POLICY BRIEF: Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District receive accolades for being last and nearly last? – The Network For Public Education

POLICY BRIEF: Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District receive accolades for being last and nearly last? – The Network For Public Education:

POLICY BRIEF: Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District receive accolades for being last and nearly last?

INTRODUCTION

In 2003, the Louisiana legislature created the Recovery School District (RSD). With this law, schools that did not meet “minimum academic standards” were to be taken over by the state.[ii]

Then came Hurricane Katrina.

Striking the coast on August 29, 2005, Katrina destroyed not only New Orleans, but also much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Soon after, in November 2005, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 35.[iii] The new law lowered the academic criteria that made a school eligible for takeover and empowered the state to takeover 100 plus “low performing” schools. The RSD was given the vast majority of New Orleans public schools, leaving just a few high-performing schools to be run by the Orleans Parish School Board.[iv]

In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education and education reformer Arne Duncan infamously referred to Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing to happen to the education system of New Orleans.”[v]Repeatedly, the RSD has been acclaimed as a positive “game changer for New Orleans”[vi] and has been held up as a model for school reform by various education reformers, politicians, foundations, think tanks, and lobbyists in states across the nation. More recently, the education reformers have parlayed a single research study as demonstration of success in the RSD.[vii]

For the 10th anniversary of Katrina, this brief seeks to provide an overview of Louisiana and RSD data ten years after the implementation of widespread “education reform” in New Orleans.

---

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

The NAEP is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas.[viii] This analysis will focus on the 8th grade 2013 NAEP Reading and Math— currently the most recent NAEP data available. For a pre- and post- Katrina comparison, 2003 8th grade NAEP is included.

Bottom US States: 2003 NAEP Math 8th[ix]

	2003 Scale Score	2003 Rank		2013 Scale Score		2013 Rank
Louisiana	266	47th	Louisiana	273		47th
New Mexico	263	48th	New Mexico	273		48th
Alabama	262	49th	Mississippi	271		49th
Mississippi	261	50th	Alabama	269		50th
District of Columbia	243	51st	District of Columbia	265		51st

In math, Louisiana increased its scale score 7 points, reflecting longer term rising NAEP scores across the nation. However, relative to all states, it remained ranked at 47th in the nation.

Bottom US States: 2003 NAEP Reading 8th[x]

	2003 Scale Score	2003 Rank			2013 Scale Score	2013 Rank
Louisiana	253	46th	Louisiana		257	47th
Nevada	252	47th	West Virginia		257	48th
New Mexico	252	48th	New Mexico		256	49th
California	251	49th	Mississippi		253	50th
Hawaii	251	50th	District of Columbia		248	51st
District of Columbia	239	51st

In reading, Louisiana also increased the average NAEP scale score. However, its ranking relative to POLICY BRIEF: Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District receive accolades for being last and nearly last? – The Network For Public Education:

Teachers Offer to Work for Free to Save Their School | gadflyonthewallblog

Teachers Offer to Work for Free to Save Their School | gadflyonthewallblog:

Teachers Offer to Work for Free to Save Their School

Lawmakers have failed Chester Upland School District.

And now it’s up to teachers and professional staff to save the day.

For two decades, the Pennsylvania legislature hasn’t fulfilled its duty to equitably fund the public school district. Neither has the federal government. Instead, they left the impoverished school just 20 miles west of Philadelphia to survive on the drip of local property taxes from residents who, themselves, don’t have two pennies to rub together.

Moreover, our lawmakers not only permitted but encouraged three privately run charter schools to come to Delaware County and suck away whatever funds they could from the district while shortchanging student services at their privatized facilities.

And even worse, our elected officials drew up legislation allowing these charters to gobble up more funding from the district than the public school is allowed to spend on its own students.

Surprise! It didn’t work!

So the state put the school in receivership, taking away control from local tax payers so unelected bureaucrats could fix all the problems.

Surprise! That didn’t work, either!

And now state and local officials say there isn’t enough money left in the district’s piggy bank to make payroll by the time the school’s 3,300 students are scheduled to arrive on Wednesday.

In such situations, there’s only one thing to do: close the school. Bus the kids to neighboring districts and any charter or cyber schools willing to take them.

No more Chester Uplands. Another neighborhood school bites the dust.

But the district’s more than 300 employees refused to let that happen.

The dreaded teachers union held a meeting and decided to what? Hold a strike? Demand more pay?

No. The 200 members voted unanimously to work without pay as the school year 

Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10 | Cloaking Inequity

Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10 | Cloaking Inequity:

Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10

Has the flood of lies about education reform has reached a crescendo 10 years post Katrina? The news media (and President Obama) has mostly spun a narrative of “improvement” and “real progress” post Katrina. However, there are several notable stories out this week that are providing counternarrative. I will begin with a look at the national and national comparative data for Louisiana and the RSD in my new policy brief that I collated primarily from Louisiana voices and was released by the the Network for Public Education. I will then conclude with a roundup of the lessons learned from the aforementioned counternarrative.

In 2003, the Louisiana legislature created the Recovery School District (RSD). With this law, schools that did not meet “minimum academic standards” were to be taken over by the state.[ii]

Then came Hurricane Katrina.

Striking the coast on August 29, 2005, Katrina destroyed not only New Orleans, but also much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Soon after, in November 2005, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 35.[iii] The new law lowered the academic criteria that made a school eligible for takeover and empowered the state to takeover 100 plus “low performing” schools. The RSD was given the vast majority of New Orleans public schools, leaving just a few high-performing schools to be run by the Orleans Parish School Board.[iv]

In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education and education reformer Arne Duncan infamously referred to Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing to happen to the education system of New Orleans.”[v]Repeatedly, the RSD has been acclaimed as a positive “game changer for New Orleans”[vi] and has been held up as a model for school reform by various education reformers, politicians, foundations, think tanks, and lobbyists in states across the nation. More recently, the education reformers have parlayed a single research study as demonstration of success in the RSD.[vii]

For the 10th anniversary of Katrina, this brief seeks to provide an overview of Louisiana and RSD data ten years after the implementation of widespread “education reform” in New Orleans.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

The NAEP is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10 | Cloaking Inequity:

George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina - The New York Times

George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina - The New York Times:

George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina

NEW ORLEANS — Returning here Friday 10 years after this city was inundated, former President George W. Bush painted a rosy picture of the recovery since Hurricane Katrina, saying that the devastation had “sparked a decade of reform” in public schools and declaring, “New Orleans is back, and better than ever.”

Visiting one of the schools that became a charter in those early years after the storm, Mr. Bush focused on education, citing the failings of the city’s public schools before Hurricane Katrina, and the marked improvement since. “Isn’t it amazing? The storm nearly destroyed New Orleans and yet, now, New Orleans is the beacon for school reform,” he said.

Mr. Bush did not address what made the flooding a rich target for critics of his administration: the weakness of the initial response to the disaster, when federal, state and city agencies were widely seen as doing far too little to help the stranded and displaced, and doing it much too slowly.

Many New Orleans residents make the distinction between those horrific first days and what was eventually a robust federal rebuilding effort — a difference Mr. Bush himself noted in his memoir, “Decision Points.” “I should have recognized the deficiencies sooner and intervened faster,” he wrote.

Continue reading the main story

10 Years After Katrina

The New Orleans of 2015 has been altered, and not just by nature. In some ways, it is booming as never before. In others, it is returning to pre-Katrina realities of poverty and violence, but with a new sense of dislocation for many, too.

“All of us who are old enough to remember will never forget the images of our fellow Americans amid a sea of misery and ruin,” Mr. Bush said Friday. But twice, he said, “I hope you remember what I remember,” citing the work of military personnel, law enforcement and thousands of volunteers in rescuing, feeding, sheltering and rebuilding.

“In spite of the devastation, we have many fond memories,” he added, recalling sitting with Russel L. Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general who coordinated the military response to the storm, “on top of one of those big ships, strategizing.”

Mr. Bush received an enthusiastic response from several hundred dignitaries, students and school staff members in the auditorium ofWarren Easton Charter High School, on Canal Street, a former city school that was flooded and battered 10 years ago and reopened the next year as a charter.

But in the city at large, where signs of recovery are just blocks away from neighborhoods where little progress can be seen, bitter memories of the George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina - The New York Times:

What to believe? Greedy teachers, a successful budget director, a warped news account, threat of a shutdown | Reclaim Reform

What to believe? Greedy teachers, a successful budget director, a warped news account, threat of a shutdown | Reclaim Reform:

What to believe? Greedy teachers, a successful budget director, a warped news account, threat of a shutdown

Teacher pensions are bankrupting a state, the $30,000 per month budget consultant successfully saved the state, the legislature and governor still have no spending plan, the governor praised the consultant’s brilliant success, the consultant suddenly quits in triumph, the state faces a shut down by the governor for lack of budget funding – all in the same article in the Tribune.

This is not, unfortunately, a TV soap opera.

This what happens when corporate media propaganda disguises itself as news, as honest journalism.

This causes cognitive dissonance which causes stress and can lead to destructive behavior and damage to an individual’s mental health. On a mass delusional level, this can destroy a country’s ability to tell the difference between image and reality.

From the Chicago Tribune:
“(Illinois) Gov. Bruce Rauner’s “superstar” (Donna Arduin) $30,000-a-month budget consultant is leaving the administration as a stalemated state government continues without a spending plan…

Donna Arduin, who joined the Rauner team in early February, helped the 

What to believe? Greedy teachers, a successful budget director, a warped news account, threat of a shutdown | Reclaim Reform:

Louisiana Charters Are by Far the Worst According to 2011 8th-grade NAEP Anaysis | deutsch29

Louisiana Charters Are by Far the Worst According to 2011 8th-grade NAEP Anaysis | deutsch29:

Louisiana Charters Are by Far the Worst According to 2011 8th-grade NAEP Anaysis

One of the primary problems with Louisiana’s state-run, all-charter Recovery School District (RSD) is that the same state that is in control of data (and the official word on its data) is also committed to representing its state-run district in the best light.

For this reason, independent analysis of data on Louisiana’s schools is particularly valuable, especially when the researchers are able to procure data independently of the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE).

Such is the case of an analysis of student-level eighth-grade 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data by two researchers from the University of Arizona, Francesca Lopez and Amy Olson. The Lopez-Olson analysis is featured in this Network for Public Education (NPE) policy brief. Specifically, Lopez and Olson compared traditional public schools to see what notable differences there might be between charters and traditional schools on eighth-grade 2011 NAEP outcomes.

Lopez and Olson’s analysis of charters versus traditional schools in Louisiana is particularly interesting since most charter schools in Louisiana are located in New Orleans, with RSD being the dominant district in New Orleans. In January 2011, Louisiana had 77 charter schools; 51 (66%) were located in New Orleans. Of these 51 New Orleans charters, 41 (80%) were state-run RSD charter schools. The remaining 10 were operated by the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB).

In order to make clearer comparisons between traditional public school students and Louisiana Charters Are by Far the Worst According to 2011 8th-grade NAEP Anaysis | deutsch29:

Chester-Upland can't pay its teachers -- but they're working anyway | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Chester-Upland can't pay its teachers -- but they're working anyway | Philadelphia Public School Notebook:

Chester-Upland can't pay its teachers -- but they're working anyway

Photo: Kimberly Paynter/WHYY

Teachers at Science and Discovery High School in Chester

Teachers union president Michele Paulick said she received some unwelcome news at the Chester Upland School District teacher convocation this week.

"Our superintendent, Gregory Shannon, read a letter from our receiver, Francis Barnes, that informed the teachers that there are no funds," said Paulick, who described feeling "shock, frustration and anger" at the news.

However, in a Thursday evening vote, the 200-member union decided unanimously to work without pay for as long as individual members are able, Paulick said. The Chester Upland School District educates about 3,500 students, with nearly the same number attending area charter schools.

"We arrived at the decision to continue working because we have to put our children first," she said. "It's not their fault we're in this situation."

Two factors put Chester Upland in an especially difficult position. The district, which has been designated fiscally distressed for more than 20 years, is carrying a $24 million budget deficit from the last school year. Thanks to Pennsylvania's ongoing budget gridlock, no money is flowing into the district from state coffers.

With no fund balance and no money coming in, officials said they won't be able to make payroll for the first week of school, which starts Wednesday.

The parent union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association, is helping to raise funds to supplement teachers' loss of income. This is the second time in recent memory that Chester Upland teachers voted to work without pay. In 2012, the district ran out of operating funds in January and asked for an emergency infusion of cash from then Gov. Tom Corbett.

This year, the timing is worse, said Paulick. "We haven't had any paychecks coming in over the summer, so it was very difficult to budget" for the coming weeks.

News that the district is too broke to operate comes on the heels of another blow to the district's finances. Earlier this week, Delaware County Court of Common Pleas Judge Chad Kenney rejected several portions of a recovery plan that would have eliminated the district's existing fund deficit.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Chester-Upland can't pay its teachers -- but they're working anyway | Philadelphia Public School Notebook:

CCSS Follow Up System: More than Money Will Follow Your Students | commoncorediva

CCSS Follow Up System: More than Money Will Follow Your Students | commoncorediva:

CCSS Follow Up System: More than Money Will Follow Your Students

In fighting the War Against the Core, we’ve all met those warriors who are great at sending tips to areas of the “Common Core” overreach into our lives. From an educational standpoint, we’ve seen the CCSS Machine usurp our schools; from a privacy standpoint, we seen the CCSS Machine ruin it. The damage is far from new NOR is it over.

Here in NC, the “Common Follow Up System” has been in place since 1992! How is this part of the agenda that comes with “Common Core”? Keep reading, my followers and anti CCSS Warriors..

What is a “CFS”?

The purpose of a “Common Follow Up System” is: “The purpose of the Common Follow-up System (CFS) is to provide information on the educational and employment outcomes of participants in publicly supported educational, employment and training programsfor use in planning, policy-making, program evaluation, resource allocation and career planning.”

Do you see the CCSS/CTE footprints? I do. If you don’t, look at the emphasized words. Publicly supported education means schools or programs connected to them. That’s the CCSS portion. The employment and training is the Career Technical Education (CTE). The two are one in the same in that the CTE portion of the Common Core begins well before high school graduation.

Let’s dig deeper, shall we? The CFS (Common Follow Up System) was designed to be a unified effort to collect massive amounts of data. The data was supposedly to help all the agencies involved to plan better as well as to have better CCSS Follow Up System: More than Money Will Follow Your Students | commoncorediva:

Have charter schools left out some New Orleans students?

Have charter schools left out some New Orleans students?:

In reforming New Orleans, have charter schools left some students out?

JUDY WOODRUFF: That brings us, appropriately, to our look at what’s happened to New Orleans’ schools over the course of the past decade and the big changes that they have undergone.

It’s a story we have reported on closely throughout.

Tonight, John Tulenko of Education Week, which produces stories for the NewsHour, has our report.

JOHN TULENKO: As you can see, in parts of New Orleans, life seems to be getting back to normal 10 years after Katrina. But many folks are wondering about the public schools. For the last 10 years, they have been engaged in what some have called the most ambitious experiment ever in public education. And whether or not it’s working depends on whom you ask.

WOMAN: I do see improvement in the kids and in the schools.

JOHN TULENKO: Is it working?

MAN: No.

WOMAN: The charter system has done tremendously well for the local kids here.

WOMAN: It’s working for those who have their money, their hand in the cookie jar.

MAN: I think they are better than they were 10 years ago.

JOHN TULENKO: Ten years ago, New Orleans’ public schools were headed for rock bottom. Fewer than a third of eighth graders could pass a reading test. And corruption was so deep, the FBI had set up an office inside the school administration building.

Patrick Dobard, who oversees the schools today, remembers those days.

PATRICK DOBARD, Superintendent, Recovery School District: Orleans Parish School Board at that time, unfortunately, it was really academically and in some instances morally and financially bankrupt.

And then Katrina came. When you have a catastrophe like that, it is an opportunity to start anew, because a lot of the institutional barriers, both real and perceived, were literally and figuratively, unfortunately, washed away.

JOHN TULENKO: Seizing the moment, the state took control of the city’s failing schools. Pink slips were sent to all 5,000 teachers and the state set out to remake New Orleans as a city where nearly all the schools would be independently run charters. Local school officials were no longer in charge.

MAN: I will know you’re ready because your eyes will be just on me. Thank you so much.

JOHN TULENKO: Some charters split up the boys and girls. Others focused on the arts. Most introduced uniforms and strict rules, and all were to be held accountable for Have charter schools left out some New Orleans students?: