Vallas: After Katrina, 'no one can tell me what to do...'

Management guru Tom Peters, had this advice for his corporate followers: “DESTRUCTION IS COOL!” and “DESTRUCTION IS JOB 1....It’s easier to kill an organization, that to change it. Big idea: DEATH!”

Peters’ organizational death mantra has been picked up by shock-and-awe neo-cons (in Iraq) and school-reform privatizers in cities like D.C. and New Orleans. In Paul Tough's Sunday NYT Magazine piece, “A Teachable Moment,” N.O. schools chief Paul Vallas explains why Katrina’s destruction was a godsend for him.

When I asked Paul Vallas what made New Orleans such a promising place for educational reform, he told me that it was because he had no “institutional obstacles” — no school board, no collective bargaining agreement, a teachers’ union with very little power. “No one tells me how long my school day should be or my school year should be,” he said. “Nobody tells me who to hire or who not to hire. I can hire the most talented people. I can promote people based on merit and based on performance. I can dismiss people if they’re chronically non-attending or if they’re simply not performing.”

Who got the grant? Who takes the credit?

I’ve worked with high schools around the country on quite a few grant proposals. So I know that the process for winning a federal Smaller Learning Communities (SLC) grant is a pretty rigorous one. A lot of work and teacher time usually goes into the planning and writing of these proposals and the review committees look carefully at each large high school to make certain that they have the will and the capacity to successfully restructure the entire school over a four-five year period.

A recent winner of a $2.7 million SLC grant, writes the Northwest Indiana Times, was a consortium of Indiana high schools, including schools in Hammond and Merrillville. So far, so good.

Now I’m not foolish enough to believe that politics doesn’t play any roll in the way DOE funds are distributed to districts—especially these days. But read over the lead sentence in the article and see who takes all the credit for the schools’ winning grant proposal.