New Orleans Model Is Not Such a Model After All | janresseger

New Orleans Model Is Not Such a Model After All | janresseger:

New Orleans Model Is Not Such a Model After All

In the five years from 2006 to 2011, I visited New Orleans at least twice a year.  I have been baffled since that time by the one-sided research created to paint the transformation of the city’s schools as a sort of miracle.  The reality is very troubling and far more complicated.  I recommend Gary Rivlin’s extraordinary new book, Katrina: After the Flood, because Rivlin’s stories of real people’s return or failure to return—their hard work and their despair—their financial losses—and their courage to keep on keeping on—create a real sense of the depth of the struggle, particularly for African American families in Gentilly and New Orleans East. But Rivlin doesn’t really cover the transformation of the schools.  For an authoritative summary of what has happened since all of the teachers and staff were laid off in the fall of 2005 and the schools progressively turned into a mass of privately managed charter schools, one must read the new brief by Frank Adamson, Channa Cook-Harvey, and Linda Darling-Hammond from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, Whose Choice? Student Experiences and Outcomes in the New Orleans School Marketplace.  (If you want to read further, a much longer report on the research is provided.)  All references in this post are to the shorter research brief.

While the schools of New Orleans are now virtually all charter schools, some schools that were high-performing prior to the hurricane and were not seized by the state remain under the control of the old Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB).  The research brief calls these Tier I schools. Another tier of schools are three kinds of schools authorized by the Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD)—charter, stand-alone, and direct run.  Then there is a third tier made up of alternative schools, those students volunteer to attend and those to which some students are assigned.  “It is clear that the organization of schools in New Orleans is highly stratified: The school tiers sort students by race, income, and special education status, with the most advantaged students at the top and the least advantaged at the bottom.  Only the top two sub-tiers within Tier 1 have any appreciable number of white and Asian students and any noticeable number of students who are non-poor.”  The authors remind us that, “Louisiana’s charter law explicitly allows some schools to engage in selective enrollment practices that New Orleans Model Is Not Such a Model After All | janresseger: