Thompson: Washington Monthly Spins NOLA School Reform Impact
The safest summary of evidence on the effectiveness of New Orleans school reforms is Politico's Caitlin Emma. Emma's The New Orleans Model: Praised but Unproven explains that "mayors and governors from Nevada to Tennessee have sought to replicate the New Orleans model by converting struggling public schools into privately run charters and giving principals unprecedented autonomy to run their own staffs, budgets and curricula — as long as they deliver better test scores." But, she adds, "behind all the enthusiasm is an unsettling truth: There’s no proof it works."
Emma further notes that there have been "similarly mixed signals in other places where the New Orleans model has been tried." As we wait for better evidence, a newcomer to education, such as the Washington Monthly's David Osborne, could have contributed to the discussion on the lessons of New Orleans, but he would have had to have written an article that was far different than his How New Orleans Made Charters Work.
Osborne starts with the dubious claim by the pro-charter CREDO that charters receive less per student funding, but he did not mention the additional $3,500 per student funding provided for post-Katrina schools. He cites the objective researcher, Douglas Harris, who says that NOLA undertook “the most radical overhaul of any type in any school district in at least a century.”
But, Osborne cites no evidence by Harris or anyone else that the New Orleans radicalism can work in a sustainable manner or that it could be scaled up. Instead, he devotes almost all of his article to praising true believers in unproven theories on school improvement.
Had Osborne dug deeper into Harris's research, he would have seen that the scholar's first report on NOLA strikes at the heart of reformers' claims that high-performing charters serve the same students as lower-performing neighborhood schools. Neither does Osborne ask whether the test score evidence he cites is meaningful or not. But, Osborne's greatest failing was ducking an opportunity to consider his daughter's experience as a lens for evaluating policy issues.
Osborne's daughter was a Teach for America teacher at a charter that faced closure if it did not raise scores dramatically. The school "pulled out all the stops on remediation and test prep. Its scores soared, the state raised its grade from an F to a C, and BESE renewed its charter. But the school continued to struggle with student discipline, and the next year it fell back to a D."
Improved test scores in such schools might or might not be meaningful. In a situation like that, is there any reason to believe that increased test scores mean that more learning occurs when all stops are pulled from test prep in a C school, as opposed to a D or F school? Rounds of such remediation are bound to improve metrics important to adults, but do they help or hurt the children who endure them?
That brings us back to the reason why we should wait for Douglas Harris's Education Research Alliance (ERA) to complete its research before claiming that New Orleans shows that charter schools can systematically overcome poverty. I certainly plan to withhold judgment on New Orleans until Harris's final study is released, even though the first two ERA reports should undermine Osborne's This Week In Education: Thompson: Washington Monthly Spins NOLA School Reform Impact: