Archives for category: Louisiana
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Gary Rubinstein: Was There a NAEP Miracle in Louisiana?

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2017 //
9

Gary Rubinstein has a somewhat startling habit of insisting on accuracy. He gets very annoyed when educators or pseudo-educators make claims that are false or only half-true or embellishments. I have worked with him on several occasions to track down the facts about “miracle schools” that turned out to be schools with high attrition rates or some other explanation of a dramatic spike in test scores or graduation rates.

In this post, he examines a claim made in an article by Louisiana Superintendent John White and Massachusetts Commissioner Mitchell Chester. Both of them are members of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, which is a strong indication that they are wedded to test scores and school choice.

Chester comes from a state that has historically been the highest-performing in the nation.

What bothers Rubinstein is that White uses the article to claim some sort of Louisiana “miracle” on his watch, and he cites NAEP scores. That sets off alarm bells for Rubinstein.

This is White’s claim:

In Louisiana, radical change means that 128,000 fewer students attend schools rated D or F than did in 2011. That’s had a powerful impact on the historically disadvantaged children too often consigned to failing schools, vaulting the performance of African-American fourth graders into the middle of the pack on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2015. In 2009, for example, black fourth graders ranked 43rd and 41st in the nation for proficiency in reading and math, respectively. Those rankings jumped to 20th and 23rd in 2015.

Rubinstein writes:

As far as the 128,000 fewer students attending schools rated D or F, since they are the ones who assign those ratings and since the criteria for getting a D or F has changed over the years, I don’t take that one too seriously.

But I was interested in ‘fact checking’ that NAEP statistic since that was one I hadn’t heard of before. I knew that Louisiana as a whole had very low NAEP scores and they were not improving very much over the years the way, for example Tennessee and Washington D.C. have, otherwise we’d be hearing about Louisiana NAEP much more.

White says that black fourth graders ranked 43rd in reading and 41st in math in 2009 and now rank 20th and 23rd. So I went to the National Center for Education Statistics website and dug into the data.

Since NAEP isn’t just for 4th graders, the first thing I checked was what their current ranking was for black 8th graders and saw that for 8th grade math they actually dropped from 39th to 44th between 2009 and 2015. For 8th grade reading they dropped from to 43rd to 45th between 2009 and 2015. So it is obvious why they don’t mention their 8th grade change in rankings.

I also checked how they have done in math for all 4th graders regardless of race. I found that in 2009 they were 48th while in 2015 they were not much better, at 44th. In reading they went from second to last in 2009 to 8th to last in 2015. A jump, but not the sort of thing that John White would ever use to prove his point about his knowledge of improving schools.

But he went on to inquire about the statistical significance of the fourth grade gains.

What he learned will surprise you.

Categories Louisiana, Massachusetts, NAEP

Lousiana Voucher School Program Graded D by the State

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2017 //
1

Students who wanted to sign up for the Louisiana Voucher Program had to make their decision by February 24. But that was before the state released the grades for the participating schools.

Overall, the voucher schools performed very poorly, as reported by Danielle Dreilinger writing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Please open the story for the links and for the data charts.

Louisiana parents interested in the school voucher program, which allows students from struggling public schools to attend participating private ones, had to sign up by Feb. 24. But they didn’t have an important piece of information: the most recent academic results from schools that accept vouchers.

The Louisiana Department of Education sent the 2016 Louisiana Scholarship Program performance scores to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune more than three months later than usual — on the voucher registration deadline.

Those scores synthesize test results and graduation rates to give a complete picture of how effectively private schools have educated their taxpayer-funded voucher students. Usually they are released with their public school equivalents, which came out in November.

Spokeswoman Sydni Dunn atrributed the difference to “a delay in the data verification process.” She noted that the department was two months early on submitting its annual report to the Legislature, which it also did Feb. 24.

Now in its fifth year, the Louisiana Scholarship Program lets low-income students enroll in participating private schools at public expense if they are entering kindergarten or zoned for public schools graded C, D or F. It’s the kind of program President Donald Trump is promoting Friday (March 3) as he visits his first school since taking office, and a signature initiative of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Louisiana’s long-awaited 2016 voucher data shows some improvement, to a level that is still very low.

Measured like a school district, the Louisiana Scholarship Program earned 61.4 on a 150-point scale, Dunn said. That would be a D on the state public school report card, and worse than any public school system except for those in St. Helena Parish, Morehouse Parish and Bogalusa. No voucher program earned an A.

In short, students are encouraged to leave a public school rated C, D, or F, for a voucher school that may be rated C, D, or F.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Louisiana, Vouchers

The Disappointing Results of Vouchers in Louisiana: An Evaluation of the First Two Years

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2017 //
13

A team of researchers associated with the University of Arkansas studied the first two years of the Louisiana Scholarship Program. Their report was released in late February. For those hoping to see a validation of the transformative power of vouchers, the results were disappointing, to say the least.

“The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide private school voucher program available to moderate- to low-income students in low-performing public schools. The LSP is limited to students with family income at or below 250% of the federal poverty line. Children in these families also have to either be entering kindergarten or be attending a public school that was graded C, D, or F for the prior school year. In the program’s rst year, 9,809 students were eligible applicants, with a majority of them located outside of Orleans parish. This group of students, the 2012-13 LSP applicant cohort, is the focus of our evaluation.

“The voucher size is the lesser of the amount the state and local government provides to the local school system in which the student resides or the tuition charged by the participating private school that the student attends. Average tuition at participating private schools ranges from $2,966 to $8,999, with a median of $4,925, compared to average per pupil spending of $8,500 in Louisiana’s public schools.

“To participate in the program, private schools must meet certain criteria related to enrollment; nancial practice; student mobility; and health, safety and welfare of students. Participating schools are prohibited from being selective in their enrollment of voucher students and must administer the state accountability test (LEAP and iLEAP) annually to voucher students in grades 3-8 and 10.

“Nearly 60% of applicants received scholarships for the 2012-13 school year. Of the students who received voucher awards, 86% used their voucher to enroll in a private school in the rst quarter of 2012- 13.

“Roughly 87% of the students in this cohort are black; with 8% white, and 3% Hispanic. Prior to applying for the LSP, students in the 2012-13 cohort performed below the state average in English Language Arts (ELA), math, science, and social studies by around 20 percentile points on the LEAP and iLEAP in 2011-12. Applicants to the program in 2012-13 were concentrated in the earlier grades, with a third entering Kindergarten through 3rd grade.”

As noted in the report, the students who received the voucher were already low-performing. Over two years, their test scores declined significantly. Even though some of the academic losses were reduced in the second year, the students nonetheless lost ground. The academic losses were significant.

Looking for other results, the researchers sought to measure non-cognitive skills like “grit,” self-esteem, “locus of control, and “political tolerance.”

The report says:

“The differences between the two groups are minuscule and not statistically significant. We find little evidence to suggest that, after two years, students receiving an LSP scholarship had noticeably different non-academic skills or political tolerance than students who did not receive a scholarship. Moreover, given the limitations in our measures, we stress that our results are largely inconclusive.”

The researchers conclude that the scholarship program improved integration because the public schools that students left became somewhat less segregated, while the private schools became somewhat less integrated. Thus, “When we combine the largely integrating effects of the program on students’ former public schools with its slightly segregating effects on their new private schools, the overall effect of the LSP is to improve the racial integration of Louisiana Schools.”

The researchers also examined what they believed were the competitive effects of vouchers on nearby public schools:

“We find no effects across both math and ELA overall, but find large positive effects on math and ELA test scores when we restrict the sample to those public schools with a private competitor in close proximity. In sum, our analysis of the competitive impacts of the LSP show that public school performance in Louisiana was either unaffected or modestly improved as a result of the program’s expansion.”

Overall, these are might slim pickings. The students who received a voucher experienced large academic losses, which might or might not rebound in years ahead. There was no change in their noncognitive skills, to the extent these can be measured. Highly segregated public schools became less segregated when black students left for private schools, but this was not the purpose of the program, and it is certainly a roundabout and inefficient way to increase racial integration. As for the supposed benefits to public schools, this seems awfully speculative. And again, the purpose of the program is to “save poor kids trapped in failing schools, not to raise test scores of students in public schools that low-performing students leave.

Bottom line: getting a voucher had negative effects on the test performance of those who received the vouchers.

Please review the bios of the authors:

Patrick Wolf, who has conducted numerous voucher evaluations, is part of the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, where he is “Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.” He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard where his mentor was Paul Peterson, the nation’s leading academic proponent of school choice. Jonathan Mills received his Ph.D. at the University of Arkansas in 2015. Anna Egalite received her Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas and postdoctoral work at Paul Peterson’s program at Harvard.

This is a team predisposed to find the bright side. But they are honest scholars and the bright side was hard to find.

Categories Louisiana, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: When Tenure Is Abolished, Teachers Leave

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2017 //
40

Mercedes Schneider reviews a new report from the Education Research Alliance in New Orleans. The bottom line: When Louisiana eliminated tenure, teacher turnover increased.

Louisiana Research: When Tenure Ends, Teachers Leave.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Removing job security encourages attrition. Other research has shown that instability and teacher churn are not good for teaching and learning.

Schneider writes:

“In 2012, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 1, commonly known as the “teacher tenure law.” Moreover, the Louisiana State Department of Education (LDOE) has translated Act 1 into an evaluation system whereby 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation is connected to “student learning”– the bottom line of which is student test score outcomes.

Act 1 began in 2012 as House Bill 974. The reason it is called Act 1 is that the 2012 Louisiana legislature rammed it though as the first act, with calculated speed, amid an atmosphere dripping with then-Governor Bobby Jindal’s business-and-industry-backed intention to bring “accountability” in the evaluating of the state’s teachers.

Once 2012 hit, Louisiana teachers began considering how and when to leave the profession. And each year beginning with 2012, Louisiana’s teacher workforce has experienced a noticeable exit of many experienced, seasoned teachers who otherwise would not have likely chosen to leave the profession so soon.

Thus, it comes as no surprise to me that a February 22, 2017, study by the Education Research Alliance (ERA) for New Orleans has found that based on teacher data from 2005 to 2012, Louisiana teachers did indeed begin leaving at a more notable rate, with those retirement-eligible comprising the greatest number of exiters.

Having 25+ years of employment, this group also happened to be the most experienced.

Moreover, it should come as no surprise that schools graded “F” lost the highest number of teachers in the post-Act-1 exit.”

The most experienced teachers left. The leavers disproportionately taught in high-needs schools. Can the state replace? The state seems to have succeeded in creating. A teacher shortage in hard-to-staff schools.

Categories Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Teacher Shortage, Teacher Tenure

What Trump Could Learn from Bobby Jindal’s Failed Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2016 //
14

Robert Mann, professor of journalism at Louisiana State University, hopes that Donald Trump will pay attention to the disaster of former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s failed voucher program. Open the article to read the links.

 

“This is where the disappointment of Jindal’s voucher program enters the picture, as policy makers and the media will inevitably examine its dismal performance. At Jindal’s urging, in 2008 lawmakers created the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), enabling some disadvantaged students to leave public schools graded a C or lower and enroll in a participating private school. By 2014, more than 6,000 public school students attended one of 126 private schools.

 

“In 2015, Jindal bragged about his program. “For students attending private schools on public dollars, almost all of whom arrived several years behind, their lives are being turned around,” he wrote in a column on CNN’s website.

 

“If only that were true. In a paper published last year by the National Bureau for Economic Research, three scholars documented “the large negative effects” and the reduced academic achievements of scholarship program students in 2013, the first year after the program’s expansion.

 

“Our results show that LSP vouchers reduce academic achievement,” the researchers concluded, explaining, “attendance at an LSP-eligible private school is estimated to lower math scores” and “reduce reading, science and social studies scores.”

 

“Why? “We find evidence,” the researchers wrote, “that the negative effects of the LSP may be linked to selection of low-quality private schools into the program.”

 

“A comprehensive 2016 study of the program for the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans also concluded “an LSP scholarship user who was performing at roughly the 50th percentile at baseline fell 24 percentile points below their control group counterparts in math after one year. By year 2, they were 13 percentile points below.”

 

“Imagine that. Pluck kids from troubled public schools, put them into substandard private schools and — voila! — you’ve made their academic condition worse.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Louisiana, New Orleans, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

An Urgent Plea from Teachers Displaced in Louisiana

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2016 //
8

This comment was posted on the blog:

Diane,
Can you please help us out in Louisiana. Many of our educators have lost everything. Many have been displaced because the schools and classrooms have been flooded and cannot be used at this time. The Louisiana Association of Educators, the NEA affiliate in Louisiana has established on its webpage http://www.lae.org, the 2016 Louisiana Flood Relief Fund. A small amount of $5 or $10 will help our educators.
Thank you

Please help if you can. I will.

I SUCCESSFULLY MADE A DONATION. I HAD TO REMOVE THE HYPHENS FROM MY CREDIT CARD NUMBER!

Categories Louisiana

Mark Dynarski Explains Why Two Voucher Studies Reached Opposite Conclusions

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2016 //
8

I recently posted a link to a Brookings Brief by Mark Dynarski, which warned that vouchers had not been successful in two states, Louisiana and Indiana. About the same time, the University of Arkansas released a research review that lauded vouchers. Although I did not know Dynarski, I contacted him and asked if he would explain the discrepancy for the readers of the blog. He graciously agreed.

He wrote:

In a recent article for Brookings, I highlighted recent research on vouchers to attend private schools that had found negative effects on student achievement. The same day, May 26, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial pointing to positive effects of school vouchers on student achievement, citing a review of studies published by researchers at the University of Arkansas. You asked if I could help readers understand the discrepancy.

In its reading of the University of Arkansas review, the Wall Street Journal included the review’s findings for voucher programs that operated in the US and programs that operated in Colombia and India. The largest positive effects of vouchers were from the program in Colombia. Education systems are quite different in other countries, however, and findings from Colombia and India have little relevance to debates about vouchers in the US today. If we ask about voucher programs that have operated in the US, the review reports that average effects of those programs is about zero.

The Louisiana and Indiana programs I focused on operated statewide. The negative effects reported for these programs could be a result of private schools being compared to higher-quality public schools in suburban and rural areas. Earlier voucher programs that reported positive results often operated in single cities—Milwaukee, New York City, Dayton, DC—which means studies of them essentially are comparing private schools only to urban public schools.

The Louisiana and Indiana programs also are recent, and my piece notes another possible explanation for their negative effects. Public schools have been under pressure for the last fifteen years to improve student achievement, which may have caused them to up their game. Recent research I cited concluded that public schools have substantially caught up with private schools. The National Assessment of Education Progress reports that private schools still have higher test scores than public schools, but those score differences could arise because of differences between private school students and public school students. The research approaches used in the Louisiana and Indiana studies allow for ‘apples to apples’ comparisons. Essentially the same students are compared in public and private schools and the test-score results favor public schools.

Vouchers will continue to be an important topic for discussion and debate, and we need to be open to new evidence and let our understanding of the world and of education be affected by it. I emphasized in my piece that our historical understanding that private schools perform better than public schools may be flawed. The University of Arkansas review is valuable for synthesizing a large amount of research on vouchers since the nineties into quantitative findings. The recent studies in Louisiana and Indiana are valuable for asking what the effects of vouchers might be today if a state were to begin a program or continue one. That the findings are negative means policymakers should proceed with caution—the relative positions of public and private schools may have changed.

I hope the discussion is useful for your readers, who rightly might feel a sense of whiplash from having different findings about vouchers released on the same day.

Kind regards,

Mark

http://www.brookings.edu/experts/dynarskim?view=bio

Categories Education Reform, Indiana, Louisiana, Research, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Louisiana Superintendent John White Sues Citizen Who Files a Request for Information

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2016 //
5

Since former Governor Bobby Jindal took control of the state education department in Louisiana, there have been numerous battles over access to public information.

The state superintendent appointed by Jindal, ex-TFA Broadie John White, has just made plain that public information is not public.

Mercedes Schneider reports that White has sued a citizen who made the mistake of seeking information from the state education department. Apparently John White doesn’t realize that he works for the public and is paid by the public.

As she says, this is a new low.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Data, Louisiana

Mercedes Schneider: What Happened to New Orleans?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2016 //
5

You may have read that Louisiana’s famous, controversial, ballyhooed Recovery School District has been dissolved. Eleven years after Hurricane Katrina, the district comprised of charter schools is being returned to the districts from which they were drawn. Most are in New Orleans and will be returned to the Orleans Parish School Board.

 

Can it be true? Are the charter champions really giving up their struggle? John White knows. He is the State Commissioner who regularly boasts about the miracle of the RSD. But he is not telling.

 

Michael Klonsky has his doubts. So does Karran Harper Royal.

 

 

Mercedes Schneider has written two versions.

 

Here is a brief overview.

 

Here is her close analysis of the law. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Louisiana, New Orleans

James Kirylo: Why My Son Will Opt Out–Again

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2016 //
1

James Kirylo is a professor of teaching and learning at Southeastern Louisiana University. His son opted out of testing last year. And he will opt out again this year. He went to his local school board to tell them his reasons. He did it twice.

 

In this post on Mercedes Schneider’s blog, Kirylo explains why.

 

When No Child Left Behind was passed, we were told that it would raise achievement so high that no child would be left behind. That was not true.

 

Kirylo writes:

 

There you have it—fourteen years later since NCLB was introduced—standardized tests, as they are currently administered, interpreted, and used in school communities across the country, do not work, have not worked, and will not work as they were presumably intended. In fact, the adverse effects of them are overwhelming. Nevertheless, we continue to use them like a bad drug to which the desperate addict keeps crawling back.

 

And like the addict who is in need of dire help, until there is admittance to the problem, school systems will continue down this addictive path of testing until that type of assessment system is recognized as inherently harmful. Until then, therefore, parents have only one option to not enable the addiction to testing: opt-out.

 

He is also outraged by the school grades that the state slaps on every school. As it happens, his children’s school does not have a high grade. Kirylo knows the letter grade is meaningless:

 

 

 

My two children attend a school that has a state report card grade that has been hovering between a D and C– hardly a glaring narrative. What am I thinking by sending my sons to just a slightly-below-average school– and, by implication, one that is populated by slightly-below average teachers and administrators, only to be surrounded by slightly-below average children? But indeed, that is the warped message corporate reformers want to convey.

 

In other words, this objectification of children and those who work in public schools—which is particularly heightened when my children’s school is only slightly above the prospect of receiving even more threats to intensify the obsession on everything testing—ultimately works to close those schools. In short, corporate reform operates under the framework of threats, coercion, shaming, and blaming, and it has taken us nowhere.

 

What does matter is a strong public education system that is intentionally mindful of the common good. This is done through collaboration, cooperation, and the cultivation of meaningful relationships, which is attentive to building up the community, a state, a nation–all of which is filtered through the fostering of developmentally appropriate practices–and through the professionalization of teaching.

 

To be sure, the assistant principal who every morning greets my two boys with a welcoming smile at carpool drop-off and clearly demonstrates great care is an “A” person; the teachers who work hard, communicate well, and have the best interests of my children’s educational growth are “A” people; the principal who I had the fortune to teach in graduate school is an “A” administrator who is diligently working to push the school forward; and, finally the over 1000 children who attend my sons’ school are “A” human beings, relying on the adults to cultivate a schooling environment that works to maximize their opportunities.

 

We all should have no patience with so-called school report grades that are misleading and by which the public is being erroneously manipulated. Thus, the only option I see if things don’t change is to opt-out.

Categories Accountability, Louisiana, NCLB, Opt Out, Resistance, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »