The founding myth of the corporate reform movement is the rebirth and transformation of the public schools of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most of the city’s public schools suffered physical damage because of the horrendous storm. Large numbers of the students and teachers were scattered after the storm. The state of Louisiana moved in aggressively: it lowered the bar at which a school was deemed to be failing. It took control of most of the public schools and turned them over to charter operators. It fired all of the teachers, most of whom were African-American, disbanding the teachers’ union. The charter operators hired large numbers of Teach for America recruits. The media hailed the experiment in privatization as a success story. Numerous states followed the lead of New Orleans, turning over their lowest-performing schools to charter operators. Michigan created the Education Achievement Authority. Tennessee created the Achievement School District. North Carolina and Nevada launched similar but smaller experimental districts. All of them failed.
Now comes a report that the nearly all-charter New Orleans district did not live up to its hype.
Dr. Barbara Ferguson
Research on Reforms, Inc.
April 2024
Following Hurricane Katrina, a newly enacted state law identified schools that scored below the state average as failing and subject to take-over. The state then took-over 107 of New Orleans’ 120 public schools and turned them into charter schools. Last year’s scores showed that 56 of New Orleans’ 68 public schools had scores below the state average.*
Thus, after nearly twenty years, over 80% of New Orleans schools are still below the state average. This charter school experiment has been a failure.
Of the five worst performing high schools taken-over, only one now scores above the state average. Two are still below the state average. Another was closed and then reopened as a campus to expand the Willow selective admission charter school. The status of the other, Walter Cohen, is unclear. Recall that the New Orleans College Prep Charter took-over Cohen High School, operating its selective charter school on one floor, while leaving the failing Cohen students on the other floors. Thus, we learned that the take-over of a failing school simply meant taking-over the building, not the failing students in the building.
Of the five highest performing high schools taken-over, they continue to be the highest performing except for one, McDonogh #35, which is now below the state average. These schools, except for McDonogh #35, collectively received over $5 million in Charter School Grant Funds. The five worst performing high schools received nothing in Charter School Grant Funds following the takeover.The Louisiana law, which termed charter schools “an experiment,” also stated that they were to “serve the best interests of at-risk” children and youth.
But the legislative auditor found in 2022 that for the past six years, more than 1 in 5 charter schools failed to meet requirements on enrollment of children from low-income families.
Louisiana’s “state takeover” law required schools below the state average to be taken-over. Thus, half of the schools should have been taken-over because half are below the state average and half are above. Yet, only the New Orleans’ schools below the state average were taken-over. Targeting New Orleans seems to again be popular with our new governor.
Research on Reforms, Inc. consistently reported on the status of the state-takeover through its website and a published book, “Outcomes of the State Takeover of the New Orleans Schools.” This will be the final of its outreach, which ends with hope that our legislature will one day enact laws that provide equity and excellence in education for our New Orleans children and youth.
Barbara Ferguson, Attorney and Co-founder
Charles Hatfield, Co-founder
Research on Reforms, Inc.
Comments to
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reform was never the intent because the reformers only care about getting free taxpayer money to enrich themselves at the students’ and taxpayers’ expense. It’s legalized graft. Free up all that money marked for salary and benefits, throw in the grant money, and there’s definitely a tidy sum to be had with the right connections.
And NOT so far away in France. Inner City families recognize the same blatant/deliberate inequalities when they experience them day after day.
Public School Parents Are Protesting In Seine-Saint-Denis France.
Children are writing President Macron begging for teachers, toilet paper, soap, playgrounds & bldg repairs.
Powers That Be are Pumping BIG BUCKS into the Upcoming Olympics.
None to spare for the kids.
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240428-paris-suburbs-get-spanking-new-olympic-venues-teachers-pupils-seethe-decrepit-schools-france
Saint Denis is adjacent to Montmartre in the northern suburbs of Paris. It is where many of the poor migrants have settled. Like the disadvantaged in New Orleans, these folks have little agency or clout so politicians tend to ignore them.
Southern states have been underfunding public schools since the Republican takeover. This is about money allocation. The benefit of charters has been the growing privilege of privatizers, more accurately described as privateers, or pirates. Katrina, soon followed by the Great Recession, became an excuse to defund public schools. The Republican Party moved away from public school advocacy decades ago. Schools in underprivileged districts are the worse for it.
Paul Bonner,
As the GOP defunds public schools, it pats its own back for being “reformers.”
When New Orleans decimated its public system and replaced it with an assortment of private contractors, it lost a cohesive force, accountability and community identity that public schools provide. This was a political decision that failed to account for the consequences of such a decision. Unlike public schools that are accountable for all students, private operators have no such obligation. When students are expelled or dismissed from privately operated schools, many students are adrift and left without access to schooling, and they are not getting the education to which they are entitled. Unaccountable private contractors do not have the same social and academic accountability that public schools provide. It is a systemic failure that deliberately allows students to fall between the cracks. Thanks for Dr. Ferguson for being a much needed watchdog.
Power demands inequality in order to exist. You can’t “lecture” equality into a system based on inequality anymore than you could “essay” integrity into a system defined by test scores. Using test scores as a measuring tool reinforces inequity an exclusion. Can the children wait for the union to bring the test givers to heel?
No. Because the “union” is part of the problem.
“Using test scores as a measuring tool reinforces inequity an exclusion.”
I know NoBrick that you understand the absurdities involved with the standards and testing malpractice regime. Thanks for reminding about those absurdities. So what follows is for others who don’t, who refuse to understand those absurdities.
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
Those supposedly but not objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
There is absolutely nothing that can be done. Just accept it.
Of course, the major teacher’s unions could end the national testing mandate tomorrow. Until they do that, they are complicit in extreme child abuse.
Whatever “it” is.
The failed experiment was based on a faulty idea, that public employees are lazy. Someone assumed churn and burn teachers would outperform public school teachers. It’s a prejudice against the working class held by the Scrooges of the world. In reality, competition was never going to improve education or raise test scores (two different things), and everyone in education should have known it before experimenting on human subjects.