For a city as infatuated with its old-world charm as New Orleans, institutional change arrives slowly – if ever. Often, it takes a catalyst, sometimes a horrible one, to create the impetus for shifts and adaptations that appear in retrospect utterly transformative. The disastrous physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans had this catalyzing effect. For all the shocks and displacements that arose from that tragedy, its destabilizing effects also resulted in sweeping progress. The reforms to the city’s education system, which has risen like the phoenix out of the disaster, is the miracle that the left dares not acknowledge. For the nation’s entrenched public education unions, its implications are too terrible to contemplate.
The city of New Orleans did not embark on the most radical education reform experiment in generations out of a sense of altruism or adventure. In the wake of the devastation that followed the flooding of nearly 80 percent of the city, education reform was a project of necessity. After the floods, much of New Orleans’ educational infrastructure had been damaged beyond repair. The city’s tax base had fled. The Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) was reluctantly compelled to ask some 7,000 teachers and staff – many of them displaced themselves — to find new work. In November of 2005, with flood waters still lingering in disadvantaged parts of the city, the OPSB acquiesced to the surrender of four-fifths of the entire New Orleans public school system to the all-charter Recovery School District (RSD).
The loss of the city’s schools to a private firm in the aftermath of Katrina was not widely lamented. Prior to the storm, the city’s school system was among the worst in the nation. In 2005, only 56 percent of New Orleans students graduated high school, a rate 10 points below the national average. The majority of the students who did graduate performed below average when tested on fundamental curricula like reading and math. The city’s schools were not just underserving students; they were also hopelessly corrupt. In 2003, the city wrote checks to 4,000 people who didn’t deserve them and provided health benefits for 2,000 recipients who didn’t qualify. A 2004 FBI investigation yielded indictments for 11 people implicated in the criminal mismanagement of the city’s school system.
Nearly ten years after the storm, the reversal of fortunes for New Orleans’ students is becoming apparent – and it is remarkable.
By the start of the new school year in 2013, 76.5 percent of the city’s students were graduating on time – a figure on par with the national average. Graduation rates for the city’s black students were outperforming the national average by 16.5 percent. A 2012 study conducted by Tulane’s Cowen Institute revealed that ACT scores had improved by an average of 1.2 points, a rate of improvement that was faster than ACT scores on either the state or national level. In 2005, only one-quarter of New Orleans public school graduates qualified for a Taylor Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS) scholarship. By 2012, 39 percent of high school graduates were qualifying. Graduation and college entry rates had increased by 10 and 14 percent respectively.
Some have claimed that New Orleans became a different city after the storm, and to compare it to the city that existed before Katrina is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The socioeconomic makeup of the city differs too dramatically from pre-Katrina New Orleans, they say, to make an accurate assessment of the effects of the RSD reforms. A 2015 study conducted by Tulane University Economics Professor Douglas Harris, Director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, sought to address this concern. Harris first looked at only the performance of students who returned to New Orleans after the storm and then compared their performance to that of every student regardless of whether they were displaced. “Between 2005 and 2012, the performance gap between New Orleans and the comparison group closed and eventually reversed, indicating a positive effect of the reforms of about 0.4 standard deviations, enough to improve a typical student’s performance by 15 percentile points,” Harris observed.
What’s more, a culture of accountability has again returned to the school system. This year, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education shuttered Lagniappe Academies for failing to provide adequate services to special-education students and for claiming falsely that it provided services it hadn’t.
Few things are as controversial as acknowledging the empirically positive effects of choice-based education reforms. Influential civic leaders in New Orleans are quick to complain about the reforms, but their complaints rarely take into account their beneficial effects for students.
“The vast majority of public schools closed by RSD in the past five years were in poor and working class, African-American neighborhoods,” read a federal civil rights complaint submitted to the Department of Justice in 2014 by an alliance of community groups. “These schools employed teachers and administrators who have taught in our communities for decades — staff who hold community knowledge, understand the hardships that face our students, and pass down our shared values.” That complaint contended that, in much the same way post-Katrina neighborhoods are more racially segregated than they were before the storm, so are the schools.
“There’s no higher concentration anywhere in the country of education-related nonprofits, philanthropies, and startups,” wrote NPR’s Anya Kamenetz. The reporter noted that social-justice activists have ratcheted their rhetoric up as the positive effects of New Orleans’ reforms have grown harder to deny. The University of Georgia Education Professor Joyce King called the adaptations a “Slave-market-based reform.” For a school system in which the student body is 85 percent African-American, this hyperbole is nevertheless resonant.
Though these complaints are of dubious value, not all criticisms of the charter system are so easily dismissed. The charter schools are, in theory, compelled to admit all students that apply and hold lotteries for applicants after the system is over-enrolled. In practice, charter schools have been accused of selective admittances that appear to conspicuously weed out more disenfranchised students. Under Louisiana State Superintendent of Education John White, New Orleans has made it much harder for charter schools to manipulate their enrollments. “Now, some 90 percent of New Orleans students entering kindergarten and high school get one of their top three choices, students receive admission letters without any contact from schools and there’s a central hotline for families with enrollment challenges,” US News and World Report’s Thomas Toch reported.
Still, a concerted effort to frame the charter experiment as an unmitigated failure has taken shape. A Google search on the subject of post-Katrina education reforms yields a deluge of opinion pieces declaring the project a disgrace, a failure, and, of course, the resurrection of Jim Crow. It’s no coincidence that professional educators are the principle advocates of this narrative. Complaints that center on “the loss of union jobs” or reduced “percentages of teachers with regular certification” betray these critics’ true objections: the loss of the education establishment’s power and privilege.
The New Orleans experiment is not perfect, but it is an objective improvement over the condition that prevailed before the storm. The louder those who once derived their livelihoods from underserving American students scream the more these reforms are hurting. Make it hurt.
