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Voucher Follies in Louisiana (continued)

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2012 //
2

When Louisiana’s voucher plan begins in September, the Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans plans to enroll an additional 214 voucher students. The addition of these students will add $1.8 million in taxpayer dollars to the school’s coffers.

Upperroom Bible Church Academy is already a voucher-receiving school. New Orleans has had a small voucher program since Hurricane Katrina (about 1800 students). Because the school is already getting public funding, its students take the state tests (called LEAP). Last year, only  21% of its students in grade 3, 4 and 5 scored above basic on state tests of reading and math. Some parents left comments about the school on this site (and be aware that this site is unmonitored and thus the comments are not necessarily accurate).

Among the state’s voucher and charter schools, it was third to last on the state LEAP rankings. This raises the possibility that children may be “escaping” from a low-performing public school to an even lower-performing voucher school.

That link demonstrates that most charter and voucher schools perform well below the state average in a low-performing state. If you are looking for a miracle, you won’t find it here. Nor will you find evidence that the Jindal administration is raising standards or expanding opportunities for students in Louisiana to get a better education.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Is the Jindal Voucher Program a Boondoggle?

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2012 //
8

I don’t mean to pick on Governor Bobby Jindal but it is fascinating to watch the evolution (or should I say “the creation”) of his voucher program.

First came the news that many of the schools that are taking voucher students had no facilities or teachers. Then we learned that many of the little schools opening their doors are Bible-based church schools that teach creationism and use textbooks in history, science and other subjects from Christian publishing houses. Then it turned out that no one at the state department of education had vetted any of the schools that were approved to receive the students “fleeing” l0w-rated public schools. Then the Commissioner of Education John White said that the letter informing the schools that they had been approved really was not a letter informing them they had been approved.

What he actually meant to say, he said, was that the letter of approval was just a letter of “preliminary” approval, and they were going to be vetted for real approval.

But it gets worse (or better, depending on your point of view). According to an article in a Louisiana newspaper, the state will not require voucher-receiving schools to have certified teachers, to have modern technology or to accept students with disabilities.

I hope someone will find the time to explain why they expect to improve the education of these children by sending them to schools that lack the essentials required even of so-called failing public schools. Other than saying that parents in Louisiana know what’s best, Commissioner White has not offered a persuasive answer. If that were true, why does no one listen to the parents who oppose the closing of their public schools? When John White worked in New York City, he never cared what parents wanted  for their children when he closed their neighborhood schools and replaced them with charters.

Categories Charter Schools, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Vouchers and the Future of Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2012 //
15

I debated whether to give this blog the title you see or to call it “State Commissioner of Education John White Acknowledges That He Doesn’t Know How to Improve Schools.”

I felt a sense of outrage as I read the latest account of the Louisiana voucher program. Since Bobby Jindal is already doing what Mitt Romney promises to do, I keep a close watch on Louisiana. So should the national media. A Shreveport newspaper ran an article linking Jindal’s plan to the ALEC model of school reform.

The Reuters article skips the rhetoric about “the civil rights issue of our era” and goes to the heart of the voucher program:

“Louisiana is embarking on the nation’s boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children.”

The voucher program is a bold effort to privatize public education by taking money away from public schools and giving it to anyone who claims that they can offer some sort of an educational or tutoring or apprenticeship program, in person or online, regardless of its quality.

Commissioner John White defends the radical privatization scheme, saying that: “I know the governor and bill authors had the goal in mind of improving student achievement,” White said. “The importance of that has been highlighted in studies which show the economic sustainability of a state is predicated on education, and we are dead last in the number of students growing up in communities with at least one parent with a college education.” Follow the logic here. If Louisiana ranks last in parent education, is that a strong argument for choice? Or for a higher level of professionalism and quality in the public schools? You decide.

More than 400,000 students are eligible for vouchers, which is more than half the students in the state’s public schools. Only 5,000 seats are available, and some of these seats don’t even exist. There are some good seats in good schools. A highly regarded private school in Baton Rouge will accept only four students, and only in kindergarten. But it appears that many of the students will be accepted by small religious schools that have no track record of providing good education; for some, the state funding will be a windfall of millions of dollars. They may be far worse than the public schools that the students are fleeing. But parents will choose them anyway.

Next year, the state will expand the program to all students to get mini-vouchers, which can be used to pay private vendors for tutoring, apprenticeships, online courses, whatever. Given the absence of any due diligence in the rollout of this year’s voucher program, you can just imagine the private vendors that will spring up to claim millions of dollars from the state treasury.

Bear in mind that public education is level-funded, so all these millions for vouchers and charters and online schooling and tutoring will come right out of the public school budget, making classes more overcrowded, closing libraries, shutting down services for students that need them.

The Reuters article describes some of the curricular and instructional issues that any sensible person would worry about:

“The school willing to accept the most voucher students — 314 — is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.

 “The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding.

 At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution.

 “We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children,” Carrier said.

 Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don’t cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.”

Louisiana officials have decided that it is not up to them to make any judgments about quality or curriculum or instruction. That’s the parents’ choice.

Commissioner John White told the Reuters reporter: “To me, it’s a moral outrage that the government would say, ‘We know what’s best for your child,'” White said. “Who are we to tell parents we know better?”

Let’s deconstruct that statement. The state commissioner of education said right here that he doesn’t know what’s best for children. He doesn’t know what children or schools should be doing. It is not up to him to tell schools what is best regarding curriculum and instruction. He has no responsibility to improve schools, only to close then and to provide the wherewithal so that parents can leave them and take their public money anywhere they want.

What he means is that any parent in the state of Louisiana, regardless of their own education, knows more than he does about education. Would you want a doctor who told you that it was up to you to decide which medicine you should take when you were ill? Or a lawyer who said you should write your own defense? Or a golf instructor who told you to hold the club anyway that you wanted? Why do people get degrees and become professional if they don’t know any more than people who have no professional training?

Maybe John White is right. Maybe every parent in Louisiana knows more about education than he does, even those who didn’t finish high school. Maybe he doesn’t know what good instruction and good curriculum look like. But why is he in charge of education if he doesn’t know these things?

Diane

Categories ALEC, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Louisiana Voucher Plan Draws Criticism

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2012 //
4

Louisiana legislators grilled Commissioner of Education John White about the state’s decision to approve the largest number of voucher students (315) for a small religious school that lacked facilities or teachers. Many questions were raised about the state’s failure to do any site visits to ascertain the readiness of the school to accept new students. Questions were raised about the school’s tuition, which is less than what the state plans to pay out (and may be very much less, making the voucher program a windfall for the school).

White must have been embarrassed because he immediately started backtracking and claimed that the list of schools approved by the state was not really final (news to everyone) and that the state planned to do due diligence.

The school plans to build a new facility during the summer and be ready to welcome its 315 new students this fall.

Nothing was said about the quality of the education that the new voucher schools would provide.

I keep wondering why smart people like Bobby Jindal and John White think that children in Louisiana will get a better education if they get public money to go to any private or religious school that wants them, regardless of their program, their curriculum, their teachers, or their record.

Since Mitt Romney wants the Jindal plan to go national, this story matters a lot.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Who Will Vouchers Benefit in Louisiana?

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2012 //
6

As Mitt Romney continues his advocacy for vouchers, he should follow  developments in Louisiana.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the New Living Word School has offered to nearly quadruple its student enrollment, from 122 to 437, even though it lacks the facilities or teachers for the new students. Millions of public dollars will flow to this small church school, where students spend most of their class time watching DVDs.

A reader alerted me that another little school that will reap the benefits from the voucher program is the Eternity Christian Academy in Calcasieu Parish. It currently enrolls 14 students. It has offered to take in 135 new students. Its small budget will grow by $1 million in taxpayer dollars.

Perhaps Romney and Jindal might hold a joint press conference to explain why they think that putting more students into religious schools will prepare them for the 21st century. I wonder if they will learn about science as it is taught in the public schools. Will they learn about evolution and modern biological concepts? We need to hear more from reformers like Jindal and Romney about their views of what constitutes a good education.

Diane

Categories Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Romney, Mitt, Vouchers

The Itty Bitty Voucher Plan

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2012 //
6

According to a story in today’s Alexandria (La.) “Daily Town Talk,” large parts of Louisiana have no private schools taking part in the voucher program. They prefer to wait and see or just keep their distance. Some say they have no seats available; in one case, a school principal said her board members were “philosophically opposed” to using government money to pay for private school tuition.

With so few seats available for voucher applicants in Louisiana, I am beginning to wonder whether the voucher proposal was a diversion.

Maybe the point all along was to create hundreds of new charter schools across the state, which could siphon away public school students and cut the funding for public schools.

The unfolding of the voucher story is pretty intriguing, because this one is the big demonstration of vouchers, the one that voucher advocates have been longing for many decades.

And since Romney is out on the campaign trail flogging vouchers, this story has national significance.

Here are the problems:

1. Not that many seats available.

2. Some of the schools most eager to accept voucher students do not have a strong academic program, so the children might be leaving their struggling public school to enroll in a low-quality private or religious school.

3. The sorting of students into voucher and charter schools seems likely to intensify racial segregation, as students choose to go where they feel welcome.

4. The program may create demand by families who already pay for religious school to pay for their children too.

5. It’s hard to figure out how a program that allows 1% of eligible students (about 5,000 of 400,000 eligibles) to enter a private or religious school of unknown quality will end up transforming American education for the better or even helping sizable numbers of children.

Stay tuned for Gannett series that promises to “follow the money” in the Louisiana plan and to see how closely the Louisiana plan matches the language in ALEC model voucher legislation.

Governor Bobby Jindal may have discovered a way to revive racial segregation while calling it “reform.”

Diane

Categories ALEC, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Keep an Eye on Jindal’s Reforms

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2012 //
8

I just came across an interesting statistic about Louisiana that puts the Jindal education reform plan into context.*

The majority of white children in Louisiana do not go to public school. The majority of white children go to private schools.

Black children are the majority in the public schools of Louisiana.

According to Census data, 17% of Louisiana children enrolled in grades K-12 attended a private school in 2007. By comparison, 11% of U.S. children enrolled in grades K-12 attended a private school in 2007.1

Enrollment in nonpublic schools varies widely among Louisiana’s parishes, from zero children in 14 parishes to over 22,000 children in Jefferson Parish.

White children are a majority of school-age children (55%) in the state, but are 82% of the private school enrollment.

Black children are 39% of the school-age children, but only 13% are in private schools.

This suggests an interesting and politically complicated scenario.

Vouchers and charters appeal to those already in private schools, if those schools can get additional state funding and if the conditions for getting them are not too onerous. Some Roman Catholic schools are offering seats, but the numbers are small. The early response suggests that the prime beneficiaries are likely to be schools run by evangelical denominations.

Let’s see how many of the all-white private schools (some of which had their origins as “segregation academies”) open their doors to black children from D or F schools.

About 400,000 students are eligible for vouchers, but only about 5,000 seats are available across the state.http://www.louisianaschools.net/topics/scholarships_availability.html. In nearly half the parishes in the state, no private school is participating (accepting new voucher students).

It will be interesting to see the reaction of parents now paying full tuition as their school starts accepting students whose tuition is paid with tax dollars. Will they react magnanimously or will they be angry and demand that the state pay some or all of their tuition?

Before the Jindal “reforms” were passed, the state commissioner John White said that students could get a voucher only if they had been in a D or F school for a year. Let’s watch and see if the one-year requirement is maintained, and whether some parents move their children to a low-rated school for a year to save tens of thousands of dollars in the future.

Let’s also watch to see whether the legislation encourages further racial segregation, as blacks and whites go to segregated charter schools.

And let’s see if there is any oversight of these issues from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.

The Louisiana “reforms” are intended to encourage pupils to transfer out of public education. There is nothing in them to improve public schools, just to promote alternatives so that students can “escape.”

The Jindal “reforms” are a template for the Romney education program. Romney, who went to elite private schools and sent his own children to elite private schools,  views public education as a disaster. Given his Bain background, he may see public education as a business that should be shut down, with its component parts sold off. From his perspective, privatization makes sense.

Romney’s pronouncements to date mirror Jindal’s. It’s not because they chatted up the subject, but because they both work from the old songbook of Milton Friedmanites. The free market cures all ills. Break the regulatory controls of governments, give everyone a voucher, and let the market work its magic. Charters are added to the mix because they too provide an “escape” route for those who hate public schools.

It does seem odd for an advanced society to start giving away and dismantling an essential public service. It takes a certain kind of detached and cold policy wonk to engage in this sort of exercise. The sort of person who has no sense of living in community, the sort who sees a certain beauty in “creative destruction.” The sort who can look at people and institutions from afar and rearrange their lives without thinking of the repercussions.

Strictly from an educational point of view, I suspect that the charters (whose teachers need not be certified) and the religious schools will have lower standards than the public schools from which students are “escaping.”

Keep an eye on Louisiana.

Diane

*Here is the source for enrollment data: http://www.agendaforchildren.org/2009databook/Education/nonpublicschoolenrollment.pdf

White children are overrepresented in private schools in comparison to black children. White children represent 55% of the school-age child population in Louisiana, but they represent 82% of the private school population in Louisiana. By contrast, black children comprise 39% of the school-age child population in the state, but just 13% of children attending private school.

Data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics shows similar over- and under-representation at the national level as well. Nationally, white students make up 75% of the private school population, but just 57% of the public school population. Black students make up just 10% of the nation’s private school enrollment, but 17% of its public school enrollment.2

Black students in Louisiana are more likely than their white counterparts to attend a public school. While 39% of the child population in Louisiana is black, 46% of public school students are black. By contrast, 55% of the child population is Louisiana is white, but only 49% of the public school population is white. While a majority of public school students are black in 22 parishes, black students are not the majority at nonpublic schools in any parish. About half of Louisiana’s parishes have public school populations that are majority-white, but white students represent the overwhelming majority of students in nonpublic schools in each of the 50 parishes that have nonpublic schools.

Categories Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

School Reform in Louisiana, As If

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
15

The State Education Department in Louisiana has given approval to the New Living Word School in Ruston, Louisiana, to accept 315 voucher students. The school currently has 122 students, so if it can enroll its full complement of voucher students, it will nearly quadruple in size.

The New Living Word School will accept the largest number of voucher students in the state’s voucher program. The second largest number of seats is offered by the Upperroom Bible Church Academy in Orleans.

The New Living Word School does not have the facilities or the teachers for an additional 315 students, but that doesn’t matter to the state. The Rev. Jerry Baldwin, the school’s principal and chief pastor said the school would move forward “on faith” and would build new classrooms during the summer.

Instruction in the school is offered for 20-30 minutes each class on DVD, while “the classroom teacher is on hand to manage the class, review homework, answer questions and give assignments.” This is Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan to reform education, remember?

The state education department doesn’t do site visits. All that is required for a school to gain acceptance to get public money is that it has state approval and does not discriminate by race.

And the money to enroll students in the New Living Word School and the Upperroom Bible Church Academy will be subtracted from the Minimum Foundation funding for public schools.

But there’s another problem, other than the loss of funds for public schools. Rev. Baldwin said that tuition would go up for existing students from its current $8,500.

But wouldn’t the families now paying $8,500 wonder why they should pay tuition at all if the state is willing to pay tuition for the new students? Maybe they should drop out of New Living Word, enroll in a public school for a year rated “D” or “F,” return to the religious school, and have the state pay their tuition. Why pay for a religious education if the state will pay for it? For a family with two children, that’s a huge saving, possibly $18,000 a year.

Diane

Categories Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Will Vouchers Fizzle?

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2012 //
3

The Jindal education reforms include a huge voucher program that had rightwing choice advocates jumping for joy and supporters of public schools trembling. More than half the students in the state are eligible for vouchers, about 380,000 children.

But not so fast. It turns out that there are only a few thousand seats available in the state’s private and religious schools. Maybe new ones will open, but at present the voucher program looks like a mouse rather than an elephant.

Schools have the authority to decide if they want voucher students, and some politely say no. Others are full. Some don’t want students with disabilities (of 1,800 students in New Orleans who now use vouchers to go to private schools, only TWO are special-education students). (http://www.theind.com/news/10546-voucher-participation-list-pending).

Some of Jindal’s local critics predicted months ago that the real threat to public education was charters, not vouchers. Charter AU theorizers will be set up in every parish and will collect a commission for every student who leaves public school to enter a privately-managed charter.

Every dollar that goes to either vouchers or charters will come right out of the public school’s budget. This is a zero-sum game.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Jindal, Bobby, New Orleans, Vouchers

The Dangerous Facts About New Orleans

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2012 //
4

I wrote in a blog yesterday about a balanced news story about the New Orleans story. It began with the usual paeans of praise to the charter miracle and the miracle of having great (inexperienced TFA) teachers, but then shifted gears and gave time to critics of this narrative. This is the link:
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/05/sen_mary_landrieu_touts_new_o
r.html

However, the story did not appear in the print edition, and critics of the miracle in New Orleans are worried that it may disappear from the Times-Picayune’s website and its archives. I guess no one told the reporter that he was supposed to write only about the miracle and to disregard any questions about whether the miracle was real.

So in the interest of my readers and of posterity, I reprint below the story in full. By doing so, it may encourage the editors of the Times-Picayune to preserve the story online, at the least, and deter them from scrubbing it out of their archives. Here is the full story:

Sen. Mary Landrieu touts New Orleans charter schools on ‘Morning Joe’

Published: Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 10:10 AM
WASHINGTON – Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., touted the success of New Orleans charter schools on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday. “Eighty percent of our children in the city are now in public charter schools,” said Landrieu. “As my brother said, who is the mayor, we’re not rebuilding the city we were, we’re rebuilding the city we’ve always dreamed we could be, building it just better, the old New Orleans but better and that includes a brand new entrepreneurial, public school system that’s attracting middle class white and black families, Hispanics, back to the system and seeing extraordinary gains in academics, freeing up our principals to be great and expecting our teachers to be great.”
Sen. Mary Landrieu at College Prep.jpgFile photoSen. Mary Landrieu tweeted this photo of her recent visit to New Orleans College Prep Charter School.

“New Orleans has really led the way,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R- Tenn., who served as Education Secretary in the first Bush administration, and joined Landrieu on the show to talk up charter schools. Alexander said “the holy grail” of education reform was to find ways to get great teachers in the classroom, and the way to do that was to pay them more than less able teachers.

Landrieu said “unions can be a part of reform, there is nothing to keep them from it,” and, as she has in the past, complemented Gov. Bobby Jindal‘seducation reform efforts, while cautioning that “our governor’s gone a little too far with vouchers.” But, she said, “charter schools are transforming outcomes for students, and, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.”

The relative success of the massive charter school experiment in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has become a source of both local and national debate.

“So sure are New Orleans officials of the work being done to turn around schools that they think they can become a model for urban education reform, proof that students of any color, income level or social background can achieve if schools do their job,’ Jo-Ann Armao, a member of the editorial page staff for The Washington Post, wrote recently in a piece in her paper, “The Big Easy’s School Revolution.”

Armao wrote that when “the levees broke and the city was devastated … out of that destruction came the need to build a new system, one that today is accompanied by buoyant optimism. Since 2006, New Orleans students have halved the achievement gap with their state counterparts. They are on track to, in the next five years, make this the first urban city in the country to exceed its state’s average test scores. The share of students proficient on state tests rose from 35 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2011; 40 percent of students attended schools identified by the state as `academically unacceptable’ in 2011, down from 78 percent in 2005.”

But in a recent essay, “How, and How Not, To Improve the Schools,” in The New York Review of Books, New York University educational historian Diane Ravitch, offered a very different take on the New Orleans experience. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/how-and-how-not-improve-schools/?pagination=false

“As for New Orleans, it is the poster child of the corporate reformers because the public school system and the teachers’ union were wiped out by Hurricane Katrina,” wrote Ravtich. “Now about 70 percent of the students in the district attend charter schools, staffed by TFA (Teach for America) and other young teachers. Reformers have portrayed New Orleans as an educational miracle, and the media have faithfully parroted this characterization as proof that nonunion charter schools are successful. But few paid attention when the state of Louisiana recently released grades for every school in the state and 79 percent of the charter schools formed by the state received a grade of D or F.”

“Teach for America is a worthy idea,” wrote Ravitch, who served as Alexander’s assistant secretary of education and counselor. “It is wonderful to encourage young people to commit themselves to public service for two years. The program would be far more admirable if the organization showed some modesty, humility, and realism in its claims for its inexperienced teachers. Many foundations, corporations, and even the US Department of Education treat TFA as a systemic solution to the critical needs of the teaching profession. But it is foolhardy to expect that a profession of more than three million teachers will be transformed by the annual addition of a few thousand college graduates who agree to stay for only two years.”

In March, Charles Hatfield, the former director of educational accountability for the Orleans Parish School Board, issued a scathing critique of the successes being claimed for New Orleans charter revolution in a report for Research on Reforms, which he co-founded, entitled, “Should the Educational Reforms in New Orleans Serve as a National Model for Other Cities?”

Hatfield wrote that the “aggregation of achievement data,” by those proclaiming success, “makes it impossible to determine whether, and to what extent, the RSD (Recovery School District) has provided the poor, disadvantaged, and public school students with the quality education originally promised as justification by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) to dismantle the Orleans Public School System.”

What provides a better picture, he said, are the letter grades assigned to RSD charter and traditional schools by the Louisiana Department of Education, which he said “demonstrate the very low level of academic performance that still exists in these schools after 6 years of direct control by the LDOE.”

On “Morning Joe,” Landrieu cited the Audubon Charter School, where, she said, “children are speaking fluent French by the third grade.” Audubon gets an A+ on the state report card, and most of the Orleans Parish School Board charters score relatively well on the state rating.

But, Hatfield writes, “A cursory examination of the RSD schools clearly shows that the general achievement level of the vast majority of RSD schools, as measured by the assigned letter grades, is pathetic at best. Some of the major highlights that can be observed from the tables with respect to the current achievement levels of the RSD after 6 years are as follows:

  • 100% of the 15 direct-run RSD schools assigned a letter grade received a `D’ or `F’ as compared to 20% of the 5 OPSB direct-run schools graded;
  • 79% of the 42 charter RSD schools assigned a letter grade received a `D’ or `F’ as compared to 0% of the 11 OPSB charter schools graded;
  • Of the RSD students attending direct-run schools with letter grades, 100%, or 5,422, are attending schools with assigned letter grades of either `D’ or `F’;
  • Of the RSD students attending charter schools assigned a letter grade, 76% ,or 15,040, are attending schools with assigned grades of either `D’ or `F’;
  • Schools that were just opened or opened for less than three years were not assigned a letter grade at this time;
  • Although the RSD’s public relations machine glorifies the tremendous gains made over 6 years, the overall performance of the RSD in New Orleans remains at or near the bottom in Louisiana, i.e., RSD received an overall letter grade of `D’ as compared to the overall letter grade of `B’ received by the OPSB;

The state will raise the failing bar from a SPS (school performance score) below 65 to SPS below 75 for the 2011-12 school years. Unless there is significant improvement among the current `D’ and `F’ and `C’ schools, there will be a significant increase in the number of failing and poor performing RSD charter and direct run schools.”

Categories Charter Schools, Jindal, Bobby, New Orleans, Teach for America TFA, Testing
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