New Orleans' switch to charter schools after Katrina: a 'takeover' or a success?
In 2005 the city enacted radical education reform, turning its worst-performing public schools into an educational marketplace of sorts run by charter operators – but locals remain wary of its aims even as performance has improved
I was disconnected because I was focusing on surviving. That's what makes this so insidious
Karran Harper Royal
To Ashana Bigard, a mother of three, the New Orleans public school system seems built on instability. Her 22-year-old daughter switched high schools three times before passing the GED exam and going to college. Bigard’s eight-year-old, meanwhile, has already attended three different elementary schools – one run directly by the local school board, another a charter school under that same board’s umbrella, and a third overseen by the Recovery School District (RSD), the state construct that has come to govern most public education in post-KatrinaNew Orleans.
“They just got beaten down,” Bigard said of her children. “Whether [the school system] is better or not, I don’t know … I’ve seen too many fishy things. I don’t trust the current numbers.”
Trust in New Orleans’s school system is in short supply for some, like Bigard, for whom the city’s much-lauded education reform over the past decade remains tainted by its controversial origins. Like any parent, Bigard has tried to take advantage of the newfound choice in the almost all-charter school system. But information on different options remains confusing or incomplete, she said, and the board at her daughter’s former RSD charter school appeared unresponsive to parent concerns.
“I’m hoping to make more money so that I can put my children in private school,” Bigard said.
Since Katrina, New Orleans has made perhaps the most revolutionary attempt at education reform in modern American history, a near-wholesale shift from a centralized, democratically controlled urban district to a technocratic system in which nonprofit charter operators hold considerable autonomy over schools they run. The city’s schools have made collective gains on standardized test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment. The RSD, which comprises institutions that were chronically underperforming before Katrina, now fashions itself as an educational marketplace.
But local buy-in to the system remains elusive among some segments of the predominantly black public school population, and both the state-run RSD and individual charter schools still grapple with how to best engage the people they serve. Some charter operators have softened internal disciplinary policies, while others have founded schools under the banner of community-centric ideals.
The RSD has also made a number of district-wide reforms in response to parent or student feedback – some of it rising to the level of protest. But whether the school system can institutionalize that feedback to engage all parents as partners remains an open question.
“We want to make sure our decisions have an inclusive community voice without diminishing the authority the RSD superintendent has by law,” said Patrick Dobard, the RSD superintendent, adding that community relations have improved.
Starting from scratch
Such community feedback was muted when Louisiana began rebuilding the school system in November 2005. The legislature voted to raise the criteria that allowed the state to take over schools deemed “failing”, giving the RSD control of more than 100 of New Orleans’s public schools performing below the state average. The remaining high-performing schools stayed under control of the locally elected school board, creating a bifurcated governing structure.
The move caught many parents and advocates, who were just beginning the long process of putting their lives back together after catastrophic flooding, unaware.
“I remember knowing that something was going on, but I was disconnected because I was focusing on surviving,” said Karran Harper Royal, a local education activist whose second son graduated in 2014. “That’s what makes this so insidious … They came in and made life-altering decisions for a whole community when the community was least able to fight back. That’s the definition of a takeover, and by our own government.”
The parish school board soon fired all of its 7,500 employees – many of them black and unionized – eliminating invaluable knowledge of and social ties to the local community. Backed by national nonprofits, data-driven charter operatorsreplaced them with teachers who were often young, white outsiders. Schools had the power to craft their own curricula and institute their own disciplinary policies.
Though there had been near-universal agreement that New Orleans schools had been terrible before Katrina, such measures screamed of a power grab to many in the black community. In a recent editorial, the New Orleans Tribune, an African American newspaper, decried the reforms as attempts by white “social engineers and profiteers” to gain local clout.
Establishing a sense of public ownership in the new system could very well help it reform from within, advocates say. In theory, the RSD and individual charters have more flexibility to adapt to public concerns – and do so quickly.
Local input has indeed played a growing role in some of the system’s major policy changes in recent years. Amid outcry over RSD schools’ Byzantine application process – to say nothing of suspicion that principals manipulated it to attract brighter students – the district unveiled a near-universal common application in 2011. “It was our initial step in finding government’s role without stepping on the autonomy of individual schools,” Dobard said. He added that about 80% of students were placed at one of their top three choices last year.
Some reform has also come from within schools themselves. In November 2013, students at a Treme high school staged a hallway sit-in after one of their teachers was fired. “The real reason we chose to take part in a peaceful demonstration was the feeling that we were losing our voice in our education,” then junior Cassie Thomas wrote in an op-ed for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Her school’s charter operator responded by replacing its principal and making modest changes to its disciplinary policy.
After Collegiate Academies, a top-performing charter operator, came under fire that same year for its district-leading out-of-school suspension rates, it began punishing more students with in-school suspensions instead.
“School leaders believed heavily in managing the environment to improve the learning culture,” said Gregory St Etienne, who sits on the charter boards of both Collegiate Academies and FirstLine Schools. “But we found that it was counterproductive … It taught a lesson to school leaders who thought their way was the way to go. Now, they have a broader perspective.”
Measurable improvements
The 10 years of near-constant tinkering in the city have seen overall academic improvement in many statistical measures. Citywide graduation rates have risen for both students with disabilities and the general student body. From 2008 to 2014, the percentage of RSD third- through eighth-graders scoring at or above grade level on standardized tests rose from 28% to 57%, according to Louisiana Department of Education data. Performance on the ACT college-entrance exam has likewise improved, while the RSD graduation rate has risen 11 points, to 61%, over the past five years.
Melissa Quintal, whose 13-year-old son is an eighth-grader at Arthur Ashe charter school, said the new system rewards parents who do their homework on school choice. “A lot of people wait to the last minute,” she said, “and then they’re upset with what school their children end up in.” Quintal and her husband began New Orleans' switch to charter schools after Katrina: a 'takeover' or a success? | US news | The Guardian:
