New Orleans’ education reforms have been praised by school choice advocates for expanding choice and improving student outcomes. Meanwhile, teachers unions have mostly opposed reforms.
Douglas Harris, director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, was on hand at the conservative American Enterprise Institute Wednesday to separate fact from fiction. Harris’ group is a research organization based at Tulane University in New Orleans.
After Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana took control of many of the traditional public schools in the state, converting them into independent public charter schools. Now, New Orleans is an all-choice school district where nine in 10 students attend a charter school.
Here’s how well it worked out:
Academics
Student performance has greatly improved, and the reforms are responsible, according to Harris. “[The reforms] helped students learn, that’s what schools are for,” Harris said. “The evidence points strongly in that direction.”
Before Katrina, New Orleans’ schools peformed worse than schools in other areas in the region. Afterwards, New Orleans gradually caught up to those areas. As of 2012, test scores in New Orleans were slightly better than those in similarly-affected areas. It wasn’t just test scores that rose; college enrollment numbers did too.
Replication
Simply to take the New Orleans model and apply it to another urban city probably wouldn’t work, because New Orleans had special factors that helped it succeed. “The student population is distinctive in New Orleans,” Harris said. “It was a very low-performing district beforehand, before the reforms were put in place. Very high poverty rates. Maybe this is a reform that is going to be more likely to work in that situation.”
Process
“It was an undemocratic process by any account,” Harris said. It didn’t help that such a large population of the city had evacuated and nobody knew who would return.
As schools shuttered after Katrina hit, thousands of teachers were laid off, which hurt New Orleans’ black middle class, Harris said. “It deepened existing racial wounds.”
Inequality
Opponents claim that improving academics mask a growing gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. But, “Disadvantaged groups benefited as much as advantaged groups,” Harris said in regards to test scores. A gap may still exist, but Harris insists the reforms aren’t causing it to widen.
Harris made an interesting note about how parents choose schools. “When we look at how parents choose schools, it looks like lower-income families are less likely to focus on academics when they make school choices,” Harris said.
Discipline
Opponents claim that charter schools resemble prisons and are expelling students at higher rates. Charters often use harsh discipline, including no-excuses policies.
But the numbers don’t show a rise in expulsions and suspensions. In fact, the portion of students in disciplinary incidents has fallen steadily since Katrina. Prior to the reforms, it had been rising. Now, less than 15 percent of students are suspended or expelled in a given school year.
“Schools are stricter, and I think [schools] would say they’re stricter,” Harris said. “It looks like one of the outcomes of that is just to end up with fewer incidents. There are fewer things to punish.”
Data Manipulation
Critics respond to the mounting evidence that the reforms are succeeding by claiming that it’s difficult to draw any firm conclusions from the evidence. “Just not enough evidence to tell at this point,” Harris said. There is no evidence to show data have been manipulated, but there’s also little evidence to prove they haven’t been.
“We looked at missing data patterns to see whether maybe they were trying to have lower performing students not take the test,” he said. “But we don’t see any evidence that that was happening.”
Harris added that he’s trying to obtain data to examine whether schools are mislabelling some students as out-of-state transfers so that the school’s graduation rate looks higher.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
