By Christina Tareq
“This is our Tuskegee,” shouted Armtrice Cowart, co-founder of Erase the Board, a grassroots coalition of community leaders, parents, and education justice groups. “Our children are being experimented on. This is our civil rights movement.” On Saturday, May 18, Erase the Board, along with the Peoples’ Assembly, Take Em Down NOLA and Step Up Louisiana, took to the streets to demand an end to OneApp, an end to charter school expansion and to demand the re-opening of quality public schools that are adequately resourced with the city’s tax dollars.
Post-Katrina, the New Orleans education system has become a cash cow for private charter school networks. Charter schools are not accountable to parents or children but only to the people who bankroll these education experiments on children through grants. Charter schools are also allowed to use unchecked disciplinary action which traumatizes children through rigid and damaging “behavior rules.” They are increasingly replacing educators, nurses and school social workers with police officers. They’ve also replaced thousands of qualified local educators with unqualified young people through Teach for America.
Currently, nearly 60% of students in the top 6 performing schools in New Orleans are white while 80% of Black students are in failing charter schools. The closure of public schools and the rise of charter schools marks a new era of segregation in education. If you support equitable and quality education in Orleans Parish for ALL children, get involved with Erase the Board. You can find out more on their social media pages @erasetheboardnola.
