erase the board – Workers Voice

July 7, 2019July 9, 2019

New Beginnings Charter School Scandal: Children Pay the Price for CEO’s Greed

By Gabriel Mangano

One month after their scheduled graduation ceremony, 80 of 155 Kennedy High School seniors will not be able to graduate until they make up state requirements. This is the latest scandal from New Beginnings Charter Network (NBCN). Other charter schools are failing, with sudden closings and outrageously excessive punishments and financial corruption. The toll on our children in this failed experiment will continue to grow until we demand the return of our schools as public schools operated by an elected community school board.

In March, New Beginnings administrator Dr. Runell King alerted New Beginnings CEO Michelle Blouin-Williams to 17 illegal, manually changed final grades in Algebra III from F to D. These changes were made to increase the school’s graduation rate and allow it to retain its charter, even though it received an F on standardized performance. Blouin-Williams was forced to resign over these grade irregularities, as well as forging board minutes to approve a busing contract. However, for Kennedy seniors, the horror has just begun.

King’s exposure of grade change irregularities led to the state and New Beginnings to investigate all graduating seniors and other student records. New Beginnings hired a consulting firm TenSquare, LLC at $90,000 to manage the Charter, and the firm’s research found nine distinct problems. End of Course (EOC) tests were not given, were failed or results were not recorded; incorrect class coding and failure to record final grades were frequent; transfer students had incomplete transcripts; and some students were over the state absence limit. Most outrageous was that the leadership had failed to correct the problem that allowed staff to be able to change grades. After the report, five Kennedy administrators resigned.

As a result, 80 of 155 seniors have still not been cleared to receive a diploma. New Beginnings says it will develop individual plans for credits and skills for those students who are not eligible to receive a diploma. For these students the lack of a diploma is forcing many to wonder if they will be able to attend college or trade programs or even get jobs until this mess is resolved.

So far, the pro-Charter Orleans Parish School Board has only “considered” revoking NBCN’s contract over improper grade changes and financial malfeasance (stealing). It’s clear that NBCN and the entire charter experiment has failed our children. It’s time for parents, teachers, and students to demand high quality public schools run for the education of our children instead of large paychecks for profit -making company executives who are doing a worse job than the OPSB.

Join the Erase the Board Coalition, which is fighting for our children and their right to a quality public education.

July 7, 2019July 10, 2019

Income Inequality in New Orleans Charter Schools

By Beatrice Deslondes, Letter to the Editor

Many charter school and charter network leaders are earning upwards of $200,000 per year in a city with a median income of $38,721.

My survey of budget audits for 34 New Orleans charter schools for the 2017-2018 school year reveals:

Among charter networks, CEOs received an average salary of $190,743 while managing an average of 4 schools.
Among non-network schools, the average principal earned a base salary of $143,417.

The salary charts of the neighboring public school district of Jefferson Parish recommend that a principal earn up to 1.75 times a teacher’s salary. On average, leaders in New Orleans earned 2.96 times what teachers earned.

Most audits stopped including teacher salaries in 2017-2018, but audits for the two previous years reveal a trend of increasing inequality. Between the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 school years:

Average teacher pay dropped nearly 1% at non-network schools ($50,644 to $49,768) and 0.2% at networks (from $51,005 to $50,640).
Average leader salaries increased nearly 9% at non-network schools (from $144,217 to $155,234) and over 20% at networks (from $156,828 to $176,329).

Teacher shortages are a problem in New Orleans. According to a Cowen Institute report, teachers in New Orleans with Master’s degrees and 5 years of experience would need to spend 44% of their income on rent alone.

Information about pay for paraprofessionals or co-teachers is lacking in the audits. The Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) lists salaries for “Aides” between $18,863 and $23,955.

The school workers who support students’ most critical needs—security, nutrition, and health—are among the worst paid. The OPSB pay scale permits paying nurses and security workers as little as $22,427, while nutrition workers can earn as little as $16,000.

A 2018 report by the United Way of Louisiana concluded that the minimum annual income required to support human life in New Orleans in 2016 was $19,548 for a single adult and $53,988 for a family of four.

Income inequality contributes to high turnover rates in the school system and economic instability in the communities it is obligated to serve. Pay transparency and living wages for all school employees should be required of all institutions receiving public funds.

June 11, 2019June 15, 2019

Education Not Experimentation

May 18, Erase the Board led a march demanding quality public schools.

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.

April 13, 2019

Erase the Board Coalition

To the Orleans Parish School Board,

We have made our demands plain on several occasions, and here they are again.

First, we would like to acknowledge the attempt to implement two of our demands, which was the School Improvement Plan as well as the issue of TRAUMA—although they were not done as we originally stated. A part of the reason these demands were not implemented correctly is the same reason we are in this position in terms of education in the city of New Orleans. Your work is being done without including several other very important stakeholders such as parents, community members and local experts.

Erase The Board Coalition, as a group, has no interest in meeting with any entity in private. However, if there is a genuine interest in publicly going on record that this disastrous experiment has been a complete failure and you display a vested interest in course correcting, we are ready and willing to roll up our sleeves and work shoulder to shoulder with you to secure a truly equitable public school system for Orleans Parish students and families.

In closing, we would again like to show our demands:

Implement an immediate moratorium on charter school expansion
No more school closures. Orleans Parish School Board must permanently take over every failing school and implement school improvement plans using the sustainable community school model (e.g. Louisiana Legislature SR 133)
Conduct a series of accountability audits administered by the Erase The Board Coalition in schools that have a C score or lower
For the five schools set to close, Orleans Parish School Board needs to take over each school for it to remain open, and pay for private tutoring for all students impacted by the potential school closures and the instability at those campuses during the 2018-2019 school year
Abolish the One App and develop a more equitable centralized enrollment system that prioritizes access to neighborhood schools

We love our children and sincerely believe that these demands are not luxuries and should be the standard. We are diligent in our work and unwavering in our belief that this is both necessary and attainable. If these simple demands are not met, we have no choice but to continue to pull apart the fabric of this very unstable system and the people who have helped create and maintain it.

Sincerely,

Erase The Board Coalition

About Erase The Board Coalition: The Erase The Board Coalition is a grassroots-led effort composed of community leaders, parents, and grassroots education justice groups such as FFLIC and Step Up Louisiana, as well as Peoples’ Assembly and Take Em Down NOLA, established to remove the current Orleans Parish School Board members off of our board and to replace them with leaders who will actually listen to the demands of their community and run our schools as sustainable community schools! #EraseTheBoard #CharterExperimentNOLA #LetKidsBeKids #WeChoose #ReclaimOurSchools #SchoolChoiceScam #FollowTheMoney #NOLACharterCorruption #SchoolToPrisonPipeline #WhatsTheNameOfOurSchoolNOLA