Wholesale makeover of New Orleans schools after Katrina sows impressive progress, bitter recriminations
Karran Harper Royal
Georgia lawmakers must have whiplash. Back in February, Gov. Nathan Deal flew a whole delegation of them down to New Orleans with him so they could see up close how charter schools have transformed public education here, an approach the governor hopes to copy in his own state.
They toured some of the best-performing charter schools in the city and heard from state officials involved in remaking the district. Leslie Jacobs, a former state school board member, told them Georgia should act slowly and be careful about deciding who gets to run schools. “You can have quick failure or slow success,” she said.
Then, just a few days later, local education activist Karran Harper Royal got on a plane to Atlanta and told another group of legislators something completely different. New Orleans is not a success story at all, she said.
“It is an experiment in taking power and control over people because different people think they know better how poor minority children should be taught,” Royal said.
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina cleared the way for a new kind of public school system in New Orleans, the argument over its merits remains as contentious as ever.
Data show the percentage of high school dropouts has shrunk, while the number of city students passing state exams continues to climb steadily. Yet, if anything, those figures have only intensified the debate, raising the stakes considerably as lawmakers around the country implement similar strategies or consider whether to do so.
Detractors still insist that academic gains in New Orleans are illusory, or unimpressive, or bought at too high a price.
And the price, by any measure, has been high.
Teachers returning to a wrecked city after the storm found their jobs and their retirement benefits had been washed away, just like their homes. Families discovered that under a new paradigm, their children’s school might be abruptly shut down for failing to improve test scores.
Administrators for years struggled to devise a fair system for enrolling students in a district without traditional neighborhood school boundaries. And in the meantime, students with disabilities sometimes found themselves unwanted, bounced from one campus to the next.
Not even the charter school movement’s biggest fans argue that better schools came without pitfalls or pain.
“When people are looking to do this in other places, they’re coming to New Orleans 10 years later,” Jacobs said. “They’re not understanding the journey to get to where we are today.”
After Katrina, state officials were eager to blow up the traditional, centralized school system that used to run public education in New Orleans. The idea was to shift decision-making from politicians and bureaucrats to the people who actually run schools: the principals and teachers.
Before, an elected board would hire a superintendent to run the district. A central office would select principals and hire teachers, establish curriculum and buy textbooks.
Under the new regime, almost every school would operate independently as its own nonprofit. The head of each school or a small group of schools would do the hiring and policymaking. If they couldn’t get results, the state would shut down the school or find another operator.
Unforeseen challenges
Inevitably, there were challenges that officials didn’t anticipate.
Consider Derrick Batiste. In 2011, when he arrived at KIPP McDonogh 15 in the French Quarter for kindergarten, the school wasn’t sure what to do with him. He has autism. He cannot speak or use the restroom without help.
Jessica Taylor, who runs Mac 15’s special-needs program, had never had to accommodate a student without any ability to follow the regular curriculum. Ordinarily, she would work with students one on one for 30 minutes to an hour per day. Derrick needed more than that, and he was only the first.
“We got some kids who were several years behind, didn’t recognize any letters, nonverbal,” Taylor said. “I spent the first year figuring out what that meant. Our need has just gone through the roof.”
Legally speaking, charter schools like KIPP are school districts unto themselves, and as such, they cannot turn away a Wholesale makeover of New Orleans schools after Katrina sows impressive progress, bitter recriminations | New Orleans | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, Louisiana:
