Julian Vasquez Heilig collected data on New Orleans and Louisiana and wondered what the hullaballoo was about. The state is one of the lowest-performing in the nation, by federal measures; and the charter schools have produced mediocre results.
Heilig’s policy brief was sponsored by the Network for Public Education. Since NPE supports public schools, it is hardly surprising that it looks with disfavor on a massive experiment in privatization. Every high-performing nation in the world has an equitable public school system. We should too.
The report examines NAEP scores, ACT scores, high school graduation rates, dropout rates, AP course taking rates, and other criteria.
A useful conclusion to a day of all-New Orleans, all-the-time.
You might want to refer to this policy brief when your legislator or Governor offers a proposal for an “achievement school district” or an “opportunity school district” modeled on New Orleans “Recovery School District.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Important to get this out there – if one was to look at the likes of Joel Klein’s tweet streams over the past week you’d truly think that NO was a miracle solution.
We can’t count on media, so it’s up to us to share.
NO school district ANYWHERE should be allowed to self report results. I would not believe one report that comes out of ANY state. They are all fabricated to fit the agenda. Need bad results to push an agenda…voile’ bad results. Need good results to push an agenda…voile’ good results. Independent studies done by unbiased trusted companies is the only way to go but sadly there aren’t many of them that can be trusted either. EVERYBODY has a price when it comes to corporate greed.
They don’t even need different results. The same results can be interpreted as good or bad depending on the propaganda needs.
Of course this is not true. But these words did come out of Duncan’s mouth: “I think the best thing to happen to the education system in New Orleans is Hurricane Katrina.”
Good for big $$$$$ and campaign contributions, of course! It’s all so sic.
Anyone on here care to comment on the the letters from NOLA parent in the NYT? (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/opinion/new-orleans-schools-after-katrina.html?mabReward=CTM&module=WelcomeBackModal&contentCollection=Opinion®ion=FixedCenter&action=click&src=recg&pgtype=article&_r=0)?
Anyone on here a NOLA parent?
I don’t really know what to believe…
Thanks in advance!
Well, I’m not from NOLA, so I can’t offer anything first hand, but two things jumped out at me with those letters. The first letter is from John White who heads education in LA – what do you expect him to say? I’m sure his numbers are, um, massaged. The second letter is from a newcomer to NOLA, so that person has no basis on which to say whether schools are better pre or post-Katrina. I’d say the NYT published those letters as an act of contrition for publishing the original piece.
And I would add, the issue with charter systems is not whether or not individual parents are happy with their children’s schools – I’m sure a lot are indeed happy. The issue is whether or not the charter system is working better or worse to educate all children, especially the most vulnerable and at-risk. Again, I don’t have a first-hand perspective, but based on Dr. Mercedes Schneider’s voluminous research, I’d say overall the answer to that question is worse.
Dienne that is exactly right. There were plenty of people who loved their segregated schools, too. And I’m sure some of those segregated schools even got good test results. But back when the Democrats weren’t doing the bidding of hedge fund billionaire “reformers”, there were leaders who understood the difference. Instead of drawing the erroneous conclusion from “data” that segregation obviously led to better schools!
Sadly, if you are a parent who prefers not to have the most troublesome at-risk kids in your school, and are thrilled your school doesn’t have to pay a penny to educate those expensive and (apparently) worthless children, you will be very happy with your school and happily write how much it is “improved” without those children in it. And I don’t even blame them – many parents prefer a school like that. But the reformers had a choice — they could acknowledge the missing children and try to figure out the best way to try to reach and educate them. Or they could simply pretend that those children never existed in the name of touting their “miraculous results” and pretending it is all because a charter operator was given a very large salary to fire teachers and hire cheap (and temporary) newbies to educate the students who “fit” their schools. (That is, who can learn via the one way the teacher had been taught to teach, which works fine for many and the remainder, of course, are encouraged to seek a school elsewhere.)
The reformers had the opportunity to “do the right thing” and place their own desire to advance their careers second to the desire to make sure a far too large cohort of children weren’t being left behind. All it would have taken is a little honesty and perhaps losing some of the donations from billionaires who wanted to attack the teachers union far more than they cared about the education of those at-risk kids who they were happy to pretend just didn’t exist.
I don’t know why I expected the reformers to do the right thing. I guess all it takes is a little money waved in your face to rationalize that as long as you are helping a few kids, the children harmed by those lies just don’t matter.
He talks about coming from TN and then refers to critics as outsiders,
I lived there post Katrina. The most common question you got as a white person was “What high school did you go to?” It was a way of figuring out your social status. Most whites went to private school. It was highly segregated.
One of the reasons that I left.
““What high school did you go to?”
I thought St. Louis had that question copyrighted and patented. To figure out which high school you should have attended if you grew up in St. Louis see: http://www.riverfronttimes.com/media-archive/7642101.0.pdf
Oops meant to say pre Katrina
I may be wrong, but assuming this is the last posting for 8/29/2015—
I want to humbly thank the owner of this blog and the commenters on today’s threads for providing much food for thought.
😎
KTA –
Could not agree more. I usually start my day here, but today spent many hours on the interwebs, then came to Diane’s blog and found, in one place, everything I had already deemed worthy of my attention. Got to remember to first go to the SOURCE.
From Heilig’s brief: “The data demonstrate that Louisiana had the largest disparity in student achievement between charters and traditional schools in the nation, with charter school students underperforming on average by 2 to 3 standard deviations compared to public school students for both NAEP reading and mathematics.”
I suspect that part of the reason there is a larger disparity in Louisiana between charter and traditional schools is that charter schools have come into the poorest cities to educate students. And in New Orleans, weren’t the highest achieving schools left under the Orleans Parish School Board?
But, using the same “logic” and “data” as the reformers who are now touting the New Orleans miracle are using, apparently we are supposed to ignore anything but the results. Since these results show without a doubt that charter schools aren’t working as well as traditional schools in Louisiana, how can we come to any other conclusion but think that traditional public schools are obviously superior to charters?
It is sad that this is the kind of data the reformists keep telling us is important. But I wonder how they like it when this way of analyzing data is turned against their own beloved charter schools.
The reformers deserve the biblical imprecation, “hypocrites!” They are insistent on data-driven instruction in the classroom and VAM for teachers, yet they hide, ignore and fudge the data for the New Orleans Recovery School District.
The charter schools’ practice of competing for the least expensive students to educate is unsustainable, and there will be a day of reckoning. It might be 5 years or 10 years from now, but at some point it will no longer be possible to suppress the true results. The grand social/political experiment will have left behind a very damaging wake, perhaps more damaging than Katrina, and sadder, because it was caused by humans: tens of thousands of students who “fell through the cracks”.
After some further reflection on this blog’s postings and the comments on the threads, plus reading other online and print pieces that are relevant, I realized—
The putative wonder that is the charter/privatization experiment in NOLA has brought out all the “best” rheephorm arguments. In particular, I was struck by the rheephormsters recycling in their favor the sneers, jeers and smears they customarily use against those of us in favor of a “better education for all.”
For example, for all the use of massaged and tortured number & stats, I noticed in the NOLA miracle stories what rheephormistas like to call “excuses”: gosh, this education stuff is hard, it’s going to take a while to figure this ed stuff out; we need time, a lot more time; we’ve made progress, measurable progress, but there’s a lot lot more to do; you can’t expect everything to be fixed and made right quickly; we reformers should be celebrated and praised for making all the hard decisions even if the positive results we promise won’t materialize for five or ten years or more; ad nauseam.
In other words, what happened to such bludgeons against public education as “we can’t wait years and years for public schools” to get it right when that assumes letting millions of kids fail” and “doing nothing is not an option so we have to get busy doing whatever”? Not to mention all those promises about doing more with less and being more efficient with less.
Again and again, the self-styled “education reform” movement reveals itself as a business plan that masquerades as an education model. Logic, consistency, transparency, holding oneself and others responsible for words and deeds—
Double talk. Double think. Double standards.
They quite casually and arrogantly use whatever words, and take whatever actions, fit the needs of moment. And those moments are lined up and pointed toward the ultimate metric: $tudent $ucce$$. Black is good. Red is bad.
I humbly submit that we continue to make use of one of our most powerful weapons against those that, with a studied shamelessness, won’t walk their own talk—
“Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” [Mark Twain]
They fully deserve to have their balloons of pretentiousness pricked and burst. And all we have to do is describe their actions and quote their words and compare the one against the other.
They’ve done the hard work of providing us ammunition against their follies. Let’s not refrain from taking advantage.
That’s my dos centavitos worth…
😎
Here’s the headline I would like to see:
“Ed ‘Reform’ Dead Due to Hubris, Originating 10 Years Ago in Katrina:
No One Mourns”
I have noticed Joel Klein suddenly lighting it up on twitter for NOLA reforms and progress, using many of the “C’mon naysayers…some kids have been helped so you should not disparage that result…or you must not care for kids” strategy.
Joel Klein!
I mean, up til a week ago or so, hardly ever a peep from him. Once in a while a plug for some software, or one of those former Commissioner King or engageny style tweets like:
“Hey, I am learning this stuff called math!” -3rd grader Tess on how CCLS (tablets, some new program…) has changed what her inadequate unionized teachers used to do.
Now that is paraphrased, of course…but Joel Klein was never so active or outspoken on NOLA before. Does he suddenly find himself with a bunch of free time and a ride on a revolving door to some new advisory PR position?
And….now we get the big lobbying push to put the New Orleans model everywhere:
https://www.the74million.org/article/opinion-we-owe-it-to-our-kids-to-replicate-new-orleans-education-turnaround-in-other-struggling-cities
Are these actual coordinated political campaigns, or do they just look remarkably like actual coordinated political campaigns? How much overlap is there between the Obama Administration and the various ed reform “movement” media platforms like The 74million?
Why no contrasting coverage of the other cities that have been “reformed”, like Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit? Cleveland (for example) actually has a much longer ed reform track record than New Orleans does. I lost count but I think Cleveland has been reformed 3 times using this same approach, and actually some of the same people. The original Cleveland ed reformer went on to reform Chicago.
If you want to read the reality of ed reform that was ignored in Campbell Brown’s glowing coverage of John Kasich, here’s a Toledo Blade piece that lists what’s happening with public education in the state John Kasich runs and takes Kasich to task on his deliberate omissions:
http://www.toledoblade.com/Featured-Editorial-Home/2015/08/30/Business-as-usual-1.html
Every major newspaper in the state has covered Kasich’s ed problems, daily, all summer.
12 million dollars for The74Million and none of them can read local newspapers in these states to prepare for a national forum covering ed reform?
President Obama and others are bragging about the increased percentage of graduation rate and college entrance rate in the New Orleans schools since they have been turned over to charter schools. I don’t believe these percentages, but have there been any studies about how they came up with those percentages? Have they pushed the worst students out of those studied?
Cokie Roberts just said on This Week that the N.O. graduation rate is above the national average. N.O.’s graduation rate is 72.8%. The US average is 81%. How do they get away with these blatant lies?
Evidence from Doug Harris’s recent study shows that New Orleans has made remarkable progress compared to similar students from elsewhere in the state. Heilig’s “evidence” is far inferior.
It’s funny how nothing seems to bother the Heilig’s of the world as much as hearing that poor black kids somewhere, somehow, are being offered an education in a half-way decent school. Their response is always to either: 1) deny that such decent schools actually exist, or 2) say that the decent schools should go away because it isn’t fair that other poor black kids might still remain in crappy union-controlled public schools (never mind that none of these critics would be caught dead sending their own kids to those schools — it should only be other people’s kids who have to bear that burden).
Let me remind you that the myth of New Orleans miracle has recently been debunked by many–including but not limited to Dr Vasquez -Heilig, NEPC, Schneider, and Andrea Gabor. It was also appeared in the mainstream news media.
The fact that pro-reformers and critics are out in their desperate attempt to refute Gabor’s article is a clear indication. It’s canary in coal mine.
Your pejorative term “half-way decent school” is a euphemism for RSD’s glasshouse workshop to fake their dismal performance. Louisiana State DOE bent the rules several times for RSDs so that they could put their name into the data table by manipulating their actual scores. Highly doubtful if it would make any difference even though they have some schools funded better than the rest of RSD schools–but not as much as other district schools.
Dr. Ravitch — if you read Dr. Harris’s study, he took that into account, and the changing population cannot possibly explain the results seen in New Orleans.
WT, if you get rid of 100,000 African Americans, as NO did, it means the pre-and post- scores are not comparable
WT, overwhelming majority of students(especially in RSDs) are born to African-American family who 1) live in historically high-concentric poverty; and 2) have little or no economic mobility to transfer to other districts or towns for better living condition–if not the entire state, even before Katrina.
The disaster made their already harsh living condition even worse than ten years ago. Do you really think the situation is somewhat similar to New York or New Jersey?
The only thing to take into account? Why not adding up the numbers of African-American students from neighboring school districts, and put them into ‘NO’ schools? Forget it. Who would think it worthwhile to include an extremely low raw data to suggest the city is doing even better than other school districts? That makes no sense.
If I were an ed reformer, like Doug Harris, only solution I could come up with, is to give student family “relocation bribe” so that they could go elsewhere outside the ground zero.