Public Education Week
An event series helping the community understand, navigate and advocate in the public education system.
Public Education Week: the only event series dedicated to bringing the entire public into the public education system, and training citizens to navigate the system, advocate for change, and increase equity and excellence for all students. Public Education Week takes place annually, in the Spring/Summer.
New Orleans is home to the first-ever school district of its kind: an all-charter public school system serving 44,000 students across 78 schools run by 38 different Charter Management Organizations. Under this new system, parents, students and advocates find themselves having to navigate an almost impossibly complex series of inaccessible choices. Most importantly, even after the system’s complete overhaul, inequitable experiences and outcomes persist and in some cases are even worse than pre-Katrina conditions.
Public Education Week is about information, navigation and advocacy, covering topics like:
System navigation (special education laws, OneApp)
Sharing data and resources (public records, student rights)
Addressing equity matters (education access, differential outcomes by race and wealth)
And more!
School statistics, test scores and feel-good stories don’t tell us what we need to know about the quality of this education system. Public Education Week is about the community taking a critical approach, moving past reform and onto justice.
All Public Education Week sessions center around OPEN’s six core demands for youth-facing policy in New Orleans:
