The Education Research Alliance for New Orleans issued a report today:
Study: New Orleans schools remain as segregated as before Katrina
New Orleans – A new study from the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University examines how the post-Katrina school reforms affected segregation in New Orleans publicly funded schools. Researchers analyzed changes in segregation across a number of student demographics, including race, income, special education participation, English Language Learner status, and achievement.
New Orleans schools were highly segregated prior to the reforms, especially in terms of race and income, and the study finds that segregation levels remain high post-Katrina. The authors find little evidence that the reforms affected segregation for elementary school students, but most groups of high school students they examined were affected.
The authors, Lindsay Bell Weixler, Nathan Barrett, Douglas Harris, and Jennifer Jennings, also find no consistent trends in racial segregation, as some student groups became more segregated and others less so. Among high school students, segregation has increased for low-income students and English language learners but decreased for special education students. The study also finds that segregation by achievement levels has generally declined since Katrina.
“Integrating schools has been a long-standing challenge for districts,” Weixler said. “Our results for New Orleans confirm the broader national pattern that very few school systems—whether traditional or those with choice-based reforms—have had much success in integrating schools.”
This spring, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans is also releasing a series of papers that focus on New Orleans teachers. The first study in this series, which explored the effects of Louisiana’s teacher tenure reform, was released in February. Forthcoming studies will examine the implementation of the statewide teacher evaluation system known as Compass, as well as changes in teachers’ perceptions of New Orleans schools from those who taught before and after Hurricane Katrina.
This full report is available at educationresearchalliancenola.org.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Integrating schools has been a long-standing challenge for districts,” Weixler said. “Our results for New Orleans confirm the broader national pattern that very few school systems—whether traditional or those with choice-based reforms—have had much success in integrating schools.”
That seems to be true. Was “choice” marketed to improve integration? It was marketed to improve everything else under the sun so I wouldn’t be surprised, but was this one of their claims?
Along with ending poverty, solving income inequality and ending racism did they also promise intergration?
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It might be that locations where White and non-White populations have historically been at odds due to years of colonial/caste/slavery practices are our most susceptible targets for pushing charters, vouchers and “choice.”
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That doesn’t explain places like Chicago though. It’s incredibly segregated. I haven’t been to Boston in 20 years so maybe it’s better now but when I was there it was also segregated.
One of the cities I have lived in that was not AS segregated was Toledo. They had court-ordered desegregation and much lower land value variation- there wasn’t an enormous gap between the land values in poor neighborhoods and the land values in better-off neighborhoods- so maybe that was it.
I look at some of these places and I don’t know how anyone with a middle class or lower income lives there at all. The rent is astonishing to me. I’ve never paid anywhere near some of these rents for a mortgage. I don’t know how they do it. They must spend 3/4s of their income on housing.
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Chiara: same growing segregation due to phenomenal rents/housing in Denver
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So, they do little more than charterize the district and find that little has changed with regard to either segregation or test performance.
Yet another experiment to determine if water is wet.
Surprisingly, it is.
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Wait, you mean segregation isn’t part of “the civil rights movement of our time?”
Well, at least a few people got rich…
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New Orleans has a long history of segregation. Charters have provided them with another means to select particular students. The city has undergone a demographic transformation. While New Orleans lost about a third of its poor after Katrina, there have been efforts to discourage their return by closing Charity Hospital and refusing to rebuild public housing and new services to the lower 9th Ward. Redevelopment has focused on gentrified housing in downtown and uptown and selective charters. http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2016/05/exclusive_public_schools_nola.html
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What is interesting and telling to me is that Lusher High School, which is one of the crown jewels of the post-Katrina charter regime (and not far from the most elite school in the state in uptown New Orleans) is housed in the same building that was Fortier High School. Fortier was the top public school in the city in the 30s through the 50s with notable alumni like journalist Howard K. Smith and Sen. Russell Long. After desegregation, its student body was almost universally African American and in the early 90s was cited as one of the worst schools in the country. Now it selectively picks its students and they are mostly white.
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I was surprised to learn, this past weekend, while I was visiting in New Orleans, that a Ward 7 school (seemingly public–?) is being moved into the soon-to-be-vacated Kipp McDonagh #15, in the French Quarter. Can any reader tell me why this is happening–i.e., is the Kipp School closing or relocating? And wouldn’t a 7th Ward school be a neighborhood school–will those children be bused? I am quite puzzled!
And, also,regarding the post Katrina N.O. segregation–another round of thanks, Paul Vallas.
And keep your mitts off Chicago State University (due to community backlash, his appointment to C.S.U. may not happen)! We all know that promised good business practices & purported growth of the school will only lead to prosperity–Paul’s prosperity, that is.
As usual…KA-CHING!
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Reblogged this on Network Schools – Wayne Gersen and commented:
This study underscores the persistence of segregation of all forms. I believe it can only be addressed by appealing to our higher angels
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Segregation could be ameliorated by schools, but schools alone can produce a society that accepts integration.
I wish Tulane would do some more complex studies of residential and commercial segregation, the role and power of real estate agents, backers of mega-commercial projects like the riverfront development and stadium, bankers and mortgage lenders, and deep history have helped to create and sustain segregation.
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Charter schools are the profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda.
The decpetive call for “choice” and school vouchers was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents a “choice.”
Reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and last year the NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students.
The 1950’s voucher crusade faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Courts, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property. These aren’t onerous burdens on charter schools; these are only common sense requirements to assure taxpayers that their money is being properly and effectively spent to educate children and isn’t simply ending up in private pockets or on the bottom line of hedge funds.
These aren’t “burdensome” requirements for charter schools — they are simply common sense safeguards that public tax money is actually being used to maximum effect to teach our nation’s children.
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