Teachers are not against tests. But good teachers are against one test being the sole arbiter of a whole child. Children can't be separated by and large from their commmunities. And if you believe different why do people move to Westport? Th taxes are far higher after all. Tests should be formative!!! They do not tell you everything about that child. Testing is big money. Perhaps those who say they are panaceas are really just looking out for their economic investments.
7
"And the students are overwhelmingly black and low-income — even lower-income than before Katrina — so gentrification isn’t a factor."
I am a graduate of New Orleans public, and private schools, many years before Katrina, a white one, so please allow me to express umbrage with the above reference to "gentrification". What exactly is that comment supposed to mean? How would "gentrification" affect the schooling of a city's population? What is gentrification anyway? How would it manifest itself in a city like New Orleans?
When my family moved to New Orleans in the middle 1960's the city was approximately 60% white and 40% black as was my high school, Marion Abramson, about ten years later. Most of New Orleans East was white. The public schools then were not all that great either but the city underwent the opposite of gentrification in the 1970's and 80's with a corresponding increase in crime to be among the worst in the nation. That's water under the bridge now and it's important to recognize the real improvements in the current school system, but don't engage in this veiled racist reference to the absence of "gentrification" as a contributing factor to that improvement. One might make the observation that now that the white people are out of the way the black residents of the city are finally able to improve their schools, graduation rates and test scores.
If the NYT claims to represent truth in reporting I have to conclude they are actually liars.
3
Abolish the public schools. They are, and always have been, and always will be, a cesspool for ineptitude and the un-education of American children. Bring back the fully-free private school system that existed in this country prior to the 19th century's Progressive subversion of education modeled on the Prussian/Bismarck plan.
3
Diane Ravitch has a good roundup of the research undercutting the idea of the "New Orleans Miracle" at the link below. But even going by Leonhardt's own figures, it's clear that NOLA's educational system is still operating at a woeful level. The new design of the NY Times Opinion pieces gives the false impression that they meet the paper's standards for feature writing, which is a shame when they are based on such flimsy reporting.
https://dianeravitch.net/2018/07/16/attention-david-leonhardt-to-learn-t...
9
Well the scenario with public schools we cant blame on Trup. These failing charters have destroyed minority students for decades. For some reason you don't have to be certified to teeach but you need to be certified to be a doctor. Wall Street is in love with charters and management companies. They smell the money leaving the public schools and becoming part of there bankroll.
This is on of those feel good stories I am sure Mr. Leonhardt along with Arnie Duncan dont havethere there children or anyone who works for the Times children attending these school.
Yes, there are a few good charter schools however the majority of them are not. As a parent and educator I know what I am talking about. Ive seen these schools and it is insulting to most parent.
The Russians roll us today and we are educating generations of children who have no critical thinking skills but its ok, at least we are not putting them in cages.
6
Sorry, but we saw the same improvements and then some in ATL in the early/mid 2000s only to find that 150 teachers and principals were involved in a cheating scam so pervasive as to be unfathomable. And the excuse was bizarre - how can you not expect us to cheat when our paychecks depend on how well students do on these tests? Really, seriously. And the NYTimes had an article that 'suggested' this could be happening at other schools, but that was dropped as the city school boards claimed no cheating occurred and they self-exonerated themselves. No joke, this is the real deal. Our public schools are a sham and it's not for lack of tax dollars. It's for lack of integrity, across the board.
3
So, seems we don’t need charters if education bureaucrats just leave schools alone, while describing the criteria schools must meet to remain open. We don’t need the charter movement to know this obvious truth about public education: state education tsars stifle local schools. So get rid of them! The only thing state ed departments need to do is publish a definition of what a quality education looks like. Then hire professional education reviewers to determine if districts meet the agreed upon criteria of success. We needed charters to know this?!?!?!
3
As a 36 year educator, and now as a supervisor for student teachers, this has to be one of the most dishonest defenses of charter schools ever. The "facts" are misleading and cherry-picked. I have supervised student teachers in a variety of charter schools, and these are the facts: students on the special ed spectrum are main-streamed into regular classroom, no matter the level of disability; class size is horrendous; some charter school teachers are non-degreed and non-licensed, some of whom teach honors or AP classes; charter schools are not held to the same standards as public schools, ie. students can opt out of standardized tests, schools scores are not make public, salaries are not public. I have supervised one or two charter school student teachers who are in "specialized" schools that serve students on the autism spectrum and students who excel in STEM, that are exceptional, but they are rare. Unfortunately, from what I have observed, charter schools are the biggest scam of taxpayer money since for-profit prisons.
12
There is more to this story: Mercedes Schneider rebuts the New Orleans miracle here: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/NOLA-Re... and here:
And Kristen Buras: http://www.theneworleanstribune.com/main/history-rewritten-masking-the-f...
LA's dismal NAEP scores have DROPPED even lower: https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/education/article_f71979fe-...
I would be delighted to see some of this research and commentary reflected in your followup story.
9
Your description of how bad New Orleans Public Schools
were BEFORE Katrina seems to resemble the deplorable state of New York City Public schools.
The article is clear that the Charter Schools can be part of the new solution.
Sadly, what is not clearly mentioned is apparently,
Teacher Union is part of the old problem.
2
Really? NY State schools are regularly among the top states in standardized tests. The same isn't true of Louisiana.
5
I'm a New Orleans parent. Having the city's children graduate in the 37th percentile is disgraceful--not as disgraceful as having them graduate in the 22nd percentile, but still disgraceful. My child attended a private Episcopal school from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade and became a National Merit Finalist. There is excellence in education in Louisiana, but it comes with a five-figure annual price tag. However, we deemed that cheap when compared to the cost of turning out an adult who was functionally illiterate. Many other New Orleans parents feel the same way.
5
Simple solution if charter schools are so wonderful any student who fails in the public school along with identified and ENL students can be mandated to attend the local charter school. They can then work their wonders and the people who support charters will be happy. Never happen because the fraud of charters will be exposed and it doesn't fit the anti Union right wing narrative alive and well in this country which is privatize for profit. Accountability be damned
8
Good to see that Charter Schools are leading the charge in yet another locale and putting shame to all of the naysayers.
The reforms increased student achievement by 11-16 percentiles.
The reforms increased the high school graduation rate by 3-9 percentage points.
The reforms increased the college entry rate by 8-15 percentage points.
The reforms increased the college persistence rate by 4-7 percentage points.
The reforms increased the college graduation rate by 3-5 percentage points.
Free the schools - free the students
2
How complicated. David Leonhardt, your piece was exciting, but in the comments, you appear to have run into a buzz saw of questions and doubts. Well Houdini, do you have the data to back up your enthusiasm, and isolated stories?
While your at work, please explain why the 37th percentile is better than the 22nd, and why some commenters say your an idiot to think 37th is OK.
David Lindsay Jr. is a huge fan of David Leonhardt. Lindsay is the author of "The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam," and blogs at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNews.wordpress.com
1
the democratic politicians across America need to heed this message and STOP supporting teacher unions that consistently demean charter schools. these unions could care less for students. Instead, they just want pensions, more pay, and more benefits.
3
Really? I work in a large public school where in s dept of 30 I would be very happy if my child were in 29 of those teachers' classes. And this is with low pay and long hours who in the bargain get blamed for such things as kids texting too much to Donald Trump being elected.
And if unions are the problem how do you explain test scores (the gold standard right?) are so much higher in Massachusetts, a union state, than Mississippi, a non union state?
7
For those of you that feel like you aren't getting the full story from this Opinion piece, it's because you aren't. I've worked and taught in several different states and school districts around the U.S. and the almost entirely charter run system in New Orleans was definitely the most disorganized and corrupt of them all. The clearest example of this corruption was the salaries of the "CEO's" of these systems. Instead of having one Superintendent making a salary of around $175,000/year, the city contained at least 15 Administrators making at least $160,000. If the new system has been performing as advertised, then why did the citizens of New Orleans succeed in pushing to get all of these schools under the umbrella of the New Orleans School Board by the beginning of this past school year? They knew they were being told lies by the rich backers of these Charter Schools and decided to start pushing back to get some semblance of real local control over the system.
10
The idea that student progress cannot be measured by standardized tests is nonsense. You can certainly measure whether a student can read, write or do math via standardized tests.
2
I usually admire David for his careful reporting. Not this time. He did not inquire of researchers with solid work that would at least have made this column more nuanced.
4
Hilarious, on one level at least, to read these comments from defenders of the status quo, i.e., teacher unions and school boards. Either they are right, or the author of the op-ed piece is lying about everything because...well, that's a good question. It's pretty easy to figure out why the critics are saying what they are saying.
3
What it comes down to is whether you believe the kids can do it (I do), and unfortunately, there are too many teachers who don’t believe they can.
As a 25-year veteran educator, I am skeptical of any turnaround reform that claims, "all you have to do is..." There is no silver bullet to ed reform. In fact, communities in this country are so distinct, we need to examine what works best in a particular context. Sweeping generalizations about how to design excellent outcomes for our nation's kids are irresponsible.
As a teacher who has worked in both traditional public schools and charter public schools, I can attest to the value of the traditional system (as deeply flawed as it is). Namely because of the innumerable opportunities for malfeasance and self-interest in the charter world. The original intent of charters (led by teachers and parents) was to serve as a laboratory of innovation that could then be incorporated into public schools. We have moved so far from the genesis of the movement.
In the greatest country on earth, every child should be afforded the opportunity to attend a quality neighborhood school. If we are to get serious about this charge, we need to discuss poverty; lack of access to quality healthcare (including mental health care); violence in densely populated urban communities; homelessness; working parents with limited time to childrear; segregated communities (and by extension racism); the national teacher shortage; and the list goes on.
There are no easy answers, but we should at least start asking the right questions.
10
I subscribe to the nyt because of the great articles. I’m shocked that this article would be published. This is typical of the corporatist thinking that allowing charter schools run by business is the only answer. In the case of all urban areas,the charters cherry pick the students. They have few resources for disabilities, esl. The staff turnover is much higher, and schools close in the middle of the year. When a charter school closes, they are allowed to sell the physical property and fixtures that is part of the school while still using tax payer money and leaving students stranded. In New Orleans the poorest and more vulnerable citizens packed up and left for Texas. The New York Times could do better research!
5
Many conservative politicians encourage more charter schools. Teachers unions, who support the Democratic party, hate charter schools.
That's all that is needed to predict how the NYT's comment section is going to read. Is there a willingness to look at data, challenge assumptions, accept change for the better? Not a bit of it. It's just toe the party line to the bitter end. Charter schools must be bad because our party platform doesn't support them. You're all no better than a bunch of Trump supporters in your knee-jerk fealty to dogma, and you're every bit the hypocrites middle America accuses you of being.
6
Except Tom the data doesn't support the efficacy of charter schools. The history of charter schools was they were supposed to be experimental ,laboratory of sorts for public schools. Instead they have become in most cases the battering ram to destroy public schools.
9
Louisiana is making real progress. Getting low performing students to higher levels is a real bear. I spent 20 years in education in many environments (public, private, inner-city, suburban, high school and college). Getting from the 22nd to 37th percentile also means more students are earning proficient and advanced scores on state tests. Great work! Keep reaching for higher achievements. More achievement can only happen if parents bye in too. Turn off the television and have the entire family read for at least 1-hour together each day. (Reading together can also mean having each person reading their own book).
Bureaucracies are paralyzing schools. Schools need more services at the school level and not the district level. Failed leadership in business puts people out of business. Failed leadership in schools fails children and not its personelle. So many of the comments are coming from teachers and administrator who are wary of competition. I've watched great and awful administrators in my career. It's always about the leadership. The more we localize achievement, the more we can hold all parties accountable. Louisiana is trying to do that.
2
Sean so failed leadership in business puts people out of business. What's your answer to the financial crisis in 2008 when garbage was packaged and sold to the public? The government not only threw money at those companies they failed to prosecute anyone for what was the financial crime of our time. Those guys made Bernie Madoff look Ike a petty shoplifter. Where are they today making even more on the backs of taxpayers who rely on public schools and are subsiding the tax cut for the wealthy and corporate set. When you can reconcile that then tell me about charter schools.
3
Mr. Leonhardt, please stop perpetuating the myth that charter schools are the magic silver bullet to the dysfunctional education systems across the country. It’s a disservice and a distraction from a real conversation about the real issue regarding education: the disparity and the inequity in school funding.
When economists and opinion writers/editorial boards write about the supposed solutions that are in vogue, they should ask themselves a simple question: Would you want what you are prescribing for your own children? If KIPP was such a wonderful school chain, would you send your kids there? If charter schools were the education miracle that would close the achievement gap, why don’t you encourage charter school proliferation in YOUR own school districts?
Why is the charter movement an almost exclusive “urban”/inner city phenomenon?
When you disaggregate the data for the racial composition of students in charter schools, why is a HUGE majority of the students black and brown?
If it’s so good, why don’t you send your kids there?
SILENCE.
9
I am a retired teachers from a small/mid-sized town. These are just three examples of the excellence of private/charter schools. At the private Christian school here, there was the credentialed math teacher teaching U.S. History. She came to our public school to teach--math. Then there was the science teacher who left our school to teach A.P. Language and Composition at the same private school. At our "best" charter school, the A.P. European History teacher has no B.A. In history, but he impressed the principal because he had been to Europe several times. There are,no doubt, many more examples. The point is, these schools are not reqiuired to hire qualified teachers like public schools are. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that charter schools do mostly "kill and drill" teaching to achieve higher testing scores. Sorry, but this is not learning.
6
The public schools in New Orleans had deteriorated very badly in New Orleans before Katrina. The impulse to use the hurricane as a reason to tear down and rebuild the system is understandable. The question still remains if it could've been rebuilt with certified teachers who could negotiate for wages and benefits. Charter schools don't necessarily provide magic. If there's going to be two entities that take taxpayer education dollars, they need to follow at least some of the same basic rules. Open enrollment, charters should not be allowed to dump difficult and/or struggling students and their data on public schools, charters should not be able to fine parents for violations as this is not allowed in the public. We need to look at the comprehensive picture. The intrinsic thing is that we want to educate our kids to be able to think critically and creatively and to be good. This is for the public good. We don't need to train our kids necessarily to be test taking machines.
2
Mr. Leonhardt is clearly misinformed and prefers anecdotes over facts. 77% of the schools in Orleans Parish are graded C, D, or F. The district ranks in the bottom 20% of all districts in Louisiana; a state ranked at or near the bottom of national rankings on student achievement. The most recent (2017) District Performance Scores (DPS) for Orleans Parish indicate a 16.94% decrease from the previous year. I recognize that this is an opinion piece, but this article represents laziness on the part of Mr Leonhardt and fails to meet my expectations of the NYT.
5
Lots of anecdotes and almost no data. What is the teacher attrition rate? Also, KATRINA changed the population of NOLA dramatically. So this is hardly an ideal natural experiment. More actual journalism, please.
4
Amazing to read this complete fabrication.
The evidence on New Orleans is clear and unambiguous - the reforms are a failure - a racist failure, like so much of what passes for "education reform."
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18352/10-years-after-katrina-new-orleans...
http://www.theneworleanstribune.com/main/history-rewritten-masking-the-f...
https://dianeravitch.net/category/new-orleans/
3
Your sources are all completely biased.
2
Using test scores and graduation rates to measure progress is dicey. Teachers can spend most of the year teaching to the test and moderately raise historically very low scores. And graduation rates? It's a joke how much some teachers and schools manipulate grades...a principal told a friend of mine she wasn't allowed to fail students unless she'd talked to their parents (the school had no working number for the parents in question, so this was literally impossible). Another was told that if she didn't pass X number of students, she wouldn't get tenure the following year. In other words, don't fail anyone.
I find it interesting that the NYT is so left-leaning in many ways but education articles often have an anti-union, anti-public school bent.
6
What does complete support look like? I teach in a very high needs public school. My students who really struggle aren't struggling because teachers don't care or provide them with opportunities and resources. They struggle because they're homeless, living in extreme poverty, taking care of siblings, addicted to drugs or alcohol, having kids of their own, etc. Complete support is about a lot more scaffolding an essay; these students need so much.
15
What does complete support look like? I teach in a very high needs public school. My students who really struggle aren't struggling because teachers don't care or provide them with opportunities and resources. They struggle because they're homeless, living in extreme poverty, taking care of siblings, addicted to drugs or alcohol, having kids of their own, etc.
When schools figure out how to fix poverty and centuries of institutionalized racism, then I think every child can reach their potential and succeed. Until then, it seems like people are expecting schools to be able to cure everything that's wrong in our society.
5
As a New York City teacher who has taught in both public and charter schools, I find this article troubling and misleading. I completely agree that schools do better when teachers and principals are given freedom to choose and change curriculum and are held accountable. However, the implication that generally this is happening in charter schools and not in public schools because of bureaucracy is simply not true. Public schools are often given the freedom to choose which curriculum to use and how to modify it. It is a part of our contract as union workers. In fact, in my experience, it has been charter schools that are held to a certain curriculum, even if that curriculum is not working. Moreover, the curriculum that charter schools often force teachers to use is not evaluated based on its effectiveness but rather on the profit the organization running the school makes on the curriculum.
What is left out of this article is the most important difference between public and charter education: public education is a right. Our children’s rights are not necessarily protected in charter schools. It is up to the discretion of each charter’s board and I promise you, many students, especially those who are differently abled, are either excluded or not given an equitable education. In public schools, every child is protected against discrimination and promised a quality education. Funding and resources stand in the way. Pay more taxes! Trust public school teachers!
7
The school boards at both the high school and elementary school districts where I live are democratically elected from the citizens who live here. Board meetings are open to everyone and board trustees are our neighbor. In contrast, the board of the KIPP school is based in Oakland and has zero accountability to the tax payers and citizens of Redwood City. If anything, private organizations like KIPP take away local accountability and remove channels for redress.
4
Lets face it. Until the teacher unions and the school boards that are elected to serve and protect them have power nothing will change. Charter schools and school vouchers for all.
1
You didn't mention Janus either. I can tell you from past observation unions protect teachers who advocate for children. In right to work states those teachers are often harassed until they quit or they are fired when they stand up for kids. Anything that gets in the way of the profit motive is expendable.
8
The progress on standardized test tell the story here along with the principals having the right to fire poor performers. NYC Schools need to Look at the promise of school districts that are not run by school boards that are beholden to the teachers unions.
1
No mention of tens of thousands of poor mostly minority children that disappeared after Katrina , the fact that the charters in New Orleans ( and elsewhere) dump special needs and difficult children out of their schools. This article continues an NYT trend to write puff pieces about charter schools but at least this one is labeled opinion.
16
Leonhardt was totally snookered by the "reformers" in New Orleans. This article is an example of fake news. Leonhardt ignored all the evidence, such as the NAEP scores that are among the lowest in the nation, to do the bidding of the interested parties in N.O.
8
New Orleans' example offers one very specific, limited set of parameters. Its primary difference from other experiments with charter schools is that every school became a charter school. As Mr. Leonhardt reports, "they can't cherry pick" their students. Additionally, this means that funding is equitable. In all other circumstances where there is a mix of public and charter schools, the funding formula penalizes the public schools. On the surface, funding seems logical - the funds follow the student. However, since students in a charter school will be drawn from many public schools, rather than replacing one or two, the area public schools are left with basically the same number of classes and staffing needs but with less money. In some places, much less money.
It's my belief that if public schools could truly meet the needs of their students, the cry for charter schools would lessen. What if, instead of sending money to charter schools, every child who failed the mandated tests was given the complete support he/she needed to succeed? That does not happen unless that child has parents who are informed and able to fight for their child's needs.
And finally, what happened to the students who were attending those schools that ended up being lousy enough that they were closed? How are their test scores after losing however many years of education?
4
Except most charter performance in NOLA is still a D-. Many studies have been done showing little to no progress. I suppose the writer was taken in by the charter companies tooting their own horn. He should have read some of the research available. There is quite a bit out there showing little to n
4
Mr. Leonhardt is laughable--as though moving from the 22nd percentile to the 37th percentile in reading and math has any meaning in the real world. Who would hire a student who scored 37% on a math or reading test? Is it better than scoring 22% on a test? Yes. But is such a student a fluent reader? No. Can such a student do math? No! Would you hire a student who will get the wrong answer two thirds of the time? No! NY Times columnists' insistence that such statistics mean anything demonstrates their ignorance of what constitutes progress in education. What good is teacher and principal autonomy when education by test scores prevents them from using that autonomy to provide a substantive education in which students engage in deep learning, higher order thinking, and development of voice and agency? If we use Leonhardt's standard of standardized test scores, the scores show that such autonomy doesn't' get students to scores that would be acceptable for Mr. Leonhardt's own children. This is an example of the "soft bigotry of low expectations."
6
Yet nearly 50% more graduating seniors are going to college than pre - Katrina. Sounds like success to me. We need to stop allowing the education lobby to run our schools.
3
I agree about stopping the charter education lobby and their billionaire boys club sponsors from lobbying local and federal legislatures to privatize public education.
BTW: What percent of the entering cohort are graduating seniors? There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
1
Careful now. The school population of New Orleans radically changed after Katrina. Mr. Leonhardt thinks he’s accounted for this; I’m not so sure.
5
This is the laziest piece I have read in a long time. Mr. Leonhardt never discusses school spending in New Orleans. Has it increased significantly since Katrina? Best as I can tell, the answer is yes. Given that no research has ever shown charter schools to be better than regular public schools, it would seem that would be a much better explanation for the increase in outcomes in New Orleans. Neither does he discuss demographic changes. After Katrina, many who used to live in New Orleans never went back. I know, my brother was one of them. How is the population different now from then? Not a word.
9
Another Times article that lauds school improvement, and lays it to empowerment of administrators, but fails even to mention that per student spending doubled. I don’t know what motivates the Times’ anti-teacher, anti-union slant, but it is strong and it obscures facts. Every paper has its slant, but it took NYT’s education writing to remind me to takes even Times articles with a grain of salt.
7
A Board of Educational is elected democratically. Why is having an elected Board of Education a bad thing, Mr. Leonhardt.?
4
Irishman's comments appear nothing more than an ode to the Teachers Union -- the bane of school failure thus far (surely you know of the union conflict prior to Katrina -- and the related failure associated with any semblance of teaching?!)
Similarly, your opening sentences about Cathedrals is also nothing more than the union's perennial blaming of "money being diverted to religious entities, blah blah blah..."
Any intellectually-honest researcher, such as Mr. Leonhardt, the writer of this article itself, will point out that New Orleans religious schools prior to Katrina were already producing success rates better than today's charter operators.
So there!
Keep up the (rare) positive reporting of charter-school success, Mr. Leonhardt. And ignore the sinister noise courtesy of teacher-union flunkies.
6
You might want to take off those rose-colored glasses for a minute and examine the changes in demographics, funding, and per-school retention in NO--and while you're at it, the success rates in rich v poor AND unionized v not school districts around the country. NOT enough was said in the article about these.
6
Would this journalist go into a hospital or a factory, have a look around, talk to management and to a few select patients/workers/customers, cite limited outcome statistics (shouldn't New Yorkers, having witnessed preposterously inflated test scores under Bloomberg/Klein, and widespread cheating elsewhere, be more cautious here), then make recommendations to the rest of the nation?
Welcome to education opining on the NYT op-ed page.... Every man an instant expert and every charter school a worthy experiment from which we have oh so much to learn.
9
Back in November of last year Marta Jewson told a very different story about the New Orleans "success" story.
https://thelensnola.org/2017/11/27/state-ratings-for-new-orleans-schools...
2
Except most charter performance in NOLA is still a D-. Many studies have been done showing little to no progress. I suppose the writer was taken in by the charter companies tooting their own horn. He should have read some of the research available.
2
Many southern states have traditionally had poor schools. SC is no exception. Our schools in wealthier towns and cities are at least adequate, but schools in poor rural areas are generally found wanting.
Perhaps we need a system that redistributes money for schools both statewide and nationally, so that all children have a chance for a decent education. Teachers need to be paid like the professionals with advanced degrees that they are, but they currently are paid very poorly here.
6
How interesting that David leaves out the party designations that he usually begins with? Why is that?
Yes, the failed oud system of schools in NOLA were purely a Democrat operation. The schools there, as in most single-party areas, had become a political game where employees helped keep the leadership elected, with concerns over the quality of education coming in last.
I am glad to see the city's schools doing more of their job now. But the students of the previous years are stuck with the learning they were able to scrap together, with a scattering going on to other places to learn.
There is no excuse for a lack of oversight.
1
For a fact-based response to Leonhardt's opinion, see Mercedes Schneider's piece here:
https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/NOLA-Re...
Schneider is a high school English teacher in the St. Tammany, Louisiana public schools. She is a PhD in applied statistics and research methods. She is also the author of three books on the education reform movement.
7
Anytime anyone wants to learn how to dramatically improve K-12 student outcomes they need go no further than studying KIPP methods and procedures.
1
Good Lord, here we go again. Anecdotes posing as data, education studies designed and carried out by economists, "freedom" to fire teachers with no clear way to identify real strengths and weaknesses and so no due process...and the perpetual, puzzling adoration of NYTimes writers of the Reformster hooie. This great experiment carried out on the lives of students in New Orleans and elsewhere will bring us more uncritical, hoop-jumping Trump voters, not good citizens.
6
The researchers note that the causal agent is probably NOT pure free market reform (see link below). One could attribute the positive changes to parental choice of best school matches for their kids, now that there is variety from which to choose. Or to smaller schools that allow more personalized attention to the child. Or an influx of dedicated new teachers who want to work and live in New Orleans, and are willing to put up with the noncompetitive teachers' salaries (for a while).
The real issues for school reform are:
Will this reform be sustained? Nnote that the figures in the policy brief show a leveling off or light drop in scores?
Is is scalable? Do we need a devastating hurricane and population removal to spur school change?
And are these modest gains (commendable) the best we can do for urban kids? Is there a better model out there that incorporates the best of what is learned from New Orleans, and moves the system substantially forward?
https://educationresearchalliancenola.org/publications/what-effect-did-t...
3
"Seeking to capitalize off of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, elected officials, in collusion with corporate reformers and NGOs, orchestrated the wholesale takeover of the city’s public schools in part by manipulating the cut-off scores that were that system’s criteria for 'failure.’ Moving the passing score on the Louisiana School Performance Score (SPS) from 60 to 87.4 reclassified all of Orleans Parish schools as failures. Once these schools were taken over and converted to charters belonging to the Recovery School District (RSD), the score was then dropped back down to 60 before being lowered all the way to 50 in 2012–2013 as a way of inflating the charter districts’ 'success,...Considering that Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, New Orleans will soon have an entire cohort of students whose access to the proper federally mandated services were jeopardized for the duration of their education. Many students affected by this system will, of course, not graduate with their cohort considering New Orleans’s paternalistic ‘no-excuses’ charter schools’ penchant for expelling students with diagnosed and undiagnosed behavioral disorders."
- Eastman et al. Choices or Rights? Charter Schools and the Politics of Choice-Based Education Policy Reform
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ilfQX-N07ZlEMhtuSUmteeZQUHFCELkv/view
7
Mayor De Blasio: ARE YOU READING? Pull students and schools Up, rather than trying to Push students and schools Down. It is not a zero sum game!
5
It's great to hear about poor students being given more opportunities and choices. And being able to both attend and graduate from college.
But, but, but, Louisiana is at the very bottom of the heap in education for 4th grade. While a huge percentage increase sounds impressive, it isn't actually terribly significant.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?chort=1&sub=...
And it's not all about money, Washington DC spends over $20,000 per student, and is very close to the bottom academically. Utah spends one third of what New York spends and scores about the same on NAEP. (Obviously NY City is a way more expensive place to live than Utah.)
https://www.the74million.org/the-states-that-spend-the-most-and-least-on...
Not quite at the top, with an incredibly diverse and transitory student body are Department of Defense schools. Instead of looking at marginal increases at the very bottom, why not look at why and how DoD schools are so very successful?
No one would try to build a better car company by examining the methods of the very worst performing companies. Why does the NY Times insist on ignoring and denegrating our most successful students and schools? Why not figure out what they are doing to be so successful?
5
This is just another neo-liberal missive designed to destroy public education (and, no charters are not in fact public, despite receiving public money). KIPP schools are rigged in ways that no public school would be allowed (see other comments for explanation). Take a good look at Michigan charter schools and you'll find they are not any more or less successful than public schools. Charters and school choice are a DeVos and Koch brothers inspired effort to privatize public education. Look at states that are unionized and you will find the highest performing schools....look at states where unions are weak or non-existent and you will find the lowest performing schools. Michigan is on a "Race to the Bottom" because of the Koch and DeVos directed efforts facilitated by GOP and, yes, Democratic governors and really dumb GOP legislators.
6
Never forget that teacher aren’t but ONE factor in educational outcome. Unfortunately, in study after study the best predictor of students’ educational achievement is parental socioeconomic level and educational attainment, two factors that are closely related.
10
Bingo. Those who think one can separate schools from the communities in which they are situated probably grew up in affluent communities.
7
Ellen,
I couldn't agree with you more. Here in the metropolitan New York City area all, or almost all, of the top performing public school districts are unionized as are all, or almost all, of the lowest performing schools. So unionization is not the key variable. More to your other point, wealthier students perform better, at least in part, because they don't have the same basic worries - food security, violence, evictions and other problems associated with poverty - that poor students have and which may impede their concentrating on school work. Additionally, part of the issue is giving hope to poorer inner city students who may believe (at least as they get older) that they will not succeed because they don't see many examples of such success.
So to more robustly address failing schools we need to be more effective in eliminating poverty, even if that means greater government transfer payments.
3
I lived in New Orleans from 2013 until 2016 and I heard a lot of horror stories from people who working in the schools and from parents who mostly preferred to send their kids to private schools if they could afford them. This has resulted in massive "white flight" leaving New Orleans schools highly segregated, separate and unequal. New Orleans destroyed its public school infrastructure and handed over control of its school system to a privatized system that is actually less accountable than publicly owned schools. Now that the infrastructure is destroyed, there is no going back. I would refer you to this article for an in-depth look at the issues with charter schools in New Orleans. They are not the success story Leonhardt would have you
believe.https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-orleans-charter-schools-problem...
6
Leohardt starts his column so well. He talks about an actual kid whose teachers did their job and helped him feel independent. But then he pushes the snake oil of "reform" AKA testing. Mr Leonhardt has never taught. That's obvious. As a teacher of many years at a high functioning school with great graduation rates and high regents scores I can tell you smart teachers know how to rig the test. It's not difficult. If tests are used as formative assessment that's all well and good. But when they become the way teachers keep their job and get raises don't kid yourself about the holiness of test scores.
3
The conditions celebrated in this article sound a great deal like those that used to exist in the nation's most successful public schools . In places such as New York State, the entire hierarchical structure of public education was designed in support of its most basic unit, the semi-autonomous local faculty and administration.
Then we fixed them. More precisely, with enthusiastic support from quarters such as the Times editorial board,
forces from outside the world of education designed the industrialized, test them till they bleed approach that currently prevails. Doubters of that assertion should check the public record beginning with the 1996 National Education Summit that spawned No Child Left Behind and its ugly successors.
It's difficult to imagine today's officials or commentators actually examining the historical record to discover what was special about the schools that produced the winners of the cold war and the inventors of our technological marvels, but at very least they might at least consider foregoing the cheers for charter schools freed from the absurd micromanagement imposed from without on our public schools.
2
Such a wonderful thing to read!
Educators, why can't you all get it together to use best practices and give every student an equal shot at quality education?!
The research shows what works. Experience shows what works.
Children from families who don't value education have a tougher road to climb, of course.
While it's still true that some children are ostracized by friends, and even family, for being academically inclined, schools that deliver education in a compelling way can overcome much of this.
Schools and teachers should always broadcast the message that "school is cool," as Nigel Palmer said.
Popular role models should get involved in spreading the good word.
This is how things can really change!
Congratulations to all in New Orleans who made this fantastic transformation possible and who turned the tragic Katrina chapter into something beneficial.
6
Come back in three or five or ten years and then tell us about the school system’s turnaround. As someone who retired from a major urban school district with similar problems, I don’t believe a word of this article. It is PR for the for-profit charter model which is a failure everywhere.
11
I understand all perspectives expressed in the comments, but I want to point out that there are currently zero charter schools in New Orleans that are for-profit. They are all managed by non-profit organizations. After the hurricane, they did contract a few schools to for-profit orgs, but they did not perform well, so they were taken over by non-profit charter operators. The non-profits tend to outperform the for-profits from a student achievement standpoint.
2
As someone with no particular dog in this fight, I can’t help but notice a few points that keep getting brought up.
First – charter schools remove students that don’t perform up to expectations. Yes, this is true but… in New Orleans, aren’t they all charter schools now? So any student being moved from one school to another in NOLA shouldn’t count against the aggregate, right? Unless y’all are suggesting that they’re getting kicked out of NOLA all together?
Second – the poorest students were moved out of NOLA during the hurricane and never came back, which makes the new school numbers look better. The study cited (Harris, Larsen 2018) at least makes a good faith attempt to control for that. I rarely see the other comments even mention this.
Third – These charter schools are just teaching to the test and we should be looking at how these students perform in college. Well… the study mentions that they do perform better in college. Is anyone even reading this stuff before writing angry comments? To be fair, the percentage increase in students attending college is way higher than the percentage increase in those who stick through it, suggesting that the high school system is overly pushing students into college, but there are gains in college performance.
Y'all sound ridiculous complaining about standardized tests. It just reeks of American Exceptionalism and chest beating.
5
What an affirmative read! Who would argue against, plausibly, against teacher autonomy and accountability. I want to add one more factor; i.e., teacher qualification. I am not convinced that all teachers are equally meritorious, or equally capable, or equally trained, or equally committed. Those that are, should be compensated accordingly; those that are not should be referred to jobs to which they are more suited. The assessment of merit and performance scares a lot of people in academia; K-12 and higher ed in colleges. However, despite the difficulty in definition and assessment, our children will be better off if their teacher received the same level of screening as other professionals such as lawyers, physicians, engineers, accountants, etc., receive. I would like my children's teachers to be smarter than the parents; currently one too many are not. Is the problem.
3
Teacher autonomy and responsibility are great ideas, but until public education is properly funded--especially our poorer school districts--our ability to educate our citizens will continue to lag.
I've been an educator for almost 30 years. I've taught in schools where 98% are on free or reduced lunch and at schools where limousines are the standard for student pick-ups and drop-offs. The differences in early childhood preparedness are astounding and completely unfair.
Indeed there are many super-teachers who make headlines (deservedly so), but what kind of system are we trying to create where only a small percentage of qualified and trained educators can make a difference in the vast majority of our students? Shouldn't the system work for all students with merely good and great teachers?
8
James,
Funding is critical!?! I live in a city which for awhile had the highest paid teachers in the country. Our top academic high school is now ranked a 3 out of 10 academically (objective standards for admission were removed in a bow to PC pressures).
In a tour of one of previously fine high schools the (African American) reporter concluded that 'it might be good to have schools for kids who want to learn'. That same school had reported 700 fights during a year but also made the state, big-school division, boy's basketball championship.
Culture is the huge factor. As a volunteer tutor I am about 10 times as likely to see non-African American blacks as African American kids (the latter probably 10 times as numerous as the former).
Many of the comments here are nuance-oriented. Without cultural changes nothing much will change - although the ability to remove disinterested/disruptive kids from schools (as any athletic program would do) would help.
Finally, Portland is probably a very different place, starting with their demographics.
5
Let’s remember that after Katrina many families left the area. These were mainly the poor . Subsidized housing was demolished. Charter schools were brought in . This was a whole new ballgame . Give me a better crop of students I can choose from and I can turn any school around. The is the New Orleans story. Even so, many students still lag behind.
13
Among the issues that requires examination is what has happened to the career path for teachers.
Soon after this charter plan was implemented in NOLA, there were reports that the more expensive teachers with seniority were being forced out in favor of young teachers.
Yes, you might achieve great results by employing lots of energetic young teachers, working them overtime (which KIPP does) because they don't yet have families to worry about. But is there a place for a 40 year old teacher with a mortgage and her own kids to put through college and her own family to care for in the evening hours?
Just wondering.
16
I’ve been a high performing teacher and administrator in two KIPP-like charters. I am 37 years old. In short, the answer to your question is no.
3
Consider that pre-Katrina, so many kids just didn't show up for school the first day or even the first couple of weeks that African American pastors began ringing church bells all over New Orleans as a new school year began as a signal and encouragement to send kids to school. Many highly qualified teachers taught in private schools at lower pay/benefits because their efforts in public schools were unrewarding. Today, as the article notes, "performance on every kind of standardized test has surged." While many students still lag academically, it seems a culture change has occurred. Hopefully, academic progress will continue.
6
It would seem that the reports of success of this program are more based upon who was asked rather than facts alone. Pity. More time and research might have been needed. But some of the criticism is biased.
Test like ACT and College Board are controversial because they are used in college admissions where they are used to rank students to be considered for fewer openings than there are applicants as well as relative acquisition of knowledge to confirm readiness for college work. They are controversial because they can ask a set of questions that reflect cultural biases that disadvantage those with different experiences than those who come from the more affluent and with higher educated parents. The result is that able students can be overlooked. But the tests do reflect knowledge of the material asked. As standard measures of relative performance in a given population, they should be okay.
Anytime anyone wants to learn how to dramatically improve K-12 student outcomes they need go no further than studying KIPP methods and procedures. All KIPP schools are in "at risk" areas nationwide. KIPP solved the problem about 20 years ago.
2
The reason for all the rules and controls? Corruption and self-interest. They let the principals hire the teachers, and they hired all their buddies. Since its a poor district, the parents aren't following things closely and nobody notices.
That's why they put in the rule that the principal has to take the next available teacher from the civil service list. They don't trust the people in the field to act honestly and professionally. Of course, this makes everything even worse.
4
Maybe the problem is that - at least within the reasonable resources available to school systems - we simply do not know how to successfully educate large numbers of kids living in concentrated poverty. That being said, my own view is that the most critical factor is the ability of a teacher or administrator to engage a child and spark that interest in learning that exists in every child, including the most challenging cases. However, realistically, the percentage of teachers that truly have these skills is relatively small. (This is not a knock on teachers; only a small percentage of lawyers, business people and medical professionals have the characteristics necessary to engage and lead others). We just don't know how to replicate en masse these skills in administrators and teachers. And those that may have the greatest likelihood of making of a difference - those teachers and administrators with the greatest experience - often seek higher paying jobs and better prepared students elsewhere.
6
I am a high school chemistry teacher. I love to teach. Working with high school kids, getting them excited about science, it’s the best thing ever.
What is not the best thing is working in a top-down management system. Teaching classes of over 30 students in a lab, 6 classes in my schedule. Very little to no support in classes of low-performing students with behavioral problems. Administrators who don’t listen to their teachers’ concerns and take them seriously.
It’s a crisis of the soul when a teacher, just trying to do what she loves and be the best for her kids, feels stifled, discouraged, and exhausted.
Many schools are now top-heavy with administrators, while class sizes soar and teaching loads increase. Bring the power back to the teachers, with manageable teaching loads, so teachers have time to be creative and reflective.
It doesn’t require a charter school to do those things.
36
Structural changes as exemplified in this article are only part of the solution.
Money, in the context of a culture that does not want to pay taxes on anything but national defense is the elephant in the room.
Get rid of local funding, all of it, and have schools 100% federally funded, with funding the same per capita. This would guarantee equal opportunity, which just ain't there now, what with a poor district in Arizona using 25 year old text books. It's plain morally wrong for rich districts to have facilities better--far better--than poor. And fund education well, not like a stepchild. It is symbolically important: we're a nation, and that kid in Florida is as American as that kid in Washington state.
If I were a kid in a poor district aware of what the rich districts get, maybe I wouldn't care about anything except mischief.
Get rid of ginormous schools. They are alienating. Make them smaller and get rid of team sports, except have regional teams. Have PE, but not sports. If you want to play a sport, join the regional team whose training facilities would be separate from the schools. A great benefit of this would be more serious academics and a better sequestering of bullies. Increase the teacher to student ratio. Yeah, it'll be expensive. But ignorance, despair and mediocrity are much more expensive.
And stop the union busting, unless you want a return to the bare-knuckled thirties.
5
Let teachers teach and require all "experts" wishing to set teaching mode or curriculum to teach 5 years before their idea is put in place.
All the anti-union comments point out the failure of our education system. That our schools keep turning out people so easily manipulated they dislike, or even hate, the most valuable institutions trying to protect the working person's interests.
If unions are so bad for working people why do the big bosses fight against them so hard?
10
I would urge Mr. Leonhardt and readers to dig deeper. Consider this article by Andrea Gabor, who argues that the more difficult to teach students have been abandoned by New Orleans schools. https://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigation/2013/09/20/great-char.... Also of note is that many of the poorest residents, hence the most difficult to teach students, were displace by Katrina and never returned.
19
Yes, there are numerous articles about the failure of the wondrous charter schools of NO.
1
i appreciate your coverage of this critically important, but often overlooked, topic. liberal leaning journalists often bring a bias to education stories, it seems to me, that doesn't place sufficient emphasis on student outcomes and the methods that have led to success.
An interesting related finding was reported at Marginal Revolution. It is Michael Lovenheim and Alexander Willén, The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining (National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2018).
"This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining laws on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes, exploiting the timing of passage of duty-tobargain laws across cohorts within states and across states over time... [W]e examine labor market outcomes and educational attainment for 35-49 year olds, separately by gender. We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a duty-to-bargain law, male earnings decline by $2,134 (or 3.93%) per year and hours worked decrease by 0.42 hours per week.... We also find evidence of lower male employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation. Exposure to collective bargaining laws leads to reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which male workers sort as well. Effects are largest among black and Hispanic men."
1
"The population of New Orleans fell from 484,674 before Katrina (April 2000) to an estimated 230,172 after Katrina (July 2006) — a decrease of 254,502 people and a loss of over half of the city's population." Are you suggesting the solution to under-performing schools is to force out tens of thousands of kids from poor families?
9
Standardized test are the only way to determine how students are doing. But, blaming teachers if the students don't perform is ridiculous. Ultimately, it is the students who have to perform, not the teachers. Even the best teachers can't make children want to learn if they don't want to. And you are putting a perverse incentive on the teachers to cheat for their students. No teacher should ever be held responsible for their students performance. If the teacher is a lousy teacher, that should be dealt with by the school administrator. I am always suspicious of sudden improvements in standardized test scores.
6
I think that the question you need answered is how teachers’ performance was evaluated.
Some people who become teachers just don’t educate very well. They can’t teach as well as the great majority do. They are not doing the job.
Often the schools are poorly supported and they serve populations that send children with so many personal needs unsatisfied that the teachers end up managing their behaviors with no time left to teach. Under such conditions, whole classes are going to suffer and test poorly, with none of it due to the teachers’ teaching.
3
First off, it needs to be acknowledged that David Leonhardt has sung the praises of charters before, so this piece is appropriately placed in the Opinion section.
Second, the folks who are obsessive about test scores need to be more expansive about what they are testing for and how they are testing. Leonhardt mentions that more N.O, kids are taking AP tests- so how are they doing? Many charters are gungho about kids taking AP’s but the results are dreadful. Very few pass (score 3 or higher).
Finally, I am skeptical about the college matriculation stats mentioned here. College enrollment is down across Louisiana because fewer folks are going to community college due to the strong economy. That is a normal economic fluctuation. So what specifically accounts for the increase in N.O.? Not higher test score. There must be something else afoot. Leonhardt would have a much more compelling case ic he focused on college matriculation and completion.
7
I spent the last 5 years of my professional career, teaching English and Reading to high school students labeled ESE - with emotional and behavioral disorders.
I was licensed in English and Reading - both Gen Ed and ESE - and Social Studies and History -Gen Ed.
5 years was all I could take - not because of my kids, but because of the system. Teachers and administrators here in Florida ranked from the very good to the very bad, and the bad outweighed.
My very best efforts at teaching were sabotaged by small minded teachers and administrators.
Just one example - I made a whole lesson around the film "3:10 to Yuma" with Russell Crow - using vocabulary, spelling, and history - but was told I could not use it because it used a major film - that the kids enjoyed and held their attention - but that parents might object to.
As a really great teacher - I quit. No surprise so many kids are so ignorant.
3
One big issue that Leonhardt fails to mention in this opinion piece is the performance differences between for-profit and nonprofit charter schools. All of the New Orleans charter schools are required to be nonprofit, and those schools focus more on their students and serve all students rather than cherry picking the better students as many for-profit charters do. The recent radical right push has been to establish Christian and secular for-profit schools whose primary purpose is to make money for their investors or to push a specific Christian doctrine. I recently looked at the literature curriculum of a Christian for-profit charter, which touted teaching the “classcs.” The majority of authors were mostly dead white guys, some of whom are certainly worth reading but there are many Latino and black writers—male and female—who are also worth reading. This school is located in an area with a high Latino population, so students were learning that only white men had ideas worth publishing. Likewise, history courses in these schools often use special books created by Christian publishers that gloss over or fail to mention entirely the contributions that minorities made in the building and success of the U.S. These schools often do a good job of teaching reading and math skills and preparing students for standardized tests and graduation. The problem is the content of what they’re teaching, whose purpose is to create Stepford children who are never allowed to think for themselves.
7
“In most districts, a single entity — a board of education — is responsible for both running schools and evaluating them.” Where have you been for the last 20 years? Did you miss the standardized movement where accountability goes all the way up to the DOE? Do you accept 37th percentile for your children? Not convinced that this is a success. Probably depends on who you talk to.
6
This celebration of Disaster Capitalism is very off target. The privatization of New Orleans public schools has increased segregation; made the teaching corps significantly whiter; and heightened the level of teaching inexperience. In general, charter schools tout "successes" by squeezing out students who would bring down test scores and otherwise manipulating statistics. The flight of New Orleans' poorest families post-Katrina, along with more recent gentrification, may by itself account for increased test scores. New Yorkers know all too well how bureaucrats have manipulated test scores--soaring one year, plummeting another--to justify the current policy goals. This piece cherry picks certain anecdotes and very uncritically mimics the Betsy Devos and company line about the New Orleans "miracle." I encourage Mr. Leonhardt and others to scratch below the surface of these fairy tales.
16
Very shocked that you did not talk about the fact that so many black women lost their jobs to charter operators and the temporary teachers. It's a stain on New Orleans. And, the term "overseer" really has negative connotations for a mostly black school district. As another commenter said, many tens of thousands of the most vulnerable did not return to New Orleans after Katrina. The charter operators had a clean slate, literally, and while many outcomes may have been good, the charters could not have had this success without a natural disaster. Think about that. As someone who was required to attend a desegregated school, I'm very surprised that this wholesale takeover by mostly whites was allowed at all.
8
I find the focus a bit condescending. Note the discretion to choose extracurricular activities, and the nationwide success of one charter school Academic Games team, which happened to include my son.
https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_2fcc5bf1-5c4d-576c-...
Keep on digging Mr. Leonhardt. And Thank You for making my Monday morning full of hope.
1
Now for a more complete picture. In New Orleans, an all charter district, 40% of the charters received a "D" or "F." Most of the students in those charters are black. The students in the highest performing charters are white. Accountability? Cherry picking individual cases and giving anecdotal information in order to justify a neo-liberal "reform" is what this piece is all about. The "New Orleans Tribune" has done pieces and written editorials on the myth of "The Miracle." Throughout this country teachers are starting to rebel by demonstrating and running for office. They've had enough of underfunding and vilification. Teachers have always been held accountable- what the "reformers" don't like is the fact that teachers are entitled to due process, something all employees should have the right to. Arne Duncan, the former Sec. of Education, once infamously said that "Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." He was wrong. The best thing that could have happened would have been to properly fund the schools, re-build what was destroyed, support the teachers (thousands of whom were fired) and create an environment where academic achievement could be achieved along side of creativity. exploration and self-fulfillment. The total picture of what is really happening in New Orleans, as well as other charter districts, has yet to be revealed. It's not in the "reformers," or the privatizers, interests to do so.
36
Funny - when Republican Governor Bobby Jindal was running for President in 2015 the general argument in papers like the NYT was that the New Orleans reform was a bad idea because it was outside the normal public school arrangement. I suspect this was as much about shooting down the "dangerous" idea that the school model teacher unions thrive in may be obsolete as it was about attacking Jindal. Now that Jindal is gone and we have a democrat governor and a beloved liberal as mayor, New Orleans is seen as a model once again. Remarkable.
6
Papers "like" the NYT?
If you actually read the Times, you'd know it's a long time proponent of charter schools. Kristof, Leonardt and charter school apologists regularly promote privatized education here, touting one short-lived miracle after another.
The same contingent swooned over the Bloomberg/Joel Klein reign at the NYC Dept of Ed -- until it was quietly revealed, with much less fanfare, that the enormous gains in test scores were all phony.
It's true you'll find more skeptical reporting on charter school performance in the news pages, but given their failure rate, this is to be expected.
1
@jrd I actually did recheck and sure enough the NYT ran an article in 2015 about the "myth" of New Orleans charter school success... this was the norm in the mainstream media.
Good points. Those familiar with the Finland model of education realize that when teachers are truly appreciated (in preparation and pay), and allow a climate of cooperation instead of competition, student's reach for the stars (so to speak) leaves most others wanting. And the U.S. leaves a lot to be desired...for the expense. And we haven't even touched on the stupidity of segregation, multiplying the inequality of opportunity in a sound education. This, if we consider that the best investment a country can make is in it's own people. But go tell that to the brutus ignoramus in the White House, extremely arrogant and unwilling to learn,so as to promote a better education for the least among us.
3
If you focus on getting the kids, one at a time, to run their own personal learning plan and show what they know, the schools wil run themselves.
2
Personalized learning? Who do you work for - Microsoft - or some other tech company?
2
Yes, and all the women will be strong, the men good-looking, and all the children will be above average.
Dear me, where to start with naivete like this....
1
My question to everyone connected to these articles...how long have you taught?
1
Katrina blew us out of New Orleans and put us down in the Carolinas. It is so heartening to read a positive article about our city. It truly is an ill wind that blows no good.
2
Mr. Leonhardt is uncharacteristicly lax in his cursory inquiry into the state of public education in New Orleans. I was present during the ideologically driven charter school resurgence post Katrina and would suggest Mr. Leonhardt is inadvertently parroting the party line without sufficiently talking to long time critics of the charter schools. His reliance on Tulane University sources is a case in point. Then Tulane president Scott Cowan championed the charter schools and any studies or statements originating from that institution need to be treated more skeptically and counterbalanced. Two other major factors need to be taken into into account when evaluating “progress” in New Orleans education. First, the city lost 30-40% of its most impoverished population during the diaspora and those students stayed in the systems of cities such as Atlanta and Houston. Second, I found it curious, and Mr. Leonhardt should too, that while so many in the white uptown establishment and Tulane bruited the charter schools and their success, why then are the schools even more racially segregated than before the storm? Statistics I recall from four or five years ago put that number at around 97-99%. In closing, Mr. LeonhRdt needs to enlarge his circle of informants and be more suspicious of the pro charter school and anti public school ideology that is playing out in one the nations most colonial of cities.
8
So, this 'holding people accountable' means test scores. Right? That's the 'yardstick' No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top used. So, teaching to that high-stakes 'test' is what a school will focus on.
You talk about 'poor performance' schools. Well, I'll bet they're mostly in poverty areas. Our society performs poorly in economics and then blames teachers for the problems. I think I just saw a ranking of industrialized countries and the United States and Britain were the worst in equality. We are the most unequal. Inequality is a subject rarely spoken of, because it's better to not attack the aristocracy, the plutocracy (especially commercial, corporate media which needs those folks' money).
Charter Schools? Well, how much do you know about them? Who's paid what? Do teachers really have all this 'freedom' you speak of? Why are you so dismissive of the public schools of America? Caught up in the 'movement'?
I taught in a low-income, high minority, large high school for years. My department head hired good people and supported them. I felt blessed to be on such a wonderful team, and that includes everyone from the bus drivers to the cooks, from the secretaries to the counselors. Springdale High was a jewel in this madhouse world.
Now, they worked us too hard, with far too many kids. The educationally ignorant state Congress lets a teacher have up to 150 kids a day. That's crazy. Just grading a daily assignment might take two hours.
Let's be real; with praise & blame.
4
Don't be so sure that improved test scores and completion rates are a result of better teachers and principals. Comparing test those of the old regime and those of the new one simply tells you the charters are focused on test scores and completion rates. Nothing more.
It tells you zero about whether or not these kids are actually learning. Last year in the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead wrote about Success Academy Charters, which share many qualities with KIPP. These schools teach to the test and reward obedience. Eventually in college, where more independent learning and critical thinking is required, this catches up with the students. They arrive having not learned how to learn. Pretty soon they drop out.
But they can perform all the tricks that the students Nigel Palmer first encountered can perform: they'll rattle off 50 states and do just about any other rote task they might be asked to do on some standardized test.
Uncritical praise for this model from David Leonhardt is very unfortunate. I had hoped for better.
9
As a retired educator who taught in a school system in which the overwhelming majority of students were impoverished, I support the cogent comments made by other teachers who have actually been in the trenches.
I would only add that those who have never been in a classroom have no idea of what our students have experienced.
One example of the many I could offer is the case of a student of mine who came to school in a sweatshirt during one of Boston's harshest winters. She told me that she and her brother shared one winter coat, which each wore on alternate days.
Because I was in a high school that happened to have the "luxury" of a social worker, she was deployed immediately and got the siblings jackets and began home visits. The family's story reflected a trail of public housing, moving frequently from town to town and even from state to state. The social worker was instrumental in getting this child's family into permanent housing so that her schooling could be uninterrupted. It made a great difference in terms of reducing the stress that she had to endure, probably since childhood.
The irony is that this young girl tested out in the cognitively delayed range. My hunch as an experienced teacher was this was due to the lack of continuity in her education as well as inadequate stimulation when she was young and in need of a rich language environment.
Yet she loved learning and made progress not necessarily gauged by a grade-level state standardized test.
6
So it’s BIG news to admit that an organization run by the people who are trained to work with students, who serve as PROFESSIONALS in an environment that drives academic, social, and emotional growth results in success.
What a concept in this day of politicization of the entity that provides opportunistic “sponsors” a way to snatch tax money to line their own coffers. Look at Pearson, Battelle, all the corporations that have become so incredibly powerful thanks to the legislators who insist on stepping over the teachers, principals and everyone else who may actually know something about the educating of every child in order to serve the goal of preserving our democracy.
I am thrilled for this success story, but the “concept” of empowering those who know what they’re doing really needs to continue to gain traction so that we can actually take back our schools and the future of our children.
4
David, if you insist on writing about the wonders of charter schools, you MUST understand one fundamental point. In the rural south, the primary purpose of charter schools is to formalize the return of segregated schools. It is not a side effect, it is the PURPOSE. I understand there is a different situation in urban areas, as segregation already is in full force. But until we face up to the fact that the primary driver of where the child of privilege gets educated is segregation from "those people", we are just talking around the issue.
10
I agree with your comment but have two questions. One, how do you deal with the issue of private schools to which many whites have historically gone when confronted with desegregation. Two, a good part of the problem of segregation, at least in the North, is the town wide school district (as opposed to county wide school districts that are more common in the South). In New York, how do you get inner city kids to suburban Westchester and Nassau counties and how do you compel the local school boards to accept these students?
2
In Connecticut the Connecticut Education Association note that, "that Path Academy, a Windham school run by a charter management organization, will voluntarily surrender its charter. Earlier this spring an investigation by the State Department of Education uncovered troubling practices at the school, including defrauding the state of nearly $1.6 million, billing the state for 128 phantom students, operating unauthorized schools, and tolerating excessive absenteeism."
And there is Amistad Academy that expels so many of its male students to make it graduating class look good.
Connecticut's education system, one of the best in the nation, doesn't need charters. Nor has this state, one of the most educated in the nation, ever needed for-profit charters.
15
I have worked in the private sector and now teach. Firms don't get rid of prized employees because they make them money: period. Some districts would rather save money than have experienced, quality teachers.
3
Education lays at the bottom or foundation of life itself. All of us know what happens if a structure doesn’t have a good, strong foundation: It crashes! I think of education as a road map into life itself. So if that is the case, then why are we failing to truly educate our youth? To me, it’s pretty simple. We as a nation haven’t given our students a true vision of just how beautiful the educational experience can be. We’ve been stuck for the most part on theories and regimentation. What we need now more than anything else is to have educators that can inspire their students to drink from the fountains of knowledge. How exciting would it be if everyday a student could actually come home and tell their parents what they learned today and with anticipation, dream about tomorrow? Too far fetched? Only if the teacher can’t provide that inspiration. Years ago I wrote “A generation gap is the fine line that both parties draw where the teacher forgets that they were once students, and the student forgets that they still are.”
2
It's wonderful to read an article about success in schools. My 20 years in public education tells me over and over and over: it's all about great teachers making decisions and executing. Victor Jones is the guy to pay attention to in this article. Schools must be teacher driven. As long as we undervalue the profound influence of excellent practitioners, we will continue to see great teaching as an accident or statistically unique by-product of a new policy or structure. And, look, I get the whole accountability thing. Tests give our conversations a common context and a quantifiable measuring stick. But great teachers are like great athletes or great chefs: they're held accountable by how they view their own work. They are accountable to their students. To the world, a test proves a teacher's (or a school's) worth. To a great teacher, a test is just another tool in the toolbox.
5
Kudos to New Orleans for making the hard decisions and following through. I’ve worked with elementary schools in New Orleans implementing a school health program called CATCH. CATCH focuses on healthy foods and physical activity. I can testify to the energy and enthusiasm of the many schools that have adopted the program. I believe that children who eat a healthy and balanced diet and who are physically fit are better learners. Congratulations to New Orleans!
4
The improvement noted in the NO school system demonstrates the importance of school reform. But it also noted that it only went so far. Equally important in order to continue further improvements is the need to address the social handicaps that have a negative impact on education. These would include poverty, poor health care, and limited social supports. Each of these is a complex problem which is a drag on society and growth (both societal and personal) at large.
3
Your take on accountability, a test based ceiling that provides crushing conformity, our educational systems will maintain most of the kids like those in New Orleans in poverty. Accountability should become part of the internal workings of each student and not be delimited by homogeneous curricula and testing/grading demands that are enforced across entire schools or districts. We force kids through schools with external means and they become dependent on the schools for too much of their learning. We fail in this process to give them instead the agency, knowledge and skills they need to establish and demand of themselves and others the standards by which they learn and live their lives. Since New Orleans is a poor district, this reinforces the poverty into which they learn and become dependent, performance oriented adults. Until we deal differently and more effectively with "accountability" we will see neither equality nor real democracy in this country.
1
Accountability always sounds so juicy. Hold those teachers accountable! And the administrators, too! But what does it really mean?
In a nutshell, it means that you treat education like a manufacturing process. Students will be "evaluated" as they come in, "evaluated" again as they go out, and the added value in their "evaluations" will tell us whether a good product was made.
Problem is, education doesn't work that way. You don't open up a kid's head and pour in educational substance.
Kids are naturally curious and will learn, but you need to provide a good environment for that, along with structure and discipline to keep them on the track.
Kids are not assembly line products and you cannot measure them in the way that the "accountability" crowd thinks possible. The attempts to do so reduce education to test-taking and we are witnessing now the combined destructive effects of the test-driven No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top projects of the Bush and Obama administrations.
The results are K-12 teachers who are deeply demoralized and high school graduates who (a) have learned only how to take tests, (b) are developmentally delayed in cognitive skills, particularly in critical thinking, and (c) are almost devoid of curiosity. These kids have learned how to memorize their way through the system, and along the way they have found education to be boring and stifling.
The only winners are administrators. Our once-great public educational system is broken.
23
The comments break my heart. I've been there, done that.
I sincerrely hope some kids are getting a better break.
Whether independent charter schools are the answer or not, is not the question.
It's how a school is run, whether children are treated -- not -- as the outcome, but as the living part of a school.
1
There is a place for Charter Schools but they are not in and of themselves the only answer. The fact is that the educational community knows what creates excellence in education but is hamstrung in many ways by "experts" and social pressures with their own agenda. Schools that are excellent are to be found all over our nation and exhibit common features: 1. Strong financial support leading to good facilities, up to date textbooks and other supplies, a viable teacher/student ratio and well, you have heard it all before. 2. Strong social support from a local community. 3. A comprehensive curriculum serving ALL students not just those going on to college. and 4. A well paid professional group of teachers, staff and administrators not hid-bound by special interests often trained but not educated.
14
My kids attended an urban charter school. About 90% of the students qualified for free lunch. They were transplants from the district school system, which had a graduation rate of roughly 50%. Overall, the experience they had at their charter was very good - better academics than the system schools, same diversity, far greater sense of community and parental involvement. The biggest difference was felt by the teachers: on the one hand, they had more autonomy (and better students) than the system schools. On the other hand, they had far less job security. Ever so often, a teacher we thought was good would get canned, for whatever the reason. To parents who went through public schools themselves, to see a teacher successfully terminated was a rare and unusual experience. Not pleasant. But the school had to get its charter approved every five years or it would be shut down and everyone would lose. That required discipline and objective performance metrics. It seemed a harsh, but evidentky necessary price to pay.
5
I can’t attest to the veracity of this description of New Orleans school assessments, but in Houston, the school board is not the sole entity responsible for assessing school performance. That responsibility goes to the state, and federal standards apply as well.
There is no logical reason why public schools can’t be reformed to meet new challenges. And charter schools are notorious for having their own problems.
14
Since Hurricane Katrina and the influx of charter schools in New Orleans in 2005, charter school proponents and advocates blitzed the media with a well financed PR campaign. Their narrative painted a fairly tale picture citing academic progress with unprecedented gains, high graduation rates and school choice that allows children to attend great schools out side of neighborhoods. However most of the external analysis revealed a very different picture which has included chronic academic failure, lowest performance of state mandated tests, lowest ACT scores in the state of Louisiana couple with poor operational practices and fiscal mismanagement.
The realities are that the reforms have been a failure on all fronts and the recent return of dozens of schools from the state department of education to the local school board in reality is all a farce and misleading (http://www.theneworleanstribune.com/main/a-failure-on-all-fronts-what-we....
It also should be noted that the charter schools in New Orleans are not inclusive of parents and teachers in the operation and management of he charter schools. Charter schools by and large employ a top-down management systems run by self appointed charter school boards that exist in a unaccountable system to the public and parents.
This article follow the usual pattern of distorting facts and misleading the public about the privatization of public schools.
50
Leadership is important in any enterprise. In education both teachers and administrators must be effective leaders. Evaluating, motivating and pushing both students and teachers to do the best they can is not easy. It requires people of intelligence and passion.
I worked in public schools early in my career. It's hard work. In most cases there's little support; you sink or swim on your own. Days are spent isolated in classrooms with students and it can be hard to find time to even visit the bathroom.
I give people who love to teach a lot of credit. Great teachers could do anything and succeed.
One of the challenges of public education is that we want to do it on the cheap. Don't invest in hiring high caliber people. Don't invest in staff development. Then blame teachers, or unions, when things go bad.
Perhaps the most significant recommendation for what is happening in NO is those success stories of students who are going back to be teachers in the system. I'd like to hear more about their experiences.
7
I was a teacher for 39 years and if there is one thing I have learned it is SCHOOL BOARDS ARE THE CANCER OF PUBLIC EDUCATION. As the president of my class at McGill I was targeted for rapid promotion, but when I started challenging "the system" (Why are kids being strapped, etc.) I quickly became a pariah - my golden key to higher office was bend out of shape. I have never for a moment regretted my career decision to remain in the classroom. I still get letters from kids I taught in my first year. UNTIL TEACHERS BECOME LEADERS school systems will remain leaderless and broken.
17
Politicians including school boards have no concept of "school, teaching, and curriculum". Yet they are empowered every day to make decisions for which they are not qualified. This is especially true in large school districts where school board membership is the first step in the political jobs ladder.
8
I love traveling and teaching and, as such, have taught in over 15 school districts.
Some school boards are cancerous and some support education in the same way that some politicians support their constituents and some support their donors.
The moral is vote in every election--including school board ones.
1
The disconnect between charter cheerleader rhetoric and reality is stunning. It’s amazing how indifferent so many people who know little about NOLA or education have become to the chaos they imposed on the poor children of NOLA. If there was justice these scammers would be required to return every penny with interest to the NOLA school system. Read a teacher & researcher who lives with NOLA's children wvery day for a more accurate picture https://dianeravitch.net/2018/07/14/mercedes-schneiders-report-card-on-t...
Private education management organization (EMOs) that run charter schools are even less knowledgeable or transparent about education. EMOs are, by design, unaccountable to parents & the public. They skim off public ed funds that assure investors make a profit and have no legal requirement to make public their fee structures.
Charter EMOs are no model for a fully accountable public system. Further, children with disabilities do not have the same legal rights & protections guaranteed under IDEA. Charters exclude or expel children with disabilities at alarming rates.
Leonhardt fails to account for the thousands of children with disabilities or at risk for disabilities that were lost in NOLAs privatized system. He ignores his own paper's report and many others that the NOLA experiment is a failure https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/sunday/the-myth-of-the-new-or...
3
Great article - a glimmer of hope in these days of so much negative news. Education is such an important foundation, without which , or left to crumble, will lead to a serious erosion of our society.
Kudos to the architects of this program and especially the understanding that you cannot let perfection be the enemy of good. I hope they can carry on, evaluate needed changes and improve continually.
3
There are truly great schools in the US--successful academically, in supporting college retention, in developing civic skills and competencies necessary for democracy, in creating community, and in developing a thinking and questioning culture. There are teachers and school leaders who know how to develop these schools. I've seen hundreds over the years. BUT they are often stymied by business leaders who know little about education but who are interested in a quick turn around or new efforts by politicians that trickle down to a superintendent. Of course there should be oversight and ways of assessing performance. Innovation is critical. NY has some excellent models developed for example with the small schools movement. Let's please consult the experts--teachers and school leaders who have history and experience. They are not one size fits all. Some young people flourish in huge schools w/ lots of activities. Others do well in small schools where they are seen and acknowledged in every class and can take part in the life of the school more easily. Some students do well in specialized schools that focus on a particular theme or skill. The evidence also shows consistently that kids don't do well in segregated schools--that single identity schools don't support young people as well academically or socially nor do they prepare them to live in a diverse democracy. White, black, brown, ...we need to be in schools together.
17
We have a family member who has worked both as a teacher and administrator in a charter school in one of the poorest New Orleans neighborhoods for 7 years.
The challenges are enormous and the working hours are very long. The children have to deal with a lot outside of school, especially as they reach middle school age. But the student learning environment is positive, parents have become more engaged and the improvements in outcomes are real.
The New Orleans charter schools accept all students in a choice system. Costs are high because students are provided free transportation to any school chosen by the parents and because of the range of social services provided to students. The charter schools are non-profits, attracting some of the top educational leaders in the country, who have made advances in teacher training and coaching, trauma informed education and social emotional learning. The school with the highest percentage of special education students also is one of the highest performing schools.
I am very proud of the hard work and achievements of the students and the charter staff. I would encourage readers to follow the findings of the rigorous long term Tulane study and the stories of the students to be reported in the next week.
16
Most charter schools cherry pick leaving the students with cognitive, emotional, and behavioral problems to the public schools. I would have to personally observe a few of the New Orleans schools in order to pass judgement. Generally i believe charter schools siphon off needed funds for public education. I'm also against private prisons and making bucks from the public trough.
67
Carol, I'm guessing you did not actually read the article. As Mr. Leonhardt explains, since they educate almost all the public school students in New Orleans, the one thing the charter schools cannot do is to cherry pick the students.
2
ALL of the public schools in New Orleans are charter schools.
This is a natural "experiment".
While the gains are indeed modest, it does refute the "cherry-picking" argument.
2
This is great news. I notice that there is one important point missing from the piece. Is there a Teachers' Union? Was there one before Katrina? If there is union now, how does it interact with the new autonomous system?
16
I wanted to be a teacher at one time. The reason I didn't become one is because I didn't want to be stuck teaching the same useless and boring curriculum that I was stuck with as a student.
I think it's vitally important, for a really effective school system, for teachers to be able to exercise their creativity. And yes, I think accountability is important, because growing up I had some appallingly bad teachers who were completely cynical about their jobs and made no effort whatever to teach anything.
Whether the New Orleans model described in this article is on the right track, I don't know. But certainly, I am sympathetic to some of the ideas expressed here.
7
While I note that economists have as stellar a record of scientific predictions of market trends or consumer pricing as Stephan Hawking, I fail to understand why and how they are conducting educational research. There are actually people who have doctorates in education--not economics, not political science, not physics--who should be the ones the media and public should respect and seek out first.
But sadly, no.
49
I would rather see the system evaluated by an independent group of teachers and parents.
1
Accountability always sounds so juicy. Hold those teachers accountable! And the administrators, too! But what does it really mean?
In a nutshell, it means that you treat education like a manufacturing process. Students will be "evaluated" as they come in, "evaluated" again as they go out, and the added value in their "evaluations" will tell us whether a good product was made.
Problem is, education doesn't work that way. You don't open up a kid's head and pour in educational substance.
Kids are naturally curious and will learn, but you need to provide a good environment for that, along with structure and discipline to keep them on the track.
Kids are not assembly line products and you cannot measure them in the way that the "accountability" crowd thinks possible. The attempts to do so reduce education to test-taking and we are witnessing now the combined destructive effects of the test-driven No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top projects of the Bush and Obama administrations.
The results are K-12 teachers who are deeply demoralized and high school graduates who (a) have learned only how to take tests, (b) are developmentally delayed in cognitive skills, particularly in critical thinking, and (c) are almost devoid of curiosity. These kids have learned how to memorize their way through the system, and along the way they have found education to be boring and stifling.
The only winners are administrators. Our once-great public educational system is broken.
5
Congratulations to New Orleans for the willingness to experiment and improve educational outcomes for its public school students. Heartening.
Given the inevitable teachers union driven attacks and criticism on improved outcomes for students it was gratifying to see 70% of parents were happy with the charter schools.
Always remember that education is about the students not bloated bureaucracy and corrupt teachers unions.
5
“Nationally, the average New Orleans student has moved to the 37th percentile of math and reading scores, from the 22nd percentile pre-Katrina.” If that’s how success is defined in this school system, that’s a travesty. Don’t patronize these kids, setting them up for future failure by claiming that’s great news. It’s still an awful level of performance, and no amount of feel-good sloganeering will change that. The students deserve better.
12
Some district has to be at the 37th percentile. That’s how the math works.
The data that would be meaningful is the percentage of students working at grade level in math and reading based on state test scores.
14
The 37th percentile IS within the average range. There are still too many people out there, including educators, who do not know how to interpret standardized tests. That is a shame because within their intended purpose they remain useful indicators of student performance.
6
Well, both kids graduated from a highly unionized, highly rated public school system -- a national treasure. I know that poor teachers were somehow made to go away; the process was not visible to me as a parent, nor should it be. I complained about teachers I thought weren't so great; sometimes they would be back for the next year, most often not. Fair enough.
When I look at the per-pupil costs in Massachusetts, some strangeness emerges. First, it costs really a lot for the voc-tech schools. Seems reasonable. Second is that the results of the schools look to be independent of the costs. Also seems reasonable; Lexington, for instance, has more children of academics than you can shake a stick at, and, of course, they tend to score high; but Lexington also has a large bunch of Metco kids, from less affluent and less highly educated homes, and they also score high.
I'm pretty sure that unionization of teachers, which for some reasons makes the Right grind teeth, isn't the determining factor in success of schools in Massachusetts.
I will say, though, that the Metco program has been enormously beneficial to Lexington children and Boston children. Money well spent.
14
The Lexington schools have serious flaws which are masked by high MCAS scores. Lexington cannot afford to offer a rich world language program for example. It’s extracurricular offerings (especially sports and theate) are substandard for its region. Far from being a national treasure, Lexington is the poster child of the costs of narrow test measurement and diminished funding. It is no accident that affluent white parents have fled Lexington for better funded communities closer to Boston. 45% of Lexington public school students are now Asian - these parents fail to understand that high MCAS scores do not translate into better college matriculation results. Lexington sends a smaller percentage of graduates to kids Ivy League schools than several other communities in the region.
3
Massachusetts is one of the states that has very good student outcomes and test scores.
Congratulations to the teachers and students of New Orleans. Progress so big is never easy.
The rest of the nation may also benefit from their lessons learned. We must be exceedingly careful to discern the causative relationships that were in place.
There are some who will try to cynically spin the outcomes as blanket endorsements of charter schools everywhere, in all situations.
9
"People here point to two main forces driving the progress: Autonomy and accountability.
In other school districts, teachers and principals are subject to a thicket of rules, imposed by a central bureaucracy."
A central bureaucracy often stifles schools, principals and teachers. However, they exist to protect the system against incompetent local principals and teachers and such do exist.
It's basically a toss up and sometimes a matter of luck as to what you get.
Accountability should solve the problem? Hold principals and teachers accountable. Absolutely, but the question is by what criteria. If the criteria revolve around producing instant results and standardized tests, then little is accomplished.
Education is a long-term process, a lifetime process. The major tasks of elementary and high schools are to provide the student with basic facts and skills, some ability to engage in some critical thinking, and hopefully to instill a love of learning. If the last works, then everything else will fall into place.
To accomplish this it is necessary to give the educational staff time to achieve.
27
I really question the value of standardized tests to measure the performance of schools. Schools need to be molding good citizens - people who can work with others, control their government, know their rights, and assume their responsibilities. None of this requires a knowledge of calculus or Tolstoy.
At age 25, it's not hard to tell who is a headed for success and who is not. Who has a good job; who keeps getting fired; who is in graduate school; who is in jail; who is contributing to their communities; who is costing their communities?
It would be interesting to measure K-12 success by how students are doing in the real world 5-10 years later.
1
Great news. All the children are served. Local educators free to develop solutions. The schools held accountable by a responsible authority representing the public. Performance of students measured with standard tests used for college applications. Poor teachers replaced. Schools that fail to meet expectations shut down and the students moved to those that are succeeding. Students graduate better educated. Happy outcome.
3
Public schools should be cathedrals so grand that all that enter wish to pray to education itself.
I use a religious metaphor to prove a point, and that is society can deem whatever it want, to be their priorities, and such as it is that religious entities (some nothing more than political outfits) receive tax exempt status. That money (and a whole
lot more) could be diverted to make the American public education system, the best in the world.
Teachers need to be held accountable, as do administrators (which too many are paid for work they have not done well) as well as politicians - that put off funding or decide on tax cuts for the wealthy, instead of the infrastructure of the schools themselves.
The school year needs to be extended and modified to no longer fit into an ancient agrarian vision. Technology is fabulous, but I strongly feel that just eliminating cursive has been a supremely large detriment to children's educations.
Lastly, unions and the protections/benefits they procure simply attract the best of the best of the best that want to make a difference in children's lives - being a teacher
Don't you want that for your child ?
45
I don't agree that unions "attract the best of the best"; they promote uniform treatment among a group, some of which may be the best and others of which are distinctly not. Someone who has real confidence in his or her abilities will often prefer an environment in which superior performance is rewarded, not one in which compensation and benefits are negotiated on a standard basis for all employees.
8
Joel, I disagree with your statement about unions. The union protection allowed me to develop my teaching by making sure administrators who may have felt challenged by those of us in the trenches, did not fire me. It is a historical look at why Unions came to be and are needed now that keep a balance between powerful people and those they hire, not rule. Sort of like the three parts of the Democratic country's governing body Judicial, Legislative and Presidential. Nothing is perfect when you are dealing with large systems. Our educational system needs changes for sure but let those changes be regulated by all parts of the systems and unions are necessary to keep teachers in a position where they can have a voice .
7
You seem to lack any understanding of what unions do. The highest scoring states have strong teacher’s unions with collective bargaining.
2
In 2005, the population of New Orleans was 454,845. In 2010, because of the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, the population was reduced to 347,903. The 100,000 missing residents were the poorest, and most vulnerable residents of the decimated Lower Ninth Ward — the citizens who were evacuated to Houston and lacked the resources to return. To attribute the improvement of the New Orleans School District to autonomy and accountability without even mentioning that the system lost, at a stroke, approximately 30,000 of its highest need students is grotesque. I, for one, want to improve education without ethnic and social cleansing.
141
The New Orleans metropolitan area has a population of 1.167 million, some 92% of pre Katrina levels. The lower Ninth ward is not rebuilding as before and that is good due to its geography.
1
David, not to rain on your educational Kodak moment...but, if you look at the research carefully, these Superman results, flatten out, typically, at the beginning of post-secondary schooling, where, these students from these neighborhoods drop out. This is not to say, that giving schools more autonomy along with responsibility is not a sound organizational strategy, and one that is showing in these schools the improvements you document. However, playing the long game, schools alone are not the answer. The kinds of academic results you see in upper tier suburban schools have nothing to do with quality schooling, they have everything to do with the social capital lodged in these neighborhoods. Yes, continue with these school reform efforts, but, don't allow schools to mask, what Dr. King, called the full burden of decades of racists housing and employment practices.
93
Principals and teachers - those closest to the kids- in charge seems to make a great deal of sense to me.
But I think the article left out some key facts. Average pupil spend pre-Katrina: $6,000. Post-Katrina: $12,000. Big bump; is there any comparison to another district where spending per student doubled? Students pre: 65,000. Post: 38,000. That's a lot of missing students; what was their academic performance before they were flooded out.
I'd love a deeper analysis that takes these factors into account and also compares total teacher spend divided by total students pre and post Katrina.
The academic performance improvements seem real. I'd just like to be sure the factors that drove them are fully understood.
143
Great article about New Orleans miraculously making a “public education” worthy of the term rather than a cruel ironic joke.
My kids were born and raised in New Orleans. We knew before they were born that public schools from preK onward were not an option. We were lucky because we could afford some of the excellent private schools for our 2 kids through high school.
If you were one of many however who could not afford private school, your children would not be receiving an education in any meaningful sense of the word, while being subjected to daily violence in the class room, and rampant drug use. Middle schools through high school had metal detectors students had to walk through when entering school. There were armed security guards.
We left town a year before Katrina for job reasons and the seemingly intractable problems the city faced which made it seem like a third world country.
It’s absolutely wonderful that thousands of families can now hope for a good education for their children. It’s the key to breaking the economic paralysis of the poor and politically powerless in the city. Hopefully it will enable familys to enter the middle class by giving their children the opportunity for good paying jobs and meaningful careers only a college sheepskin can garner.
And Charter school is a perjorative term where I live in NC.
Perhaps NO is a model other educational systems might want to examine.
9
These are very encouraging and heartening results. But seeing that the improvements have, so far, leveled off in a kind of mid-range, I think you have to question whether this kind of approach is useful across the board in all or most situations, or just as a salvage technique to get systems out of the disaster zone.
Is there any reason to switch schools to this system if they are already average or above average?
12
Couldn't post-Katrina gentrification have something to do with improved school performance? Or did the researchers take that into account somehow?
42
This is obvious. It’s how any successful firm, whether for profit or non-profit, operates. Give the manager (in this case, the school principal) the power to hire and fire and hold him accountable. That’s how the best private schools operate and it’s no surprise that the same principle is effective in the New Orleans schools.
13
For pity’s sake: schools are NOT businesses and should not be run as such. We (educators) are not making widgets; we are cultivating minds. Let’s pause for a moment and consider that there is a real difference here.
49
I understand the analogy between schools and for-profit/non-profit firms, but as an educator who worked in the New Orleans public education system from 2010 to 2014, I've found it often detrimental to compare schools and private businesses in parallel.
When the comparison between the two goes farther than, say, looking at the benefits of having autonomous + accountable leadership, the privacy/proprietary nature of businesses can supplant systems of community accountability that are necessary for a strong school.
In New Orleans, I observed that this city-wide shift in the culture of school administration weakened community-level protections against experimental policies that, when some of them failed, prolonged the damage of their failures in ways that may otherwise have been curtailed/avoided with the safeguards of local school boards and parent-teacher-associations.
Specifically, the ramping up of “zero tolerance” student-discipline policies that was compelling to some leaders in the New Orleans charter-school movement quickly raised youth-incarceration rates along racist lines, and the fracturing of community-level institutions undermined students, families, and organizations fighting against this rise.
Many experimental programs in New Orleans charters have proved to strongly serve students, but the culture of exclusivity that characterized many firm-mimicking New Orleans charter school administrations magnified other problems for which solutions are not “simple.”
11
So how do you come up with the measures to judge the success of an individual school? Is it simply academic outcomes alone? Should the socio economic status of the students be taken into account? Many schools have students whose basic academic skills are very poor when they start school, so achieving good academic results would be difficult. Other schools may look at their ‘value added’ ability to judge how they have impacted on their students.
Turning young people into good citizens, who follow the law and respect the views of others, would be a great outcome, but how would it be measured and over what time frame?
Having a well resourced school with well qualified staff and instilling a feeling of cooperation instead of competition, starts at the top with a Principal who can get staff, students and parents all pulling together.
Creating a school that values academic results, student successes, good student behaviour, engagement with the community, should be encouraged. Continually measuring academic ability may not be the best approach. You don’t fatten a hog by continually weighing it.
31
Firing teachers is a management problem. Usually, the managers don't want to do their jobs in this area.
I'm frequently puzzled by why some commenters are so opposed to people making a decent wage and collectively getting decent benefits. I'm not aware that I am hugely overpaid as a teacher.
98
It's called the empowerment / accountability, yin-yang of performance ... empower teachers, or any type of worker (e.g., ensuring they have the resources and skills necessary to do their jobs) and then let them loose to do it while holding them accountable for achieving a well-defined set of results. It's not rocket science, it goes back to the early '90s and Al Gore's re-engineering of government imitative.
The problem today is that the trumpliCONs have no interest in either empowering government workers and surely little interest in holding them accountable.
6
It's a really good story but, incredibly, the word "union" does not appear. The problem before was not so much an administrative bureaucracy (though that didn't help), the problem was the typical 600-page teachers union contract with thousands of work rules -- the biggest one being the requirement that teachers be hired from a seniority pool (a pool often loaded with teachers who have been forced out of other schools because of poor performance).
I suspect the single biggest factor in this turnaround is simply giving principals (and their faculties) the authority to hire the best candidates to teach in their schools, and, presumably, the ability to fire teachers who can't do the work.
The issue really isn't charter schools, private corporations or even unions per se. The key thing is the authority to hire and fire. The average urban school system in America is failing because its schools don't have the right to hire and fire teachers -- something just about every other institution in this country takes for granted.
23
if it weren’t for unions, districts would get rid of the more experienced teachers - yes, those who have senority and are most expensive. Why people who really don’t know what’s going on in schools feel they have solutions to all the problems?
The urban school system is failing because of the concentration of poverty - and all the problems that come with poverty - in cities not because of teachers.
144
I was a member of the board of a small independent school in New York until recently. No union. The most expensive teachers were the best. We dreaded their departure. Age was not a factor, far from it. Many times the most experienced were also the best at their job. It was all about quality for the students. I think your argument misses the point as to what creates value for a school in a teacher.
5
I think you have not worked in private sector. Firms never let go off their prized employees. They shower resources and rewards on them. The reason I feel you have a different idea is that your idea of a 'good teacher' and the management idea of a 'good teacher' does not match.
Seniority does not mean 'good'. Seniority can often mean 'deadwood'.
As a fifth grade teacher, I agree wholeheartedly of holding each STUDENT accountable for their learning. Test scores are not a clear indicator of a teacher's effectiveness either. I could sit at my desk all day and tell students to independently complete the assignments on the board. I don't teach to the test either. Does that make me a "bad" teacher?
If my students learn anything this year? It is to BE CIVIL to one another...and guess what? That takes A LOT of work to do.
They can Google everything else right?
26
The New Orleans plan sounds like the opposite of national union diktats. So it's safe to say that a system supporting students instead of teachers is dead on arrival in the nation's urban centers.
10
I have the same question: How do you overcome the protection of bad teachers by the Union?
13
My union, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, only protects teachers by making sure they get "due process". There is a procedure that must be followed when firing a teacher, but it can be done and it's not that difficult to do.
Beyond due process, my union does not protect me. I suspect that's the case with most other teachers' unions.
By the way - due process is guaranteed to us as citizens in the Constitution when we are arrested. It's not some novel, communistic idea.
The notion that teachers' unions are bad for students is ridiculous. Unions don't hire teachers and don't set standards or curriculum.
64
If we are going to use test scores as a data point for achievement, unionized states outperform non-unionized states.
8
Holding people accountable is pretty much the secret to success in any endeavor, public or private. It is good to hear this is working in New Orleans. Unfortunately, accountability is a rare commodity in any government organization, schools or otherwise.
20
Those that think all government workers are lugs would believe this. From Reagan on that has been the mantra of the right.
1
Parents need to be held accountable, the teachers can only do so much.
If charter schools are so great for students of color, why has the NAACP called for a moratorium on them? Because with charter schools, commute times can be much longer, schools are more segregated, there are fewer teachers of color, rules are often punitive, and the focus is often on profit. We must prepare our children for life as citizens, parents, spouses, and lifelong learners as well as consumers and workers. Let's see how long charters last in New Orleans now that citizens have a voice.
54
You raise several very good points, but the ultimate goal of most parents is to obtain the best quality education available. If you are thinking parents will move their children to schools that are more convenient or have a more PC balanced composition of students and/or teachers, I fear you are going to be disappointed.
16
A very thought-provoking column from Mr. Leonhardt. Full disclosure - I am a 21-year union public school teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest public school district in the country.
I love New Orleans, and after Katrina looked into moving there to be a teacher. I found that I would lose approximately half my salary compared to L.A., have no health insurance, which in L.A. is fully funded through my job, and have no pension. I would also lose all due process protections that come with being a union member. I could be fired on a whim.
I stayed where I was.
That said, I agree with the two main ideas of this piece: autonomy and accountability. I know what my students need, and too often am unable to give it to them.
I have seen wonderful teachers and administrators in my district, and I have also seen some of the least competent and most objectionable people imaginable in both fields. My union is currently at loggerheads with our School Board, a majority of which was elected with $15 million of outside money provided by billionaires such as Reed Hastings and members of the Walton family. They want to bust my union.
My district is a political battlefield, and the students are the losers. Much of what is happening in New Orleans in this article sounds good. Somehow, however, I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story.
228
You found you'd have no retirement or health insurance? That's false, unless you applied only to Catholic schools. All public schools in New Orleans have retirement and health care.
2
Funny. You only talk about autonomy, not about accountability.
1
I'm sure Eli Broad is involved in this also. He and his cronies forced/bankrolled a useless superintendent on the district. Turns out, the puppet had false credentials. The billionaires are always trying to manipulate LAUSD.
1
There are many comments on this article regarding unions, and most of the shorter ones are dismissive of unions. I come from a family of teachers, and had my life not taken a different path, I would have been a teacher, too. Instead, I worked as a librarian, in a right-to-work state, for a city government that blocked union organizers.
Unions are not perfect -- but neither are the entities they are organized to negotiate with. I find it extremely difficult to believe that teachers' unions exist only (or primarily) to protect teachers' jobs. Most of the teachers I know are dedicated to their work, and want their students to succeed -- to learn to learn, and to learn to think through difficult problems, and devise solutions that work. That seems to be what is in process in New Orleans.
But for teachers to do that, they need the kind of security that includes an adequate wage, a working retirement system, adequate health-care, and the time to adequately prepare for the coming year, or session. As do all workers.
The answer is not to cut out unions for teachers -- the answer is for all workers to organize and bargain collectively for better conditions. That is what corporations do -- and we seem to have ceded the ability to do that to that particular kind of "person" -- to quote Mitt Romney.
154
I've become skeptical of these turn-around stories. In almost every case, we later find out that the success was primarily a result of weeding out poorer performing, more troubled students, beginning with the "Texas miracle" that lead to NCLB.
I don't know much about New Orleans, but KIPP and some other privately run charters typically keep only about half of their students. Many have no programs for disabled children. These schools can do good job with the students they allow to remain but what happens to the students that were asked or encouraged to leave. There is an argument for these quasi-private schools but too often for every door they open, another one is closed.
Often these schools are designed to avoid unionization and typically there is high teacher turnover. The initial reorganization of New Orleans Schools was clearly driven by political not educational concerns and led to the firing of my African American teachers. Finally, there is the issue of whether students are simply becoming better test-takers.
Cutting educational bureaucracy is usually a good thing, but the real trick to improving life outcomes for these students is to eliminate the pervasive poverty and racial discrimination that affect New Orleans and so many other troubled districts. I worry that stories like this one are designed to convince affluent voters that all that needs to be done is "reorganize" schools in poorer areas and all will be well.
179
I'm always puzzled by the argument that 'we're just making them better test takers.' Life is about taking tests. Yes, high school is about developing life skills and all of these amorphous ideas. However, from a practical standpoint, high school is about getting into a good college and graduating from it. Doing well on standardized tests accomplishes that goal. Sorry.
I taught in the New Orleans area from 2009-2012. I've been teaching in Detroit from 2013- the present. I've taught in traditional public schools, and I helped unionize my current charter school. One quick point: unionized schools do fire people. In most cases, it's not very hard. As a previous commenter pointed out, collective bargaining agreements guarantee due process, not lifetime employment.
Given my real experience in both of these controversial systems, I'll say this: a journalist can tell pretty much any story he/she likes about a given school system. One simply chooses his/her measures, his/her interviewees, and his/her heroes and villains to fit the narrative he/she wishes to write.
I have friends and former colleagues who work at the schools cited in this article, who will shake their heads at the absence of any discussion of special education outcomes, suspension/expulsion data, and many other important, yet nuanced pieces of the puzzle. I'll also note that NYT published a very different (and in my opinion, better-researched) piece in 2015, by Andrea Gabor.
To the readers out there who don't work in the field of education: please have the sense to read more than one piece on a topic like this before forming your opinion. And for the love of God, please ask a few actual educators in your life what they think, too.
351
I have advanced degrees in psychology from an Ivy college and have worked in psychological/educational research for a period of many decades.
I am pleased to learn from this article that New Orleans students now score near state averages on reading, math, science and social studies.
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.
However, even setting those factors aside, no one should take comfort in reaching the sub-optimal level of 37th percentile, or suggest it is anywhere near an adequate level of performance.
I was also surprised to see that the study referred to by Mr. Leonhardt was led by economists, not social scientists and educators, who might have brought more nuance and experience to the research.
Finally, it should be noted that even in the worst of schools it is possible to cherry-pick one or two or a few outlying students who have succeeded despite the odds, and to hint--incorrectly--that--their achievements are typical.
New Orleans schools have a long way to go and I wish them--and the students--every success.
1
@Liz K You are spot on! As an educator, I become frustrated when reading articles related to schools/education with very few educators actually interviewed.
"One quick point: unionized schools do fire people. In most cases, it's not very hard."
That's utter baloney, particularly if the school in question is in a state that grants tenure to K-12 teachers, a notion that's as ridiculous as it sounds. In most cases, teachers who need to be fired because they're lousy at their jobs aren't even targeted for termination because it is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to fire a teacher for being incompetent. Why would administrators even attempt to fire a teacher for being a bad teacher when they know it's impossible?
Now, if we're talking about teachers who show up drunk or diddle kids, that's one matter. It is easier to fire them than it is to fire a teacher who is merely incompetent. But, even then, unions can and do demand extraordinarily high standards of proof before declining to go to bat for teachers who are the target of credible allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior.
Teachers and their unions created this situation through collective bargaining agreements that are all about teachers and nothing about kids, no matter what the unions say. They should own it, and instead of denying the truth and lying--it's easy to fire a unionized teacher--they should accept responsibility. Isn't that what we teach our kids to do?
1
I've taught in two charter schools in New Orleans, and the problems are huge. Many schools are founded by people with no training or background in education. Many charters close within a few years of opening, sometimes mid-year, leaving students stranded. Cheating on standardized tests has been documented. Charters are good at PR, because they are often run as a business, by business people. As an educator, I don't want to work for a CEO. Starting a school from scratch is a monumental task. Allowing inexperienced non-profits to create their own schools just because they have a business plan that looks good on paper? Well, we are playing games with the lives of our most vulnerable students.
244
Mr. Leonhardt bought the PR. Its all about privatizing and making money.
2
Any arguments made in this column are invalidated by measuring educational outcomes using standardized tests. Education professionals (Teachers) can tell you any score on a high-stakes test is useless when trying to guage the academic abilities of a student. The futility in trying to do so is well documented across myriad studies.
The continued reliance on test scores to measure academic outcomes is politically expedient because it gives those with no experience in education a neat sound byte, which they broadcast at every opportunity in support of their own agenda. Parents, who also lack experience in education, then begin to chase scores by voting on District Policies, or physically relocating into a given District. Meanwhile, students find their education compromised by a corporate mentality that chases a solitary data point in lieu of delivering a well-rounded, authentic education.
74
"Sound bite." Although the difference is more amusing than anything.
As for test scores, yes, Paul is right. Evaluation by standardized tests is the red-tape bureaucrats' and low-grade politicians' dream.
1
Douglas: You left out the part where teachers decide what kinds of changes the curriculum needs. A good principal would give teachers opportunity to affect the curriculum, as they are the ones who know what is needed. It's not just a matter of empowering the principal; that has led to destruction when a bad principal takes over. In theory "holding him [or her] accountable" is the remedy but how often, even in successful firms, is the easy way out taken by not removing destructive managers? Pretty often, by my anecdotal evidence, and very often in schools, by ditto.
5
Good for you, Scott, but no, they can't Google everything else. Googling is useless if you have no framework of prior knowledge.
3
There is a significant amount of research suggesting these improvements are due more to changing demographics, the fact that charter schools in New Orleans can and do cherry pick and counsel students out (despite the claims made here), and other factors not related to charter freedom. Indeed, the best known study that found increased student performance was ultimately retracted due to enormous errors. It's irresponsible to present such a piece without honestly recounting the research.
128
That's a pretty significant increase. And 37% is not great, but it's not awful either. You do realize, I hope, that 50% is average. Or perhaps you live in Lake Woebegon.
4
Please provide this research as it relates to New Orleans - I am highly doubtful of your claim. Also are you a union official or union member?
1
Please provide this “significant research” about New Orleans that supports your assertions disparaging the performance of their charter schools.
1
A danger of this article is it implies that one of those “all we need to do” things to improve our schools is to eliminate those bureaucratic district offices. This is kind of like teenagers saying my life would be so cool if only I could divorce my parents. District offices do the hard work of helping to implement curriculum and the related resources, so schools can be freed from having to do this individually and possibly not doing it well. That doesn’t mean principals and teachers shouldn’t ALSO be involved, and in fact you get the best results when everyone is engaged in this work and it is done in both a top-down and bottom-up way.
Things like the implementation of technology to enable personalized learning just can’t be done well if there is no district support, and instead everything is dumped on individual schools and already overworked teachers. And I suspect that isn’t what’s going on in New Orleans. One of the principals quoted in the article is from KIPP Renaissance High School. KIPP is a nationwide charter school chain with 224 schools, as big a “district” as almost any public school district in the country. Ms. Towana Pierre-Floyd, says “decisions (are) really close to the school site and the students.” That’s great, but I’m certain she also gets valuable services from the KIPP “district.” So let’s not draw the wrong conclusion from the New Orleans experience that we’ll get the best results if we set up each school in the U.S. as some sort of little island.
38
Points well taken, imo.
I have advanced degrees in psychology from an Ivy college and have worked in psychological/educational research for a period of many decades.
I am pleased to learn from this article that New Orleans students now score near state averages on reading, math, science and social studies.
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.
However, even setting those factors aside, no one should take comfort in reaching the sub-optimal level of 37th percentile, or suggest it is anywhere near an adequate level of performance.
I was also surprised to see that the study referred to by Mr. Leonhardt was led by economists, not social scientists and educators, who might have brought more nuance and experience to the research.
Finally, it should be noted that even in the worst of schools it is possible to cherry-pick one or two or a few outlying students who have succeeded despite the odds, and to hint--incorrectly--that--their achievements are typical.
New Orleans schools have a long way to go and I wish them--and the students--every success.
51
Too bad statistics wasn't part of your academic training.
The average national student is at the 50th percentile. You apparently live in a world where everyone is above average.
That a low income community has moved from the 20th percentile to the 37th, without having removed the underlying social reasons for poor academic achievement in low income communities is significant and meaningful.
2
@Mon Ray
You hit on the most obvious overlooked factor in the improved percentiles in math: the exodus of tens of thousands of low income residents and their entrapment in other cities after Katrina. The housing projects while terribly damaged were encircled with high fences and the residents were not even allowed to return to claim their clothes and household goods. Instead of rehabbing the projects for the residents who evacuated, the projects were turned into "mixed income" facilities in which few units were reserved for the most needy. The true story of post-Katrina schools involves the dispossession of the neediest and the construction of Charter Schools, some of which may be successful, and the wholesale termination of several thousand teachers and educators whose union contracts were voided. One result is the total destruction of the true public schools and their replacement by Charters that are not accountable in the way schools previously were. Another result is that the poorest former residents now reside in other cities like Houston and Dallas. The improved percentiles in New Orleans reflect their ejection from their homes and city. While I don't wish to disparage the work of
many in the Charter Schools, there is a brutally sad story here that must be told.
I am a thirty one year elementary educator, former state teacher of the year and a former union president from a high performing district in Maryland. The article does not point out how abysmal schools in Louisiana are. In fact my nieces in a nice NOLA suburb attend private school because of the low quality of the local system.
No one should read this piece and come to the conclusion that charter schools are a viable solution to weak student performance. My daughter taught for one year in a charter and left in disgust due to the poor administration in her school.
The children of New Orleans attended schools prior to Katrina that were awful due to political corruption and dreadful under funding. To be proud that NOLA kids are performing at the same mediocre level as the rest of the state is misguided.
Double or triple teacher salaries and create curriculum that is suitable for the 21st century. Develop a system of evaluation and supervision for the entire staff from the principal on down that focuses on both the art and science of educating kids. Provide support for a strong home and school connection.
Don't be fooled by profiteering school management companies.
And empower teachers to take part in decision making at the district and building level.
And write an article like this when the children of New Orleans EXCEED the unimpressive results in the rest of the state.
82
KIPP is a nationally recognized Not For Profit public charter school company. They run excellent schools in some of the toughest places in the country and succeed!
Paul, like you I was very disappointed in this article. I’m a former student, teacher, and also district office bureaucrat in big urban districts, and I’ve been watching this story play out for over 50 years. Certainly one of the biggest challenges for our country is to improve the learning achievement of all of our kids but then to work especially hard to finally find ways to dramatically raise the achievement of disadvantaged kids like those in New Orleans. But to exclaim, “Hey, we’ve found the answer, and it’s this one simple thing!” is really dangerous. By the way, there is a current book with a very similar theme, Reinventing America's Schools by David Osborne. This book also uses New Orleans and a few similar sites as examples, and then concludes that our simple answer is to make every school in the U.S. a charter school! What’s really scary is that this simplistic solution is kind of what’s being marketed by President Trump and Secretary of Education DeVos as part of their flat-out attack on public schools—one of the many frightening and evil things on the Trump road to the destruction of our once great country. And my fear is these calls that “everyone should do what they did in New Orleans” will pour fuel on that fire.
2
You hit on the problem. The doubling or tripling of teacher salaries must be paid for with higher taxes. But my sense is that the people paying the taxes do not want to pay these higher taxes, by and large, because their kids would not directly benefit from the increased school expenditures. This is a tough political problem.
2