Being Accountable Means Showing Up, Caring, and Not Giving Up

In a lot of ways, New Orleans wasn’t as different from all the cities I visit as I would have wished. When we were driving around the poorest neighborhoods, we saw boarded up housing projects, but I found myself wondering what they had looked like before Katrina. Certainly there were blocks in St. Louis where I’d been just the week before that looked just as bad.

While school governance is an increasingly complicated thing to follow with so many schools under state control and tensions and divisions around charter management a defining and distracting reality, the schools in New Orleans are governed by the most Byzantine patchwork imaginable. There is the Orleans District, the Recovery School District (why mince words?), Algiers, assorted charters operating under all those bodies and a bunch out there on their own. Each explained to us why theirs was the most oppressed, and while I have my theories, it goes without saying that none of them had enough.

But, truly, these schools were operating with more obstacles than most—no phones in some of the schools, a school relocated just two weeks ago because of mold, a school half an hour away from its previous location with all of its students bussed in daily. At one school, we were waiting in the office when one of the secretaries came out into the main part of the office to announce that everyone had to hold off on faxing and copying because she was using the microwave. Apparently this would short out the entire electrical system.

The principals also talked to us about the lack of adequate support for the kids’ social and emotional needs and the myriad ways the kids displayed what seem like text book symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress: sudden bouts of rage, kids who refused to talk, kids who started to cry whenever it rained.

But the number one stressor that ALL of the principals and staffed talked to us about? The incredible pressure of the standardized tests coming up in March.

Initially, all I could think was “Come On! This is insane. Give ‘em a break. They shouldn’t have to deal with any added pressures.” But I’ve been back a few days and it seems increasingly clear to me that what I saw in New Orleans was just the extreme version of what I’ve been seeing in all the other cities I am visiting.

I am in favor of accountability—especially when we hold our government accountable to educating the kids who have been historically overlooked. I’m not talking about the achievement gap, I’m talking about the education debt: the huge chasm of disparity that exists not because of what today’s educators are doing or not doing, but the compounded effects of growing up poor in our country.

What New Orleans does is point out the tremendous hypocrisy of our government holding anyone to a notion of accountability. There has been little discussion in the presidential debates about our government’s failures to adequately address the unmet needs in New Orleans a full two years after Katrina. And they would be well-served to remember that accountability is a complicated thing and that democracy aspires to a higher goal when it comes to being accountable to its citizens. It would mean a lot to the people of New Orleans and the children in our most under-performing schools if the candidates could remember that when we’re talking about people, being accountable means showing up, caring, and making a commitment not to give up, even in the most challenging of situations.

Jill Vialet is the Founder and Executive Director of Sports4Kids, a national youth development organization whose mission is to create and support youth sports and recreational opportunities to enhance the health and well being of youth and communities. Sport4Kids is a member of the America Forward Advisory Board.