From elaborate PowerPoint presentations to four conveniently chosen principals all the way to the sanctuary of a sacred New Orleans Baptist church, the definitive statement put forth by the group OPEN at a recent public forum to discuss what’s working in local education is that the so-called renaissance in New Orleans public schools is a done deal.

As a result of this nearly five-year educational experiment launched since Hurricane Katrina and breached levees left the city looking like the city of Pompeii, OPEN (Orleans Public Education Network ) appears poised to espouse the mostly unchallenged edict and oppinions of local media and major power brokers opinion that the city’s overwhelmingly African-American school children are in good hands, as "proven" by improved standardized test scores, idealistic young teachers from across the American academic landscape and greater expectations from administrators, teachers and parents.

By most accounts, all of this has transpired in the throes of the nation’s deadliest natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, as those same schoolchildren have been scattered across the nation, experienced teachers fired and a cadre of focused but ignored parents maintain things aren’t all what they’re being chalked up to be.

Those who’ve returned to New Orleans, on the other hand, have brought back with them a plethora of psychological and emotional issues that even their principals acknowledge remains a major obstacle to educational achievement. Classes may be in session but some are starting to wonder if George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” needs to be revisited and renamed “What About Children Left Who Can’t Catch Up?”

For all parties involved, whether they’re six-figure principals, cute children dressed in their schools’ uniforms or the power brokers who’ve seized control of the schools and the enormous amount of taxpayer dollars that go into their operation, one thing is certain: Public education in New Orleans is poised to be the single most talked about, most expensive and potentially most divisive issue facing the city in the coming decade.

Painting a Rosy Picture

At a meeting inside the cavernous Franklin Avenue Baptist Church this month, about 100 people, including school district and charter school administrators, teachers, parents and several citizens engaged in the public education debate called “What Works and Why?” There was hardly little if any debate on what doesn’t work, although several people in the audience clearly have not bought into the notion being promoted by incoming city leaders, civic groups and other disparate groups on the front end of the educational revolution taking place that everything is fine.

The objective of the meeting was to target those “best practices” that are reaping successful results for New Orleans school children while simultaneously identifying and rectifying those “strategies” that are not working. To be sure, the two-hour long meeting, which kicked off with musical performances by some local schoolchildren, was less of the rabble rousing type that have historically marked most public education forums.

It was more the cerebral and thoughtful type where well-dressed school officials and their hand-picked subordinates identified all that is right with the city’s four-tiered public education apparatus while preaching to a choir - not the church kind here - who also seemed wrapped up in all the talk about charter schools and their improved test scores. It paints a disciplined climate and a cadre of young teachers prepared to conquer the world.

But not everyone was impressed and sold on what some are claiming to be the new footprint of public education in the city of New Orleans.

“I do not think it’s working,” said Damekia Morgan, herself a product of New Orleans public schools and founder of Citizens for Local Control, which seeks to return the public schools in New Orleans to its rightful owners - the taxpayers and schoolchildren whom Morgan believes were wrongly - and possibly illegally - stripped of the power of self-determination when it comes to the education of their children.