A Letter From New Orleans
A member of the education advocacy group Erase the Board posted this on Facebook over the weekend. Just in case you’re wondering if New Orleans is a success.
Dear America,
16 years post Katrina the data proves New Orleans is not the model. No not the data that economists like to use, but the common sense data.
If the experiment worked, New Orleans would be the place companies who are leaving Silicon Valley would be flocking to instead of Austin. If the experiment worked, the Tourism Industry would be forced to pay a living wage because they would be competing for workers with the Healthcare industry. If the experiment worked, the City’s index on the Child would NOT show that 65% or higher of 3rd graders still cannot read or perform math on Grade Level. If the experiment worked, you would not have the leaders of this movement doing a bait and switch to shift the attention to something called “Growth” scores and not “Performance” scores. If experiment worked, the crime numbers for the youth would not be spiking because these children would see a better future actualizing instead of boredom, desperation and lack of hope. If the experiment worked, we would have more than 10-15 out of 65+ schools scoring higher than a B on the school performance scores.
So America, I challenge you to look at the data, look a communities with GOOD Education systems and the results on the metrics for a healthy community, and then look at New Orleans.
Signed
Impacted Community Member.