Let's highlight a key passage from the RSD's press release that accompanied the master plan presentation from Monday. Unfortunately I cannot find an electronic copy of what was handed out in the press packets so you'll just have to believe my transcription.
The blueprint proposes a period between 2012 and 2016 when currently occupied buildings could be discontinued if the recommendations are implemented. Any buildings on landbanked property that are in excess of 51% damaged will be demolished. Any historic property or other important or valuable buildings will be repurposed, including the possibility that these properties may be sold to third parties and used for another purpose. Landbanked or repurposed schools could be made available to third parties to revive for a school, if permission is secured from the appropriate governing authority.
Now I think this was a very interesting thing to include.
Why would third parties want to revive a school in a town where, theoretically, our brand new '21st century schools' would be meeting our educational needs?
And why would third party operators be reviving landbanked schools and not the public school system itself?
At each presentation that Parsons-Concordia has given thus far, Mr. Bingler has been very careful to say that the master plan "was agnostic in terms of operator," meaning that determinations about the future of certain facilities did not take into account whether or not the building was operated by the RSD, the OPSB, or a charter.
Yet the RSD's own press release already is already floating this idea of a future of privatized education, but you have it specifically tied to the master plan's Phase II - which has no funding.
Who would those third party operators be and which communities would they serve?
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A brief observation from Dr. Lance Hill of the Southern Institute for Education and Research:
Note the plan plans to demolish virtually all the open-admission public schools between St. Charles and the river: Banneker Elementary, Arthur Ashe Middle, McDonogh 7 Elementary, New Orleans Free School, and Bauduit Elementary.
The school facility demolition plan has nothing to do with flood protection. Note below that the plan is to demolish schools above sea level that have never flooded (uptown open-admission elementaries), while renovating selective admission schools like Franklin and Lusher that are below sea level and did flood. The criteria is clearly not elevation.
That's very interesting because "flood protection" is the refrain I constantly hear as a justification for withholding public dollars from certain neighborhoods in general terms.
UPDATE:
From loyal reader and blogger Alli (emphasis a combination of hers and mine):
"...Agnostic in terms of operator" and "third party operators" sounds like it's in reference to this article from the NYT over the weekend:The theorist who has had the most influence over Pastorek is Paul T. Hill, who runs a research group at the University of Washington called the Center on Reinventing Public Education. In September 2005, while much of New Orleans was still submerged, Hill published an article in Education Week that urged state and federal officials and philanthropic foundations to resist the temptation simply to send emergency aid to whatever programs seemed most in need. "The circumstances call for a coherent strategy, not just a round of do-gooding," he wrote. "Don't spend money rebuilding the old district structure."
In 2000, in a book titled "It Takes a City," Hill and two other researchers laid out a new architecture for urban school reform that they called the Diverse Providers Strategy. Under this model, local school boards wouldn't run a school system hierarchically, the way they usually did; instead, they would oversee a "portfolio" of schools, some run directly by the board and many run on contract by nonprofits, universities or private companies. Schools would receive money on a per-student basis, and principals could then use that money to staff their schools as they liked and pay for whatever instructional methods they chose. Each school would negotiate salaries and work rules directly with its teachers. The system's small central office would be responsible only for oversight, though it would have considerable power to hold principals accountable: schools that didn't produce results would be closed, and successful schools would be imitated and replicated.
It is this model that Pastorek and Vallas have adapted for New Orleans. Pastorek says that he wants the state's role to be that of a "harvester of high-quality schools" in the city — nurturing promising ones and weeding out failing ones. "If schools run into trouble, you support them," Pastorek said. "But if they're still failing after you support them, then you pull the plug and bring in a new provider or an experienced provider. Over a period of 5 or 6 years, 10 at the most, we'll have nothing but high-quality operators in our city."
Diverse Providers: Because New Orleans Has Never Had Any Problems With Contracts, Ever.
Wait, when has New Orleans ever had trouble with private contracting? What is Alli talking about?
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