New Orleans "Miracle"? Let's Look at ALL the Facts

The New York Times had a two-part op-ed series on the changes forced on New Orleans and their Orleans Parish Schools because of Katrina.  Both were written by David Leonhardt.  Mr. Leonhardt states that he is going to talk about the good and the bad of what happened in New Orleans but rather than do that, he makes excuses about anything negative, hypes up the good and leaves out quite a lot of the bad.

I know you're thinking, "Why should I care about New Orleans and/or charter schools?"  I say it's important to keep up with the landscape of public education across the country because issues tend to land.  As I noted in the Tuesday Open Thread, I believe that the WA Supreme Court is likely to uphold the latest version of the charter school law (and I doubt they will rule this year and certainly won't - as they did last time - right before school starts).

A few quick updates before exploring the "New Orleans miracle."

• A national poll in 2017 finds interest in charters waning.  It shows a 12% drop in support for charter schools from 2016-2017. 
• Costs to districts from charter school growth is really starting to show causing more attention from parents in those districts to the issue.  In California we see:

• Charter schools cost Oakland Unified $57.3 million per year. That’s $1,500 less in funding for each student that attends a neighborhood school.
• The annual cost of charter schools to the San Diego Unified is $65.9 million.
• In East Side Union, the net impact of charter schools amounts to a loss of $19.3 million per year.
• Even our friends at the Center on Reinventing Public Education see it.   

But the rate of growth is slowing. Until 2013, the total number of U.S. charter schools was increasing by 6 to 8 percent each year. Since then, that number has fallen steadily, to less than 2 percent in 2016. In addition, charters are being asked to jump through bureaucratic hoops and comply with complex public-records requests and onerous administrative requirements, which one leader described as “death by a thousand cuts.” 

You mean like requirements that real public schools have to comply with?  They whine about public records requests? You are funded with public dollars so yes, that's part of the territory.

Charter growth in Washington state is at a snail's pace and I'm not sure that winning the latest Supreme Court battle will change that much.

The New Orleans "Miracle"

You can read the NY Times op-eds that sparked this thread but I'm going to start with the public education blogger, Mercedes Schneider, who actually lives in New Orleans.  She has written extensively on this subject including how billionaires saw an opportunity after Katrina.   Don't get mad at her for saying it:

In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education and blatant reformer Arne Duncan insensitively referred to Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing to happen to the education system of New Orleans.”

Last fall (in 2011), a coterie of extremely wealthy billionaires, among them New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, turned the races for unpaid positions on the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) into some of the most expensive in the state’s history. Seven pro-education “reform” candidates for the BESE outraised eight candidates endorsed by the teacher’s unions by $2,386,768 to $199,878, a ratio of nearly twelve to one. In just one of these races, the executive director of Teach for America Greater New Orleans-Louisiana Delta, Kira Orange Jones, outspent attorney Louella Givens, who was endorsed by the state’s main teacher’s unions, by more than thirty-four to one: $472,382 to $13,815. [Emphasis added.]

She has stated:

The New Orleans Miracle is sand in the mouths of those who would drink from its mirage. 

She adds:


First, one must consider the unclear term, “New Orleans.” This is the name of a city, not a school district. There is Orleans Parish Schools, and its 2010-11 graduation rate was 93.5%. This begs the question: Why focus on 76.5% as the evidence of “New Orleans success” instead of Orleans Parish Schools’ 93.5%?  

Furthermore, Orleans Parish received an “A” on its 2012 district report card. Why not highlight the achievements of Orleans Parish Schools? Jacobs cites “the failure of New Orleans Public Schools” later in her writing. Why not note a beautiful recovery (pun intended)?
The answer: The success of Orleans Parish Schools only serves to underscore the failure of the state-run counterpart, RSD-NO.

Her newest piece, based on the study that the Times' op-eds uses, is How to Make New Orleans Market Ed Reform a Success: Hide RSD Failure Inside an OPSB-RSD Data Blend

On July 15, 2018, the pro-market-reform research group, Education Research Alliance of New Orleans (ERA) published this 72-page technical report entitled, “The Effects of the Post-Katrina Market-Based School Reforms on Student Achievement, High School Graduation, and College Outcomes.”

Both authors, Douglas Harris and Matthew Larsen, are economists, so it should be no surprise that they view educational success through the lens of market-based reform, and that such a view colors their perceptions of the history of ed reform in New Orleans, which they neatly package near the beginning of their paper.

Once again, not education professionals but economists.

Much history has been excluded from the Harris-Larsen background, including the fact that then-state superintendent Cecil Picard withheld federal emergency dollars from OPSB (and not from other affected school systems), which put OPSB in a position of “all educators were fired” and “allowing its teacher contract to expire.” I have written about these and other issues (and Picard’s and the state legislature’s shady hand in it) in other posts (see here and here and here for some background, or do a deep dive here).

Moreover, a number of OPSB schools are selective-admission charter schools (see also here and here), which gives even more advantage over state-run RSD schools (and which puts a snag in the “open school choice for families” narrative). It is the OPSB advantage that allows researches to combine post-Katrina, OPSB and RSD data and actually hide the lack of progress that state-run, all-charter RSD has made, all the while selling a generalized version of New Orleans market-ed-reform success to the public. 

More background from Slate

Before Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans school system boasted a significantly higher share of black teachers than most urban districts. In 2003, just 15 percent of teachers in large cities across the country were black. In New Orleans, where nearly all students are black, that figure was 72 percent.

In the aftermath of Katrina, the school board fired the district’s thousands of teachers en masse as it reconstituted the system as one largely composed of charter schools. Many educators weren’t rehired; some left teaching, or the city, for good. Between 2004 and 2014, the percent of black teachers plunged from 71 percent to 49 percent. And far fewer teachers working in schools were raised in New Orleans—resulting, many say, in large cultural gaps between the teachers and their majority-black, native New Orleanian students. In recent years the proportion of black teachers in the city has stabilized, according to a report by Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance. But hiring rates are telling. Some years, nearly 70 percent of new teachers in the city are white.

But as a result, a core part of the city’s black middle class lost work, and the demographics of the city’s teaching corps have shifted significantly in the decade since—from about 71 percent black to just under 50 percent black,

Additionally, charter schools too often rely disproportionately on educators of color to staff certain positions in the school, like disciplinarian, according to Perry and others. It raises loaded questions about who is fit to teach and who is fit to punish. Foster says black teachers are often tapped for elective subjects, like music, or coaching extracurricular teams. “That’s powerful, but I think it could be more powerful to see people of color in front of you in your core classrooms,” she says.

In 2005, more than half of the teachers had more than 10 years experience, compared with about 30 percent in 2014. 

Here are the issues with the first op-ed in the Times on New Orleans, How New Orleans is Helping Its Students Succeed

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.

Meaning, New Orleans became the first (and only) all charter school district in the country.

This grand experiment had many good and bad sides for its majority black and low-income student population.

That "bad side?" He barely looks at it in either op-ed. 

The charters here educate almost all public-school students, so they can’t cherry pick.

Well, that is good news and at least he admits that's just what charter schools try to do.

What came next?

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.

The second Times op-ed by Leonhardt:

A Plea for a Fact-Based Debate About Charter Schools

I have to smile at that title because he so does not make this particular column "fact-based."  Or rather, he leaves out a lot.  That's convenient.

He first muses on how strict it is for charter school students at one school have to walk on one side of the hallway  but then gets to more of the problem:

Students walking between classes had to stay on the right side of the hallway, for example. Most alarmingly, during the year of the protest, more than 60 percent of Carver’s students were suspended for at least one day. Getting suspended was normal.

What he fails to say is that charters who have kids walking down corridors like this generally have to do it with one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them AND silently.  That's what's strict about it. 

He goes on to say he will talk "a bit" about problems that occurred in New Orleans and then writes this:

There are two high-profile camps on education reform. Staunch defenders — who tend to be conservative — support not only charter schools but virtually all school choice, including vouchers for private schools. They see market competition as a cure-all. On the other side, the harshest critics of reform — who are largely progressive — oppose nearly any alternative to traditional schools. They view charters as a nefarious project of billionaires, and they think the academic progress is statistical hooey.

The bit about problems?  Hard to find.

I don't oppose alternatives to traditional schools. I'd just like - for example, in our state - to see schools fully funded and supported before we decide we need to have a whole other system of schools.  It is an interesting thing how many billionaires support charter schools when there are no real, large-scale successes (not even New Orleans).

From a comment on the op-ed from a psychologist who specializes in educational research:

However, saying that the average New Orleans student score in math and reading has now moved to the 37th percentile from the pre-Katrina score of 22nd percentile is like saying the schools' performance has risen from total failure to abject failure.

It is of course possible that the gain from 22nd percentile to 37th percentile might be due in part to doubling the expenditure per student or that the students who left New Orleans after Katrina were among the lower-scoring cohort.

Continuing from the op-ed:

Here’s what the evidence shows: Initially, charters’ overall results were no better than average. But they are now. The main reason, notes Margaret Raymond of Stanford University, is that regulators have shut or overhauled many of the worst-performing charters (which rarely happens with ineffective traditional schools). One form of charter has particularly impressive results — highly structured urban charters with high academic standards.

But he cites a CREDO study that says the results are still mixed.  Better (largely because of closing crappy charters) but not great and certainly not better overall than traditional schools.

As for those "structured urban charters", they are some of the most highly-segregated and uber-disciplined schools in the country. There are virtually no white children in them and I'll go out on a limb and say that Zuckerberg and Gates and the Waltons would never have sent their children to them.

And charter schools sometimes focus so much on academics that they overlook extracurriculars, as well a school’s role as a community center.

What is disturbing is setting up a system where kids of color tend to get grouped, disciplined and served in academics far differently than white students.