This is a fascinating article about the New Orleans Recovery School District, that appeared in the International Business Times.
Which children were left behind? Who benefitted by the expansion of choice to cover the entire district? It describes the special education students who were pushed from school to school. The students who were suspended again and again for minor infractions. The high school graduation rate, still far behind the state rate.
Broader measures show a rejuvenated school system. ACT scores in the state-run district increased from 14.5 in 2007 to 16.4 in 2014, and far fewer students in the majority-black district attend schools deemed failing. The proportion of Orleans Parish high school graduates enrolling in college has grown more than 20 percent since 2004.[ed. note: a score of 16.4 is very low, too low for admission to four-year colleges.]
But parents of children like Jeremiah feel left out. Critics worry that many children, particularly those with behavioral needs, fell through the cracks. And newly available data from independent researchers, corroborated by former district employees, suggest that due to misreporting, official graduation rates may be overstated by several percentage points.
In relinquishing oversight to independent charter operators, former employees say, district authorities lost sight of at-risk students. Under stiff pressure to improve numbers or face closure, schools culled students and depressed dropout rates. And as families muddled through a complex and decentralized system, a sizable contingent of at-risk students may have left the system unrecorded.
“With an open system like that, it’s relatively easy to misreport information and fudge it,” says Clinton Baldwin, who coordinated the district’s student data from 2012 to 2014. “It was definitely something that was prevalent.”
Meanwhile, for the parents of the most difficult-to-teach students, the notion of school choice seemed to become a mirage.
“It’s not what you decide,” Osbey says. “It’s what they decide for you.”
The good news in the article is that the charter leaders are paying attention to the local critics and making changes.
The RSD, facing community pressure, has made substantial efforts to ensure students don’t get pushed out. A new enrollment system allows families to list their top eight picks. A lottery-like algorithm matches kids to schools so no one is excluded.
And a centralized expulsion system, designed in consultation with community groups, has curbed schools’ abilities to dump students for minor misbehavior, such as talking back to a teacher or violating dress codes. The state reports that expulsions dropped 39 percent last year.
“We listened to the community,” says Superintendent Dobard. “Parents have more opportunities now that the district is decentralized to make their voices and concerns heard.”
The efforts of people like Clinton Baldwin and Karran Harper Royal, the special education advocate, reflect a less-recognized current of reform that has characterized the post-Katrina recovery. Though outsiders largely defined the course of institutional reforms, native New Orleanians have made them more equitable.
“Many of the local critics of this system have led to dramatic changes,” says Stone, the head of the reform outfit New Schools for New Orleans.
That’s true in the charter community as well. “I’ve seen a big shift in the last five years,” says Gubitz, the principal at the K-8 Renew Cultural Arts Academy. “We are all listening more.”
Although there are powerful forces who want New Orleans to be a national model for urban districts–fire all the teachers, get rid of the unions, recruit Teach for America, replace public schools with privately managed charters–we should all look more deeply into the consequences of these changes in New Orleans before adopting it in other cities.
Reblogged this on Education Talk New Orleans and commented:
We will not sit quietly and let distortions of data lead the perception of what happened with public education in the last 10 years as a road to success. The idea that we are on a continuum and we just need to stay the course is insane. Continue excluding the most challenging children? I don’t think so. There are real costs to “disruptive innovation” in public education. Those costs are borne out in the lives of the people. Thankfully there are a few principled journalists who are telling a more full story of the children left behind. It is my hope that at the Katrina 20 year mark, we will see that there has been a course correction with these wrong headed “reforms” and the focus will be on how we have helped rebuild community in New Orleans. Our children and our communities can’t take another 10 years of disconnectedness caused by the takeover of public education in New Orleans. There is something particularly insidious about using flawed data to promote the RSD type reforms as something for other cities to replicate. How do you promote replicating something that you now admit is only “improvement” and needs much more work? We must shift this narrative of “improvement” to evidence of these changes in public education leading to real differences in uplifting children inside of their communities. The very idea that we have to transport children outside of their communities to take a chance of maybe getting a school that will survive long enough to improve their academic performance is not in the best interest of children or our city as a whole.
@thedailybeast: Ten years after Katrina, miraculously, kids in New Orleans are testing better than before. Here’s how: http://t.co/9nRt4T9QEk
Crazytown is proclaiming the destruction of New Orleans – a success?
People are not paying attention. New Orleans is different now. Many people were displaced – and now live somewhere else. Many African Americans left.
The schools are gone. You see profiteers in the malls selling products. You see older historic public schools gated and closed. There has been significant change.
You can say the corporations won.
You can say they succeeded in driving out the public school teachers.
But it is a significant stretch if not an outright lie to say that it has improved. Changed yes. Improved?
The tests are important to the rephormers – vital in fact – because they’re so easy to manipulate. If you drive all of the “bad” kids (i.e., poor test takers) out of your system you get to declare mission accomplished and look how much we support poor and minority kids, unlike those evil teachers unions who are only in it to protect the adults.
We can never win on test scores precisely because we insist on educating all kids.
This is very true. And it explains why, in New York City, the charter operators and all the politicians, pro-charter lobbies and “experts” underwritten by their hedge fund supporters are having conniption fits about opt out!
If you live by the test — making test prep the focus of all learning, trumpeting results while ridding yourself of low-scorers, and spending megadollars to market to families about how terrific your students do on the state tests — you will also die by the test. All those parents who DON’T want a charter school that has made it clear that your child is only as good as his test score, will avoid them like the plague. Then what will they do?
We as teachers were taught to believe in quality, unbiased, deep scholarly research. These people were taught that money is the bottom line.
My view; people who have never learned who they are as human beings, thus with an emptiness in their psyche seek to fill that emptiness with SYMBOLS of success, power, money, whatever but that void can NEVER be filled because those kinds of things can never fulfill that longing to fill that emptiness. No matter how much money, power etc is accrued it will never be enough and the search for more continues.
Sad for us but for them also.
For me, finding oneself – know thyself – is one of if not THE goal of true education. Our world is disintegrating in so many ways because those in power have never really been educated, never assimilated what humankind’s best minds have promoted: who are we as HUMAN beings, why are we here, where are we going, etc, the things for which true educators have always striven.
It is difficult for those who HAVE continually sought for enlightenment to understand that these depraved souls will never understand what “it is all about” until they join the JOURNEY to truth and light. That education,life is a journey, not a destination that one never ever truly reaches, but that that journey can be a joy making life really worthwhile. Plato, the unexamined life is not worth living. At least that statement is worth examining. Others say it much better than I but hope that my ruminations are not all bad.. ..
We are NOT allowed to ask about what happens to any children who do not remain in charter schools. All their “data” is expunged as irrelevant to whether the charter school has superior results. We must trust the “authorizers” to look after their interests, and since those very same “authorizers” have made it clear such unimportant and unwanted students should not be included in evaluating a school, we must all agree those children just don’t exist anymore. Anyone who questions the motives of the people telling us those children don’t matter needs to be shut down.
At least, that’s what many of the “reformers” who post on here keep telling me.
TAGO Gordon! You have succinctly described the difference between those who are truly human and those who have not a glimmer of humanity. Unfortunately, there seems to be many more of the later these days, and a glut of them in education reform.
Many are mean-spirited (how can you even say you like children if you are not a nice person?) and are totally flabbergasted when the rest of us don’t fall all over them in thanks for their leadership and intelligence. I for one will NEVER trust them because of their lack of basic humanity and will never agree with or accept their distorted vision of education.
Who are the ‘authorizers’?
When I look over the NYS authorizers site, I find that charters can be authorized by Buffalo Dist, NYC Chancellor’s office, Board of Regents, or SUNY. At the NYSEd site, all charters are listed with their authorizers and links. It would seem NYSEd has the responsibility for educating all the state’s students. Clearly they are linked up to the 4 authorizing bodies; presumably they have the info technology/ capability to track all students among the authorizing bodies.
I read in another post that pre-radical-reform (i.e., before the proliferation of charters)– in Bloomberg’s day, graduation rates could be inflated by ‘losing’ students transferring between districts, i.e., neither the discharging nor the receiving district took on the responsibility of whether the student showed up at the receiving district. Nevertheless, the Chancellor’s Office presumably had the resp to track the student. The implication: under Bloomberg the Chancellor would ignore the resp– ignoring those who drop out rather than showing up at the receiving district [as opposed to acknowledging them as drop-outs] increases the alleged graduation rate.
It would seem that post-NYC-proliferation- of-charters, things are similar in one sense– I think– can I assume that if a charter student changes schools, there is still discharge and receiving paperwork required? If so, there is still trackability.
BUT, significantly, the ‘tracker’ is no longer the NYC Chancellor’s Office. The NYC responsibility post-ed-reform has been diffused among several authorizing agencies. [Example: if you look at the NYSEd list of the 282 NYS charter schoolS, e.g., you can see that the various ‘Harlem Zone’ charters are authorized variously by NYC, SUNY, & NYSBoard of Regents]. This means the ultimate tracker of whether individual students graduate is… NYSEd.
205 of the 282 NYS authorized charters are located in NYC. Only 69 of those 205 are authorized by the NYC Chancellor’s Office; the rest are authorized by state agencies (SUNY or NYSEd Board of Regents).
Sorry for this long-winded post. It seems to me, graduation rates can only be verified by tracking the ed-history of students identified by census. Auditing the NYC school system was already difficult given the political proclivity for ‘disappearing’ dropouts whenever possible so as to inflate grad rates. Post-ed-reform, we have added 205 NYC schools to the mix, of whom only 69 need report data to NYC (the balance report to state authorizers)– which muddies the waters, & throws the auditing responsibility for NYC students onto the state.
IMHO, NYSEd possesses all the data they need to track every census-identified kid in the state to graduation. But kicking the responsibility for NYC kids’ ed up to the state slows the whole business down, & opens the audit process up to more levels of politicized bureaucracy… now we’re talking, manipulating the data for Cuomo & his supporters!
I’d like to think NYS is a tad more progressive than LA, where NOLA is not even sure how many kids are in the RSD, but doesn’t really give a crap– they provide the ed ‘opportunity’, but if folks don’t take advantage of what’s offered, they’re not counting them anyway… but NYS seems headed in the same direction.
The goal of the ‘reformers’ is to get as many new charter schools as possible and oversight is irrelevant! Because all that matters is that some kids are getting good educations — even if they happen to be upper middle class children whose parents are celebrating the fact that their charter school happily encourages all those struggling at-risk kids who don’t fit to leave!
When the state recently approved 50 more charter schools and the SUNY Charter Institute mentioned their inability to do real oversight without more resources, would you like to know the response of the state? “We fully expect the Charter Institute and SUNY to comply with the law and approve applications for high-performing charter schools, as it would be IRRESPONSIBLE not to,” a Cuomo administration official said in a statement.” By “high-performing”, of course, they mean high performing with the students they have, since no one cares one whit about the students who leave. And I love how it’s IRRESPONSIBLE to care about oversight! Tragic!
And the charter schools themselves? Well, HERE is what they think about “oversight”:
“While we are sympathetic to the need of charter authorizers, including SUNY, to have sufficient resources to accomplish their critical oversight role, nothing can or should delay new great public charter schools from opening,” Charter Center CEO James Merriman said in statement.
Delaying the opening of 50 new schools for a stupid reason like oversight? As the people who support and promote charter schools say themselves — what a truly idiotic reason! Oversight is something they give lip service to as long as no authorizer looks very closely at attrition and as long as it doesn’t stop any charter except the least politically connected charters that actually try to KEEP their at-risk kids from closing.
bethree, I am sure that it is not all that hard to track where the students who leave NYC charter schools go — especially when they are of elementary school age. Instead, those who believe attrition rates don’t matter go through a lot of trouble to figure out “average” attrition rates in schools (often including high schools with high drop out rates), to basically provide a reason why they don’t matter and are just something that happens everywhere.
If a charter school is showing unusually “successful” results, the obvious thing for any authorizer who actually cares about doing oversight is to look at their attrition rates and make sure that at-risk kids aren’t leaving and if they are leaving in large numbers, that it is because their parents moved away or because they transferred to a better school. If large numbers of at-risk kids are transferring from a high-performing charter school to a lower-performing public or charter school, then questions should be ask about why that is. Especially if the justification for the charter is that all the kids trapped in failing public schools need their education.
What’s sad is that instead of showing the least bit of curiosity, the authorizers basically say that attrition doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does — they will be convening a subcommittee to organize another subcommittee to talk about whether it does matter, and if it does, how best to organize a third committee to decide what to do about it. Because they really, really care.
Reblogged this on Lifelong Quest.
Dear Senator Appel and BESE Members, Last year I appealed to the honor of the Members of the Senate Education Committee. I explained that my husband, Hy McEnery, and I have a Christian Evangelistic ministry to highly impoverished and very At Risk inner city youth in New Orleans. I told them that young people are being regularly pushed/driven out of charter schools in New Orleans. I told them that these unfortunate kids, the ones who may not be able to produce high scores on the high stakes testing which is associated with COMMON CORE and it’s conduits, the system of privatized public schools now called charter schools, these kids mostly end up on the streets of New Orleans, out of school and out of luck. Many end up dead. We have attended many funerals for many kids who were driven out of charter schools. Veronica Brooks, Head of LA Charter Schools association, spoke after me and publically mocked and insulted me for daring to step out of the party line by telling the truth. Ms Brooks was wrong. Kids are regularly driven out of charter schools here. They do end up on the streets. Many do end up dead. When will the Senate Ed Committee believe what is right before their very own eyes? I have sent you many articles and website or blog addresses that prove these tragic facts. Now I am sending you a new article which says the same thing. When will you do your own research-unbiased research- on the destructive consequences of CCSSI and the 100% charter school district, which is the RSD? Does your conscience not burn within you because of these devastated, or even DEAD, youth. They are Louisiana citizens. They are YOUR responsibility. Before God Almighty, you are responsible for the well being of each child or teen who is