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.

It is little more than a collection of prefabricated steel-and-wood classrooms floating in a no man’s land by the highway, and its vague location and bootstrap atmosphere sum up the problems and promise of the big education experiment now under way in this city nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina. There is no gym and no auditorium at Carver, and at breaks the school’s 350 students congregate on unshaded strips of concrete between the trailerlike boxes.

Carver’s only context is ruin — it sits across a field from the flooded-out pre-Katrina Carver High — and yet it is trying all over again, with new teachers and new methods, at what largely failed before the storm and immediately afterward: educating its students. Carver High is hope’s challenge to bleak circumstance.

And it is beginning to meet that challenge. Though there is disorder in many classrooms, there is also learning going on, amid the struggle. In an English class taught by Courtney Stuckwisch, the searing hard-times images of a Langston Hughes poem touch a chord, and the students look up eagerly. In Colleston Morgan’s social studies class, students beetle earnestly over textbooks for a lesson on supply and demand.

All around the city there is a similar would-be alchemy. Dozens of new charter schools, a flood of idealistic young teachers from elsewhere around the country — now as many as 17 percent of the total here — and a hard-charging reform superintendent from Chicago are all arrayed to rescue one of America’s most needy student bodies, which ranked at the bottom of a bottom-dwelling state even before Hurricane Katrina.

Read the full aritcle at the New York Times

Comments

[Shannon]

The New York Times article is very interesting. Although the situation in NOLA is presented as greatly improving, I am concerned by some of the things written in the article. For one, where are all of the teachers with degrees in Education going? Is there some kind of brain drain or flight from NOLA? The article mentions the "flood of idealistic young teachers from elsewhere around the country" and the fact that by next year NOLA "will be the largest Teach for America district in the nation." But where are all of the people with degrees in Education going? The second thing that seems concerning to me is the "wide range" of teaching styles the article indicates are being used. Based on the two examples they listed, I am not sure I would support either of those approaches. I hope they use others than the two listed, but I would have liked to see a broader, more diverse list of teaching styles. The third thing that really bothered me about this article were some of the quotes and comments from some of the teachers. There seem to be a lot of underlying assumptions and perpetuated stereotypes about the kids according to their teachers. This is most concerning to me. One comment in particular bothered me: "'The kids, for most of them, it's no more than a social dating scene...They don't care about the work.'" A teacher actually said that about his students. That is infuriating. I hope he was misquoted because I cannot imagine making that assumption about any of my students let alone all of my students.

This semester I have really been trying to incorporate ideas about social justice into my teaching philosophy. Reading that article makes me worry about the social injustices students appear to be suffering from in NOLA. I am very encouraged by the No Matter What! organization, however. As a pre-service teacher in leadership positions, I am excited to see how pre-service teachers and student organizations can partner with No Matter What! to make sure that there is an end to the social injustices in NOLA. Whether the social injustices come from assumptions made by teachers, lack of resources, or whatever, it is important that we take action to stop it. I have sent an email to the contact person for No Matter What! I specifically asked about how School of Education students can support this organization, and I'm interested to hear what she has to say. Hopefully, she will respond with some suggestions that people can work on collaboratively. I would love to see some multilingual, multicultural, interdisciplinary curriculum/resources from Indianapolis make it onto their H.E.E.L. Mobile, a teacher resource lending library on wheels.

[Rob H.]

New Orleans’ notorious homeless camp cleared

http://southernstudies.org/facingsouth/2008/07/new-orleans-notorious-homeless-camp.asp