NOLA Schools — 10 Years After Katrina – America's Education News Source Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:10:37 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 /wp-content/uploads/2022/05/cropped-74_favicon-32x32.png NOLA Schools — 10 Years After Katrina – 32 32 Watch Documentary: Big Gains in New Orleans’ Schools After Katrina, Big Goals for Next Decade /article/reviving-the-schools-katrina-destroyed-a-documentary-about-the-past-present-and-future-of-new-orleans-education/ /article/reviving-the-schools-katrina-destroyed-a-documentary-about-the-past-present-and-future-of-new-orleans-education/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000
This is one in a series of articles covering the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans’ schools. Read all our coverage and essays here – and be sure to watch our three-part documentary series about the past, present and future of New Orleans education.
I was born and raised in Louisiana – a small town called Ferriday, north of Baton Rouge. My family is scattered around the state and in late August of 2005, when word came that a massive storm was bearing down on the Gulf Coast, I headed south, both to cover the story and be with the people I care about.
I reported on the unfolding chaos and tragedy for NBC News, returning many times over the weeks, months, and even years to follow up on the city’s recovery and on the fate of the many dispossessed residents and evacuees. Many of those that I had reported about and gotten to know were children. (See photos from the schools left damaged by Hurricane Katrina)
I talked with kids in the makeshift street camp outside the convention center where 20,000 people waited three days without food for rescue (no one voiced their anguish better than ) and in the horrifying squalor of the Superdome.
I would have never believed it back then if anyone had told me that over the next 10 years these children would so improve their school test results, graduation rates, and college entry rates, that a nationally prominent researcher would conclude, “we are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time.” That could not happen in the New Orleans that I knew, not in a million years.
As we now know, that’s exactly what has happened since the city’s near-destruction a decade ago. A paper titled “Good News for New Orleans,” released by Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance earlier this month, lays out the findings.
Between 2005-2012, the ERA found, student test performance rose by 15 points. To control for test prep, researchers use scores in social studies and science to offset reading and math.
The graduation rate rose 10 points during this period and the college entry rate rose 14 points. But then, you actually may not know about these gains.
As Richard Whitmire pointed out on , the nation’s top-shelf newspapers have devoted a total of zero coverage to the news: i.e., a largely black and very poor American city has experienced unprecedented educational growth following a radical reorganization of its school system made necessary by a massive disaster. (The New York Times finally sounded in last Sunday, publishing a critical oped piece – it is meticulously rebutted here.)
Whitmire provides reasons for the press silence; elsewhere on our own Matt Barnum deconstructs efforts by critics to downplay the gains. What’s clear is that the changes that helped New Orleans students reach new heights have been urged for years by reformers across the country, and contested by teachers unions and other reform opponents for just as long.
Most notably, the gains in the study coincide with all but five schools in the city becoming charters. ERA highlights all that’s at stake:
[The] city has provided the first direct test of an alternative to the system that has dominated American public education for more than a century….the underlying principles are what many reformers have dreamed about for decades—that schools would be freed from most district and union contract rules and allowed to innovate. They would be held accountable not for compliance but for results.
In other words, to date New Orleans establishes proof of the reform concept, with its emphasis on choice; school as the unit of change; strong accountability; and recruitment, staffing and compensation flexibility. The unions’ warnings that charters worsened inequity and segregation in New Orleans, or that they just taught the test, turned out to be just crying wolf.
To be sure, there’s a long road ahead and no one should be satisfied. New Orleans has been the second-worst district in the nation’s second lowest-performing state; it couldn’t have gotten much worse.
But, after an enormous trauma, the indicators are pointing the right direction. Children are learning, more are going to college, brilliant young people are flocking to the city, attracted by the atmosphere of innovation and the talent that is already there.
My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed, they’ve probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they’ve resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.

These are the inspiring young people featured in the first two installments of our documentary series about the rebuilding of New Orleans schools. In part three, we talk to local parents who have taken an active role in deciding who will turn around their school. They also refuse to give up, but for their children’s sake.

A 74 Documentary | Part I: Reopening in the Flood Zone

 

Part II: The Class of 2015

 

Part III: The Next Generation

Article Updated Aug. 27; Photo by Getty Images

]]> /article/reviving-the-schools-katrina-destroyed-a-documentary-about-the-past-present-and-future-of-new-orleans-education/feed/ 0 Opinion: Opinion: We Owe It To Our Kids to Replicate New Orleans’ Education Turnaround in Other Struggling Cities /article/opinion-we-owe-it-to-our-kids-to-replicate-new-orleans-education-turnaround-in-other-struggling-cities/ /article/opinion-we-owe-it-to-our-kids-to-replicate-new-orleans-education-turnaround-in-other-struggling-cities/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000 This is one in a series of articles covering the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans’ schools. Read all our coverage and essays here.
If you were a parent in New Orleans this summer and waited until August 1 to enroll your child at an area high school, you would have had only three options: Carver Collegiate, Cohen College Prep, and Joseph Clark (by early August, all the other schools were fully enrolled)
In most big cities across the country, families enrolling their child this late risk sending their children to a dysfunctional school. But not here in New Orleans. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, parents can show up on the last day of enrollment and send their child to some of the most academically impactful schools in the state.  
Just consider the three options I mentioned above:
Carver Collegiate — A recent study by a research group out of Stanford found that students who attend Carver Collegiate achieve over two years of extra learning in math per year compared to similar traditional schools.
Cohen College Prep  — The same study found that Cohen College Prep delivered roughly a year of additional learning in math.
Joseph Clark — This used to be the lowest performing school in all of Louisiana, but last year achieved at the same level as similar district schools.
So how did this happen? How did New Orleans go from a city where 62% of schools were failing to a city where, on the last day of enrollment, you can still send your child to a life-changing high school?
It happened because New Orleans did something no city has done in our nation’s recent history of school reform: it handed power back to educators and families.
In New Orleans, educators create and run their own schools in the form of non-profit charter schools. In New Orleans, any family can choose from nearly any school in the city and get free transportation to the school.
Equally important: the government ensures that all schools open themselves up to serving all children. If you kick kids out or don’t serve students with special needs, you can loose the right to run a school.
And that’s the New Orleans equation: educators run schools, families choose, and the government keeps an eye on both performance and equity.
As the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, I was able to see how all of this worked first hand.
We were able to support incredible educators as they attempted to create the schools of their dreams in a city that was still reeling from Hurricane Katrina.
None of it was easy. Carver Collegiate opened in trailers with a class of ninth grade as the community struggled with how to resurrect what once had been a great school. Cohen College Prep, an existing middle school, expanded to become a high school as it phased out a struggling traditional school. The leaders of Clark attempted what most thought was impossible: the full turnaround of one of the toughest schools in state.
The fact that, in early August, these high schools still had slots available is in part caused by the lack of public trust in many of our historic schools. Many New Orleanians, of all races and from all parts of town, had written off the public school system, which made the turnaround effort all the more difficult.
It also made the work all the more meaningful. When a great school opened, there was an overwhelming sense among its educators that they were playing a small but vital role in making things better, in reinventing what public education could be.
When it didn’t work, when schools we launched ended up failing, we experienced some of the hardest days of our professional lives. No one does this work with the expectation of failing children. But sometimes it happens.
But here’s the thing: if you keep on trusting to educators to open great schools, and then you have the foresight to double down on the schools that work and the courage to phase out the schools that don’t, a city can be transformed.
There are no shortcuts. There’s no magic top-down policy that will make everything better. All there is the thrill, grind, and hope of creating new schools.
What happens when you transform a city school by school?
Researchers at Tulane University just completed a study on the New Orleans reform efforts. In what should be one of the most important education studies of the year, the researchers found that the New Orleans reform efforts achieved gains in the range of 0.4 standard deviations.
To put this 0.4 standard deviation in context, the black-white achievement gap is about the size of. Meaning in the years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans students and educators achieved an effect that is almost half the size of the black-white gap in this country. And they did this with a student population that was still combating the deep ills of poverty.
The learning gains were greater than the gains often found in studies that focus on pre-k or class size reduction. And they were accomplished for roughly 25% of the cost of those other reform initiatives.
By drawing on our country’s deepest values and skills – entrepreneurship, problem solving, and perseverance – New Orleans educators delivered the greatest achievement gains of any city in our country’s recent history.
To be very clear, New Orleans still has an incredible long way to go. Despite tremendous growth, student still perform at low absolute levels. Moreover, the New Orleans reform efforts occurred under unique and tragic circumstances.
We don’t yet know if similar efforts can be replicated in other cities. But we owe it to the children of this country to try and find out.
No family should ever have to walk into an enrollment office in August with dread and apprehension.
Every last child in this country deserves access to an excellent public school.
 

A 74 Documentary: New Orleans Schools, a Decade After Katrina

Part I: Reopening in the Flood Zone

 

Part II: The Class of 2015

 

Part III: The Next Generation

Photo by Getty Images
]]> /article/opinion-we-owe-it-to-our-kids-to-replicate-new-orleans-education-turnaround-in-other-struggling-cities/feed/ 0 Photo History: After Katrina, Devastation and Renewal Inside New Orleans’ Schools /article/photo-history-after-katrina-devastation-and-renewal-inside-new-orleans-schools/ Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000
This is one in a series of articles covering the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans’ schools. Read all our coverage and essays here.
The few photographers who dared venture into New Orleans’ devastated schools after Hurricane Katrina emerged with images that were harrowing and haunting. Portraits of sheer obliteration, wreckage towering frame after frame.
When the storm came ashore on August 29, 2005, some neighborhoods in the city were submerged beneath 12 feet of water. More than 1,800 were killed by the surge and its aftermath; an estimated million Gulf Coast residents were displaced by the storm.
The city’s school system was left in ruins. More than 100 buildings were damaged or destroyed beyond repair, and the images that emerged from those derelict structures point to the magnitude of the challenge that awaited the city.
Ten years after one of the worst natural disasters in American history, here’s a look back at how Hurricane Katrina forever reshaped New Orleans schools.
AUGUST 30, 2005

A woman is rescued from a school rooftop after being trapped with dozens of others in high water in Orleans parish during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (Photos by Getty Images)
A resident uses a board to paddle through a flooded school zone in New Orleans.

Survivors from New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward wait to be rescued from the rooftop of the Martin Luther King Jr. School and Library, one of the only two-story buildings in the area, after Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 30, 2005.
AUGUST 31

Two men paddle in high water after Hurricane Katrina.
 
SEPTEMBER

A submerged school bus is seen in the flooded Lower Ninth Ward on Sept. 24, 2005.

OCTOBER

A destroyed classroom at St. Dominic's school is seen before it is cleaned up after more than a month under water in the Lakeview area of New Orleans, Louisiana. Oct. 14, 2005.

NOVEMBER

Emily Lampo, 15, and Jessica Meyer, 14, wait for their St Bernard Parish United School bus to leave the new school campus after the first day of classes following Hurricane Katrina's wrath, on Nov. 14, 2005, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

2007

A small group of lockers continue to rust inside Alfred Lawless High School July 29, 2007 in the Lower 9th Ward.
A clock hangs upside down inside the heavily damaged Lawless High School, Aug. 28, 2007.
Aug. 22, 2007: A classroom at Hynes Public School in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans is left abandoned almost two years after Hurricane Katrina.
Students from John McDonogh Senior High School’s first graduating class since Hurricane Katrina celebrate and pose for photos after their commencement June 8, 2007 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The struggling inner-city school was damaged by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and students were only able to re-enroll in the school a year after the storm.
Teacher Anya Anderson comforts kindergartner Eriana Hoffman on her first day of school at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology in the Lower 9th Ward, Aug. 20, 2007.
A kindergartner runs toward a playground for recess on her first day of school at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology in the Lower Ninth Ward on Aug. 20, 2007.

 

2015

Students attend class at the Encore Academy charter school on May 13, 2015 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
A school bus drops off a student in front of the Claiborne Bridge in the Lower Ninth Ward on May 12, 2015 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
A 74 Documentary | Part I: Reopening in the Flood Zone

 

Part II: The Class of 2015

 

Part III: The Next Generation

]]> Opinion: In Praise of My City, and My Students: One New Orleans Educator Marvels Over a Decade of Progress /article/in-praise-of-my-city-and-my-students-one-new-orleans-educator-marvels-over-a-decade-of-progress/ /article/in-praise-of-my-city-and-my-students-one-new-orleans-educator-marvels-over-a-decade-of-progress/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000
This is one in a series of articles covering the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans’ schools. Read all our coverage and essays here.
August 29, 2005 is a date I will remember for the rest of my life. I personally lost a lot, but also discovered a new sense of resilience and determination. Just two days earlier, I was one of 100 Edna Karr High School coaches and students who were huddled together in New Orleans, learning that our first football game of the season would be canceled due to a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. We all assumed we would return to New Orleans in a day or two to play the game, and that a normal school year would follow. But that distant storm turned out to be Hurricane Katrina, and in the days that followed, our city was devastated beyond recognition. August 27, 2005 marked the last day that I would ever see numerous students, parents, and families — and the first day of a very different New Orleans.
I relocated to Baton Rouge for the next 12 months, and during that time, I often thought of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling in hopes of processing the sense of loss that followed.  After the hurricane I was fired like all other educators in New Orleans due to a lack of students in New Orleans and struggled greatly with the emotional toll that accompanies the uncertainty of not knowing whether my students or coworkers were safe, secure, or even alive.
As we now approach the 10th anniversary of Katrina, I find myself once again pausing to remember all those students, families, and coworkers. In December of 2005, Edna Karr High School reopened to serve the students and families returning to rebuild their homes, communities, and city. It has been a long process, but now, nearly 10 years after the hurricane, I can truly see the academic progress of our city’s youth. Now, more than ever, I salute those students, families, and teachers who, before the storm and especially after the storm, continuously fight for our students — and our city.
Just think of how far we’ve come as educators: Since 2005, New Orleans has cut the percentage of students attending schools labeled “Academically Unacceptable” or “Failing” from 62% to just 7%. We’ve more than tripled the number of students attending schools graded as A, B, or Cs by the state—from 20% to 67%. Within my organization, InspireNOLA Charter Schools, our graduation is now 100% and our schools are now regarded as top academic institutions with high parent demand.
New Orleans students have closed the overall performance gap with their peers statewide from 23 percentage points to just 6 points. For African-American students, the passage rate on state tests is now five points higher in New Orleans than it is statewide. Additionally, 40% of students with disabilities are passing state tests—a huge improvement from the 11% who passed those tests in the years before and immediately after the storm.
While something incredible has been happening in our schools, our students have been told by some critics that those incredible things aren’t possible
These numbers make it clear that the changes made over the past ten years have produced significant growth that is broad, sustained and meaningful. Most notably, the K-12 system in New Orleans is beginning to accomplish one of its most important goals: sending students to college with aspirations to graduate and then return to New Orleans to continue to rebuild their local communities. For the first time in recorded history, the rate of students from New Orleans entering college matches the average for the rest of Louisiana. As those students find success on college campuses and eventually return to New Orleans as active young leaders, they will help overturn decades of low expectations, poverty, and violence in our city.
As I think back on some of the arguments that have surrounded our schools and education reforms over the last decade, I often think once again about Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If.” With its description of how to overcome adversity and obstacles, this poem is a source of light in times of struggle. And in this moment of city-wide reflection and nationwide discussion as we approach August 29, 2015, there is one stanza I return to repeatedly:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.

As we hear some of the critics debate our students’ progress, I want them to know that New Orleanians know all about stooping and building their lives with worn-out tools. This is a city that has rebuilt from fire, plagues and floods many times over the last 300 years but has never lost its deep sense of pride, love, and hope. To know New Orleans is to understand that we believe in a rebirth and progress; it goes hand in hand in living so close to the delta.
During these last ten years, the first half of Kipling’s stanza has been put to the test for too many of our students. Because while something incredible has been happening in our schools, our students have been told by some critics that those incredible things aren’t possible: they aren’t actually graduating from high school, aren’t succeeding at higher rates than before, and aren’t enrolling in college programs.

I realize more now than ever that nothing I write will convince some national pundits to stop their bickering over whether or not New Orleans school reforms are working, but, as we approach Katrina’s 10th anniversary, I hope we can all focus on saluting students, teachers, and families for our miraculous rebirth. We have rebuilt our city, neighborhoods and most importantly have brought a renewed sense of purpose to our families and students.
As we approach the anniversary of Katrina, I once again lead our New Orleans students with a chant we use at InspireNOLA charter schools: MOTIVATED, MOTIVATED, down right MOTIVATED! You check us out! You check us out!

A 74 Documentary | Part I: Reopening in the Flood Zone

 

Part II: The Class of 2015

 

Part III: The Next Generation

Photo by Getty Images
]]> /article/in-praise-of-my-city-and-my-students-one-new-orleans-educator-marvels-over-a-decade-of-progress/feed/ 0 Opinion: Tucker: Time to Cheer – and Double Down on – NOLA’s Ed Breakthrough /article/tucker-now-is-the-time-to-acknowledge-and-double-down-on-new-orleans-education-breakthrough/ /article/tucker-now-is-the-time-to-acknowledge-and-double-down-on-new-orleans-education-breakthrough/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000
This is one in a series of articles covering the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans’ schools. Read all our coverage and essays here – and be sure to watch our three-part documentary series about the past, present and future of New Orleans education.
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc along the Gulf Coast, nearly destroying New Orleans, rebuilding efforts are proceeding slowly but steadily. The Big Easy has restored its tourist economy, reclaimed its place as a haven of fine dining and rebuilt some of its once-uninhabitable neighborhoods.
Nowhere is the renewal more evident than in the city’s public schools, which have overturned a failing bureaucracy to emerge as innovative laboratories for learning. Data from several studies show that, since 2005, standardized test scores are up and graduation rates are, too. Tulane University researcher Douglas Harris has found test score gains of 8 to 12 percentage points.
None of the data portray the city’s new schools as a panacea. They have not found a magic formula to close the achievement gap between poor students and their wealthier peers, to grant them the knowledge and sophistication that affluence bestows.  Tulane’s highly-respected Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives says the schools have stepped up from “failing to average.”
Still, that’s genuine progress, cause for excitement. You’d think that educators and legislators, parents and activists would join in the celebration — before rejoining the hard work of ensuring every child a good education. Instead, news of the schools’ early successes has been met with recriminations, controversy and dispute.
That’s because nearly all the students who attend public schools — about 93 percent — attend charters run without the oversight of traditional bureaucracies. That’s the highest rate of charter school attendance in the nation. So the success of the Recovery School District has drawn the ire of the anti-charter school crowd — traditionalists who are furious at the suggestion that throwing out the old bureaucracies, and replacing sub-par principals and teachers, might actually work.
Leading the charge against charter schools are teachers’ organizations, including their unions. They are especially chagrined that New Orleans has become a model for other education reformers, fearing that it may inspire similar experiments across the country.
Let’s take a look at New Orleans schools before Hurricane Katrina.
Louisiana has historically languished toward the bottom of the heap in educational achievement — in January, Education Week ranked the state 44th out of 50 —and the Orleans Parish school board operated some of the worst schools in Louisiana.
The schools’ mission is to educate children, not to provide paychecks to adults
Essentially, the city had a two-tier system, with private and parochial schools serving the advantaged and the failing public schools serving the poor. (Even now, about 25 percent of New Orleans’ students attend private or parochial schools, one of the highest rates of non-public school attendance in the nation.) Even working-class families with little money to spare scrimped and saved to send their children to parochial schools.
The local education bureaucracy was corrupt and dysfunctional. Eight superintendents served between 1998 and 2005, lasting, on average, 11 months. The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued indictments against 11 people in the system for financial mismanagement in 2004.
When Hurricane Katrina struck, shutting down essential services, the state of Louisiana took advantage of the tragedy to take over the entire system. Without money to pay teachers, the state laid off more than 7,000 of them en masse and required them to reapply for their jobs. Some were re-hired; many were not.
Those lost jobs are undoubtedly the source of much of the animosity that has greeted the charter schools of the Recovery School District. And it’s understandable. It’s difficult to overestimate the trauma for teachers and principals who lost not only their homes but also their livelihoods.
But the greater injustice would have been to leave New Orleans’ poorest students — its most vulnerable citizens — in schools that weren’t teaching them anything. Without the skills necessary to thrive in a global economy, they would likely have been doomed to lives of poverty. After all, the schools’ mission is to educate children, not to provide paychecks to adults.
Critics also note that the teaching corps is whiter (and younger) than it was before Hurricane Katrina, drawing many of its professionals from non-traditional programs such as Teach for America. With a student body that is about 87 percent black, the Recovery School District employs a teaching force that is about 54 percent black, down from 71 percent before Katrina, according to the Cowen Institute.
The Recovery School District is making an effort, as it should, to hire more black teachers. But those teachers need not come out of the traditional educational bureaucracy and teacher certification programs that have shown themselves incapable of innovation.
Finally, many of those who dispute the successes of the Recovery School District cite its failure to solve all the problems of educational inequity: children continue to struggle with poverty; the drop-out rate is still too high; college entrance scores and college attendance rates remain sub-standard.
All of that’s true.
That’s why education advocates should continue to build on the gains that New Orleans has made over the decade since the storm. There is certainly much more work to be done. But denying the progress that’s already been made is a huge step in the wrong direction — a denial that would doom New Orleans’ poor, black kids.
A 74 Documentary | Part I: Reopening in the Flood Zone

 

Part II: The Class of 2015

 

Part III: The Next Generation

Photo by Getty Images
]]> /article/tucker-now-is-the-time-to-acknowledge-and-double-down-on-new-orleans-education-breakthrough/feed/ 0 Q&A: New Orleans Education Expert Doug Harris Walks Through His Research Showing a Decade of Student Gains /article/qa-new-orleans-education-expert-doug-harris-walks-through-his-research-showing-a-decade-of-student-gains/ Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000
This is one in a series of articles covering the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans’ schools. Read all our coverage and essays here – and be sure to watch our three-part documentary series about the past, present and future of New Orleans education.
The debate has raged for years about the effects of school reforms implemented in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as the vast majority of traditional public schools were converted into charters independently operated by nonprofit organizations.
No one has studied these effects in greater depth than economist , who directs the Education Research Alliance of Tulane University. Harris has done pioneering on the effects of New Orleans reforms on student outcomes, and I have previously summarized the top findings of his latest report, which was unveiled at a conference in May.
In mid-July, I talked with Professor Harris at length about his studies — including New Orleans’ gains in test scores, the change in the teacher workforce, and the challenges of someday replicating New Orleans’ reforms in other cities. We present the transcript below, lightly edited for length and clarity:
The Seventy Four: Let me start by asking — What were the New Orleans reforms exactly?
Professor Doug Harris: I view it as a package of changes. It wasn’t one thing. They were a combination of changes that all fit within a few basic principles. Really two, I’d say: accountability for schools and autonomy for schools. Let me flesh that out.
On the accountability side you have what economists would call “market accountability.” They got rid of the attendance zones that would normally determine which students would go to which schools, so that no schools are guaranteed students. The schools in a sense have to compete for students and so they’re accountable to the market in that way. Second thing is that the government, in allowing charter schools into the market, was holding them to contracts where if certain schools didn’t perform — if they didn’t generate high enough test scores — then the schools would be closed down. And a lot of them have been. There have been 46 schools in a city of only 90 schools that have either been shut down or taken over or merged with other schools. There’s a high degree of accountability there based on the scores.
The second principle is autonomy: letting the schools figure out how to reach those goals. The government was setting the bar in terms of test scores, but then letting the schools figure out how to get there. Schools had control over their budgets. The budgets were on a per pupil basis, so it’s more like a business — if you get more customers you get more money. They were then given the flexibility on how to spend that money. You also got rid of the union contract, which was a pretty substantial change. There was no longer any restriction for hiring, firing, or evaluation of teachers. That was another big part of the autonomy puzzle.
Are test scores the only metric that are used for accountability purposes?
Pretty close. At the high school level they also use high school graduation. But otherwise that’s pretty much it.
Did it “work”? That is, what evidence is there that New Orleans reforms worked or didn’t work in terms of improving student learning or other outcomes?
When I got down here the first thing that everybody talked about are the increases in outcomes. And if you look at pretty much any measure, there has been a substantial increase and even more importantly a substantial increase relative to the state as a whole. You worry with some of these measures that maybe the scales are changing over time or there are state policies that also have an influence separate from the reforms, so having some sort of a comparison group is helpful. No matter what measure you look at, New Orleans has improved compared to the state. Whether it’s the state test scores in grades 3–8, or the ACT, or high school graduation, or college entry — everything looks better in New Orleans. The problem is that there are a lot of different reasons why that might be other than the reforms.
I’ve spent most of the last year, year and a half, trying to untangle the reform effect from those trends. And I think we have, so I’ll give you a rundown of the things we’ve looked at.
One concern is that the population changed. The public housing projects were shut down for a while. The hardest-hit neighborhoods in terms of flooding were also the lowest-income neighborhoods and there’s more direct evidence that low-income populations did not come back as quickly. From that alone you’d expect the scores to go up because of the strong link between income and educational outcomes. It could be the increases are just reflecting that.
We did a couple different kinds of analyses to address that. One, we looked at the pre-Katrina characteristics of people who returned to see whether they seemed to be higher-performing in terms of scores or more advantaged in socioeconomic status. What we found was that at the beginning that argument holds up. At the very beginning, the pre-Katrina scores of the returnees were much higher than the non-returnees. But over time it actually came back quite close to the pre-Katrina average. So at the beginning you could make that argument that the populations change was playing a role. But we’re mostly interested in whether there was an effect of the reform as of, let’s say, 2012. By that point the population actually looked quite similar demographically.
The second thing we did was look at census data, and then we actually simulated using some other data the relationship between income and test scores. We could get that information from this other nationally representative federal data set and do some statistical analysis there. And then we can combine that with information about how income changed here relative to the surrounding districts. And when we do that we get almost exactly the same answer: basically it looks like New Orleans ends up slightly more advantaged socioeconomically or has a slight improvement in socioeconomics relative to the other districts. But it’s so small it couldn’t possibly explain the increases in outcomes that we see.
So that’s the first thing: the change in the populations.
The second thing is test-based accountability distortions. So here we mean things like teaching to the test, drilling test items, and doing things that will get the scores up without actually improving learning in any substantive way. This was a little harder to tease out, but there’s certainly good reason to think that it would be a more severe problem here than in other districts. One reason is that charter schools tend to be very test-driven to begin with — their ethos is built around generating results and having high expectations. The second reason is they were going to be shut down if they didn’t show results. It wasn’t just a belief in scores generically — it was that their livelihoods depended on the scores.
To get at that we did a few different things. One was to look at the scores based on the stakes. In Louisiana, during the time frame we were looking at, the science and social studies tests had lower stakes than math and English language arts tests. If it’s an incentive driven response, you’d expect then to see larger gains in math and language arts. But we don’t see that — the science and social studies effects are about the same as math and language arts. That was our first direct indication that it probably wasn’t teaching to the test.
We also did an analysis of what we call “bubble effects,” which refer to the idea that if students are right near proficiency then the schools might put all their chips in the pot for those students and give less attention to students who are a ways from the bar — who are either too far below to make it to the standard or so far above that schools don’t need to pay any attention to them anymore. And since the school performance score was, at least for a while, based more on the proficiency rating, you might expect that to happen. We also don’t see any evidence of that — at least it’s not any different in New Orleans than any other districts.
Those are the only two things we could do. It’s still possible — and I actually still suspect — that some of the effect is driven by test-based distortions. But one reason I’m still reasonably confident in what we’re saying is that we also looked at the state reports of things like high school graduation and college outcomes in New Orleans.
College outcomes are really the most important outcome for two reasons. One is: from the standpoint of long-term life outcomes for students, college is the best predictor — it’s a much better predictor than test scores. We use the test scores because it’s an immediate response and it’s something we can look at quickly.
When we look at college outcomes and high school graduation, those also look positive. The percentage of students who graduate from high school that are going on to college right away is increasing, at the same time the high school graduation rate is going up.
Are they both going up at the same magnitude as well?
Yeah — well, actually the fact that they’re even going in the same direction is remarkable. Normally if you have a higher graduation rate you expect a lower percentage of those students to then go on to college, because presumably the extra students graduating are lower performing students, who you might think wouldn’t go on to college. The magnitudes are similar, but it’s even more remarkable that they’re going in the same direction.
SCHOOL DISCIPLINE
What about school discipline? One of the concerns, as you know, is that these schools are suspending, expelling more students, and it’s argued that they might be getting these positive outcomes but there’s some cost in how students are treated in schools.
We did do some analysis of that. We have the number of expulsions and the number of suspensions in particular and whether suspensions are in school or out of school. And we find that initially when the reforms were first put in place that there was an increase in the number of disciplinary incidents — which you could attribute to two different things. One is when people were coming back there was a lot of trauma and upheaval in their lives, and they may have just been more prone to misbehavior because of what was happening in life at the time. The second reason could be that the schools were being more strict. We can’t really disentangle those two things clearly. What we can say is that at this point in time, that the number of incidents is actually lower than it was pre-Katrina.
There are a couple possible reasons that might be. One is that the number of incidents is actually lower. And I think that might be true. But it might be true because of the strict discipline policies. The fact that there are fewer suspensions doesn’t mean that schools aren’t strict; it could mean that the strictness is leading to there being fewer incidents.
Has there been any work looking at whether there are correlations between schools in New Orleans that are strict and their achievement outcomes or their outcomes in terms of suspensions or anything like that?
We haven’t done anything like that in part because I don’t think you can really interpret those numbers very well. For one reason, the schools that are doing that, or that have particular discipline policies, also have particular ways of teaching and it becomes very difficult to separate out these factors.
SCHOOL FUNDING
Next question is about the money. Some people would say, “Well, there’s all this money put into New Orleans and the increase in money really is what explains the improved outcomes.”
It’s possible, and I would say it’s pretty difficult to isolate the role of any one of the changes, including what we think of as the reforms but also things like money.
I can describe how the money changed. At the beginning New Orleans was spending about $8,000 more per pupil relative to similar districts. In other words, spending didn’t quite double, but it came pretty close to doubling in the initial years. And then it converged back to the normal, or close to normal rate. Now they’re spending about $1,000 more per pupil than similar districts, whereas before the storm they were spending close to the same as those comparison districts. The numbers I just gave you exclude construction money.
So what do you make of the interpretation of this, that all New Orleans shows is that we need to invest more money into our urban school districts and that will spur the improvements that we’ve seen in New Orleans?
It’s pretty unlikely that that’s the explanation, only because when we look at evidence from other places we don’t see really strong relationships in other places that have rapidly increased spending without generating substantial increases in scores, which isn’t to say there’s no relationship. In fact, I think the increase in spending was almost certainly a necessary component of the reforms because to be able to attract people down here you needed to pay people well. And you needed to put in resources to get things going. I’m not sure that everybody would have come down and that they would have done as well with the money that was being spent before. I think probably every element of the reform package, including the change in spending, probably contributed in some fashion, but I think there’s not much reason to think that it was all about the money.
Last question on the money point. What do you make of the argument that well okay we know we can’t just throw money at the problem necessarily, but what New Orleans could have done was really invest in things like pre-K, lower class sizes, and higher salaries for veteran teachers who were still in the system and that doing that would have improved academic outcomes and would have been less disruptive to the community?
It would have less disruptive for sure. The existing system is quite different from what people were used to. It took a long time to create and get off the ground; it continues to involve disruption because you’re closing schools, and because there’s higher teacher turnover. But it’s not clear how much disruption should be a criteria. I think ultimately what we should be focusing on is whether the schools are better or not.
Again I would say it’s true that putting more money into the schools does have some positive effect, but again looking at past research there’s not any reason to think that just doing those things would have generated this kind of an effect. In fact, we compared the effects that we generated to things like early childhood education and smaller class sizes. I’ve also done work in the past comparing increases in teacher salaries to things like smaller class sizes.
There just isn’t evidence to support the idea that any of these policies would generate effects of this size. Put differently, I’ve never seen an effect of this size before, which isn’t to say it hasn’t happened. I’m always poking around, asking people, “Have you ever seen an effect of this size before?” And I’ve yet to find one. And that’s thinking about any reform or any change in policy, including when you look at the track record of spending more money and smaller classes. Pre-K definitely has more support, and I support early childhood education. But even that doesn’t appear like it would have generated this kind of effect.
TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS
Can you talk about the change in the teaching force and the demographics in the teaching force? Particularly the sort of paradox as I see it — that the teaching force has gotten whiter, less experienced, less credentialed, and that from past research we would have expected at least some marginal decreases in teacher effectiveness based on those facts.
It’s an important topic and one reason New Orleans is so important is that it touches on so many different parts of the school reform debate. It touches on finances, how we think of the teacher workforce, choice, test-based accountability — it’s all wrapped in one package.
Descriptively, you’re right. The percentage of teachers who are certified dropped by 20 percentage points; the percentage of teachers with 10 or more years of experience dropped by 20 percentage points; teacher turnover doubled. Certification, experience, low turnover are all typically thought of markers of a quality school and workforce.
I think there’s actually a fairly easy resolution to the paradox. One part of it is that you’re bringing in teachers from alternative certification programs and those programs have a pretty good track record, at least a decent track record. For example, you look at Teach For America [TFA] — the evidence seems to suggest that TFA teachers in terms of generating achievement are about as good as traditionally prepared teachers and in some cases maybe better. And that’s where a lot of these teachers were coming from. Not just TFA, but other programs like it.
Second part of the puzzle is that the school models here involve teachers working really long hours — 80 hour weeks are not uncommon for teachers down here. The traditional career path doesn’t allow that. Teachers start to have families in their twenties and thirties, and nobody’s going to work 80 hours a week in that situation unless they have absolutely no other choice. By bringing in teachers who were less experienced and who didn’t intend to make it a career, they can have this model of very long hours and that’s how they built it. If we can get these less experienced teachers working much longer hours than more experienced teachers, you’re kind of making up for the lack of experience in that other way.
Do you think that selection and deselection of teachers through the evaluation system — I don’t know if charter schools are using pay for performance models, etc. — contributed?
Yes. There were two other factors I was going to mention and that’s one of them. Let me give you the other one, which is that the city is small, with only 90 or so schools. This is not New York City or Miami or Los Angeles or Chicago. This is Memphis. It’s a small city. You had all these people — not just locally, but people from all over the country — who wanted to come to help rebuild New Orleans and help be part of this unprecedented reform movement. So you’ve got a lot of people interested in that and you had a very small number of openings and a very large supply of people going to fill those slots. Because the schools could be selective, it’s closer to where you were going — they could pick who they want, and they could fire people, and they’re going to have a long list of people waiting. That’s a condition that’s unlikely to hold in most other places. I think that is part of what’s going on here. I think it’s important to consider that when we think about what New Orleans means for the rest of the country.
REPLICATING NEW ORLEANS
So let’s talk about that! What does New Orleans mean for the rest of the country?
The way I look at it, first of all, the results I think are clearly positive almost no matter how you look at it. Even the side effects seem to be small or not there. It didn’t seem to increase segregation. It seemed to benefit all subgroups of students, including special education students, who some were especially worried about. It didn’t increase the number of disciplinary incidents; in fact the number of out-of-school suspensions is substantially lower now. A lot of good news here for New Orleans.
I think one thing that tells you is what’s possible with a reform like this. I tend to think what happened here is the ceiling of what’s possible with this kind of approach. If other places try it, probably they’re not going to see effects of this size, which doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it. It just means they should view New Orleans as what might be possible.
Another thing that I think is relevant is the way it forces people to rethink what a school system can look like — not necessarily what it should look like. The first two years I was here I saw something every day where I just sort of twisted my head and puzzled over, because it was something I’d never seen before. You realize the whole system is just totally different from anything you’d ever seen before. Even separate from how well it’s worked, seeing something this different I think is healthy. It’s kind of like going to a foreign country and seeing that in China everybody rides a bike. So why doesn’t everybody ride a bike in the United States? You don’t really think about it that way until you go to another country and see how their system works.
On the more skeptical side, as I said earlier, I don’t think you’d see the same effects in other places because the conditions here were distinctive. You have a lot of people from around the country wanting to come here to help in a way that you’re not going to have in Detroit for example. It’s the center of school reform. So you have a lot of very talented people who want to be part of school reform who are going to come to New Orleans. If you want to build a tech company you go to Palo Alto. If you want to be involved in school reform you come to New Orleans, and that’s not going to be true in other places. There’s only one Silicon Valley.
I think those are the considerations. I don’t think you’d see the same effect, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons here.
Imagine a hypothetical school district that’s an urban district that’s struggling — I understand that “hypothetical school district” might not be the best way to think about this — but a school district that’s struggling, does not have any charter schools or has a limited charter sector. And they come to you and they say, “We want to replicate the New Orleans reform. Should we do it?” What are the factors you would tell them to consider and how likely would you be to recommend the New Orleans reforms?
Let me answer that by adding one more thing to what I was saying earlier about the conditions of New Orleans. One of the conditions in New Orleans was it was a very low performing district. It was a disaster by almost any measure. When I first got here I thought some of that was just hyperbole because everyone kept saying it, but now I’ve seen more and more objective evidence of that. The FBI had an office within the school board because there was so much corruption to investigate that they needed to have offices within the school board offices. I just got my hands on a report after many years of trying that was the Council of Great City Schools evaluating the human resources management of the district. The litany of problems in the district was just appalling, the way it operated. The outcomes were also poor as a result. It was the second lowest performing district in the second lowest performing state in the country.
If you’re in a district that already functions pretty well, maybe this is not necessarily a good idea. Here you had a district that was not functioning well by any measure. I think people tend to assume that all urban districts are terrible because the scores are low but it really is true that a lot of that is driven by the demographics and the socioeconomics of the districts. That’s real. There are some very good schools in urban areas and there are some districts that probably do a pretty good job. You don’t want to throw that out just because of a probable misinterpretation, if they’re not taking into account where students are starting.
I would tell a district or somebody advocating it in a district to look very carefully at how the traditional district is operating before going down that path.
I would also tell them all the conditions, all the things they have to do to make it work. I think people tend to think, oh we just need more charter schools. But Detroit is a case study in how that goes wrong. Detroit has a lot of charter schools — I think it’s second or third in market share — but it’s terrible. The system has so little coordination.
One thing that’s different about New Orleans is you have two authorizers; in Michigan you’ve got dozens of authorizers. It’s a very uncoordinated system. It’s possible to have autonomy at the schools and still have coordination at the system level. One possible lesson of New Orleans is that just making it a free-for-all is probably not going to be the right approach. You do need to have an active government, but a government that’s active in different ways, in ways that are ensuring the system of schools works well, but not putting its thumb on every little thing the schools are doing.
What do you think the chief methodological critiques of your paper are going to be?
To my mind the biggest critique isn’t so much methodological. I don’t think the critique will really be about methodology, in the sense that I don’t think people will say we should have done something else. We’ve shown this paper to a lot of people and we’ve done everything that anyone’s suggested that made any sense, and we reached the same result.
It will be more about how we’re interpreting it. I think one critique will be the critique that we put out there ourselves, which is that we can’t totally account for all the different elements of test-based accountability and distortions that can come with that. We did our best with the data that we have, but unfortunately there’s no National Assessment of Education Progress [NAEP] test in New Orleans. It would have been wonderful if we had a pre-Katrina NAEP and a post-Katrina NAEP and this would all be a much simpler exercise. I think that’s probably the biggest question mark.
One other thing that will probably come up is that when we look in the very first few years, so just up to 2009 when the system was still getting off the ground, the effects are generally positive but they’re not statistically significant. Some have looked at that result and said “well, what about this result?” even though what we really care about is 2012, which is the most recent year that we’re studying. When you’re developing a new system from scratch you want to give it some time to develop and see what happens in the long run. What we see looking at the data is that schools get better year after year after year. The differences in 2009 are not statistically significant, but if you just wait to 2012, they’re always statistically significant. We’ve estimated hundreds of different ways and it’s very hard to make the 2012 effect go away.
Going back to the test-based accountability piece I would say in addition to what we can directly study in terms of high-stakes and low-stakes subjects the fact that we’re seeing in the state reports that high school graduation and college entry also going up at very high rates suggest that it can’t just be teaching to the test because that would not get students into college.
I still think the data are quite convincing. Honestly, I didn’t expect that at all. I thought I was going to end up with a really murky situation where there were population change and test-based accountability distortions, and all these other things that could have gone wrong, and that we would not be able to draw really clear conclusions. We sort of went down our checklist — and it was a very long checklist — and it was so consistently positive that I think it’s very hard to look at these results in a negative way.
Any other things you wanted to mention?
One other thing that’s worth bringing up is the process, as much as we are focusing on the results. There is a real concern in New Orleans about how the system was put in place and how it’s run. The fact that you have a much smaller share of teachers who are African-American now, and that came on the heels of taking the schools away from the local district, which was elected by a majority African-American city, and turning it over to the state. The state leaders are not anywhere near a majority African-American. There’s a lot of racial tension around that. I think people feel like, especially taking a longer view of history, that the African-American community worked for a century to have some control and authority over its schools, and that was taken away.
When you think of it that way it gives you a little bit of perspective. There is a bitterness, even among the families who have their kids in charter schools, who might even like their individual schools — they have concerns about how the system operates and how it was put in place to begin with.
Is there data about how parents or even just how members of the New Orleans community, view the schools, view the reforms, and view the effectiveness of the reforms?
There is survey evidence. The Cowen Institute has done every couple of years. Generally those results have majority support and majority support both in the white community and the African-American community. There’s not universal support by any means.
But I don’t think the questions were getting at quite what I was describing either. They were along the lines of “Do you think the current system works?” If they had also asked, “Do you think it’s good that a handful of people, while everyone was evacuated, made this decision to run the schools this way?” Almost everybody would say, no, that was not a good thing.
I think the process matters. One of the sessions from our had Howard Fuller in the discussion. This is a guy who has been a strong supporter of this kind of reform for much of his adult life, but who is deeply concerned about the process and the way the reforms are perceived in the local community.
As much as I’m about evidence, it’s not all about evidence and we have to keep that in perspective.

A 74 Documentary | Part I: Reopening in the Flood Zone

Part II: The Class of 2015 

Part III: The Next Generation

]]> Opinion: Media Ignores New Orleans Success Because It’s Good News on Charters /article/opinion-media-ignores-new-orleans-success-because-its-good-news-on-charters/ /article/opinion-media-ignores-new-orleans-success-because-its-good-news-on-charters/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000 This is one in a series of articles covering the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans’ schools. Read all our coverage and essays here – and be sure to  our three-part documentary series about the past, present and future of New Orleans education.
Just for a moment, suppose that convincing evidence emerged from an unimpeachable source showing that one city in the U.S. had dramatically improved its schools for poor and minority students – a feat that has eluded nearly every other city in the country.
That would be major national news, right? At the very least worthy of a blurb. A tweet?
Apparently not. The national press maintained total radio silence last Monday as Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance for New Orleans released a laying out the details of students making unprecedented gains in the re-invented school district made possible by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
No reports appeared in The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal or USA Today. Also nothing from the networks. The New Orleans Times Picayune , as did from the trade publication Education Week. The Seventy Four did a piece debunking the report’s critics, point-by-point, a few days later.
That was about it.
Perhaps there’s a simple explanation for this. After all, it was a hot, lazy Monday in August, with lots of reporters on vacation. What few reporters were around probably attended the TNTP press conference in Washington, D.C. Tuesday morning to hear about a report on dubious teacher professional development (That’s where I was).
One plausible explanation was offered by education reporter Greg Toppo from USA Today: “My sense is that news organizations are probably saving their powder for the week of the Katrina 10th anniversary (starts Aug. 29).”

Douglas Harris (Courtesy Tulane University)

Report author Douglas Harris agrees: “I think all these (media) places are trying to figure out what their Katrina coverage will be.”

So that’s all there is to it? Probably not.
To me, the radio silence tells us that for reporters charter schools have become the third rail of education, best dealt with by wielding a long, wooden pole. If New Orleans had produced these gains without using charter schools, it’s likely the report would have been big news.
And it's not just the press: All those sprawling education associations representing principals, teachers and superintendents, the ones that vow to track down what works best for students … silence from them as well. Again, the charter issue.
Let’s put this into context: It has been more than 30 years since A Nation at Risk, the report that put us on notice that our education system was stumbling, especially for urban minority students. Since then, countless depressing headlines have reminded us of our failures to right that wrong. Now comes the New Orleans experiment, definitively declared a success, and … nothing?
Aren’t there lessons to be learned from New Orleans that could be applied to the urban school reform efforts in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere?
Not even mentioning a major study like this, especially one that carefully weighs every objection ever raised by critics of the dramatic reforms there, makes no sense — even if your staff is planning future coverage. Does a takeout on global warming scheduled in two Sundays mean you don’t write a daily story should a major Arctic ice shelf collapse?
The complete revamping of New Orleans may represent the nation’s largest-ever attempt to help low-income and minority students. Did it produce anything positive? Seems worth a mention.
Let’s take this paper-by-paper (the networks, unless there’s great bang-bang video, are pretty much no-shows on stories like this):
That USA Today didn’t cover the report is understandable. These days, my old paper (I was an editorial writer there for eight years) lacks the resources for this kind of continual coverage, unfortunately.
At the Washington Post, education editor Josh White declined to comment on coverage decisions. My sense is that the Post, which does some good national education reporting, will return to New Orleans.
The Wall Street Journal education editor never answered my email query, but any WSJ reader can see the obvious: If the education story doesn’t involve New York schools — or admission to elite private schools or top colleges — it pretty much doesn’t exist.
That brings us to the national paper with the resources and the commitment, at least in theory, to stay on top of stories like this —  The New York Times. The Times definitely had New Orleans on its mind last week: an Aug. 4 headliner story was about the new  of New Orleans. But, alas, nothing about the school turnaround.
I got no response from Times’ education reporters or editors, but the lack of coverage doesn’t come as a surprise. The New Orleans story doesn’t fit into their long-established pattern of covering charter schools, which has been to portray them as fueled by hedge funders and no-better-than-neighborhood schools. Pretty much the union line.
Full disclosure: Over the years I have mostly delighted in the Times’ many coverage biases. Loved their SUV bashing of years ago. Only wish the message had stuck. Also admired their pro-gay rights reporting. At least that message did stick.
Charter schools are the first bias I’ve come across where I find myself on the opposite side. It’s a weird feeling.
The latest bias example was the weirdest ever. In a on New York’s Success Academies, the reporter left the impression that the startling student achievement results were an illusion, achieved only by test prep so cruel it made some kids pee in their pants.
The dog whistle message:  Schools cannot erase the effects of poverty, even by a little. Again, the union line.
Problem is, any experienced education writer who has observed the rich curriculum in Success Academy classrooms knows there’s a lot more going on than ruthless test prep. At the end of the Times piece, I was left wondering whether UFT President Michael Mulgrew had been a guest editor.
The Times is not the only publication where coverage gets a little hinky on the subject of charter schools. In part, that’s understandable. Reporters from states such as Ohio, Florida and Arizona probably assume that charters and scandals are synonymous. Must be true in New Orleans as well, right?
Based on the coverage to date of New Orleans school reform, it appears most reporters treat charters as a “controversy,” a view strongly encouraged by the unions (see twitter #nolaedwarning). Here’s how reporters are dealing with the controversy: They come to town, visit a school or two and then, based on a pre-visit Google search, quote two prominent supporters and two prominent critics. Done and done.
“They never get around to looking at the muddled middle,” said Peter Cook, a former New Orleans teacher whose has become the go-to place for press analysis, especially when outsiders write about the Big Easy.
If you come to New Orleans and make a major error, as NPR did not long ago, you’ll get a from Cook. He’s also no fan of doctrinaire progressive criticism of charters, as Salon just unleashed. .
Cook has a point. There’s plenty of “muddled middle” to report on in New Orleans. The reforms may have produced the biggest bump in academic performance by minority students ever seen, but that doesn’t mean all the news is good. Proficiency rates are low and African American parents are far less supportive of the reforms than whites.
Asking whether the progress is sustainable is an excellent question, as is questioning whether the lessons of New Orleans can be applied to other cities (absent a Katrina).
The latter I definitely get. A couple of years ago, when sifting through chapter options for a book about high-performing charters, I decided against visiting New Orleans — for that very reason.
In hindsight, I was wrong, as this report makes clear. Something . New Orleans actually did it.
The irony: How the schools rather than the fact that almost all are charters, may be the big takeaway. But the hangup about charters keeps most reporters from getting that deep.
Sure, there are plenty of warts you can throw into the New Orleans story, but first you have to concede that there’s an obvious lede: These folks actually did it!
That’s what got ignored last week.
Photo by Getty Images
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