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No Matter What! Schools in New Orleans

Friends,

  Here's a news article updating us on the sadly oft-forgotten situation in post-Katrina New Orleans and public education.  One organization, No Matter What (linked here to NewTeacher as a partner) is striving to provide support and resources to the folks taking up the teaching work down there.  My hope here is that the NewTeacher community might use this particular post to offer some ideas as to how we might help out the good work down in Nola.  What are some ideas?  How can we help?  I often ask for folks to comment but this time...it feels important that we step up.  Thoughts?

Against Odds, New Orleans Schools Fight Back

By ADAM NOSSITER

Published: April 30, 2008

NEW ORLEANS — No road leads to George Washington Carver Senior High School here. It sits on no street and has no address. No sign announces it.

On rethinking teaching

A former student sent this along for us to think about. The suggestion is that we're thinking about this work in fundamentally wrong ways. How very John Dewey, yes? She could be on to something.....thoughts?

Rethink ways to teach

By EILEEN LANDAY, The Providence Journal
Thursday, December 6, 2007

As a society, we've raised the bar on what it means to comprehend a text. At the same time, we've increased the percentage of students we expect to master these processes well beyond the 50 percent who graduated from high school half a century ago. Recognizing that many students don't achieve the standards now being set, we have labeled them "struggling readers." That label seems incorrect and inadvertently ironic, and it signals the murkiness of our own understanding.