The Next Economy
By Dr. Andre M. Perry

The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center just released the report, Building an Inclusive High-Skilled Workforce for New Orleans’ Next Economy. Its findings reflect national trends that the New Orleans metro workforce is shifting towards jobs that require postsecondary training in order to be competitive in a global economy. Concomitantly, the entire metro area is quickly becoming majority-minority. However, minority groups are among the least likely to attain the types of skills and postsecondary training that predict for a high quality of life.

In particular, poor people of color must improve their educational outcomes in order to reap the benefits of the Next Economy. But, our collective destinies are interconnected. Citywide growth will be a function of how inclusive New Orleans’ economy is. Therefore, we must all find ways to help educationally under-equipped residents gain the requisite skills of the Next Economy.

New Orleans is attracting the types of businesses that will sustain the city during the Next Economy, but according to a Brookings Institution report, the New Orleans metro scored in the lowest quartile among the largest 100 metros for its gap in 2009 in the supply of educated workers relative to demand. This is easy to understand given that the share of African Americans in the New Orleans metro with postsecondary degrees continues to be lower than the U.S. average. Consequently, African American and Hispanic Households earn 48 percent and 24 percent less income, respectively, than white households in the area.

Still, New Orleans is improving since the storms, but we will soon realize the limits of our growth. The GNOCDC Report states, “If we are to continue our recent economic successes, coordinated action across a range of corporate, political, civic, and community leaders is needed to improve existing workforce, education, and training systems so they work for all races and ethnicities.” The City should not be so naïve to think we have the experts to coordinate these necessary actions between the various sectors.

Nor should schools be solely responsible for building a highly skilled workforce. Skill and degree attainment are basic. The City still needs people who understand how to create and sustain multicultural spaces where they did not exist previously. Our past lack of inclusivity helped create social, political and economic settings that produced 14,000 youth between the ages of 16 and 24 in the New Orleans metro who were neither enrolled in school nor employed in 2010.

Mainstream institutions will have to engage with “disconnected youth” in creative ways that simultaneously provides job training, degree attainment, professional development and employment. Small and large businesses must truly see professional development for youth as an investment for the community.

Postsecondary institutions will play a different roll than serving as merely a training ground for industry. We should never forget that higher education is industry. Therefore colleges and university must become more inclusive as well as create leaders of industry who will reshape economies and our collective futures. We need leaders who will demonstrate inclusion in practice.

The Next Economy will need transformational leaders who will help move the formerly incarcerated into jobs that will sustain a family. We need transformational leaders who will create programs like those in Chicago that encourage English language learners to gain Licensed Practical Nursing positions. We need community college leaders to create more agreements that pair industry with G.E.D. graduates. New Orleans needs graduate programs to train people who understand the connections between socioeconomic status, human development and education.

Most importantly, no one should feel comfortable living out the Dickens quote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” In deference to the poor, the doors of opportunity must open. However, disconnected youth have little choice but to find their way and walk through. If individuals and institutions don’t accept our responsibilities for change, the New Orleans metro will continue to underperform.

What is the Purpose of Jindal’s Education Reform Agenda?
By Dr. Andre M. Perry

What exactly is the purpose of public education? Gov. Bobby Jindal’s sweeping education package has introduced a litany of policy initiatives, slogans, and ideas that have flown over the public’s head faster than it did through the House and Senate education committees. As the general public literally waits for whatever falls in our collective laps, would proponents or opponents please articulate a coherent vision of the purpose of public education.

In the latest reform scrum, stakeholders have generally fought to put mechanisms in place that eventually constitute a good school.  Merit pay, tenure, charter school expansion and to a lesser extent school choice all speak to how to improve educational outcomes at an individual school level.  The voucher program does get at a larger a vision of a public system, but the defenses of the program have leaned heavily on the importance giving individual families options to attend a school, public or private, of their choosing.

Over the last twenty years, reformers have demanded change based on the failure of public schools and have used the faces of urban poor embarrassingly to garner political support. Very few reformers have spoken explicitly to the importance of achieving a quality public system for everyone.  Families aren’t the only entity in need of good schools.  The Country, State and our neighborhoods need good public systems.  Public systems, especially in education, should definitely not translate merely to systems for the disenfranchised. Achieving a supermarket of good school options is also not the ideal.

A good public system is not just about parent choice. The Black Alliance of Educational Opportunities of all groups should know that parents’ decisions don’t always comport with national and/or state goals. Systems built rigidly on individual choices helped facilitate segregated schooling and financing systems based on property taxes, both of which created deep-seated inequities that states still grapple with today.

Parents should have choices. However, we should not decentralize education to such a micro or family level that we remove a collective purpose from our vision of public education.  “Let parents decide” is too often said in the spirit of individualism and not community. Teachers placing their professions over the clear need for change is a result of individualism.  Narrowing good schools to a test score is a result of individualism.  Selfish acts, no matter who decides, won’t deliver educational or community progress.

Many have derided the lack of deliberation and discussion around Jindal’s package.  I’m less sympathetic to most of these cries because most policymakers seek legislative alignment over community understanding.  However, I do think the lack of deliberation is recklessly undemocratic and is symptomatic of a society filled with individuals wearing headphones.  Ideology is beating anti-intellectualism in the race to the bottom.

No matter how slow and messy, democratic decision-making creates better outcomes. We should honor those.  In a democracy, public schools represent our democratic means to create a better country.  If there is a purpose that should guide Jindal’s education agenda, let us remember it’s to create places where students of different religions, ethnicities, races and creeds can learn that it’s not just about my choice, my faith, or my agenda.

What is the Purpose of Jindal’s Education Reform Agenda?
By Dr. Andre M. Perry

What exactly is the purpose of public education? Gov. Bobby Jindal’s sweeping education package has introduced a litany of policy initiatives, slogans, and ideas that have flown over the public’s head faster than it did through the House and Senate education committees. As the general public literally waits for whatever falls in our collective laps, would proponents or opponents please articulate a coherent vision of the purpose of public education.

In the latest reform scrum, stakeholders have generally fought to put mechanisms in place that eventually constitute a good school. Merit pay, tenure, charter school expansion and to a lesser extent school choice all speak to how to improve educational outcomes at an individual school level. The voucher program does get at a larger a vision of a public system, but the defenses of the program have leaned heavily on the importance giving individual families options to attend a school, public or private, of their choosing.

Over the last twenty years, reformers have demanded change based on the failure of public schools and have used the faces of urban poor embarrassingly to garner political support. Very few reformers have spoken explicitly to the importance of achieving a quality public system for everyone. Families don’t just of need good schools. The Country, State and our neighborhoods need good public systems. Public systems, especially in education, should definitely not translate merely to systems for the disenfranchised. Achieving a supermarket of good school options is also not the ideal.

A good public system is not just about parent choice. The Black Alliance of Educational Opportunities of all groups should know that parents’ decisions don’t always comport with national and/or state goals. Systems built rigidly on individual choices helped facilitate segregated schooling and financing systems based on property taxes, both of which created deep-seated inequities that states still grapple with today.

Parents should have choices. However, we should not decentralize education to such a micro or family level that we remove a collective purpose from our vision of public education. “Let parents decide” is too often said in the spirit of individualism and not community. Teachers placing their professions over the clear need for change is a result of individualism. Narrowing good schools to a test score is a result of individualism. Selfish acts, no matter who decides, won’t deliver educational or community progress.

Many have derided the lack of deliberation and discussion around Jindal’s package. I’m less sympathetic to most of these cries because most policymakers seek legislative alignment over community understanding. However, I do think the lack of deliberation is recklessly undemocratic and is symptomatic of a society filled with individuals wearing headphones. Ideology is beating anti-intellectualism in the race to the bottom.

No matter how slow and messy, democratic decision-making creates better outcomes. We should honor those. In a democracy, public schools represent our democratic means to create a better country. If there is a purpose that should guide Jindal’s education agenda, let us remember it’s to create places where students of different religions, ethnicities, races and creeds can learn that it’s not just about my choice, my faith, or my agenda.

What if everyone’s day ended after seventh period? Would that make life better? Would our educational problems dissolve if all our days started with fifty minutes of focused reading? Imagine an annual Civics class before each election; voting rates could possibly reach the 90th percentile. Vision the district attorney playing on the same basketball team with the police chief. In this world, the mailman would take attendance and City Hall would have a swimming pool in the basement. What if New Orleans was a good school?

Several metaphors and models have been bestowed upon schools to assist in their improvement. Reformers have applied medical models, business approaches and neighborhood constructs to help educational institutions develop. It seems somewhat illogical to borrow other sectors’ models and frameworks when we have ample evidence of their frailties and shortcomings. Indeed, it has troubled us to hear how schools should operate like businesses during a worldwide meltdown of controlled economies.

Yet New Orleans has adopted a range of reforms, some of which are having positive effects on the education of our youth. I believe schools have improved. However, schools are not better because we’ve become more corporate, or because we can “diagnose” problems. Schools have improved because they have become better communities.

Educator Sheldon Berman states, “A community is a group of people who acknowledge their interconnectedness, have a sense of their common purpose, respect their differences, share in group decision making as well as in the responsibility for the actions of the group, and support each other’s growth.”

Unfortunately, we have based our support of education reform on the growth of test scores and not the growth of community. Consequently, the evidence that advocates uplift as proof of New Orleans educational improvement distracts schools from continuing what I believe exemplar work in community building.

Closing the achievement gap is not the essential problem of New Orleans. Increasing test scores among low-income residents should not be a final destination. We should eliminate the thought of “if we can only get education right, we’ll be a better city.” We must close the community gaps that make it too easy to quote Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

We must start asking questions that examine the connection between various sectors and community wellness. I believe that school leaders have asked themselves community based question and have discovered solutions that New Orleans can adopt. For a change, let use schools as the model for a system in need of improvement. Let’s ask students and families of good schools what it takes to be a better city.

Three seniors from Sophie B. Wright Charter School and I will do just that. We will give a public lecture titled. “Curriculum of a Community: New Orleans as a Good School.” It will take place on March 6 at 6 p.m. in Louis J. Roussel Performance Hall at Loyola University New Orleans. The lecture is free, open to the public and like all schools should be.

Video Promo – Curriculum of a Community: New Orleans as a Good School

The Art of a Bad Learning Environment
By Andre M. Perry

So what are we to learn from the Boyet Junior High School art installation, which in one case displayed an image of President Barack Obama with a bullet hole in his head? This digitally manipulated image was the low light of several political cartoons drawn by middle school students of this Slidell, Louisiana school as part of an art project that at least one concerned child and parent brought to the attention of authorities.

Since the news broke more parents have rightly demanded a full investigation as to how those images made it to the exhibit. I don’t understand how a lesson of political cartooning can roam so aimlessly in the academic woods. There’s a reason why Civics is generally taught in high school. Middle school students should be building the historical and rhetorical acumen to engage in what should be a structured conversation or project on politics. Students’ abilities to discern political discourse and/or systems are limited by the curriculums up to that point. The assignment clearly demonstrated a lack of preparedness.

If the students were prepared, then what goal was the teacher aiming for?

When I first saw some of the completed assignments, I noticed the intellectual laziness that contributed to what a teacher could not possibly consider art. Certainly, it can’t be considered worthy enough to go on a school wall. To go on the Internet and transpose a bullet hole on a random image of President Obama is clearly a nasty, regurgitated political argument of some derisive talk radio show or dinner table.

However, it’s even more disturbing for a teacher or faculty to allow this obviously loose political commentary to hang on the walls. I hope the aftermath of this incident does not devolve into a base conversation of free speech. The Boyet exhibit made clear, free speech in schools is filtered by a responsibility to maintain an environment conducive to learning. In addition, there are actual laws that prohibit speech that can incite violence particularly against elected officials and especially the President of the United States.

I hope St. Tammany School District officials conduct a learning walk at Boyet to see what other images violate common decency let alone the purpose of public schools. All institutions that consider themselves to be places of education, but in particular public institutions, have obligations to practice an idealized connection between truth, justice and community. To practice an idealized connection between truth, justice and community is to assume there is currently no perfect person, community or social system. Schools are the agents of positive change that help society work towards a more perfect union that is inclusive, civil and free from bullets.

Applaud the students, families and teachers of Boyet who understand that schools introduce free speech to intellectual rigor and civility.

However, there something we can all do to learn from this incident. Look around your child’s school. Take in the physical space of your college or university. See what’s on the walls. Who does the bronze bust immortalize? For whom are the buildings and rooms named? The physical structures that contain schools and colleges are also windows and mirrors to the values and people that communities hold dear.

If your schools’ walls say more about who you are than what we should become, then the only art that we’ve mastered is that of repeating history.

Vouchers must provide good options
By Andre M. Perry

As a staunch public school advocate, it pains me to say, vouchers can work. But are Gov. Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent John White prepared to give parents the information and transparency required for high levels of parental choice? Also, will state officials hold all schools accountable for character education? Voucher programs typically fail to adequately address these questions.

Give parents real choices. The State should first poll families to see where they prefer to send their children. The RSD recently developed a centralized enrollment system for public schools. We could easily adapt the technology to get a listing of preferences that includes public and private schools. The amount of the voucher should not simply be a function of the per pupil expenditure; it should also be determined by the options families seek. Typical voucher programs only expand the options of what’s affordable and available; not what families actually desire.

Families also deserve report cards on the performance of eligible private and parochial schools. Academic performance is often shrouded in the parochial and private sector. Still, non-public schools take standardized exams of which the State can rank and grade to provide the requisite information for parents to make educated choices.

In addition, Louisiana must always monitor the academic performance of students who take vouchers. If a student performs at a reasonably lower mark at a voucher-receiving school than the average public school student, then that school should not be allowed to take more vouchers.

These actions contribute to a fuller concept of choice. Still, private and parochial schools don’t have to accept vouchers, for good reason. Families send their children to religiously affiliated schools to receive an explicitly religious education. Families expect students to learn the tenants of a particular faith as well as a religious perspective on the world. Thus, faith-based school parents want their children to be held to a standard set forth by religion. ACT, End of Year Exam, or LEAP tests are tertiary to values and tenets of faith that students must constantly demonstrate in faith based schools. In this regard, Louisiana has no authority to issue accountability standards.

Faith-based schools must continue to serve families who want a religious education. Unfortunately, vouchers encourage the growing trend of parochial schools admitting students whose families simply want out of public schools.

The exception of course is of the growing number of families who want their children to receive explicit training and teaching around love, charity, reciprocity, karma, agape, etc., of which their teaching are perceived to be lacking in public schools. I do believe that the crime epidemic is largely a function of families not having additional formal mechanisms for instilling those aforementioned values and moral decision-making skills.

Nevertheless, we arrived to this new phase of reform mainly because students were not learning how to read, write and compute proficiently enough to enable them to participate and contribute to a functioning democracy. The state must be accountable for taxpayer money, and schools that receive those funds should be held to the same academic standards.

Nevertheless, schools’ abilities to instill character are measurable. Attendance is probably the most important and under-appreciated statistic we have in education. It is a proxy for student and family engagement, positive culture, rigor and character. If our accountability system seeks to benefit the student and community, then let’s incentivize and dis-incentivize schools for not be able to build character. No school should receive taxpayer money that has constantly shown they can’t hold onto children. Scholarship and character must be measured.

Bobby Jindal and John White should adjust the accountability system to put more emphasis on keeping students in the building. Particularly in our urban areas, we need schools to keep students in an educational system rather than a juvenile justice system. Cities can’t rely on curfews to keep students away from mischief. The State would help itself in the voucher discussion by issuing them to students in public schools who have high rates of early school departure, i.e. “dropout”, “pushout”, expulsion and suspension.

If State leaders are sincere about using vouchers to give parents greater information and choice and giving funds to those who can keep students engaged, then they will win over more than me.

Minority Serving Institutions help students break through barriers to attending elite colleges and universities

More and more students of all races and socioeconomic classes are attending college.  Limited access to elite colleges and universities can facilitate racial and class-based stratification later in life.  However, expansion of Minority Serving Institutions can help mitigate the impact of inaccessibility to the most selective institutions.

Education pays. Folks with graduate and professional degrees earn significantly more than their high school graduate counterparts.  Certainly, the most selective and highly regarded institutions increase the likelihood of attending graduate or professional schools that qualify individuals for the highest paying jobs.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, college selectivity has modest impact on individual earnings – meaning people with similar test scores, income and family educational levels earn relatively the same wherever they go.  However, attending an elite college or university has much greater impact on low-income, African American and Latino students than whites.

The groups who are most likely to reap the benefits of an elite education are the least likely to attend.  African American, Latinos, American Indians and Southeast Asians are more likely to attend failing high schools, have parents who did not go to college, and come from families in lower economic brackets – all barriers to selective colleges.  Race and class are so interconnected that diverse student bodies are contingent upon post-secondary institutions’ consideration of both factors in admissions decisions.

Unfortunately since the Bush administration cautioned universities against using race as a factor for admissions, post-secondary institutions have developed practices that limit diversity on campuses. As a consequence, statewide governing boards control college enrollments in ways that stifle institutional freedoms to diversify student bodies. In many states, lawmakers are mandating admissions criteria, which creates tiers of institutions based on entering high school GPA and standardized test scores. These coordinating strategies assume that faculties can more efficiently graduate students with similar preparation levels.

Policymakers employed this approach in spite of the historically stable research that shows that GPA and SAT/ACT only predict 50% of the variance of whether or not students move on to their second year in college. Yet, many state and individual college policies stratify student enrollment in public colleges based mightily on test scores, which effectually faults the student for inequities in high school. In particular, poor students of color are most harmed by these policies. The research says retention and graduation have much more to do with universities’ inner workings. Faculty-student interaction, robust student affairs departments, on-campus job and research opportunities improve retention.

The current practice of tiering leaves little room for challenging universities to enroll students based on diversity goals so we can change the communities that need it most.

That is why before the end of 2011, the Obama administration sent a message to U.S. post-secondary institutions urging them to increase levels of racial diversity on their campuses. The Departments of Education and Justice jointly issued a 10 page guidance “to explain how, consistent with existing law, post-secondary institutions can voluntarily consider race to further the compelling interest of achieving diversity.”

Nevertheless, Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), which include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Tribal College and Universities (TCUs) and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), are critical in providing access to their respective underrepresented sub-groups.

MSIs hire faculty of color, exhibit high levels of faculty/student interaction, have an institutional practice of working with low-income students and are committed to embracing and addressing cultural factors that impact student success.  Rashida Govan, Policy and Research Director for the Orleans Parish Education Network and a Morgan State University graduate says, “HBCUs have provided access has historically provided access to those denied to predominately white institutions.  Upon their graduation, they have proven to matriculate into the best graduate schools in the country.  This is evidenced by the high percentage of blacks with graduate degrees who come from HBCUs.”

Marybeth Gasman professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and author of the book, Understanding Minority Serving Institutions, says, “MSIs definitely provide opportunity, but more importantly, they are very good at creating pathways to graduate school for students who might otherwise be ignored. They provide a gateway to elite graduate education, which breaks down race and class barriers.”

If economic equity is a goal, the aim should be to get more people of color into colleges and universities that will prepare them for graduate and professional degrees.  MSI’s may be the answer.

This week in education news, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education confirmed long time educator Patrick Dobard as the latest Superintendent of the Recovery School District.  Dobard is the third person to hold the position in a year. Still, the political journey to his selection would have been probably seen as pedestrian if it were not because he’s a black man from New Orleans.  It’s a sad testament that Dobard’s hiring merits applause in that school reform has unnecessarily projected a Lone Ranger narrative that makes a not so implicit statement of who should be responsible for bringing moral character, discipline and justice to educational peril and inequality.

This time the Lone Ranger is black. Will the black community embrace the hiring? Will reformers embrace a Black Lone Ranger?

Reformers are and should be as diverse as the city, but that hasn’t jibed with the narrative that everything resembling the old system should be discarded.  Evidently the storyline grossly includes local and black teachers, administrators and advocacy groups.  The reform narrative has been so effective that terms “local” and “black” have become synonymous.  Consequently, the fight for local control has been insidiously pitched as black rage against the noble machine of change.

I hope the hiring of Dobard reveals that anyone can embrace reform philosophy including local, black people. Likewise, anyone can be conservative, liberal, market-driven or community-centric. We should expect a browning of reform.  Kira Jones’ winning BESE campaign is evidence that diversity within reform-minded camps does exist.  Therefore, we should embrace Dobard’s hiring as a positive sign that the Lone Ranger narrative is flawed.

Therefore, we must also challenge Dobard, Jones and everyone else in reform that inclusion of our durable community members should be a central focus of reform.  We should not challenge Dobard and Jones in particular because they’re black; we should challenge them to fight for locals because it’s the right thing to do.

A day after Dobard’s confirmation, the Coalition for Community Leadership in Education, a consortium of community advocates, public school alumni groups, educators, parents and professionals held a press conference to highlight that in the last round of charter school applications, none were granted to any of the nine community groups that applied. The Coalition stated, “We are concerned that being community-led and community-driven organizations is a scarlet letter.”

New Orleans needs new voices, ideas and people in education, but reformers can’t continue to make the mistake of assuming that new voices must come from the outside.  We have young professionals, career changers, college graduates as well as veteran teachers who support reform and radical change.

Demands for inclusion are not cries against education reform.  Accordingly, hiring and then trusting the Black Lone Ranger from New Orleans is not an end; it should be evidence that locals can be their own heroes.

The preponderance of evidence shows that curfews are not that effective in reducing crime citywide.  However, my friends in places like New York and Miami have told me curfews can be effective in driving violent crime out of entertainment districts and areas frequented by tourists.  Now is this what we ultimately want?

All one has to do is a simple Google search to find that curfews have proven unsuccessful in reducing crime.  Findings generally state that while popular “empirical studies indicate that curfews are not effective at reducing juvenile offending or victimization.” Also, the peak hours for juvenile crime is between the hours of 3 and 6 pm when children get out of school and around 9 pm on non-school days.  The approved, extended curfew with an 8 pm start is more aligned to French Quarter needs but does not address “mundane” crime among adolescents.

Theoretically speaking, if we keep every juvenile at home, supervised by a good parent, then violent crimes would be reduced dramatically. But this is New Orleans.  The ordinance falls short of addressing why juveniles can physically commit heinous crimes.  A curfew in the Quarter doesn’t provide an incentive to keep juveniles at home or for adults to become stay-at-home effective parents. Access to guns, drugs and discretionary time are also not impacted by the ordinance.  Parents are often flipping beds in the Quarter while their children are being raised by one of the thousands of formerly incarcerated males.  In addition, a child who can kill will respect a curfew law as much as jaywalking.

Certainly, those with criminal records are careful not to make their criminal activity visible in areas in which there’s a higher likelihood of contact with authorities. Consequently, I do think the original extension of the curfew in the Quarter and the attention it will receive can move violent crime to other areas of the city.

In that regard, I understand why Councilperson Kristen Gisleson Palmer, the sponsor of the first ordinance, introduced it.  Palmer’s district includes the French Quarter, and the residents and businesses want crime out of their jurisdiction. I am confused that other council members voted unanimously, for if the curfew proves successful, it will more than likely yield small increases of violent crime in other areas. Council Members have to know that the curfew in the Quarter will receive lopsided attention and it’s generally easier to manage than a citywide ordinance. The citywide curfew idea was clearly a reaction to the black community whose children will bear the brunt of the mandate.

I also understand why elected officials pile on the support of these curfews.  The recent killings of tourists in the French Quarter disrupts the good news associated with the BCS Championship Game, Sugar Bowl and increases in conferencing in the City.  Reverberations of French Quarter killings in the national news have different economic consequences than a murder in Gentilly.  However, if individual council members think a Bourbon Street-styled curfew solution is applicable to all of their needs, then those council members are missing the mark in providing a nuanced way to address their specific communities needs.

On a personal, tertiary note, I look sideways at the notion that we are making other people’s mischief safe at the expense of permanent residents’ civil liberties. Moreover, it feels like we’re saying, ‘that human trafficking, under-aged drinking, as well as the exploitation of undocumented and low-skilled labor is okay as long as there’s no murder.’  Also, law-bidding children of color from good families will undoubtedly be the collateral damage.  I have a 19 year-old college student who would go to a football championship game in the Quarter if Sarah Lawrence College developed farm-league team like those in the SEC.  But I digress.

Curfews can never replace the hard work associated with active parenting, keeping children in school, good teaching, effective truancy programs, having viable recreational activities, and safe high school sport venues. Curfews are such a minor part in a much bigger solution that residents aren’t seeing.

What is most unsettling about the unanimous vote of the ordinance is implicit prioritizing of who matters in the Council’s efforts to fight murder. Tourism and its importance to the city’s vitality can’t be discounted.  However, the overall economy is much more dependent upon the safety and stability of New Orleans’ durable residents.  I shouldn’t have to go to the Quarter to feel safe.  We can stop murder in the French Quarter, but reductions in murder should emanate from making New Orleanians safe.