Emily Langhorne | May 21, 2019, 11:42am
Nearly 14 years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana’s elected leaders decided to rebuild New Orleans’s failing public education system from the ground up, as a system of public charter schools. Prior to the storm, the district was considered one of the nation’s worst. Half the students dropped out, and four in 10 adults in the city could not read beyond an elementary school level. The district was almost bankrupt, searching for a $50 million line of credit just to meet payroll. Katrina only exacerbated an already dire situation, displacing 64,000 students and creating over $800 million in damage to school buildings alone.
For New Orleans, this catastrophe brought with it an opportunity. In 2003, the governor and state legislature had created a Recovery School District (RSD) to take over the state’s worst public schools, including five in New Orleans, which the RSD had turned into charters. After the storm, the legislature placed all but 17 of New Orleans’s 127 public schools in the RSD. Over the next nine years, the RSD turned them all over to charter operators, and academic progress surged.
In 2015, Louisiana switched to standardized tests aligned with the Common Core standards, which were far more rigorous than the old tests. It began the process in 2014, when it first moved its tests in that direction, and it continued to alter the test after 2015. Not surprisingly, starting in 2014, what had been a steady rise in proficiency leveled off. Education reformers began to fear that this plateau revealed waning effects of the move to charters, rather than just the impact of tougher tests.
But a new report by the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) focused on student growth scores reveals that New Orleans’s progress has continued.
While an important metric of academic achievement, student proficiency scores offer a limited perspective on academic improvement. “One of the major problems of looking at proficiency cut-offs is they are a somewhat arbitrary cut-off line,” explains Neerav Kingsland, former CEO of New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) and now managing director of the City Fund. “For example, if a student started off extremely below proficient, but then improved to one test score question away from being proficient, the student would still show up as not proficient.”
CREDO’s new report compares the performance of New Orleans students against the state average of demographically similar students. The analysis found that nearly every year from 2014-15 to 2016-17, New Orleans outpaced the state in student growth scores for both reading and math. When compared to the average learning gains of the state, New Orleans students gained about 65 days of learning in math during the 2014-15 school year and 42 days during 2016-17. (For 2015-16, math gains were not statistically significant). In reading, students gained an additional 65, 47 and 36 days during the 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, respectively.
These gains on their own would be impressive enough, but New Orleans’s growth has occurred in a city serving significantly more low-income and minority students than the rest of the state. Approximately 82% of public school students in New Orleans are African-American, while African American students make up only 43% of public school enrollment statewide. Likewise, New Orleans serves a greater percentage of economically disadvantaged students, 85% compared with the state’s 70%.
CREDO’s analysis included all of the city’s public schools where students were enrolled in grades that participate in state exams over those three years – seven traditional public schools and between 78 and 81 charter schools. (Today 98% of public school students in the city attend charters, and the remaining traditional schools are about to be converted.) The report uses the 2016-2017 school year to explore how academic growth differs by sector and subgroups. Researchers found that African American charter students experienced stronger learning gains than the state average in both reading and math for this period, while African American students in traditional public schools experienced gains similar to the state average. Similarly, economically disadvantaged students in charter schools had much stronger growth in both subjects while economically disadvantaged students at traditional public schools posted gains similar to those of their state counterparts.
According to Patrick Dobard, the CEO of NSNO and former superintendent of Louisiana’s Recovery School District, the charter school governance model, in which school leaders are given the autonomy to make most decisions and held accountable for the results, has directly contributed to the city’s educational progress.
Prior to 2006, most students in New Orleans were assigned to schools based on their home address, as is the case in many districts today. The highest performing schools were concentrated in the wealthier neighborhoods. Today, however, high-quality schools exist throughout the city, and they are required to accept new students for all open seats in any grade, no matter the time of year. Dobard believes that this has been essential in maximizing equity and progress throughout the city, because it provides families with the greatest number of school options and keeps the highest-quality schools at maximum capacity.
Because students in New Orleans can attend any public school in the city regardless of where they live, families participate in a unified enrollment system for most public schools. Families rank their top twelve schools in order of preference, on one application. A computer program then matches each student with an open spot at a school, based on their preferences.
In 2018, 82% of incoming kindergarten and ninth-grade applicants received a placement at one of their top three choices. (Most schools in New Orleans are either K-8 or high schools.) Moreover, the number of students attending schools with an “F” rating, as determined by the Louisiana Department of Education, dropped from 62% in 2005 to 8% in 2018. Meanwhile, as the state raised the bar for all grades, the number of schools with an “A” or “B” ranking more than doubled.
Those schools still represent just under a third of all public schools in New Orleans, however. As Dobard says, we still have one “grave problem: we do not have enough of those great schools.” But by continuing to replace the D and F schools with replications of A and B schools or new schools with high potential, the city will continue to make progress.
Without a doubt, difficult work remains to be done in the Big Easy. Still, urban education leaders from across the country should be flocking to New Orleans to figure out how it improved so fast. As Neerav Kingsland puts it: “In most cities, the longer poor children stay in the system the further behind they get. In New Orleans, the opposite is true: the longer you enroll in New Orleans public schools, the closer you get to your peers across the state.”