BATON ROUGE -- Gov. Kathleen Blanco's legislation allowing the state to
take over most New Orleans schools was approved Wednesday by a House
committee that also passed an even farther-reaching rival bill that
would take all the city's schools away from the beleaguered local school
board.
Both bills survived close votes in the House Education Committee and go
next to the House floor. Both were offered during a special legislative
session that Blanco called to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina, which devastated New Orleans. The city school board was
operating 110 schools before Katrina hit on Aug. 29. All are currently
closed and only a few are expected to re-open in the coming months.
Blanco made a personal visit to the committee to ask for passage of her
measure, repeating her contention that the Katrina disaster gives the
state a rare opportunity to try to improve education in New Orleans.
"Even before the storm, New Orleans schools were not educating our
children as they so deserve," Blanco said.
Blanco first outlined her proposal last week as state education
officials released figures showing 68 New Orleans schools operating
before Katrina were failing, earning a label of "academically
unacceptable" based on testing.
The state already can take over perennially failing schools. Under
Blanco's proposal, any New Orleans school with a performance score below
the state average of 86.2 could be taken over by state officials and
handed off to independent operators as charter schools. The proposal
would bring the number of New Orleans schools that would be eligible for
takeover by the state to 97, with about a dozen left under Orleans
Parish School Board control.
Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Metairie, said the board should be stripped of all
schools, particularly the ones that are performing well. "Why would you
leave them to that group that we don't trust to run the other 90-plus
schools?" he told the committee.
Ultimately, the committee decided to let the full House see both bills,
turning back pleas from one of the state's major teacher unions and from
some New Orleans lawmakers who said the bill was being rushed through.
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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