Kristen Buras lives in New Orleans and has written several notable books about the charter school takeover of the city’s schools. After two decades at Emory University and Georgia State University, she currently works in New Orleans as a scholar-activist. She is cofounder and director of the New Orleans-based Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, a coalition with Black educational and cultural groups that melds community-based research and organizing for racial justice. Buras has written multiple books on urban educational policy, including Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance and What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.
Her latest report appears here:
The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on ‘Large Achievement Gains’ in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students
Buras’ latest report exposes how “Large Achievement Gains” in New Orleans’ charter schools mask persistent inequities
The National Center for Charter School Accountability (CCSA), a project of NPE, has released a new independent report, The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on ‘Large Achievement Gains’ in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students, authored by noted scholar Dr. Kristen Buras. The report delivers a penetrating critique of the widely circulated “success narrative” surrounding the charter-school takeover of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. It challenges the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA)’s claims of significant achievement gains. It reveals how shifting metrics, questionable data, and students’ lived experiences paint a far more complex—and troubling—picture.
The Stories Behind Statistics raises substantial concerns about the foundations of ERA’s conclusions. First, it details how Louisiana officials repeatedly modified the school performance metrics in ways that boosted the apparent success of charter schools, creating an illusion of dramatic improvement. Second, it questions the reliability of the data ERA relied upon, noting allegations, lawsuits, and documented violations—including grade-fixing, financial mismanagement, and other irregularities—that have occurred across the New Orleans charter sector. Third, the report underscores the longstanding lack of meaningful oversight and accountability for charter schools, which further undermines confidence in the performance data.
Finally, the report scrutinizes ERA’s surveys on teaching quality and school climate, demonstrating that the experiences of Black students—when examined at the school level—are far more negative than ERA’s brief suggests. To bring these realities into focus, Dr. Buras incorporates original qualitative research, including firsthand testimony from students and parents describing their experiences in New Orleans charter schools.
The Stories Behind the Statistics urges policymakers, researchers, and the public to look beyond celebratory headlines and examine the deeper structural issues that continue to shape the city’s all-charter experiment—issues that profoundly affect the educational experiences of Black youth and their families.
According to Network for Public Education President Diane Ravitch, “As cities and states across the nation look to New Orleans as a model of charter-school reform, this report cautions how important it is to dig deeper than surface metrics. Without transparency, accountability, and attention to student experience, reforms that appear successful on paper may in fact perpetuate inequities and undermine educational justice for students.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I watched a Vivek Ramaswamy clip that Sam Seder covered, where Vivek claimed that once kids can read by 3rd grade it’s “statistically impossible” for them to be poor. That assumes education reform alone can fix poverty.
This new report casts real doubt on the success claims being made about the all-charter New Orleans school system. I looked into the Black poverty rate in New Orleans and found that, once you factor in the exodus of many Black residents after Katrina, nothing has actually improved.
The New Orleans charter district is exactly the direction Vivek and other school-choice advocates want education to go. If this model truly delivered the transformative results they promise, we’d expect to see a real reduction in poverty — but we don’t.
And beyond the lack of improvement in poverty, the report shows that many students actually felt worse in the new all-charter system. It brought to mind the famous Maya Angelou line that people may forget what you say or do, but they never forget how you made them feel. The artistic contributions of the Black community to the world show a community that feels deeply, and the fact that this new system made so many students feel alienated says more about its real impact than any test score ever could.
LikeLiked by 1 person
New Orleans seems to have a history of failing to collect and report accurate data. The New Orleans police department has a history of many inaccuracies in reporting facts over the years. Now education, which has become a political hotbed, is another area in which New Orleans charter school statistics are suspect.
LikeLike
Well I got just over a third of the way through the report, and this was enough for me to show the ERA report was politically biased, and statistically useless for consumption. Highlights:
1…Charter schools are praised by ERA (and journalists who uncritically rely on ERA’s reporting) for moving New Orleans from rock bottom to slightly less rock bottom — not just in Louisiana but nationally. By any standard, the “gains” presented by ERA are gradations of failure, which means that charter schools have not fundamentally improved the majority-black education system in New Orleans
2.The ERA brief notes that “school spending increased” by 13% in the post-Katrina charter sector when compared to pre-Katrina spending on traditional public schools. These additional monies went to “higher spending on [charter school] administration.” In fact, during the first decade of reform, the brief indicates, “instructional spending decreased by 10%.
3.“We focus on this age group [7th to 9th] to capture the effects of the reforms for students while they are still in school, excluding grades with higher dropout rates (10th to 12th grades).”
LikeLike