Head of recovery district to visit EBR
The leader of public schools in New Orleans is visiting Baton Rouge to try to persuade public school officials here their schools should be emulating the schools downriver.
John White plans to meet with the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at the school system’s Professional Development Center, 3000 Sherwood Forest Blvd. The board is not planning to take any votes, and is not allowing public comment during the discussion.
White is the superintendent of the state-run Recovery School District, or RSD, which oversees dozens of schools in New Orleans and a smaller number in Baton Rouge and other parts of Louisiana.
\White is also Gov. Bobby Jindal’s pick to serve as the state superintendent of education, replacing Paul Pastorek who left in May. That nomination has been on hold because White could not get enough votes on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Recent BESE elections, for which Jindal allies raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, fell in favor of Jindal, clearing the way in all likelihood for White to take over as state superintendent in January.
School Board President Barbara Freiberg said there has been a lot of speculation about what’s going to happen if and when White takes over as state superintendent, particularly with the lowest performing schools in Baton Rouge, a few of which could be taken over immediately. She said she had a private conversation with White on Nov. 14.
“I just want the board to hear what he has told me,” Freiberg said.
After spending his first months focusing on New Orleans, White has turned his attention to low-performing schools in Baton Rouge that are part of the RSD.
White, like Pastorek before him, has resisted sporadic attempts by East Baton Rouge Parish school system officials to allow some of the takeover schools to return to the district. Instead, White has focused on finding new charter school groups to run the most problematic schools or, failing that, having the state run them directly.
White started first with Advance Baton Rouge, a charter school management group with four schools in Baton Rouge and one in Morganza, where he successfully persuaded that group’s board to pull out of running those schools over the next 19 months. Instead, Advance Baton Rouge will seek other charter school operators to take the Baton Rouge and Morganza schools starting in fall 2013.
In a Nov. 18 interview with The Advocate, White said the idea is to “replicate all of the corps elements of the New Orleans strategy.” That strategy involves turning as many low-performing schools as possible into charter schools, and if those schools do not work after two or three years, replacing those charter school operators with new ones.
In 2008, when the state began taking over low-performing schools in Baton Rouge, Advance Baton Rouge, which had not run charters schools before, was one of the groups willing to try to take over low-performing schools in Baton Rouge.
White said he is working to entice charter school management groups with track records of success to Baton Rouge, many of them already working in New Orleans, by giving those groups more time to apply and set up for the arrival of students than the charter groups RSD chartered in 2008 and 2009 to run schools in Baton Rouge.
In particular, White proposes giving these groups more “seed money,” building “a base of talent and educators,” and looking into creating “a nonprofit that helps facilitate change.”
White offered another reason why charter school groups in New Orleans would move north.
“The highest performing organizations are running out of real estate,” he said. “They want to expand their impact to children.”
White said the planned changes for Advance Baton Rouge are the template for what he would like to see for all of the low-performing schools in East Baton Rouge Parish, some of them still operated by the parish school system.
“We need to face the reality that what we are doing in EBR and in RSD schools in north Baton Rouge is not working and we have an opportunity to do what is working and do it together,” White said.
In a Nov. 14 talk to the Baton Rouge Press Club, White sketched out a similar vision. He said north Baton Rouge has about 30 low-performing schools — some operated by RSD, some by the East Baton Rouge Parish school system — that will likely have “F” grades after this school year and that are ripe for a change.
White displayed a chart showing the East Baton Rouge Parish school system has shown steady growth academically in recent years, similar to the state as a whole. The chart also showed schools in New Orleans, both ones run by RSD and the much smaller Orleans Parish school system, growing even faster and nearly pulling even with Baton Rouge.
“We know we have something in Louisiana that is working for kids with challenges,” he said.
White has said that the East Baton Rouge Parish school system can compete against other charter school groups by setting up its own charter school management group.
Freiberg said the school system would have to make some changes to enter such a competition.
“I don’t think we’re ramped up to do that,” she said. “Perhaps when the new superintendent (for East Baton Rouge Parish school system) is there we can.”
Superintendent John Dilworth is planning to leave in June when his three-year contract expires and the parish school system has launched a search for his replacement.