchers.

Sounds a whole lot like the dream of our own conservatives, doesn't it?

Before I explain how Louisiana's Recovery School District works, let me explain how I made the connection between RSD and the potential future of Arizona's educational landscape.

I was googling around to see if any other states had gutted teacher tenure the way we just did. The answer I got was no, with one exception: Louisiana's Recovery School District, which includes 84 schools, 70 of them in New Orleans. Half of New Orleans' RSD schools are charters. Teachers in the RSD schools are expendable. Their jobs can be taken away at the whim of principals and the RSD superintendent. They have no salary guarantees. Teacher unions? Forget about it. To the extent unions still exist in those schools, they have no bargaining power whatsoever. In other words, RSD teachers are in a similar situation to all Arizona teachers since our recent anti-tenure legislation passed.

So that's where I made the connection. If you put together AZ conservatives' hatred of teachers' unions with their desire to get rid of the district school model in favor of "free market education," "educational choice," or whatever is their term du jour, you end up in New Orleans. All we're missing is a hurricane to wipe out all the schools so conservatives can start from scratch (though I have to say, the Republican-fueled budget-cutting tsunami is doing a pretty good job of it without needing a natural disaster).

Here's a short history of Louisiana's Recovery School District.

The legislation creating the RSD passed in 2003, so it predates Katrina by a few years. The idea was to let the state take over failing schools — not entire districts, just individual schools within districts. A few schools were taken over around the state, including a couple in New Orleans, but the RSD wasn't a major force in Louisiana education.

Then came Katrina in 2005, wiping out much of New Orleans and rendering its school system inoperative. Conservative educators saw the flooding as a gigantic opportunity to create an entirely privatized school system, and they immediately set up a number of charter schools which were supposed to handle the  student population that was still in the city. But there were more students than there were spaces in the charters. So the RSD stepped in and opened a bunch of New Orleans schools to handle the overflow. Those parents who acted quickly enough got their children into the original charters, which picked up the majority of the better students with the most involved parents. The rest of New Orleans' children, and most of the students who returned to the city after fleeing with their parents, mainly went to the RSD schools.

Currently, RSD has 33 traditional schools and 37 charter schools in New Orleans (and only 14 in the rest of the state. Post Katrina, this has become a New Orleans-based project). The long term goal is to turn more of the traditional schools into charters, with the not-quite-stated goal of the total privatization of New Orleans education, making all of the schools either charter or private.

(NOTE: Charters are publicly funded schools, but they're run by private individuals and/or corporations and are reasonably independent of government oversight. They're not "private," but they are "privatized.")

Governor Bobby Jindal is helping the privatization process along. He pushed through voucher legislation for about 900 New Orleans students to attend private schools.

There is no — repeat, no — evidence the New Orleans charters are doing a better job educating students than the traditional public schools. I've read that test scores have gone up for both types of schools — how much is a matter of contention — but the whole experiment is too young for anyone to evaluate it well. Remember, the traditional schools have to take all comers, while the charters can set an enrollment cap. Charters can "discourage" students from attending and create an atmosphere that will attract only motivated students with involved parents. The school populations are in a constant state of flux, meaning there aren't stable student populations whose progress can be measured. It's an educational measurement expert's nightmare.

But the whole situation in New Orleans is being promoted as an unqualified success, and most of the credit is going to the charters and their ability to educate the students without having to worry about government regulations or the interference of teachers' unions. To hear the conservatives crow, you'd think New Orleans is filled with education miracle workers, especially in the charter schools. In fact, it's just a staging ground for their vision of the free market future of U.S. education.

I'm guessing the Republicans behind our anti-tenure bill see New Orleans on Arizona's horizon. Now that unions can't complain about teacher firings or transfers or salary inequities, the way is cleared to create our own statewide Recovery School District that can turn schools over to charter operators, fire teachers, move teachers from school to school and lower salaries at will.

So, if I'm right, the next step is for the state pass legislation allowing it to take over "failing schools" — whatever it decides "failing" means — and put them under the control of something similar to Louisiana's RSD. The schools can then be turned over to charter operators, who will receive a healthy dose of the federal charter money that's supposed to flow into the state ($14 million in the first stage, something like $40 million more later), which will give them higher per student funding than our woefully underfunded district schools. Private, pro-charter foundation money will flow to those schools as well.

The RSD schools will be the best funded schools in the state. They'll trumpet the shiny new laptops for students, the white boards in every classroom and all kinds of other costly, high tech updates and give the impression that the extra goodies are evidence that charter schools have a better idea of how to educate kids. And they'll throw the media a few students and parents who will say how their lives have changed because of the new, improved schools.

If all this comes to pass, it will take a few years for test results to give any indication of whether Arizona's version of the Recovery School District has had any effect. And even if the test scores go up, no one will know how much is attributable to the increased funding those schools receive and how much has to do with the changed educational landscape. Regardless, educational privatization will have a stronger foothold in the state.

Teachers, teacher unions and other supporters of public education, take note. If you hear an uptick in phrases like "failing schools," "the state taking over failing schools" and "recovery distict," be prepared to fight what's coming next.

NOTE: For some reason, our comments section is balky. If you want to make a comment on this post but are experiencing trouble, please email your comment directly to me: safier@schooltales.net.