A Talk with Ethan Ashley of Orleans Parish School Board
Kellogg Fellow Discusses Education Policies that Encourage Personal Growth
When it comes to understanding education policy, ending generational poverty and improving the lives of young people, it’s hard to find someone more committed than Ethan Ashley, alumnus of the WKKF Community Leadership Network.
A member of the Orleans Parish School Board, Ashley has a strong background working for the rights of all. He currently serves as National State and Local Advocacy Director for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), where he coordinates engagement with state and local governments throughout the United States. In the past, Ashley served on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, at the Urban League of Louisiana, and for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.
What he has to say about educational policies might surprise you…
It’s a new school year, what are your most important concerns about education policy in New Orleans this year?
Actually, I’m the most concerned about the more nuanced issues that affect our ability to operate our schools well.
There are so many layers to the most important challenges. From the policy side, it’s making sure we’re being effective regulators and that we’re thinking about how to innovate our school model. At the same time, we must keep in mind our young people’s safety and the convenience for our parents relative to school shopping, scheduling and enrollment process.
Up until July 2018, the New Orleans schools were not fully operating under local control and governance. They were partly operated under Orleans Parish School Board, and the other part were funded by the Recovery School District of Louisiana. Now we have the schools back under local control.
After evaluating these processes, we’re trying to figure out what’s working, what’s not working and how we can continue to interface with our young people and their families to make the system function better for them.
One thing we have focused on this past year has been safety, particularly around buses. We developed policies around the amount of time that young people are forced to spend on a bus. We now limit pick-up and drop-off times.
We are also reviewing the school system’s scheduling. As a parent, I have an eight-year-old and a thirteen-year-old who attend Morris Jeff Community School. I understand the need for a unified calendar in New Orleans’ school system.
That’s why we’re working to achieve a common calendar, so that our parents — who have multiple young people in multiple schools — can have some sense of normalcy when it comes to events happening, vacations, holidays or school starts.
We’re also continuing to focus on New Orleans school enrollment process and make it better for our young people. In the last year, we created a policy to ensure that kids who live in a half mile radius from a school have preference in enrollment considerations. That’s a good start, but we need to start to normalize our entire system and figure out the larger piece of our system so we can review the regulatory pieces.
In New Orleans, our school board is responsible for authorizing charter schools. We are responsible for regulating these schools to ensure they are doing what they are supposed to on behalf of young people. We have a couple of schools that haven’t necessarily met their goalposts. But they continue to improve. So, we need to look at our policies on how we regulate our schools that are in non-compliant situations. What’s the best way to intervene?
What do many people not realize about education in cities like New Orleans?
The issues related to improving the educational system often get hidden behind the question of governance. Across the country, you hear a nuanced fight between governance models of schools. Charter versus non-charter. Magnet programs. Community schools. All these different models.
The core questions should be: Are the schools well resourced? Are the teachers prepared, loving and qualified in following great pedagogy? In terms of math and science curriculum, are we spending more dollars hiring qualified, veteran teachers to run those high-need classes? Are we ensuring those core areas of learning are happening?
We don’t discuss these nuanced issues in our conversations. Our educational system is limited in that they don’t truly account for what our young people are confronting when they aren’t with our educators. That’s true, whether it is young people coming from affluent homes with exposure to many difference experiences or a family working really hard to make ends meet, but often finding itself just struggling to survive.
I try to frame policy in this way: We should make policies for those in the worst-case scenario.
That means, for young people who are homeless without a family figure, how can we provide them with the best educational opportunities possible? If we focus on the most challenging scenarios, then everybody else benefits.
This approach requires state policies and city ordinances to wrap around our young people to assure they are receiving early childhood support and mental health counseling support they need to deal with their families. Also, that our policies support the ability of their families and/or foster families to achieve an economic place where these families can be stable and sustained.
Maybe that’s ensuring we have adequate beds in homeless shelters, that these shelters are safe and that these families feel secure. There’s a bunch of issues that we don’t talk about. If you put a great education in front of a young person, but they are dealing with trauma, it’s really hard to absorb that education. Our system doesn’t allow us to be nimble enough to address those problems. We focus on the wrong issues.
What has kept you motivated in your new position? What keeps you excited?
Great question.
People sometimes ask me why I serve. I tell them, this is a kind of therapy for me. I grew up in a single-parent household where my mother was a Head Start educator. They earned very little money so she worked a number of jobs. She was a Head Start teacher, she worked at Kmart and she did hair on the side. She continued to work as hard as she could to provide for us.
But at the same time, we found ourselves needing government assistance to make ends meet. You know, children in heaven don’t get the choice to pick a poor or a rich family. But when they come into the world, and they find themselves in a particular family, it may not be able to provide for all of their needs.
That’s a challenge for us in the community to ensure we can provide better lives for the citizens in our care. This is therapy for me, because as a young person I wondered what systems were available that cared about me and my mother, who was really trying to make ends meet. So, I’m trying to be one of those adults that I envisioned was thinking about me when I was going through the educational system.
I finished high school early, at 16 years old. I finished college at 19. I got my law degree at age 22. I know how important education can be in interrupting generational poverty. I think this is what keeps me going. Can we interrupt generational poverty? Can we create systems that allow many of our young people, who find themselves in this poverty, to dream bigger than their current reality? I’m trying to create as many policies as possible to help them achieve these goals, and that support organizations supporting these youth.
How did your Kellogg Fellowship impact your work?
I was in Class 1 of the WKKF Community Leadership Network, with the New Orleans cohort. My Fellowship impacted my life significantly in general, from the focus on self-care to the personal relationships I formed. The Kellogg Foundation is really great about supporting community practices for leaders who are doing this work. You really can’t do this work alone. I found my tribe in the Kellogg family.
My Fellowship made it easier to do this type of work. I ran for School Board and was elected. Also, the current City Council Member Cyndi Nguyen ran and was elected. Emily Wolff, who is Director of the Mayor’s Office of Youth & Families, was appointed after supporting our current Mayor, LaToya Cantrell- the woman elected to Mayor of New Orleans. Both Emily and Councilwoman Nguyen were part of my Kellogg class.
Meet Cyndi Nguyen, New Orleans’ first Vietnamese-American City Council member.
We continue to meet often together. All of us are commissioners for the New Orleans Recreation Development Commission (NORDC). This Commission supports all the recreational programming for our city. I sit on NORDC as a representative of the school board and Cyndi sits on it as a city council member. And Emily is the Mayor’s designated person for the commission.
Together, we are creating a wrap-around service at every level of city government. Our relationships have made policy making easier. In New Orleans, our recreation department hasn’t always been integrated with our school system, because of our schools’ rapid changes over the last 14 years.
We’re looking for systematic ways to partner the school system with the recreational system, so young people have more options after school or during summer vacation. It provides another layer of connectedness to our young people to ensure we are supporting them at all levels.
NORDC has a new initiative that we are rolling out in the fall, which discusses this new partnership between the school system and the recreational commission around sports for middle school students. It’s a big deal.
I think about another program I was able to run as a school board member. I really believe in civic engagement and I think our young people should be engaged too. It’s our responsibility to make certain they understand how important this engagement is to our democracy.
I championed a resolution at the school board to ensure that we created a voter registration week that allows community members and organizations to go into the schools and register students. Then those organizations are supporting buses and rides to allow students to vote early. The mayor’s office via Emily’s help partnered with us to make sure that it happened.
But for the Kellogg Fellowship, I don’t think this would have happened with such ease and coordination between two different layers of community. We’re all centered around supporting the young people of New Orleans, and we all have an understanding of our core. So, it’s easy for us to work together and there’s no ego involved. It’s all about doing the work.
How can Kellogg Fellows and others learn about your work?
If you want to follow my work on the New Orleans School Board, I have a personal website called EthanAshley.org. You can subscribe to my quarterly newsletters with updates.
Our school system’s website is NOLApublicschools.org.
What lies ahead?
I am super blessed to serve as a member of the New Orleans School Board, but I would be remiss to not admit that I’m currently running for state representative for District 97, which is a state house seat.
We’ve done a lot of great work at the school board level, but there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done at the state level to show we are aligning our budgets in a way that invests back into our children or families.
I’m running to show that we can tackle key issues that are both solvable and systemic, but make it hard for our families to thrive. I look forward to serving in any capacity, but at the end of the day, my goal is to interrupt generational poverty, improve our criminal justice system and strengthen New Orleans’ infrastructure.
Oct. 12 is the primary and four folks are running, including me. The general election is Nov. 16. So, we just continue to do the work and pound the payment. But we’ll know soon whether there’s a run-off.
Meanwhile, we’ll leave that decision up to the people of District 97. No matter what, I will continue serving in any way I can.
