Andrea Gabor, experienced journalist and scholar, pulls apart the myth of the Néw Orleans “miracle.” What is remarkable is that her article appears in the New York Times, which has never investigated the exaggerated claims made by corporate reformers on behalf of eliminating public education.
The number of students in the schools of that city has dropped dramatically since Hurricane Katrina, making pre- and post- comparisons unreliable. Large numbers of students are not in school at all.
The “success” story is a myth but a very powerful one. Urban districts across the nation yearn to copy the New Orleans model: wipe out public schools; replace them with privately managed charters; fire all the teachers; hire inexperienced teachers and a few of the veterans; fund generously.
Gabor shows that other states and districts must inform themselves before proceeding.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A wonderful contrast to the hype about a miracle in New Orleans.
I apppreciated the expose of “research” contrived to show that everything was coming up roses and daffodils. Her scholarship added to journalistic skill makes all the difference.
I really like her last line: “Privatization may improve outcomes for some students, but it has hurt the most disadvantaged pupils.” It sums up the problem quite well and this is why it makes it difficult to engage with the extreme.
And in general it’s easier to advantage the advantaged than support the disadvantaged or alleviate poverty.
And in general, it is far cheaper to educate the advantaged than support the disadvantaged, which means more profit to justify higher salaries for the CEOs of those schools.
The success to Reformers is very real and not a myth. To them, the plan is working. Students who are disabled, poor, or with learning challenges need not apply. If you do get in, use the back door and don’t share drinking fountains with the kids doing well on state tests, please.
Yes, that is why I find the ones who brag about their scores while getting rid of large percentages of at-risk children — yes CHILDREN age 5 and 6 by suspending them over and over again until their parents (and the kids themselves) understand how much they are not wanted — to be reprehensible. And when I see posters like Tim and others who pretend to care about the kids in failing schools supporting this kind of reprehensible actions, I understand that they really don’t care one bit about the many, many, many kids — primarily the poor ones living in poverty — who don’t fit. They are left to rot because of those kind of liars and the people who support them. A little truth and honesty would go a long way, but instead those charter schools pretend to be something they are not.
When I hear Tim and the leader of the charter schools he loves saying “we can’t educate the majority of the kids in those failing schools because we have given up on them but we want to help the much smaller number of kids in those schools who behave well and who have parents who will do all that we ask them to do” then I will respect them. I am shocked that they don’t realize how much they hurt the MOST VULNERABLE kids when they promote those lies. I can’t figure out if they are truly that ignorant, or just find pretending to believe the lies to be far more lucrative.
Reformers are not that ignorant. They know exactly what they are doing promoting a selective, master race philosophy where kids with disabilities or challenges are considered expendable and less worthy. We had our own disgusting personal experience with that mindset in a “religious” school. It was eye opening and made me much wiser, if not a tad less naïve about mankind. Some people are just plain sociopaths and evil.
According to Louisiana’s Compulsory Education Laws, who is responsible to report children who are not in school?
Children in Louisiana at least 6 years old and not yet 18 years old (unless already graduated from high school) must attend school.
Parents of children between Kindergarten and 8th grade can be fined for having a habitually absent or tardy student, but not more than $50 for a first offense or not less than 25 hours of community service. Tardy means reporting late to class or leaving school early without an excuse.
Any student who’s habitually absent from or tardy to school is reported to the family or juvenile court of the local parish or city.
http://statelaws.findlaw.com/louisiana-law/louisiana-compulsory-education-laws.html
Isn’t the school responsible to report habitually absent or tardy students to the family or juvenile court of the local parish or city or are the private sector corporate Charters exempt from those laws too?
The transparent, non-profit, democratic public schools had a system in place to enforce this law and the elected school boards made sure the public school administrators they hired were doing what they were supposed to do.
But it’s obvious to me that the opaque corporate schools—-run by mangers and CEOs with no democratically elected school boards to oversee them—-that focus on profit above all else are not doing this because it would cost money and also bring down test scores if these children were in class during testing.
There is this little issue of coding students as “leaving the state or country” so then no one is actually looking for them. Dr. Charles Hatfield of Research on Reforms and Jason France of the Crazy Crawfish Blog have both written about the issue of incorrect exit codes for the students who are not in school. I’m sure this is partially what has lead to New Orleans having 26K young people who are not in school and who are not employed.
I wonder if the U.S. Census has the details of the population of New Orleans by age. If so, then maybe we could match children of school age with the actual number who are in school there and blow up this coding fraud.
A long-needed response to the New Orleans charter school propaganda. The fact of the matter is that the entire charter school modus operandi is to get rid of poor, low-performing students to improve statistics. That is unsustainable. If the school boards would take it upon themselves to equitably assign students among charter schools, any purported performance advantage would likely disappear, and public could then ask themselves why their tax dollars should be spent on providing profits to private entities rather than education to their citizens.
Unfortunately, Washington DC is lockstep on the push for all-charter systems. I don’t think you could break this consensus up with a crowbar. This is from 2012:
“New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu is in Washington, D.C., this week for a series of meetings with high-profile political figures, including Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British Prime Minister David Cameron, who was in the country for talks on Afghanistan, Syria and other issues. The mayor arrived Wednesday and went directly to the State Department, where he had lunch with Biden, Clinton and Cameron, who was expected to talk with Landrieu about reforms in the city’s public school system since Hurricane Katrina.”
Cameron was there to get ideas on how to privatize UK schools.
President Obama is visiting New Orleans next week. If past performance of the Obama Administration is any indication, I imagine it will be a full-bore, pro-privatization campaign stop.
The public found out yesterday that the decision to privatize all of the public schools in both Youngstown and Lorain, Ohio has already been made:
https://www.toledoblade.com/MarilouJohanek/2015/08/22/Governor-Kasich-s-education-agenda-unmasked.html
There’s an article in the “Houston Chronicle” today that discusses the impact of Katrina on Houston. There were more than 250,000 evacuees, and it is estimated that more than half of them have remained in Texas, mostly in the Houston area. In fact, Oprah donated an entire neighborhood to homes to Katrina survivors in Houston. Many of the former New Orleans residents never returned, and there are other evacuees that remained in Atlanta and other cities as well. Many of the poor residents from New Orleans never returned, and many of the new developments in New Orleans are more upscale. It is clear the population has changed a great deal.
I think everyone would agree that what happened in New Orleans was extraordinary.
Which is why people who claim to rely on “science” shouldn’t be taking that model and plunking it down in Youngstown OH and Detroit MI and Chicago IL and everywhere else they can possibly gain a foothold.
This isn’t “science”. It’s pure ideology. Otherwise they would never use such an extreme situation as a model for the rest of the US. That’s nuts. It doesn’t make any sense.
There are no miracles when they are doing the same old testing crap. As Karran Harper Royal from New Orleans stated about my book “As I read this book, I thought so much of the McDonough #15 Creative Arts School my son attended in the 1990’s. This school and its concept no longer exist; however, if New Orleans wants real reform, they will revisit that school as well as utilize the concepts in this book instead of forcing test-driven reform……..”
Karran is a blessing to those who support real reform in New Orleans understanding how important the arts are in the development of the whole child, not just the blind regurgitation of facts.
Thanks Cap Lee. I’m still longing for that school. Maybe in the next 10 years and I might possibly have a grandchild or two by then, that new McDonogh #15 will be a part of the real reform wave of the future.
The Nation magazine’s last issue contains a great deal of the publication to this and related issues.
A point by point rebuttal for anyone interested. Lots of misinformation and ignored facts in this opinion piece. http://peterccook.com/2015/08/23/gabor-nyt-attack/
More at http://educationpost.org/louisiana-superintendent-john-white-responds-to-new-york-times-op-ed/
It’s sad to see the contortions and distortions that anti-reformers have to go through to avoid acknowledging any success in NOLA.
It’s sad the the people who purport to be “reforming” education because of the children trapped in failing schools can’t be honest. Andrea Gabor did NOT say that no child did better. She said that there were many, many disadvantaged children left behind and the “reformers” are desperate to manipulate the data to not acknowledge that. Why? If you are so very desperate to hide data and pretend you are doing something you are not, then obviously you aren’t in the reform “business” to help the children trapped in failing schools, you are in the reform business to help SOME of the children trapped in failing schools, and then pretend the most at-risk and vulnerable children don’t exist or tut tut because the people who really care about those kids are not matching your results in educating them. And many reformers are doing that because they are thinking only of themselves and how good it makes them look, not because they care about kids. Because those kids are expendable, John, if they don’t help your school look good anymore. It’s what’s wrong with so many (not all, but so many) reformers. The fact that the other people in the charter movement won’t acknowledge the dishonesty (and even defend it as you do here, John) makes the problem worse and makes parents like me not trust a word that comes out of your mouth.
HONESTY, John. This op ed acknowledged the successes, but also showed that they were not as the reformers pretend they are.
It’s just like the NYC reformers who declare “success” with their charter schools where so many of the at-risk children disappear. If you are going to pretend you are doing something you are not, you are doing great harm for the children who you pretend are invisible. It’s why the recent IBO report mysteriously only looked at “bundled” attrition rate of large cohorts of both high and low performing charters when they easily could have included the individual school attrition rate. Why? Is it because honesty would not have fit the narrative of “we can educate every child”?
ALL that Andrea Gabor did in this op ed was ask for honesty and show how the cherry picked manipulated “data” (only available to pro-charter folks) was misleading. If YOU really cared about ALL students instead of caring more about advancing the agenda of the people who run charter schools, you would ALSO be asking for such honesty, John. It’s very telling that you and the links you cite don’t do that!
I will acknowledge success in NOLA because I am sure some students benefitted. I will ALSO acknowledge failure in NOLA because many other kids were left to rot and the reformers like you seem to be desperate to pretend they don’t exist because they don’t “fit” your narrative. Posting here, John, and attacking someone asking for more data that might or might not show what happened to them all speaks volumes about how little you actually care. Why?
Sorry, but her conspiracy theories about disappearing students are just that. Anything but journalism. The data shows kids are doing better, including special education students.
How can you even defend someone who says that it’s nobody’s responsibility to keep track of kids in the school system. Ludicrous.
I’m sorry – you seem to know a lot about it. Who does keep track of the students who disappear from the school system?
You must not have read the articles at the links I sent. She implies that a network of charter schools can’t keep track of students because it’s nobody’s job to do that. The piece I sent clearly says that its the District’s responsibility, just like it would be anywhere else. Facts don’t seem to matter to her.
There is a lot of trickery in the school system regarding vanishing kids. Simply changing the name of the school from public to charter accomplishes nothing. We are still under the same test based system that has failed. The Collins amendment to ESEA offers a patial solution taking kids away from the testing fiasco. However, no one seems to know about it or talk about it. Or do we want to go back to this http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2015/08/public-education-change-or-perish.html
caplee68,
So what you’re saying is that NOLA must be a failure because they use a “test based system that has failed”.
That’s your “reason”?
How about we look at data and draw conclusions instead of vice versa? In that case, we say NOLA data is impressive, so if what they’re doing is “test based”, then it’s working.
The reality is the “test” is not achievement and indicates little. What I am saying is until we assess in a manner that is real rather than artificial, no one knows what is effective.
One is example, who discovered America? We often answer Columbus because that is what we are told. When asking the question and turning kids loose, they will discover so many other explorers that entered through the west coast that there may be no correct answer. But they learn and the process is what is important. The test basically states who can kiss ass the most
John you didn’t really answer my question. Are you saying that the District did a great job in tracking all the disappearing students? And that compared to other urban areas, New Orleans school system does just as good of a job in tracking where all the disappearing students go?
I don’t think there is a conspiracy about missing children. The LDOE did a review of exit codes and found that 100% of the codes they checked were incorrect. I have seen with my very own eyes a school that pushed out a child, code that child as having left the state. Dr. Charles Hatfied of Research on Reforms also addresses the exit code issue as does Crazy Crawfish.
Yes, people leaving for out of state were not documented as they should be. This happens in pretty much every school district in the country.
I also know of an RSD charter school parent who simply stopped sending her special needs child to school, he’s now adult age. No one ever made her put him back in school. John, you don’t have to believe it, but it’s happening. When schools close, who’s job is it to make sure every child from 2009 to 2014 re-enrolled in another school? Unfortunately, I know of several special education students who have dropped out during this period. Some after many school changes or school closures. I’m sure they contribute to the 26K 16-24 year old who are not in school or working. This is real. It must be because Tulane did a study and well it’s Tulane so we have to believe it, right? Or should we believe the Tulane study about the differences within the differences, but not this one about the “opportunity youth?”
I don’t want to minimize this, but “several students”, doesn’t affect the numbers. This vague notion of missing students is just an attempt at rationalizing away the results.
John,
Without total transparency for all the data, there is no way to validate any claims made by the Recovery School District in New Orleans.
1. The New Orleans Public schools served about 65,000 students pre-Katrina.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Public_Schools
2. There were 11,000 children still in the public schools and 40,000 were reported attending the Recovery School District in 2011-12.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_School_District#Demographics
3. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that there were a total of 24 schools in the Recovery School District in the 2013-2014 school year with a total of 6,500 students.
http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?Search=2&ID2=2200054
The Census reports that 14.9% of the population of New Orleans in 2014 were children ages six to seventeen. The population of the city was 384,320 x 14.9% and that equals 57,264 school age children.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/22/2255000.html
With the Recovery School District reporting attendance of only 6,500 and the few remaining public schools with 11,000, where did the other 39,764 school age children go?
“Yes, people leaving for out of state were not documented as they should be. This happens in pretty much every school district in the country.”
No it doesn’t. Some kids may fall through the cracks everywhere, but pretending there is no difference between 5% of them disappearing and 20% or 40% or 50% of them disappearing is ridiculous.
If you actually cared about real reform, John, you’d say “Yes, we need to find out where all those missing students are and whether it’s true, as it appears, that huge numbers of them are disappearing!”
What no person who really cared about reform would ever say is “hey, everyone loses a kid or two so no need to look further”.
Shame on you, John.
You may have read the recent preposterous editorial in the Chicago Tribune expressing a fervent prayer for “a Katrina” in Chicago to wash all the “rot” away and usher in a glorious new day of a fully “free enterprise school system.” My response is a collation of some of the many articles that rebut the myth of the New Orleans miracle. The last thing we need in Chicago is more charters.
http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-public-fools/2015/08/no-were-not-done-with-kristen-mcquearys-katrina-essay-yet/
Julie, you say “They were replaced by a largely TFA, non-local, white majority teaching staff administered by white “experts” from out of town.”, but John White and Peter Cook show that this simply isn’t true. I’m generally inclined to accept opinion backed with data over opinion without any, but do you say their data is wrong, or do you think your statement is consistent with the data? Are principals and teachers majority white or majority black?
John, are YOU saying that most of the teachers who were replaced by white teachers in New Orleans were not African-American? I just want to clarify this because it is either true or it isn’t.
No, I’m saying that the majority of teachers in NOLA are black, as are the majority of principals.
John, so what you are saying is that this op ed writer wrote the truth when she said that many African-American teachers were replaced by white teachers, but because that still left a majority of African-American teachers, you think replacing 25% of them or 40% with white teachers is okay? If I am misunderstanding your point, please let me know. Are you saying as long as there are still more than 50% African-American teachers, the fact that a large number of them were replaced by white ones shouldn’t be mentioned?
By the way, I don’t necessarily think that the race of the teachers is relevant to whether the schools are succeeding or not. But if I were an African-American teacher fired because students weren’t doing well, and I saw a lot of white teachers coming in to schools that suddenly had huge amounts of money that I would have loved to have back when I was trying to teach an even more disadvantaged population, I would feel a bit as if the message was “schools with more white teachers get far more resources to teach”. It would be pretty sad if the only way that a high poverty struggling school could get an infusion of money to improve the school (along with nice new facilities) is if there are enough white teachers in it.
NYC Parent,
Julie, the person to whom I addressed my response, specifically said “They were replaced by a largely TFA, non-local, white majority teaching staff administered by white “experts” from out of town.”. That is apparently a complete falsehood. That’s what I was pointing out. She says white majority presently, data says black majority presently.
Even Doug Harris of the Ed Research Alliance notes that the majority of teachers in New Orleans post-Katrina are not black. Harris has 49% in 2013-14 and 71% pre-Katrina. (See pg. 3)
Click to access ERA-Policy-Brief-Changes-in-the-New-Orleans-Teacher-Workforce.pdf
If one were to consider percentages of certified teachers, that number would likely drop.
Yes, he has black as the plurality, but not majority. In either case, the OP was incorrect in referring to the “white majority teaching staff”.
For what it’s worth, my reading of the OP’s statement is as follows.
First, the OP wrote that “7,000 teachers and staff, mainly black New Orleanians, were fired.” Second, the OP wrote that “[t]hey were replaced by a largely TFA, non-local, white majority teaching staff.”
I read this to say that the most of the teachers who replaced the fired teachers were white. I don’t think it says that most of the teachers in New Orleans public schools are white.
John, how hard is it for you to answer a straight question? If you were not so determined to mislead readers, you would just answer honestly.
Were many African-American teachers replaced by white teachers? Was it more than 20%? 30% 40%
Here is a little math lesson. If you start out with 10,000 African American teachers and 5,500 lose their jobs, that is a “majority” of teachers losing their job. If you then rehire only 4,000 white teachers and have the remaining 4,500 African American teachers left, you can still claim they are “the majority”. But you have conceded that larger point that so many African-American teachers were replaced with white ones. Is that what you are doing? Conceding that many of those teachers were replaced by white teachers but as long as they are still barely a majority you don’t care. And will attack any person who dares to point this out?
I am STILL waiting for you to answer this question. Is it true that the teaching force in the new charter schools lost many African-American teachers and gained many white ones? Yes or no.
NYC Public School Parent,
You seem to like to argue for argument’s sake. I made a statement about what Julie said. You implied I said something completely different and now you’re arguing about it. I don’t have time for that.
Yes, there is a lower percentage of black educators now than before. I didn’t make any comment about that, so you’re arguing with nobody.
Julie said there was a “majority white” teaching force. I said that wasn’t true. That’s all.
Thank you for acknowledging that there is a lower (in fact a MUCH lower) percentage of African-American educators than before.
Are you really saying that it was vitally important for you to clarify that whites don’t make up 51% of the teaching force, they “only” make up 47 or 49%? Especially when the larger point is that the MAJORITY of teachers who lost their job were African-American and the MAJORITY of teachers who were hired to replace them were white.
Read that again: The MAJORITY of teachers who lost their jobs were African-American (according to that report cited above) and the MAJORITY of the teachers who were hired to replace them were white.
I don’t care if you defend that John, by saying that the “best” teaching candidates just happened to be white or the white teachers worked for cheap or some other reason you can come up with. But please don’t pretend that it is not the case by taking a statement out of context and pretending that the larger point is not absolutely true.
You either approve of this replacement of teachers or think it may be questionable. But it happened and your attempts to pretend it didn’t makes me question you. So, do you think it was GOOD that all those teachers were replaced, John?
NOTICE: To be clear to those who don’t like the facts that some of us choose to write about, we are not “anti” reform, we are working towards “real’ education reform. It doesn’t help our children to call massive manipulations of data real reform. Now certainly many people are working hard in many schools just as they were before the takeover offer schools. But at the end of the day, when it came to the takeover, their progress did not matter, so why should it matter when it comes time to give a 10 grade. 10 years ago, on Nov. 30th legislation was passed to place 107 schools into the recovery school district because the redefined standard for failing was he state average at the time. That state average was an 87.4 on the school performance scale created by the Department of Education in our state. It’s only fair to look t how many of those 107 schools score above the current state average with is 89.2 and the answer is 4 schools. Only four schools after 10 years of having what charter school advocates say they need. That is unacceptable for a reform. It does not discount any child’s hard work nor any teacher or administrators’ hard work. They simply don’t meet the same standard as Pre Katrina teachers were held to. As the charter advocates denigrate all of what as the OPSB system, they did not stop to praise any part of that system. Why now must we all be held to following the LDOE’s talking points of progress and work to be done?
It’s a shame that the Andrea Gabor was attacked or swarmed that way but I guess all’s fair in love and edReform.
Well said edutalknola. hmmmm picture looks familiar 🙂 Keep the faith and your book is in the mail.
Andrea Gabor puts wisdom to the matter with: “For outsiders, the biggest lesson of New Orleans is this: It is wiser to invest in improving existing education systems than to start from scratch. Privatization may improve outcomes for some students, but it has hurt the most disadvantaged pupils.”
This also means neither disadvantaged pupils nor advantaged pupils is neither a limiting factor nor a requisite factor for any school district (or school or classroom or even pupil) to start a never-ending journey of continual improvement.
The barrier to starting a never-ending journey of continual improvement is but a way of thinking, which is the usual status quo, win-lose, bell curve, competition-based, oppressor-oppressed, “the way the real world works” way of thinking. It should not and, in fact, does not have to take lessons from New Orleans to acquire this wisdom. The legacy of W. Edwards Deming and similar others embodies the wisdom and shows it works.
http://peterccook.com/2015/08/23/gabor-nyt-attack/
Here is a preliminary response to some who have attacked the research behind my NYT OpEd. First a little background: I’ve spent months in New Orleans over the past several years researching New Orleans charter schools and published a lengthy piece in Newsweek in 2013. (I’m also working on a book.) However, much of the impetus for this piece came from what I heard and saw at a conference, The Urban Education Future?, held by the Educational Research Alliance at Tulane University this June.
First, the data that ERA just published, and that many education-reformers point to for their positive results, is based on numbers leading up to 2012, i.e. the period during which the worst excesses, including creaming, special-education abuses, high suspension and expulsion rates took place. More than one of the participants an ERA panel in June noted that it’s questionable whether the numbers would look as good as they do if it hadn’t been for those practices.
This was also the period before the common core, so the elementary and middle-school test results presented by ERA, as several experts at the conference noted, were based on Louisiana’s very low-level standards.
For years, the ed-reform establishment claimed there were no abuses—no creaming, no special-education abuses—in New Orleans. Now, they are saying: In 2012 we fixed all that, so it’s not fair to reference the problems. Except that we don’t yet have evidence of if/how the new safeguards are working.
What we do know is that there’s a major governance/oversight problem in New Orleans. In 2013, a report by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor found that the “LDOE no longer conducts on-site audits or reviews that help ensure the electronic data in its systems is accurate.” The audit also found significant discrepancies in the data on attendance, dropout-rates and graduation rates reported by the charters. http://www.lla.state.la.us/PublicReports.nsf/0B6B9CAE61DC9C2786257B6C006DB81E/$FILE/00032CA4.pdf
Also last spring, a Louisiana appeals court ruled that the State of Louisiana, which had given a trove of student data to CREDO, but withheld it from other researchers, had violated public-records laws. So much for transparency.
Click to access student_data_case_c_court_of_appeal_notice_judgment_and_disposition_2014.pdf
I had the opportunity to ask several experts at the ERA conference questions about governance/oversight problems in New Orleans and the kids who “slip between the cracks”. Among others, I asked these questions of Dana Peterson of the RSD as well as members of the panel on the “Role of Communities in Schools.” The exchanges were captured on the webcasts below.
To see the startling discussion about governance/oversight problems during the panel discussion of the “Role of Communities in Schools” go to the 1-hour-and-12-minute mark of the following webcast and listen for three or four minutes: http://educationresearchalliancenola.org/sessions/2015/6/19/role-of-communities-in-schools
Some highlights:
Deirdre Burel, executive director of the Orleans of Public Education Network: “There’s common agreement, we know for a fact that kids have slipped through the cracks because of the closures.”
When an audience member asks: “The RSD doesn’t know who’s in the system?”
And again later: “Who’s responsible for the whole?”
Burel answers: “There is no whole. That’s a governance conversation. There is no single entity responsible for all children.”
I asked a similar question during a panel on “Test-Based Accountability Effects of School Closure” on school closings, their impacts on high school students, and received the response below from Dana Peterson of the RSD and Whitney Ruble, the ERA researcher who was presenting her findings on school closures. Two points of note: First, Ruble’s/ERA results on the effects of school closures said nothing about the impacts on high school kids who are most at risk of dropping out. You had to look and listen very carefully to realize that all the data was about elementary and middle-school effects. However, Ruble acknowledged that “A lot of students disappear from the data.”
This at about the 1-hour-two-minute mark of the following webcast:
http://educationresearchalliancenola.org/sessions/2015/6/20/test-based-accountabilty-effects-of-school-closuremost.
Dana Peterson of the RSD, a few minutes later: “We’re more worried at the high school level than the elementary level. Its true some kids do leave and fall out of the system.” That’s why, he said, the RSD started hiring couselors specifically for high school kids two years ago to try to make sure they didn’t disappear from the system.
When I asked whether he knew how many kids fall between the cracks, Peterson acknowledged: “I don’t know the total number. I don’t.”
After the panel, I asked whether there was anyone at the RSD who could get me that data. He said there was and he promised to get me the information. He never responded to subsequent emails and phone calls.
Finally, some, including John White, have taken issue with my assertion that the mostly black teaching force was replaced by young idealistic (mostly white) educators. According to another ERA report, the number of black teachers in New Orleans dropped from 71 percent before the storm to 49 percent in 2013/2014. White teachers, by contrast, made up just a little over 20 percent of the teachers in NOLA before the storm and were close to 50 percent in 2013/14. See p. 3 of the following report: http://educationresearchalliancenola.org/files/publications/ERA-Policy-Brief-Changes-in-the-New-Orleans-Teacher-Workforce.pdf
I should note that I’ve visited over half-a-dozen charter schools in New Orleans. With two exceptions, I barely saw a single African-American face among any of the educators.
I’m sorry, I posted late last night and didn’t realize that you had responded to the blog. However, only 19% of children in New Orleans are proficient on state tests, not 63%. Passing in Louisiana is basic, which is a step below proficient which is called mastery in Louisiana.
It is explained in this article:
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2014/05/louisiana_state_test_scores_re.html
Jonathan Chait just wrote an article New York Magazine incorrectly stating that 62% (not 63%) of the school children in New Orleans are on grade level. They are not on grade level, they are mostly basic.
All this rhetoric is based on an artificial test which, as Dr. Angela Dye states, has children seeing themselves as objects rather than subjects. This isn’t only unethical, it is immoral. We should never, ever treat kids as commodities. And we should never use the test as an indicator of success or failure no matter what the stats indicate
Andrea Gabor made a major mistake in the article. She said, “Last year, 63 percent of children in local elementary and middle schools were proficient on state tests”. That is not true, only 19% of children in New Orleans were proficient.
In Louisiana proficient is called “mastery”. The level below proficient/mastery is called basic. Sixty-three percent of kids in New Orleans were basic or above, which is considered passing. The state of Louisiana won’t define passing as proficient/mastery or above until the year 2025.
It is all explained in this article: http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2014/05/louisiana_state_test_scores_re.html
I’m so glad you brought that up. I don’t think most people know that in Louisiana proficient and basic is not the same. All the focus on the percentage of students scoring basic and the use of the word proficient sends the wrong impression about “progress” in Louisiana.
The New Yorker just posted an article by Jonathan Chait stating that 62% (not 63%) of New Orleans children are on grade level. That is not true, only 19% are. Sixty-percent are scoring at basic which is considered passing in Louisiana until 2025, but is a level below proficient/mastery.
Here is the truth about test scores in Louisiana:
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2014/05/louisiana_state_test_scores_re.html