Lessons from New Orleans: 'Don't Copy'
I went to New Orleans to see if its 10-year experience with charter schools and market-based school choice had application to Los Angeles. I came away with the admonition of my 4th Grade teacher ringing in my ears: Do your own work; don't copy.
In other words, context matters. A lot. It's not just that L.A. is 12 times larger than New Orleans, or that we haven't yet had a natural disaster, or that we have five times as many charter schools with three times as many students. The two cities are profoundly different, and that difference shapes how to interpret the New Orleans results, which are being represented as the leading edge of school reform.
Unprecedented Changes
Without doubt New Orleans' changes are historically unprecedented. The Recovery School District, which controls most schools, represents most radical school reform in a century, and the most complete example of a "portfolio" school district. Some 93% of the schools are charters, open enrollment exists throughout the city, and the data show that students and their parents are active choosers. About 86% percent of students attend a school other than the one closest to their home.New Orleans schools educate about the same number of students as Oakland, Sacramento, or Garden Grove in California. A decade after Hurricane Katrina, enrollments have risen to 46,457, about 70% of their pre-storm level. About 84% of the students are African-American. Before the storm, enrollments stood at 66,372, 93% of whom were African-American. Still, fully 25% of students in New Orleans attend private school, the highest non-public school-going rate among large cities in the country. Private school enrollments are about 50% white.
Student achievement gains were trumpeted at a conference sponsored by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA). Graduation rates have gone up, the numbers of students going to schools labeled as "failing" has gone down, and performance on the state's standardized tests has increased. While the significance of these changes is open to intense discussion and debate, including whether the new regime "juked" the stats (see this on failing and excelling schools), it's clear that outcomes are moving in the right direction. There is intense excitement and pride among the civic elite.
But the theme of the conference was not whether the New Orleans transformation worked in its city of origin, but whether it represents "the urban education of the future." Douglas Harris, Tulane University economist and president of the ERA (pictured above), argues that the effects of New Orleans' reforms are relevant and significant to other cities, such as Detroit, and the rest of the country.
Harris makes the point that politicians from different ends of the spectrum—from Barack Obama to Bobby Jindal—have lauded the reforms based on technocratic management, weakened teacher unions, and the relentless focus on output data. The same big foundations that put money into New Orleans are transporting its "proof of concept" throughout the country. Indeed, several states areconsidering creating charter districts.
I was interested in New Orleans in part because it has decentralized and that it has tried to find a path using autonomous operating groups of schools. LAUSD, which has struggled with decentralization for decades, has five times as many autonomous schools as New Orleans if one counts both charters and Pilot schools, but autonomous operation hasn't become "the system."
In Learning from L.A., I wrote about creating autonomous networks of schools as a way of accomplishing decentralization, and, certainly, the civic elite in Los Angeles embraced charters in the wake of its frustration with the last decentralization effort in the 1990s. In recent posts, I recalled my advocacy of network organization as a way to transform LAUSD.
Political Trash Talk
But my takeaway lessons were not to embrace the package of reforms that New Orleans Lessons from New Orleans: 'Don't Copy' - On California - Education Week: