This will be of serious import in our paper on education! THANK YOU!--Mary

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Here's the article I heard on NPR on Tuesday, and there are several other articles listed on the NPR page where I found this one:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6183978

For Charter Schools, New Orleans Is Citywide Labby Larry Abramson  Students in Scarlet Feinberg's fifth-grade class at KIPP BELIEVE: College Prep, a charter school in New Orleans. KIPP is a San Francisco-based charter company that runs two schools in New Orleans and 52 schools nationwide.  More in This SeriesThis is the second in a three-part series on the rebuilding of New Orleans' school system.

Oct. 2, 2006Part 1: Remaking the New Orleans School System  

IN DEPTHRebuilding New Orleans, One Neighborhood at a Time: A neighborhood-by-neighborhood survey reveals a city slowly fighting to return.

Teen Photographers Take Aim at 'My New Orleans': See the city's recovery through the eyes of its youths. 

Morning Edition, October 3, 2006 · In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina destroyed thousands of homes and ruined countless communities. But the storm has also created new hope for the city's school system, long regarded as one of the worst in the nation. New Orleans has become the country's leading laboratory for charter-school experiments. Many educators and parents hope that a rejuvenated school system might help draw residents back into the city.

A New PurposeDrive through the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans and you'll see boarded-up homes and FEMA trailers. But there's one bright spot here: Pierre A. Capdau Charter School on Franklin Street: The school's mission has always been to provide a path to college for kids who ordinarily would not be able to get that far. And now that Katrina basically wiped out the city's education system, this school has a new purpose -- to help lead the recovery of this one neighborhood by drawing families back into this area. At a glance, this class looks like other well-run elementary classes. But this charter is run by the nearby University of New Orleans. Principal Christine Mitchell says the connection with the university provides additional resources that the old system could not."If I wanted someone to come out and talk to my teachers… I had to pay for it, but with UNO, I don't have to pay for that," Mitchell says. "They come out and talk to the teachers and work with the teachers for free, because of the connection, and they come out willingly."New Orleans parents and educators have hope and choices for the first time in a long time. What they do not have is results. Most schools are starting with a blank slate -- it will be a couple of years before test scores will show which schools are doing a good job. Robin Jarvis, superintendent of the state-run Recovery School District insists she will yank charters from schools that are not on the path to success.

If You BelieveAt the KIPP BELIEVE College Prep school, teacher Scarlet Feinberg is putting her new students through their paces. These fifth graders have to get past some addition flashcards before they can enter the classroom. For many of the fifth graders, it's clearly a struggle to demonstrate the second-grade-level skill.In the classroom, Feinberg is relentless in her efforts to make up for years lost in the old Orleans school system, and the months of instruction lost to the storm.KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) is a San Francisco-based charter company that runs two school in New Orleans, and has 52 schools nationwide.Like other KIPP schools, this one relies heavily on a call-and-response style of teaching. It's one way to keep the attention of ten-year-olds who are expected to stay focused for KIPP's nine-and-a-half-hour long school day. The kids are kept so busy; they hardly have time to act out or lose attention -- they wait eagerly for Feinberg to snap her fingers so they can respond in unison.Many of the teachers here are young; Feinberg is in her third year. Charter schools have the freedom to hire whom they want, and for this school, being young and enthusiastic counts for a lot. Feinberg knows that she and the school face tremendous pressure to improve the test scores of the city's most challenging students."But it's great pressure, I mean it's pressure that makes you work harder, that gives you a sense of urgency every day that they must learn these skills," Feinberg says. "If you don't produce the results that need to be produced, it's very possible that you could lose your job."That lack of job security has turned teachers against charter schools in many cities. The threat has been dulled in New Orleans -- the state has taken over failing schools, so teachers unions lost their citywide contract, and much of their clout. The teachers who are working at schools like KIPP BELIEVE don't have time for much of a social life. "The teachers I have gotten have been people who can give 110% of their life right now over to teaching..." says Principal Adam Meinig. "We're here on Saturday on Sunday, painting the walls and unpacking furniture."The federal government has sent millions of dollars to help jump-start charter schools in New Orleans, and the city is being watched closely by charter-school supporters nationwide. Local school reformers, like Sara Usdin of New Schools for New Orleans, say the challenge is to stay away from policy debates about the merits of charter. Usdin says that regardless of who is funding or operating the schools, "What we absolutely have to focus on is what's happening in schools with kids."At lunchtime, the KIPP BELIEVE kids review their times tables by reciting a chant they repeat throughout the day. They may not know it, but their ability to master basic skills may determine the shape of education in New Orleans. Katrina & Recovery

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http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2006/10/02/no_review/print.html

Crescent City blues

By Tony D'Souza

Oct. 02, 2006 | The editors at the New Orleans Review have put together a post-Katrina issue that avoids easy responses to the disaster, withholds simple prognoses for the future, and inhabits its moment of most-relevance so surely that its collective voice rises high above the din. And what a disheartening din it's been. Whether it was Anderson Cooper's repeated public tears, Celine Dion's Marie Antoinette-esque sound bite "Let them touch those things!" President Bush's Potemkin photo ops, or, later, Ray Nagin's helpless racial buffoonishisms, the culture hasn't managed to deal with the hurricane in any significant way. Perhaps we're all still too shocked. And why shouldn't we be? We lost one of our most beloved and mythical cities, a psychological escape of libertinism and subversion -- whether we've been there or not -- from our prudish, puritanical country.

No literary journal has ever been called upon to react specifically to the loss of its place of genesis, and what more could have been expected from this collection than page after page of horror and sorrow? But after the first four poems without a mention of Katrina anywhere, I understood that something very different was being done. Look at these lines from Ralph Adamo's poem "New Orleans Elegies": "I wish once we could sleep like two horses/ standing side by side after a twilight feed,/ eyes lashed for the night, forelegs atremble,/ but just barely, with being so strongly still." And again from Brad Richard's poem "St. Roch Camp Santo, New Orleans" a few pages later: "I would kiss his dark sore if it would give/ either of us solace, if it would bring back whole/ companions who died from the wrong touch,/ whatever killer stole their love…" And from "Memento N.O." by Srdjan Smaji: "me kneeling & you kneeling/ me pressing into you/ in the alley behind the bar.../ we return repentant/ two prodigals all apologies/ & our friends plug us back/ into the same conversation." The first 112 pages of the review are full of stories and poems like these, not of Katrina, not disaster, but of people, of their desires, loves, losses, of their small lives frankly lived in a city we all recognize within a few words, the first glimpse of an image: New Orleans, our New Orleans, even if it wasn't ours. Cajun, jazz, the French Quarter, Canal Street, Bourbon Street, Algiers, Louis Armstrong and, of course, Mardi Gras. David Rae Morris' photograph on Page 92 of a New Orleans brass band marching beside a death-head wearing a "Constitution" sash is an image understandable only in the context of that one place.

That place is gone. Whether intended or not, the first half of the New Orleans Review has the feeling of walking around in a Holocaust museum: all of those head shots, all of those piles of shoes. This is the lost New Orleans we knew and took for granted. From Aliisa Rosenthal's story "Mambo": "I light one feminine cigarette under the languish of saxophones and cellos. There are debutantes in the gutters here. The dirty blonde and rusting beauties decay in hot puddles. But we're all sipping mint juleps and our feet are leveraged into stilettos and we know how to limbo our words into a drawl with lusty undertones, until the boys lunge at palmettos in the dark lantern light." And from Tara Jill Ciccarone's "Wait for Me, Susanna": "the men drinking their beers in front of the little grocery stores, saying How ya doing with sex in their eyes always, the young women, curvy and without makeup in flowered dresses, blooming themselves, the heat that slowed the body, teaching the body not to fight so much, to give in to the needs of the flesh and take it slow, and the guitar players on the sidewalks outside the coffee shops not wanting to go to work." And from C.W. Cannon's "Fools Rush In": "The kid's cornet was right on the thermostat, frowning and threatening and ignoring all supplicants, sending the mercury up, up. The band started chanting Talk Dat Shit Now and Say What?! and pointing at the dancers, pushing them to march harder. The boy blowing into his horn through the side of his mouth found some undiscovered and previously unused muscle in his face or his belly and started swinging and leaned into it, bumped the volume up one more decibel, and treated the air in front of his cornet to a righteous, vicious pummeling."

It's wonderful stuff, like a vault full of the literary art of Atlantis. Reading it in the context of Katrina is to almost hear these characters and places cry out, "We existed. We existed like this." But the work is so good that it transports the reader at times away from the fact of pre-Katrina New Orleans' own existential end, no one piece more so than C. Morgan Babst's story "Other Real Girls." With early lines like, "The cheese man liked their school skirts, and they would unbutton their second buttons and pull their Wigwams up to their knees for him ... Lille turned up her turned-up nose at him because he was a Yat. He came from the West Bank ... Allie had tried to keep from getting a crush on him," Babst creates a world quick to seduce. Complete in its universe, it leaves no ground to wonder whether Allie or Lille or any of the often nasty teenage girls of a certain New Orleans privileged upper class captured here are anything but real. "Other Real Girls" should win an award, as should the whole issue. Interviewing Christopher Chambers, editor since 1999 of the New Orleans Review, about what happened to him, his staff and his city after Katrina, I received this e-mail: "I am so tired of talking about Katrina, yet living here there is no way not to talk about it. We used to joke that New Orleans was like a third world country ... it is no longer a joke. City services are unreliable, leadership and a coherent plan for recovery nonexistent, violent crime back to pre-K[atrina] levels with one third of the population. Looting continues ... not sure why this has been swept under the rug ... Everyone here has been traumatized, and there is an undercurrent of bad energy. Recklessness, rage, and hard drinking like even this town has never seen."

Chambers and the NOR's poetry editor Katie Ford deserve credit for the artistic achievement of their editing. Running only work that's set in the days before Katrina in the first half of the issue, they ground and contextualize the loss and drama of the post-Katrina second half. And they manage to make the turn from the "pre" to "post" landscape feel as sudden and dramatic as it was in life. Though there are warnings of impending disaster, they are as easy to ignore as were all of those 1950s-era levee warnings. The excerpt of Walker Percy's 1968 essay "New Orleans Mon Amour," which opens the issue, reveals that the city has always suffered corruption and a certain sense of doom, and James Nolan's poem "Acts of God" admits that the city had been flooded by hurricanes past. Of all the lively poems and stories about New Orleans nightlife and Mardi Gras, almost none can be said to end joyfully.

And still, on Page 113, when Katrina appears almost out of nowhere in Anne Gisleson's essay "The Chain Catches Hold," we're not prepared. Gisleson's essay seems to be a quaint walk through interesting neighborhoods of the city. It's not. Like the whole of the issue itself, Gisleson's essay is a bait and switch: Here's New Orleans, here's New Orleans taken away. She writes about bars, brawls, a decaying mural, quietly decaying fences. Interesting but innocuous stuff. And then comes this entry: "Fall 2005. The razor wire rolled back, the concrete barricades moved to the side, the Bywater was opened back up to us officially in early October. On one end of Clouet Street at the river, a block from our house, a fire, started by either looters or the police, depending on whom you talked to, had raged for several days during the aftermath and destroyed six blocks of riverfront warehouses and wharves ... thousands of propane tanks were being stored inside ... during the fire many of them exploded and shot all over the neighborhood into houses, throughout streets. You can still come across their dented blackened carapaces, in gutters, on sidewalks and untended yards, pocked with rust, puckered holes."

Katrina happened like that. As with everything else in the city, the storm brought to a halt production of the New Orleans Review. Among the better of the literary journals in the country, the NOR regularly had work reprinted in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Anthology, Poetry Daily and the Utne Reader. Katrina scattered the staff to Baton Rouge, Austin, Texas, Portland, Ore., Washington and Boston. Some have left New Orleans for good.

Chambers says, "In the first few weeks after, I can't say that I gave the magazine a thought. I spent my days sitting stunned in front of CNN for hours on end, drinking steadily, and searching the Internet for news of friends and colleagues. I remember the dates I returned to the city: September 15, October 2, October 30. Otherwise those months are a blur. At some point, late September I guess, I started to think about how New Orleans Review could respond to this unfolding disaster. Everywhere I turned ... people were writing about New Orleans. Much of it was good and accurate, but there was also a lot of bullshit written by people who did not really know or understand the place. It occurred to me that now was the time for the magazine to publish an issue on New Orleans, by New Orleans writers. By this time, my wife and I had moved into a tiny ramshackle garage apartment in Houston. I compiled a list of all the local writers I could find, sent out a call for submissions, asked them to forward it around.

"I began receiving submissions immediately. My vision for this issue was that it would be a celebration of New Orleans, a chance for the writers and poets of the city to respond to the disaster. And I saw it as an elegy, for I knew by this point that the New Orleans I had left no longer existed, and that though the city might survive, it would never be the same. In March, there were already a slew of New Orleans and Katrina books in the stores. There must have been people signing book contracts before the waters receded. I feel we had a little more critical distance, and were able to put together something that was more thoughtful and coherent." The post-Katrina half of the issue looks at how the storm hurt the city, and how seeing the injured city hurt its people. It's imagistic and visceral, and of special note are the nine photographs by David Rae Morris that range from an accounting of the graffiti that blossomed in the flooded city, from both an official "Possible Body" sprayed on a home to a less official "9 Ward RIP," to evocative images of humanity's remnants underwater. Yes, there are some simple laments here that don't add much to what's already been said about New Orleans, though these are few and almost serve as a brief record of that genre of contemporary literature.

The best part about this Katrina writing is how quirky and unexpected it is. Lyrical, often funny, the second half of the issue even includes a science fiction story. From Moira Crone's "The Great Sunken Quarter": "September, 2132. The sun started to come up behind the clouds, turning the sky from pink to white, and then the Ponchart Sea was all silver. Port Gramercy shrank into a line on the horizon. The Islands of New Orleans were thirty miles distant, and not yet visible. We were headed for the greatest of the wonders there, the Sunken Quarter." Wry, witty, often angry edging toward bitterness, this Katrina-inspired art is decidedly postmodern, clearly distrustful of traditional forms, confrontational, impatient, and there is almost enough of a theme here to announce a new school. These lines, for example, from Elizabeth Gross' "Delta": "The video store is broken. I mean,/ closed for good, the tapes all sold,/ or else boxed up and taken home/ by those bird-eyed men who/ used to run the place." And this from Robin Kemp's "Body" on the facing page: "the Dumaine Street Bridge/ ...now it's snagged itself/ just another face-down man/ right there where I used to walk the dog." How about this little gem from Abraham Burickson's "Soft and Splinter": "She called to say she wasn't coming back/ ...to say that he could keep the fish, keep the television, the house,/ that Texas is a big ol' pile of rock/ and she's gonna stay..."

Then there's Andrei Codrescu. As Jeffrey Chan writes in the issue's penultimate essay -- a who's who of the recovering N.O. literary scene -- Codrescu is "the famous New Orleans author in some people's opinion ... one of New Orleans' literati and editor of a terminally hip pub called Exquisite Corpse. His distinctive Romanian accent can be heard on NPR ... I think he's in the Ozarks now. He's written several books ... including "Road Scholar," the mandatory haywire road trip book which takes him across this oh-so-kooky country. [I]t was quite a bore..."

Why is Chan taking shots at Codrescu? Admittedly, Codrescu's contribution to the issue was the only one of the more than 40 pieces that gave me real pause, because while I clearly am no fan of lament for lament's sake, flippancy doesn't seem appropriate at all. What was Codrescu up to in his poem "The Good Shepherdess of Nether," a Dadaist experiment that he wrote jointly with Dave Brinks? While Brinks' stanzas come across as searching for meaning in all of this, Codrescu's are more like the ADHD kid in the back of the class who clearly is in his own world, here again offering little more than confirmation of his well-known morbid fascination with bugs. Brinks begins: "when hurricane names reach/ the greek alphabet/ it takes us a long way away from the theory/ of original sin/ and the common housefly." Codrescu responds, "all the way to common sin/ of wishing it was not the way it is/ and the original fly/ did you ever see one this blue, Dave?" Chan closes his essay with a parting salvo at the eminent one, "As for you, Codrescu ... oh, whatever. You get published, get on the air, get to be the king of the freak parade, and slouch for Ferlinghetti. More power to you."

One New Orleans has passed, another begun. And if the writers are already sniping at each other, then the writers are returning to normalcy. Whatever dark or bright thing it will eventually be, the new New Orleans will find a normalcy as well. This remarkable issue of the New Orleans Review ends with an outward look, beyond the flooded city and its own black and nighttime cover, to the plight of the greater world in the new era of weather chaos. As Gisleson had written earlier in the collection, "In the hard blue fall sky two jet contrails had crossed each other, and for a moment it wasn't just our houses, or city but the whole sky, the world itself, marked for search and rescue."

-- By Tony D'Souza

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"We were suddenly driving along the blue waters of the Gulf, and at the same time a momentous mad thing began on the radio; it was the Chicken Jazz n' Gumbo disk-jockey show from New Orleans, all mad jazz records, colored records, with the disk jockey saying, `Don't worry 'bout nothing!' We saw New Orleans in the night ahead of us with joy. Dean rubbed his hands over the wheel. `Now we're going to get our kicks!' At dusk, we were coming into the humming streets of New Orleans. `Oh, smell the people!' yelled Dean with his face out the window sniffing. `Ah! Dog! Life!' He swung around a trolley. `Yes!' --- Jack Kerouac, "On the Road."

"What I love about New Orleans is that it tolerates every kind of eccentricity. Tennessee Williams didn't end up there by accident." --James Lee Burke

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As I had suspect, there are no New Orleans authors doing any kind of sponsorship or grants.

Meanwhile, I looked into that Neighborhood Story Project (http://www.neighborhoodstoryproject.org/) which publishes the books I mentioned. Begun before Katrina, thought turning inexorably towards that as a topic, its goal is to teach high school kids how to write books about their neighborhood, thus teaching them how to write, and documenting the rich and varied cultural and historic layers to the city, which is so much more than the Quarter and Uptown. There are currently five available (Wendy, I brought some of these to that meeting we had before the semester began; do you have them?) covering living in a project, above a neighborhood store, a couple of particularly diverse blocks, the local Mardi Gras Indian tribe, and more. The goal is not just literacy, but helping kids see their work both as a method for examining their world, but as a method of change. The group works wiwth both kids and their families, and begins orally, and in groups, so that kids can learn about the development and rewrite process as they go. In this way, they are working with methods Tyler was discussing in group last week. Given the shockingly low literarcy rates coming out of New Orleans public schools (pre-Katrina, as low as 20%), and the increasing need for a written historical record of a possibly vanished era of New Orleans, plus the theraputic value such a project has for kids, I think this is an excellent project already in place that we should strongly consider suggesting additional funding for. It seems to fit neatly in with all the elements we were discussing in group. It's already fairly well-established, if small, and associated with both Literacy Alliance and the University of New Orleans.

Meanwhile, literary quotes about New Orleans:

The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you
and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get
that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off. That means beignets
and crawfish bisque and jambalaya, it means shrimp remoulade, pecan pie,
and red beans 'n rice, it means elegant pompano en papillote, funky file
z'herbes, and raw oysters by the dozen, it means grillades for breakfast,
a po-boy with chow-chow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between. It is
not unusual for a visitor to the city to gain fifteen pounds in a week -
yet the alternative is a whole lot worse. If you don't eat day and night,
if you don't constantly funnel the indigenous flavors into your
bloodstream, then the mystery beast will keep on humping you, and you will
feel its sordid presence rubbing against you long after you have left
town. In fact, like any sex offender, it can leave permanent psychological
scars.

-- Tom Robbins, from Jitterbug Perfume 

In those days in New Orleans, there was always something nice, and always with music.--Louis Armstrong, from Growing Up in New Orleans 

Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is the flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?” Ignatious bellowed over the crowd in front of the store. “This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problem with you, but don’t make the mistake of bothering me.” --John Kennedy Toole, from A Confederacy of Dunces 

New Orleans, in the spring-time—just when the orchards were flushing over with peach blossoms, and the sweet herbs came to flavor the juleps—seemed to me the city of the world where you can eat and drink the most and suffer the least.--William Makepeace Thackary, from A Mississippi Bubble 

Mardi Gras ain’t so much if you are broke.--John Dos Passos, from Funiculi, Funicula

 I’ve always wanted to eat fried dough in the most corrupt city in the world.--Dale, from “King of the Hill” 

Yet to all men whose desire only is to live a short life but a merry one, I have no hesitation in recommending New Orleans.--Henry Bradshaw Fearon, from Sketches of America (1818) 

We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water—the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.--Mark Twain, from Life on the Mississippi 

We picked up one excellent word—a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word—“Lagniappe”…It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a baker’s dozen. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop—or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know—he finishes the operation by saying “Give me something for lagniappe”. The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor—I don’t know what he gives the governor; support, likely. When you are invited to drink—and this does occur now and then in New Orleans—and you say “What, again?—no, I’ve had enough:” the other party says, “But just this one time more, --this is for lagniappe.”--Mark Twain, from Life on the Mississippi 

On Mardi Gras day, as you know, it is a town gone mad with folly. A huge masked ball emptied into the streets at daylight; a meeting of all nations on common ground, a pot-pourri of every conceivable human ingredient, but faintly describes it all. There are music, and flowers, cries and laughter and song and joyousness, and never an aching heart to show its sorrow or dim the happiness of the streets. A wondrous thing, this Carnival!--Alice Dunbar-Nelson, from Odalie (1899) 

For in this season is the glamour of New Orleans strongest upon those whom she attracts to her from less hospitable climates, and fascinates by her nights of magical moonlight, and her days of dreamy languors and perfumes. There are few who can visit her for the first time without delight; and few who can ever leave her without regret; and none who can forget her strange charm when they have once felt its influence.--Lafcadio Hearn, from The Glamour of New Orleans (1924) 

Living in New Orleans is like drinking blubber through a straw. Even the air is caloric. --Andrei Codrescu, from “Fantastic Fast”. 

She glanced back at the little peaked roofs of the tombs visible over the top of the wall.“The dead are so close they can hear us,” she thought.“Ah, but you see,” said Ryan, as if he had read her thoughts. “In New Orleans, we never really leave them out.”--Anne Rice, from The Witching Hour 

THere is something left in these people here that makes them like one another; that leads to constant outbursts in the spirit of play, that keeps them from being too confoundedly serious about death and the ballot and reform and other less important things in life." --Sherwood Anderson, from "New Orleans and the Double Dealer."

 

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