Dear Commons Community,
New York Times Op-Ed columnist, David Leonhardt has a piece this morning commenting on the success of charter schools in New Orleans. The timing of his column coincides with the release of a new study coming out of Tulane University. Here is an excerpt from the column.
“After Katrina’s devastation, New Orleans embarked on the most ambitious education overhaul in modern America. The state of Louisiana took over the system in 2005, abolished the old bureaucracy and closed nearly every school. Rather than running schools itself, the state became an overseer, hiring independent operators of public schools — that is, charter schools — and tracking their performance.
This month, the New Orleans overhaul entered a new stage. On July 1, the state returned control of all schools to the city. The charter schools remain. But a locally elected school board, accountable to the city’s residents, is now in charge. It’s a time when people in New Orleans are reflecting on what the overhaul has, and has not, accomplished.
So I decided to visit and talk with students, teachers, principals, community leaders and researchers. And I was struck by how clear of a picture emerged. It’s still a nuanced picture, with both positives and negatives. But there are big lessons.
New Orleans is a great case study partly because it avoids many of the ambiguities of other education reform efforts. The charters here educate almost all public-school students, so they can’t cherry pick. And the students are overwhelmingly black and low-income — even lower-income than before Katrina — so gentrification isn’t a factor.
Yet the academic progress has been remarkable.
Performance on every kind of standardized test has surged. Before the storm, New Orleans students scored far below the Louisiana average on reading, math, science and social studies. Today, they hover near the state average, despite living amid much more poverty. Nationally, the average New Orleans student has moved to the 37th percentile of math and reading scores, from the 22nd percentile pre-Katrina.
This week, Douglas Harris — a Tulane economist who leads a rigorous research project on the schools — just released a new study, with Matthew Larsen, another economist.* It shows that the test-score gains are translating into real changes in students’ lives. High-school graduation, college attendance and college graduation have all risen.”
As New Orleans enters its next phase of charter school public education, it will be watched closely by other cities around the country.
Tony
*NOTE: Figure 1A above comes from the Harris-Larsen Study.
