The New Orleans myth continues to crumble, despite efforts by privatizers to call it a miracle.
The latest state scores (LEAP) were released, and the scores in New Orleans stalled or dipped. While the state average held steady from 2018 to 2019, the proportion of students who reached “mastery” on state tests dropped from 32% to 30%.
New Orleans scores continue to rank significantly below state averages. Louisiana is one of the lowest-performing states in the nation on NAEP.
The few high-performing private charters have selective admissions. Most of the city’s private charter schools are far below the state average. Most of the city’s charters perform far below the city’s average.
Last year, an extraordinary 30% of NOLA teachers quit. The charter promoter New Schools for New Orleans says teachers should have more professional development and higher pay.
Although the privatization lobby likes to claim that test scores and graduation rates have miraculously improved since the district’s schools were privatized, there is no valid comparison because the enrollment before and after Hurricane Katrina is very different. Enrollment was about 62,000 before the storm, and 48,000 now. It is not only much smaller, but less impoverished, with less concentrated poverty. Many of the poorest families left NOLA and never returned.
