Lance Hill of the Southern Institute of Education and Research reflects on the evolution of charter schools in New Orleans.
Charter schools that perform better by recruiting and retaining better students don’t exist in a vacuum: skimming the best and most profitable students affects other schools, though it is hard to detect in systems with few charters. The systemic effects are easier to see in a “closed system” as we have in New Orleans in which 80% of students attend charters. Every high-performing charter creates a chronically low-performing school somewhere in the system. The students that charters reject, who are high-needs and high-cost, become concentrated in a separate set of schools. These “dumping schools” concentrate students with enormous skill deficits and disruptive behaviors, making it impossible for educators to teach and also creating an intractable non-compliant student subculture. Privatization creates good schools by creating even worse schools.
The evidence of this “rob peter to pay paul” phenomenon is not difficult to find. As charter schools increased in relative performance the first few years in New Orleans, the remaining state-run public schools were locked into chronic failure. For four years in a row, the direct-run state schools posted an average 80% failure rate on the 8th grade math LEAP progression test. This, despite the fact that the state had doubled the expenditure per pupil for a period of time and all these schools were directly run by Supt. Paul Vallas who selected the “world class” school administrators, contracted to staff the schools with the “best and brightest” teachers (TFA), and controlled the curriculum and hours of instruction. It was clear that the every year charters would skim the best students from the remaining schools and dump the low-performing students forced on them by the lottery.
In 2007, the highest ranking official in the state takeover of New Orleans schools said in a meeting that I attended that some charters were systematically dumping challenging and low-performing students into the remaining public system. Six years after the takeover, only 6,000 of the total 42,000 students remain in non-charter dumping schools: 100% of those students are in state-run schools that the state graded as “D” or F” in 2011. It is a wonder that New Orleanians can’t figure out why we have the highest per-capita murder rate in the nation, and school-age teens are the principal perpetrators of the most reckless of the violence.
Creating excellent schools is not the same as creating excellent school systems. The free-market has one goal: profit. It did not come into existence to create innovative and equitable public services. The New Orleans Model ensures that successful schools are created at the expense of the system as a whole; one student advances at the expense of another. If other school systems opt for the New Orleans Model, they need to do so knowing that the result will be a separate and unequal system of “college prep” and “prison prep” schools.
Lance Hill, Ph.D.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul….yeah pay Paul Vallas.
We are stuck with him here in CT. Everyplace he has been is now chaos….Chicago, Philly, New Orleans. He once referred to Haiti as “disaster as opportunity”. We know, we know……everywhere you have been becomes a disaster.
Can someone please explain how you get a good reputation for reform with this track record?
“There’s a real opportunity here, I can taste it. That is why I’ve flown [to Haiti] so many times.” Meet Paul Vallas. The 58-year-old Vallas is the former CEO of the Chicago and Philadelphia public school systems and was hired in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as superintendent of the Recovery School District of Louisiana that oversaw the transformation of the New Orleans school system.
Vallas’ legacy in these cities of privatizing schools, reducing public accountability and undermining unions made him a shoo-in to take charge of the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) education initiative in Haiti.
http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/08/shock-doctrine-schooling
Vallas’ education and early career was spent as an accountant, and Mayor Daley picked him as his first CEO for that reason. Unfortunately.
Charters cherry pick students based on test scores in Chicago. Chicago Tech Academy hounded us with phone calls, saying my child had been accepted. She is a high scorer on the ISATs. Just one problem; we hadn’t applied to that school. I asked the fellow calling me if he recruited for Chicago Tech full time. He told me that he had a full-time job in CPS HR department, and helped with recruiting at the charter part-time.
Interesting.
So you don’t think they were calling the ELL and spec. Ed. kids?
Now they are resorting to telemarketing calls and the taxpayers pay this person’s salary to stalk certain families/students?
And teacher salaries are the problem with school budgets, right!
Sounds just like the calls one gets, Congratulations, you’ve just one a cruise trip to….as the ships horn blares in the background. What a joke!
“There’s a dead skunk in the middle of the road stinkin to high heaven”* in this overheated summer and it’s called privatized charter schools.
*Loudon Wainwright 3rd-and I apologize to skunks the world over for comparing them to privatized charter schools.