Tag Archives: Gary Rubenstein

Privatized Education Disaster in New Orleans

3 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/3/2025

August 29th was the twentieth anniversary of hurricane Katrina wiping out New Orleans. On this occasion, the billionaire-funded baloney machine is outdoing itself. Ravi Gupta wrote a post for ‘The 74’ called, “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools.” The Washington Post assigned a guy from the United Kingdom, Ian Birrell, to write, “Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution.” I gave up my subscription to the Washington Post some time ago but my friend Gary Rubinstein wrote a post about Birrell’s article. He noted, “Supposedly based on recent research, it basically trotted out all the old bogus claims that I hadn’t heard anyone claim in at least ten years.”

The truth is that the all charter school district is a giant failure that even corruption rampant New Orleans is struggling to hide.

Before Katrina, Louisiana was passing laws aimed at taking over the New Orleans public school system and there was some merit to their endeavor. Six interim superintendents appeared between 1998 and 2005. An FBI investigation led to 11 indictments in 2004 and by end of the school year in May 2005 the district was effectively bankrupt. Unfortunately, the state created the Recovery School District (RSD) and turned to privatization to solve the problem.

By the end of the 2004-2005 school year, the state had taken over five New Orleans schools. RSD turned all five into charter schools operated by four groups: University of New Orleans; Middle School Advocates, Inc.; Knowledge Is Power Program; and Institute for Academic Excellence. All set to begin in the 2005-06 school year; however Katrina made landfall soon followed by “disaster capitalists” swooping like swarming buzzards.

Before Katrina, Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), which ran the public schools in New Orleans, operated 123 schools; in the spring following the storm, it was running just four. With OPSB out of the road and RSD in charge, “pheaulanthropists” like the Walton family, Bill Gates and Eli Broad were ready to help.

2005 Devastation by Hurricane Katrina

In 2009, Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) made it more difficult for schools to remain academically acceptable, effectively ending most of the remaining public schools in New Orleans. BESE raised the minimum school performance scores for academic unacceptability to 65 for the 2010-11 school year and 75 for the 2011-12 school year. By 2018, there were no public schools left.

Evaluating the Results

In her 2018 book, After the Education Wars, Andrea Gabor wrote, “To borrow another ancient military metaphor, the New Schools Venture Fund and its New Schools for New Orleans offshoot, is the Trojan horse that funnels outside money, expertise, and influence to New Orleans.” (Page 229) The majority of the school privatizing billionaires invested by funneling funds through New Schools Venture Fund and New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO). Most of the investing was in schools adhering to the KIPP no-excuses model.

Around 2014, Neerav Kingsland was leading NSNO. He would go on to work for Reed Hastings and then become the leader of the Hastings and John Arnold created City Fund designed to promote privatization and end voter directed public schools.

In his article for ‘The 74’, Ravi Gupta claims, “There’s no one better at parsing the data than Doug Harris, who chairs Tulane’s economics department and directs the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans.” It is almost impossible to check Harris’s work because he has proprietary control of much of the education data from New Orleans. Furthermore, confidence in his work is undermined by his team sharing office space on the seventh floor of 1555 Poydras Street with NSNO.

In June, Harris released “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons”. It is organized around twelve conclusions. Of course conclusion-1 claims improved student outcomes in testing scores, graduation rates and college going. (Page 8) Improved graduation rates and increased college going is a national trend for which it is hard to credit the all charter school system. The claim of improved testing results cannot be shown. Since the entire system was shut down and then reconstituted as a significantly smaller privatized organization, there is nothing to compare to that was not changed.

Gary Rubenstein explained:

“Reformers needed a new experiment where the schools would keep the same students they already had, but the staff at those schools would be replaced with nonunion charter school educators, and charter chains or start-up charter boards would run the schools. Race to the Top provided Tennessee the funding and incentive to test the reformers’ hypotheses.” (Doomed page 19)

This experiment demonstrated that it was not the public schools causing poor performance and privatizing them provided no improvement.

There are a few items in Harris’s report that do not support the privatized system. One of those is Conclusion-5: where he shares, “Transportation costs doubled, and students are traveling farther to get to school.”  (Page 20) From his map, it appears that more than 30% of the students are spending in excess of one-hour a day on busses which must be miserable and drives up costs.

In the report’s acknowledgement section, there is another reason to be skeptical of Doug Harris’s results. It says, “Second, we thank our funders, including Tulane and the Murphy Institute, but also the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Spencer Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, and Booth Bricker Foundation.”

Like almost all large foundations the Spencer Foundation (EIN: 36-6078558) with $667,415,167 in assets makes a few troubling grants but in general is supporting research and scholarship. The same could be said for the William T. Grant Foundation (EIN: 13-1624021) with $403,141,185 in assets.

However, The Booth-Bicker Fund (EIN: 72-0818077) with assets of $68,702,721 is spending heavily to promote privatized education and almost no organization in America has spent more to privatize public education than the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (EIN: 26-3241764) with its whopping $4,309,915,225 in assets. Of course, these large amounts of money are influencing Harris and his team.

What Do the Locals Say?

In April, at the NPE conference in Columbus, Ohio, Ashana Bigard and Antonio Travis presented on the all charter school system in New Orleans.  Antonio’s description of being a student in New Orleans sounded like classic child abuse. Mrs. Bigard informed us that New Orleans schools are being sued regularly because of their practices with children. However, there is almost no reporting about the suits because the settlements always include a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). She told the story of asking a KIPP administrator how many NDA’s they had created. He said none but when she responded that she was in court just the week before and saw a KIPP NDA created, he backed off and promised to get back to her. She is not holding her breath.

Ashana Bigard is on the Right

Last year, when a charter school failed, the superintendent replaced it with the first New Orleans public school since 2017. The superintendent was fired, but that is what Mrs. Bigard said parents want. She said they desire that every time a charter school fails it is replaced by a more stable public school. Charter schools have become a revolving door with a couple schools going out of business every year.

In her 2018 book, “After the Education Wars,” Andrea Gabor reported that a third of New Orleans charter schools had been shuttered.

Senator Joseph Bouie Jr. equated the NOLA school system to the “Tuskegee syphilis experiment.” Professor Bouie, former administrator of Southern University at New Orleans, had good reason for this analogy. At Tuskegee University, black men with syphilis were given no treatment even after penicillin was shown to be effective. Dozens of men died and their wives, children and untold number of others were infected. NOLA black residents had their community schools taken away and replaced by privatized schools, often miles away. This “experiment” stole their rights and bestowed the public schools to private actors.

In 2021, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona visited the Orleans Public School District. He heard first-hand the growing disillusionment with the all charter system. Four of the six parents told him they wanted to go back to neighborhood schools. Parents complained about Teach for America placing unqualified teachers in schools and the One App process for not offering school choice where they lived.

Raynard Sanders who has over forty years of experience in teaching, education administration and community development, said the charter experiment has “been a total disaster in every area.” He asserted NOLA had “the worst test scores since 2006, the lowest ACT scores, and the lowest NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores.”

In a letter to the editor, former OPSD superintendent, Barbara Ferguson, stated:

“The state took over 107 of New Orleans’ 120 public schools and turned them into charter schools. Last year, 56 of New Orleans’ 68 public schools had scores below the state average. Thus, after nearly 20 years, over 80% of New Orleans schools remain below the state average. This charter school experiment has been a failure.”

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More Proof: Charter School Experiment FAILED

25 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/25/2024

Two new reports detail the high closure rates of charter schools and the negative effect of school closures on students. In 2020, Network for Public Education (NPE) produced “Broken Promises,” the first ever comprehensive study of charter school closure rates. Their just released new report, “Doomed to Fail,” updates “Broken Promises.” In May, Houston researcher, Jeonghyeok Kim, published “The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students’ Educational and Labor Market Outcomes.” Taken together these two new studies demonstrate why the charter school industry is a dangerous failure.

Since the inception of charter schools in the 1990s, billionaires and entrepreneurs have worked to sell these privatized schools. Under Bill Clinton’s leadership, the Democratic Leadership Council embraced school choice believing in the power of the entrepreneurial economy to reform schools (Left Behind Pages 122-127). The federal government started experimenting with charter schools. A rewrite of the 1994 Elementary and Secondary Education Act included a provision for a new federal Charter School Program. In 1995, the new program granted a total of $4,539,548 to nine states. Today, $400 million federal dollars are spent yearly to promote charter schools and oversight is relatively weak.

There is no denying that some charter schools are excellent, however, in general they are unstable. As NPE has documented their closure rates are so high as to be a big risk for parents and students.

Doomed to Fail

Reformers believed that a large-scale charter experiment would either prove or disprove the superiority of charter schools. In 2006, after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana turned to the new Recovery School District (RSD) and all the schools in New Orleans became charter schools. However, because the students who returned to New Orleans were different from those in the city before, and there was an enormous influx of philanthropic funding, it was impossible to determine if the charter experiment worked.

Gary Rubenstein explained:

“Reformers needed a new experiment where the schools would keep the same students they already had, but the staff at those schools would be replaced with nonunion charter school educators, and charter chains or start-up charter boards would run the schools. Race to the Top provided Tennessee the funding and incentive to test the reformers’ hypotheses.” (Doomed page 19)

The theory was that “failing” schools in the bottom 5% of testing data would be taken over by charter schools. The goal was to show that these privatized schools would soon be in the top 25% of schools on testing results. It was a complete failure. None of the 33 charterized schools ever left the bottom.

This experiment demonstrated that it was not the public schools causing poor performance and privatizing them provided no improvement. The type of school, charter or public, made no difference. However, unstable schools are harmful and “Doomed to Fail” shows that charter schools induce a failure rate crap shoot.

The NPE report describes how professional marketing campaigns convince parents that the new charter school is different and better than the nearby public school. “Doomed to Fail” states:

“However, as hundreds of thousands of families have found, enrolling your child in a charter school comes with enormous risk. Charter schools close at far higher rates than public schools. And, unlike public school districts where infrequent closures are orderly with the district finding a new school for the child, charter school closures are often chaotic and abrupt, taking parents by surprise.” (Doomed Page 1)

“Doomed to Fail” Page 11

Researcher Ryan Pfleger, Ph.D. used the federal Common Core of Data to create the table above. Each cohort is comprised of every year’s batch of new charter schools. The table informs us that 16% of new charter schools close their doors within the first three years. The ten 15-year cohorts failed at a 49% rate which is a 1% improvement over the 2020 “Broken Promises” report. However, the huge federal COVID payments of 2021 probably kept many schools in business that otherwise would have failed. The 20-year failure rate of 55% makes it clear that failure keeps happening and that more than half of all charter schools close their doors forcing families to make other arrangements.

The charter industry says their schools are more academically accountable and are closed if they do not meet the agreed to goals. However, NPE’s research discovered that this was the cause for only a minority of the schools that closed. Not being able to maintain enough enrollment to be viable or corruption and mismanagement were the cause in more than 68% of closures. 

“Doomed to Fail” Page 13

Closures Bring Long Term Negative Effects

In 2019, Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reported on 17 studies of the effect of school closures on students. There were differing results but in general reading and math scores suffered but after three years, the academic effects seemed to have disappeared.

Researcher Jeonghyeok Kim took a longer range look at the student outcomes and the results were surprising. Like other studies, Kim’s showed a short term academic decline and then recovery within three years. However, he also discovered long term discipline issues, lowered college completion rates and reduced incomes.

In EdWeek, Libby Stanford reported, “Kim centered his research around a dataset of 470 Texas schools that closed from 1998 to 2015.” Stanford also noted, “In a study of federal enrollment data from 2000 to 2018, researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that majority-Black schools were three times more likely to close than schools with smaller enrollments of Black students.” Since Kim associated the harshest closed school outcomes with economically disadvantaged families, this represents a double whammy.

The abstract from Kim’s paper states:

“Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students’ educational and labor market outcomes. The findings indicate that experiencing school closures results in disruptions in both test scores and behavior. While the drop in test scores is recovered within three years, behavioral issues persist. This study further finds decreases in post-secondary education attainment, employment, and earnings at ages 25–27. These impacts are particularly pronounced among students in secondary education, Hispanic students, and those from originally low-performing schools and economically disadvantaged families.”

Kim’s ground breaking research shows that the negative effects of experiencing a school closure are not just short term, but appear to be a life long hindrance.

Conclusion

NPE’s new study, “Doomed to Fail,” makes it clear how unstable privatized schools are. The study also reports on charter skullduggery and specific school closures like Jubilee academy, sharing:

“On August 14, 2023, Jubilee Academies Highland Park in San Antonio, Texas, began the school year. Two weeks later, parents were informed that the school would close by mid-September. Families would have to find another school or agree to bus their child to another Jubilee school. Two hundred and ten students were displaced.” (Doomed Page 14)

When “Doomed to Fail” is combined with Jeonghyeok Kim’s new research, it is clear that parents are risking the future of their children when they enroll them in a charter school.

To be clear, trusting your child to a charter school is a bad idea.

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