First Hand Report on New Orleans Recovery School District: You Decide
The Great Charter Tryout
By Andrea Gabor
September 26, 2013 The Investigative Fund
September 26, 2013 The Investigative Fund
Long before Sci Academy, a charter school in New Orleans, had graduated its first senior class, the school was being heaped with accolades.
In September 2010, when Sci Academy was just two years old, its 200 excited students — then all freshmen and sophomores — filed into Greater St. Stephen Baptist church, next door to the school. Together with local dignitaries, journalists, and a brass band, the students watched on jumbo screens as the leaders of six charter schools from around the country appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. At the end of the show, they watched as Oprah handed each charter-school leader — including Ben Marcovitz, Sci Academy’s founder — a $1 million check.
Sci Academy is a flagship charter school and a model of the new data-driven, business-infused approach to education that has reached its apotheosis in New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, education reformers swept away what remained of the traditional public schools in what had been one of the nation’s lowest-performing districts. In their place, charters promised choice and increased accountability. More than 75 percent of New Orleans kids landed in schools controlled by the so-called Recovery School District, which was heavily dominated by charter schools.
“This transformation of the New Orleans educational system may turn out to be the most significant national development in education since desegregation,” wrote Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the city’s leading venture-philanthropy group incubating local charter schools, a year ago. “New Orleans students have access to educational opportunities that are far superior to any in recent memory.”
But eight years after Hurricane Katrina, there is evidence that the picture is far more complicated. Seventy-nine percent of RSD charters are still rated D or F by the Louisiana Department of Education. (To be sure, some charter operators argue that the grading system in Louisiana, which keeps moving the bar upward, doesn’t sufficiently capture the improvements schools have achieved.) Sci is one of two RSD high schools to earn a B; there are no A-rated open-admission schools. In a school system with about 42,000 mostly poor African-American kids, every year thousands are out of school at any given time — because they are on suspension, have
