Too Cool for Skool
Maybe that’s New Orleans’ problem. Maybe that’s why the school system in New Orleans parish is in such bad shape that even Tara Reid wouldn’t have sex with it. We’re just too cool for school.
Let’s face it, how smart does a population of ticket takers, drink servers, cooks, and custodians really have to be? As long as there are a few folks smart enough to expand the Convention Center by half-again as much space as it offers now; expand the port’s cruise ship capacity to take advantage of a growing market for ever-larger ships (the largest of which is already bigger than an aircraft carrier); and build a movie studio on the river complete with a Faux Quarter (and start a tax war with California — who can afford it perhaps even less than Louisiana — in the process); does it really matter that more than 50% of the city’s schools are considered to be failing?
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Um. Or maybe the schools are boring and NOLA’s very smart kids are bored out of their minds?
Most of NOLA’s smartest kids are sent to private schools by their parents because their parents give a shit about their welfare. A few go through the public school system, but Franklin only has a couple of hundred students a year, which doesn’t offset the tens of thousands of other students graduating from NOPS.
That’s true. NOPS is failing to meet its mission, by the standards of many. But maybe we’re the ones with the broken measuring stick.
How many financiers does it take to build a movie studio, and how many guards, extras, set-builders, best-boys and grips does it take to staff it?
Perhaps NOPS is the way it is because it’s very close to achieving an equilibrium: it does enough to educate kids to just satisfy expectations and, for most kids, no more. Its goal is to run just sloppily enough that the state doesn’t take over, and it has only recently managed to cross that line.
Of course, it isn’t unreasonable to believe that that line was crossed long before. But maybe it really didn’t need to be taken earlier.