As we all know, New Orleans has been presented as a national model of school reform: eliminate public schools, open lots of charters staffed by inexperienced young teachers, watch for miraculous results.
But now a major promoter of the all-charter model–the Cowen Institute at Tulane University– has released a brutally frank report saying that things are not really working as hyped.
Kudos to the researchers at Cowen for their candor.
66% of the New Orleans charters are rated D or F, so parents don’t really have enough good choices, the report admits. It seems that the all-charter model does not produce the transformation advertised by Kopp, Rhee, White, Jindal, Duncan, ALEC, et al,
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
Please watch….only 3.5 minutes..consider posting. Cornel West on the shameless silence of the progressives:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4322638&updatedclip
Wow!
Thanks Linda, Cornel West is on the money.
Obamas, Duncan, and Oprah are setting the agenda for the education of the black community, so ultimately, they will be responsible for the effects of reform/profitization/privitization.
I hope it works out, but to me it looks like 50 years of progress is about to be wiped out in short order.
If you didn’t notice, go back and watch Newt’s face at the end. Looks like he was trying to find a way to slip out. Ha!
It began with the Bradley Foundation and its purchase of Cory Booker to make inroads on the minority community. The Bradley Foundation is a far right outfit dedicated to destroying public education.
The article doesn’t say charters don’t work, it says that parent choice can be problematic. Give it a little time and the Sylvester McMonkey McBeans will come up with a clever solution — what about a state-funded company that evaluates the different charters and disseminates information to the parents? Oo! I’ll bet the likes of Broad, Gates, and the Waltons probably have LOTS of suggestions about how to go about running such an organization! I’ll bet they’d be willing to donate substantial amounts of money if the otherwise state-funded organization that evaluates charters would take on their own people and methods of charter evaluation! This is gonna be GREAT!
We already have such an organization – it’s BESE, the state board of elementary and secondary education. They have already been funded ( in their campaigns) by the likes of Bloomberg, Walton Family and the others. Three were appointed by Gov. Jindal. BESE pretends to have NACSA evaluate and recommend charters and the public actually pays them but BESE decides in many cases to accept those charters NACSA cans and reject some that NACSA recommends. Nothing left out in Louisiana when it comes to reform.
Some of my favorite quotes from the report… “When choice works, and parents indeed have the opportunity to send their kids to a good school, it’s a great concept. But when the choices of great schools are limited, especially in a landscape where 66 percent of schools received either a “D” or an “F” as their latest state-calculated school performance score, it can be very stressful for parents to take on the responsibility of choice, Zimmerman said.”
And the best of all quotes, “Based on the focus group discussions, we conclude that, due to limited seats at high quality schools and a complicated application process, school choice in New Orleans currently does an inadequate job providing all parents with access to the best schools for their children.”
Doesn’t sound like the claims of the reformers such as Louisiana State Superintendent John White and the Governor, Bobby Jindal, are supported even by their biggest supporters!
As was correctly pointed out to me by a friend, the first of my quotes above is actually from the article in The Advocate, and does not appear in the report. As he pointed out to me, Cowen does not really want to admit to the actual numbers describing their so-called “miracle.” The second is from the report. Sorry for any confusion it may have caused.
Even President Cowen’s steadfast dedication to charters didn’t corrupt the new management team at his Institute.
Even these new revelations are dependent upon data that is not revealed by LDOE. It becomes more important with every passing day that serious longitudinal studies be done, by unbiased researchers, to determine the real dropout/graduation rates and to insure that ALL students are tested. The last data available showed 16.67 percent of RSDNO students’ tests were unreported.
Recent outstanding analyses, featured on LPB, reveals the grades reported are skewed and unreliable. Even these analyses don’t account for the missing test units.
Infuriating that Cowen Institute has persisted in lying about the RSD and reform for so long. I posted this comment to the article.
Mr. Ayers, why did you so adamantly support the RSD and reform in your retort to comments I and others made at the recent education forum held in Hammond? You seemed offended by suggestions that the RSD was still a failure and repeated the same old same old spin and misrepresented statistics being sold to the public and the media by Jindal and White. I find it difficult to applaud the Institute for this sudden revelation when you and they have been handed valid research and facts for so long and you refused to report or consider it. It is truly infuriating that only two weeks ago you issued quite a different picture to the press and the public. I challenge you to explain honestly your change of heart and ask how you are going to compensate for the damage done to parents, students and educators of this state as a result of the Institute’s presumed reputation and misrepresentation of the reality of reforms in New Orleans and nationwide. Much more will be needed to earn the trust you have lost.