What New Orleans Tells Us About the Perils of Putting Schools on the Free Market
A year ago, I volunteered to serve on the board of a charter elementary school in New Orleans, where I live. Two months ago, in a cafeteria crowded with whiplashed parents, I tried to give some comfort by explaining why, three days before the school year ended, the school had announced that it wouldn’t be open this fall. I apologized. I described the scrambling to try to solve a six-hundred-thousand-dollar budget shortfall. I apologized again. But what I didn’t explain was that the fate of Cypress Academy, a unique closure in a unique, charter-dominated school district, was not just about one school. It was about how startups fail, and about what happens when a school system is redesigned around the engines of the free market—autonomy, competition, and customer choice. Frankly, I didn’t understand this until later. Which is good, because the parents didn’t want to hear market theory. They just wanted their children to get a good public education.
In New Orleans, alone among large urban districts, almost all schools are now charter schools. This is the result of perhaps the most ambitious school-reform effort in the country’s history. In 2004, the year before Katrina, only fifty-four per cent of New Orleans high-school students graduated. After Katrina, the state of Louisiana took over almost all of the city’s schools and began turning them over to independent groups—either single-school charters, like Cypress, or largely local charter-management organizations, or C.M.O.s. This month, after thirteen years, the Orleans Parish School Board assumed control as the regulatory body over all the public schools in the city, reunifying the district and stirring intense reflection—locally and nationally—on the effects, so far, of ceding the city to a charter system.
That system, in which eighty-three per cent of students are economically disadvantaged, still has a long way to go. Forty per cent of the city’s schools are ranked “D” or “F” by state standards, and New Orleanians are no rookies at the national pastime of school segregation: the C.M.O.s serve mainly poor black students, while independent, “community” charters serve racially mixed populations. But, in the years since Katrina, the rates of high-school graduation, college attendance, and college persistence have increased by a range of ten to sixty-seven per cent. That’s confirmed in a recent study by Matthew Larsen, a professor at Lafayette College, and Doug Harris, an education researcher and economist at Tulane who, in the past, has been wary of “teach-to-the-test” results and the notion that “scores equal learning.” New Orleans achieved all this without two of the features most detested by charter critics: there are no for-profit charter schools in the city, and the charter system doesn’t drain money from the “regular” school system. In New Orleans, there is no other system.
Sitting on a charter-school board, I could observe that system firsthand. I joined the board of Cypress because Bob Berk, the founder of the school and a childhood acquaintance, convinced me that volunteering in elementary education was the most direct way to help children in a state that’s hard on them. (Save the Children recently ranked Louisiana the worst state for children, for the second year in a row.) And I admired the school’s philosophy, which stressed diversity, a “whole child” education, and a commitment to teaching all types of learners, from gifted to special-needs, in one classroom.
In New Orleans, parents rank schools through a common application, so Cypress treated every challenge—teacher turnover, disappointing enrollment—as an existential threat that demanded a creative response. By the end of the Continue reading: What New Orleans Tells Us About the Perils of Putting Schools on the Free Market | The New Yorker
