Behind the Charter facade.

• Author: France, Jason
• Position: Essay

I worked at the Louisiana Department of Education when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. While many residents were drowning in their homes, choking on the oily toxic floodwaters, expiring from exposure on their rooftops, or furiously evacuating if they had the wherewithal, operatives at the Department and the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education were scheming to remake the city's school system to their liking. On August 29, 2005, canals were breached across New Orleans, killing more than 1,000 people. Public education in New Orleans also died that day. New Orleans is now a 100 percent charter district.

Louisiana had charter schools long before Katrina. Many of our first charters were closed for gross malfeasance and fraud. Some claimed they had hundreds of students, and received payments for these students, although they actually had none.

One of Louisiana's oldest charter schools, Delhi Charter, made national news for requiring girls to take pregnancy tests. If these tests came back positive, girls were forced to withdraw.

In Louisiana, charter schools have intensified segregation by race and poverty.

The fate of one school, John McDonogh, also known as John Mac, speaks volumes about charters in New Orleans. John Mac was in trouble before Katrina. It was located in a historic building on Esplanade Avenue in Mid City, a nice part of town. But the school itself had fallen into decay after many years of neglect by the local school board. After the storm, the community had a glimmer of hope. Donors with big dollars were pouring into the city, and people from around the country were lining up to help. A local community group applied for a grant from the Waltons. They were awarded close to $1 million to fix up the school. Paul Valias, a self-styled reformer and recent evacuee from the Philadelphia school system, where he left behind an enormous budget crisis, was taking over as superintendent in New Orleans.

When Valias learned of this windfall for the community, he set to work to get grants for a number of Recovery School District schools he was brought to New Orleans to oversee. Valias did receive a much larger award from the Waltons totaling almost $6.3 million for schools including John Mac, which he took over from the local community and began to run. The school appeared to do well enough under Vallas's tenure. The truth became public only in 2014 when the state performed an audit that showed Vallas's schools had purged...