Andre Perry

Last week, the Mississippi Department of Education requested $1 million from the state legislature to combat cheating on statewide examinations. The request comes on the heels of alleged cheating systems The Clarion-Ledger wrote about at Clarksdale’s Heidelberg Elementary School earlier this year. Thereafter the state’s education department spent $300,000 to hire Utah-based consultant Caveon Test […]

“Why can’t New Orleans have a charter school for middle class blacks?” A black physician and parent of a teenage daughter unashamedly asked me this question as we deboarded a first class cabin from our flight to the Crescent City. If I weren’t bourgie (African American slang for Bourgeoisie – pronounced boo-zhee), I would have […]

­Two of the most significant student movements in the United States occurred in Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans – separated by less than a three hours’ drive and fifty years. En masse, high school students and coeds migrated to these cities leading up to Freedom Summer of 1964, and they came in the years immediately […]

New Orleans’ renaissance won’t be determined by how many “smart” people emigrate into the city. Her resurgence will be determined by how smartly the space includes all its residents’ gifts. For five weeks in the summer, Carlos, my 18 year-old son, who has special needs, contributes to New Orleans’ recovery by building bat boxes – […]

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wants to make the state the fourth, including Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina, to turn back Common Core implementation. Jindal adopted Common Core state standards, which put him in line with other presidential hopefuls like Jeb Bush, four years earlier. Since Common Core has become the litmus test for conservatism, Jindal’s […]

This week, the Black Alliance of Educational Options (BAEO) convenes its Annual Symposium in New Orleans, a battleground city for school reform validation (some may say disapproval). As a Symposium participant, I’m leading a town hall dialogue described as “[a] discussion of the progress that has been made to reform public education in New Orleans […]

Closing schools has become an almost reflexive, corporate solution to a complex fiscal and social problem – a problem to which no one has found a satisfying answer. Districts shutter, sell or destroy physical properties typically for said fiscal reasons. Districts also terminate contracts of poor-performing service providers to make way for new leaders who […]