Now the first all-charter district in U.S., New Orleans schools experiment still faces questions
Two decades ago, a group of frustrated New Orleans educators proposed a radical idea: start an open-enrollment charter school that would educate kids better by freeing the school from the bureaucracy of a poorly performing district.
The response was overwhelming. In its first year, about 900 applications came pouring in for just 117 spots at the school they created, New Orleans Charter Middle School.
That was in 1998. Fast-forward to today, and all of the city's public school students now attend charter schools as part of the nation's biggest experiment in education reform.
This summer, New Orleans officially became the first large American city to not offer a single traditional public school.
"We are embarking on a historic new chapter when it comes to public school education in America," Orleans Parish schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. said recently. "Since Katrina, we have been defining a new model for public education that has required innovation and a different way of thinking and approaching problems."
The colossal shift has come with promises nearly as big: to improve student performance, increase parental choice and spark innovation while holding charter organizations to a greater level of accountability.
Data from Tulane University show that in the past decade the charter movement in New Orleans has produced gains across across several measures, including improved test scores. The number of students graduating from high school rose by between 3 and 9 percentage points from 2005 to 2014. Some surveys show that most parents attribute these gains to the proliferation of charter schools.
Yet New Orleans remains a city conflicted over how to educate its children.
Improved scores notwithstanding, some parents say the charter process has been disruptive. The closure of failing schools, for instance, has bounced kids to other schools, sometimes miles away from home, that don't necessarily perform much better.
In a survey conducted last year by Tulane University's Cowen Institute, which studies education in the city, only 39% of respondents said that they thought public schools were getting better in 2018.
That, in turn, means few children still have access to schools that get top grades. Last year, only 14% of the city's students attended a school with an A grade. Another 16% went to a B school.
"The schools are improving, but there is still a perception that they're not at a level we want them to be," Rossmeier said. "We don’t have an A school in every neighborhood, and until we do we can’t say we’re the system that we want to be."
Parents' perceptions of the district's success have in the past been CONTINUE READING: Now the first all-charter district in U.S., New Orleans schools experiment still faces questions | Education | nola.com
