“Charters are doing a heck of a job,” in post-Katrina NOLA.

You would think that the one phrase you would never again hear when referring to post-Katrina New Orleans is, “you’re doing a heck of a job.”

But that was New Orleans’ Recovery School District superintendent Paul Vallas’ comments to a crowd of angry, mostly African-American parents on Monday.

When Vallas stated at Monday’s meeting that charters are doing “a heck of a job” educating public school students, the mostly African-American audience responded with jeers. Many speakers called for the return of neighborhood schools and expressed fears that many charters accept only students with high test scores.

The crowd, described as “openly hostile” were meeting with Vallas to complain that the privatized schools of the the RSD were not meeting the education needs of their kids.

NOLA.Com:

“Charters don’t want anything to do with our children. They’re sending them away,” said Brenda Valteau, who identified herself as a 1961 graduate of George Washington Carver High School. “We’re losing our young people to the streets. It sounds like a conspiracy to me.”

“You’re doing a heck of a job,” was what George Bush told Michael Brown, then head of FEMA, as New Orleans was being destroyed by the incompetence of FEMA following Hurricane Katrina. It has since become synonymous with the bureaucratic incompetence of government officials.

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