Archives for category: New Orleans

Douglas Harris of the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University responds here to critics of the 2015 study of New Orleans in which he was the lead researcher. Its findings were the same as his 2018 study.

He summarizes and links to the divergent views about the New Orleans’ adoption of market-driven reforms.

The school system before Katrina was corrupt and dysfunctional. After the hurricane in 2005, the state stepped in to turn most schools into privately managed charters.

He writes:

“In a study I conducted with Matthew Larsen, we found that the city’s test scores rose dramatically because of the post-Katrina reforms. Even the most pessimistic estimates suggest that the reforms significantly increased scores (and probably high school graduation rates and college entry) and more than alternative policies and programs would have. These achievement gains also occurred across the board. In this respect, low-income students were not hurt. They benefited academically.

“That being said, some of the rhetoric of reform supporters has gone overboard. There are some real issues and questions, just not the ones that these critics have set their sights on.

“For example, though disadvantaged students benefited, they seem to have benefited less than other groups. Early on, as this entirely new type of system was being put in place, there were real horror stories about how special education students and others were suspended and expelled at high rates. Under pressure from community groups, state and local leaders took several steps to address the problem, yet it remains unclear whether the problems are solved.

“Critics are concerned that schools under the reforms are too focused on test scores. This is a national concern as well, but the intensity of test-based accountability in New Orleans is even stronger and may reduce focus on other important educational goals like creativity and local cultural knowledge. In the coming years, we’ll get a better sense of the real results by looking at college and beyond.

“One potential weakness of a system of autonomous schools like the New Orleans model is that disadvantaged students can more easily fall between the cracks. With neighborhood attendance zones, a specific school is responsible for each student. With school choice, tens of thousands of students are in the hands of one or two district staff people. And there are signs that high school dropouts are being under-reported.

“Finally, whatever lessons we might draw from New Orleans may be exclusive to New Orleans. Our student outcomes had nowhere to go but up. New Orleans also saw a massive influx of federal and philanthropic funding and skilled people from across the country that other cities are unlikely to experience. Other districts should look to New Orleans, but tread carefully.“

If only the professional Reformers heeded Harris’ words of caution. You can be sure they will use his New Orleans study to tout the advantages of privatization.

For example, David Leonhardt did not write two columns in the New York Times to report the findings and cautions that Harris here reports, but to tout the wonders of charters.

Now that Harris has won $10 million from the DeVos’ Department of Education to establish a National Center for Research on School Choice, perhaps he can help shine a light on how School Choice has worked in Detroit and Milwaukee. Perhaps he can persuade the professional Reformers that the neediest kids are the ones least likely to benefit and most likely, as he put it, to “fall between the cracks.” Then, they might drop their false narrative about “saving poor kids from failing schools.” But that may be too much to hope for.

What David Leonhardt Ignores, Denies and Gets Wrong about the 2005 Seizure of New Orleans Schools

Jan Resseger deconstructs David Leonhardt’s columns celebrating the privatization of New Orleans schools, which she says is riddled with ignorance. If charter schools were as great as he says, the best urban districts in the nation would be Detroit, D.C., and Milwaukee. They are not. They cluster at the bottom. Explain that, David.

Why am I posting so much about New Orleans?Because it is the foundational lie of Corporate Reform.

For her many links, open her post.

Jan writes:

What David Leonhardt Ignores, Denies and Gets Wrong about the 2005 Seizure of New Orleans Schools

What David Leonhardt Ignores, Denies and Gets Wrong about the 2005 Seizure of New Orleans Schools

The NY Times columnist David Leonhardt reflects anew on the school transformation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After a recent visit to New Orleans, Leonhardt extols a New Orleans miracle. Many knowledgeable people have disagreed. Perhaps Leonhardt’s new column is a case of confirmation bias or maybe just rose colored glasses.

Leonhardt concludes: “(T)he academic progress has been remarkable. Performance on every kind of standardized test has surged… People here point to two main forces driving the progress: Autonomy and accountability. In other school districts, teachers and principals are subject to a thicket of rules, imposed by a central bureaucracy. In New Orleans, schools have far more control. They decide which extracurriculars to offer and what food to serve. Principals choose their teachers—and can let go of weak ones. Teachers, working together, often choose their curriculum.” “The charters here educate almost all public-school students, so they can’t cherry pick.”

Leonhardt is flat-out wrong on that last point. What is different about New Orleans’ charter schools is the Louisiana law passed right after Hurricane Katrina, a law allowing charter schools explicitly to select their students. Charter schools in New Orleans can use admission tests and other admissions screens that cannot be used by the charter schools in any other state. I remember being shocked by the formation of selective charter schools when I visited New Orleans myself in the summer of 2006. The Rev. Torin Sanders, a member of the Orleans Parish School Board, told me: “Pre-Katrina, New Orleans already had a dual system for privileged and poor children. We used to call the selective schools our magnet program. Then we used the term ‘city-wide access.’ These schools were created for children of promise. After the hurricane, legislators said Act 35 created the charters to demonstrate innovative ideas for at-risk students, but the highest performing schools… went charter first. The law was used to make these privileged schools unencumbered and autonomous.”

For example, after the hurricane, New Orleans added a selective charter high school by seizing the storied Uptown Neighborhood’s comprehensive, public Alcee Fortier High School and turning it into a charter high school with priority admission for the children of faculty at Tulane and other local universities. Tulane granted $1.5 million to clean and transform the old neighborhood high school into its model charter. Although Fortier’s former neighborhood students were allowed to apply to the new charter Lusher High School through an admissions test, the test was waived for children of professional staff at Tulane, Loyola, Xavier and Dillard Universities.

A decade after the New Orleans’ schools takeover, Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education explored the implications of the Louisiana law that permits selective charter schools in New Orleans: “Louisiana’s charter law explicitly allows some schools to engage in selective enrollment practices that resemble those of private schools—for example, requiring minimum grade point averages and standardized test scores, as well as other criteria, for admission.”

The Stanford report continues: “It is clear that the organization of schools in New Orleans is highly stratified: The school tiers sort students by race, income, and special education status, with the most advantaged students at the top and the least advantaged at the bottom. Only the top two sub-tiers of schools within Tier 1 have any appreciable number of white and Asian students and any noticeable number of students who are non-poor… Because schools at the top of the hierarchy largely choose their student body, few students actually have the option to attend these schools, while those schools at the bottom are assigned students who are not chosen elsewhere or who are pushed out of schools further up the hierarchy… This stratification occurs as a function of both admissions patterns and transfer/exclusion patterns. The top schools not only have selective enrollment criteria, they are also permitted to ask students who do not maintain a certain grade point average to leave. Similarly, they are allowed to determine which and how many special needs students they admit, often turning parents away because they do not, for example, serve students with cognitive or physical disabilities that require significant accommodations. The students identified as ‘special education’ in the highest performing schools are generally designated as ‘gifted’ or ‘talented,’ and rarely include the kinds of disabilities found in lower tier schools. When schools at the top of the hierarchy, disenroll students whose GPAs have slipped, or turn away children with special needs, these children end up attending schools further down on the hierarchy.”

Not only is Leonhardt’s column based on a factual error when he highlights what he imagines to be “open admissions” in New Orleans’ charter schools, but there is also so much that he chooses to ignore. In a column last year for the Brookings Institution, Andre Perry describes the ideologically driven seizure of the city’s schools and details some of the collateral damage: “Sure, rebuilding school buildings and improving systems are worthy goals after any disaster. But Hurricane Katrina blew a window of opportunity wide open for New Orleans reformers to ram through a mostly predetermined agenda of disempowering the New Orleans Public School Board. In the weeks after the storm, the Louisiana legislature changed its previous definition of an academically failing school to be able to take control of the vast majority of schools in the city.”

Then the Recovery School District fired the entire staff of the public school district, ignoring tenure laws and eliminating the teachers union. Perry continues: “Of the more than 7,000 employees who were terminated from New Orleans schools in the months after Katrina… approximately 4,300 were teachers, 71 percent of whom were black, and 78 percent of whom were women. Not only did this negatively impact the black middle class of the entire city, it emasculated the black community as a whole, which still feels the sting of that decision today.” In 2015, Teach for America bragged about its “growing footprint” in New Orleans: “Today, TFA corps members and alumni comprise a full 20 percent of the New Orleans teaching force, and over 50 alumni serve as leaders at the school or school systems level.”

Andre Perry’s hindsight demonstrates his own personal learning from the charter experiment: Perry served for several years as the CEO of the New Beginnings charter schools in New Orleans. Writing for the Hechinger Report, Katy Reckdahl quotes Perry describing the way he had to exaggerate expectations as he proposed the formation of a new charter school: “Perry, then CEO of the New Beginnings Schools Foundation submitted an application for Gentilly Terrace Elementary predicting that 100 percent of the school’s fourth and eighth graders would reach proficiency or close to it… ‘If I had submitted more realistic numbers, the state would have never accepted it… There is a general belief that you have to shoot for the stars or you’ll be shortchanging a possibility of miraculous growth.’”

In this week’s NY Times piece, David Leonhardt alleges that, “(A)cademic progress has been remarkable. Performance on every kind of standardized test has surged.”

That conclusion certainly contradicts reports last November about a collapse of state standardized test scores. For The Lens, Marta Jewson reported: “State rankings for most New Orleans schools are on a three-year slide, with 65 percent of the schools dropping from 2014 to 2017. The drop in school performance scores from 2016 to 2017 caused hand-wringing among the city’s education leaders, but The Lens’ analysis of state data shows it’s just part of a worrisome trend… Charter networks Kipp New Orleans Schools, New Beginnings Schools Foundation, ReNEW Schools and Algiers Charters operate a combined 23 schools. Only one of them improved its school performance score from 2016 to 2017… The three-year drop appears to confirm education leaders’ fears about what would happen when tests aligned with tougher standards were introduced in 2015… Some school leaders say those tougher standards have caught up with the city’s schools….”

Yes, scores tend to drop when new tests and new standards are introduced. But the fact remains that Leonhardt’s boast about remarkable progress seems to contradict a three year slide in scores.

In the fall of 2006, writing for the Center for Community Change, Leigh Dingerson described the seizure of New Orleans’s public schools: “Over the past twelve months, buoyed by the support of the federal government, a network of conservative anti-government activists have moved with singular intensity to patch together a new vision for K-12 education that they hope will become a national model. It is a vision that disdains the public sector and those who work within it. It is a vision based on competition and economic markets. It is a vision of private hands spending public funds. Most disturbing, it is a vision that casts families and students as ‘customers,’ who shop for schools in isolation from—and even in competition with—their neighbors. It is a vision that, like the game of musical chairs, requires someone to be left without a seat.”

Several years after the hurricane and the New Orleans school takeover, in perhaps the most stunning moment I have ever experienced at a public meeting, a well-known keynoter echoed then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—calling Hurricane Katrina a remarkable opportunity for New Orleans to redesign its schools. A woman in the audience leapt to her feet and loudly contradicted his conclusion by telling the truth of her own experience as a parent: “They stole our public schools and they stole our democracy, all while we were out of town.”

Mercedes Schneider responds here to an article in The Washington Post by one Emily Langhorne of the “Progressive Policy Institute,” which is one of those DC advocacy groups that champions charter schools.

Langhorne seems to be the designated point person at PPI assigned to churn out pro-charter propaganda. She was last seen writing about the graduation rates of D.C. charter schools, falsely claiming that they are higher than the graduation rates of the D.C. public schools. That claim was shot down by a genuine expert, Mary Levy, a civil rights lawyer who has been tracking the travails of education in D.C. for many years.

Recently, asserted that New Orleans has become a national model. As Schneider explains, this is simply not true, unless you are a fan of separate and unequal schools.

“When one writes an op-ed on the post-Katrina success of New Orleans schools, one should consider what one is trying to sell as success. Continued racial inequity, low school grades for almost half of the charter replacements for once-community schools, abounding fiscal corruption, and community exploitation are all components of the true narrative that is almost-all-charter New Orleans schools 13 years post-Katrina.

“Anyone omitting these sad and frustrating realities from an op-ed on the New Orleans charter miracle is either ill-informed or allied to promoting a flashy, market-based-ed-reform agenda likely from headquarters hundreds of miles away from those Katrina-swept streets.”

A note to Emily Langhorne: Be careful not to develop a reputation as a propagandist. The money is good, but think about your reputation.

Paul Thomas has gathered a reading list about the Recovery School District and claims that it was proof positive that “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein’s term) works.

Since Reformers have experienced failure in everything else they have attempted, the New Orleans “miracle” is their last best hope for proving the “success” of privatization. David Leonhardt of the New York Times called his one-sided review of the New Orleans “miracle” fact-based while ignoring the inconvenient facts that disproved the claims. He should read Paul Thomas’ list and try again.

Leonie Haimson, parent activist in New York City, critiques David Leonhardt’s highly admiring and uncritical review of the latest study of charter schools in New Orleans.

Leonhardt says he wants a “fact-based debate,” but Leonie says, he didn’t provide “fact-based journalism.”

She opened the links he provided and found that most have nothing to do with his claims. He introduces no new facts or evidence.

She begins:

David Leonhardt’s latest NY Times column touting charter schools is full of bogus claims and sloppy journalism. He inveighs against progressive critics, writes that he wants a fact-based debate over education reform “in a more nuanced, less absolutist way than often happens” but then adds: “Initially, charters’ overall results were no better than average. But they are now.” The link is to a CREDO website that doesn’t show this.

The most recent CREDO national study of charters from 2013 examined charters in 26 states plus NYC and found significant (if tiny) learning gains in reading on average but none in math. CREDO is generally considered a pro-charter organization, funded by the Walton Foundation and many independent scholars have critiqued its methodology.

Moreover, the main finding of the 2013 study was that the vast majority of charter schools do no better than public schools, as Wendy Lecker has pointed out. In 2009, CREDO found, 83 percent of charters had the same or worse results in terms of test scores than public schools, and in 2013, about 71-75 percent had the same or worse results.

Finally, to the extent that in some urban districts, there are studies showing that charters outperform public schools on test scores, there are many possible ways to explain these results, including an overemphasis on test prep, differential student populations, peer effects, higher student attrition rates and under-funding of most urban public schools.

Leonhardt also writes that “The harshest critics of reform, meanwhile, do their own fact-twisting. They wave away reams of rigorous research on the academic gains in New Orleans, Boston, Washington, New York, Chicago and other cities, in favor of one or two cherry-picked discouraging statistics. It’s classic whataboutism. ”

Yet three out of these four links have nothing to do with charter schools, nor are they peer-reviewed studies. The NYC study by Roland Fryer instead focuses on which attributes of NYC charter schools seemed to be correlated with higher test scores compared to other NYC charter schools.

The Chicago link goes to a NY Times column Leonhardt himself wrote on overall increases in test scores and graduation rates in Chicago public schools that doesn’t even mention charter schools. The DC link also is far from “rigorous research,” but sends you to a DCPS press release about the increase in 2017 PARCC scores, with again no mention of charter schools, or even “reform” more broadly.

If there is indeed “reams of rigorous research” supporting charter schools, one might expect that Leonhardt would link to at least one actual, rigorous study showing this.

Open her post to see her masterful analysis of Leonhardt’s vapid claims.

The Orleans Parish School Board has hired an auditor for Harney charter school upon suspicions of financial shenanigans or worse.

The Orleans Parish School Board confirmed Tuesday that a charter school improperly withheld employees’ retirement contributions, which The Lens has reported could have reduced their investment gains and may violate federal guidelines.

The school district is looking to hire a forensic auditing firm to help investigate Edgar P. Harney Spirit of Excellence Academy and other schools with financial issues. The audit could help quantify employees’ losses.

By The Lens’ count, Harney has received six warnings since last fall related to finances, enrollment, special education, public records and improper restraint of a student. Two more warnings are on the way.

Meanwhile, its chief financial officer is under an ethics investigation for being paid on the side to do school accounting.

Orleans Parish schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. said the embattled Central City school might not reapply for its charter, which is up for renewal this fall….

In a similar case in Baltimore, delayed retirement payments resulted in a federal conviction and a two-year prison sentence.

Last week, the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University released a report declaring that the market-driven reforms in the New Orleans schools were a success. The formula for success: Get a big hurricane to wipe out a large swath of your city, close down the public schools, fire all the teachers, eliminate the union, get the federal government and foundations to pour in huge sums of money, and voila! A miracle! The miracle of the market!

When watching an illusionist at work, keep your eye on the action. Watch his hands. Or watch what else is happening (I saw an illusionist last year in Las Vegas and still haven’t figured out the tricks he pulled off while everyone watched his hands).

Watch the master illusionists at the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University. They said that the New Orleans corporate takeover was a roaring success. They said it in 2015. They said it again in 2018. Guess what? On the same day that they published their latest study, Betsy DeVos gave them a $10 Million grant to become the National Research Center on School Choice! What a happy coincidence!

Unfortunately for the ERA, Mercedes Schneider figured out the Big Trick.

You see, after the hurricane in 2005, the state created the Recovery School District (RSD) and took control of most of the NOLA schools, turning them over to charter operators. The best schools, however, remained under the control of the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB).

The RSD is all-charter. Forty percent of the charters are failing schools. The white kids go to the top-rated charters. The failing schools are almost all-Black.

The best schools in New Orleans are the OPSB schools, some of which are selective-admission charter schools. Not surprisingly, the selective-admission schools have the highest test scores.

The ERA pulled a fast one. In its report, it combined the results of the less-than-stellar RSD with those of the high-performing OPSB.

Schneider titled her post: “How to Make New Orleans Market Ed Reform a Success: Hide RSD Failure Inside an OPSB-RSD Data Blend.”

She writes:

“The problem here is that OPSB schools were never taken over by the state, which means that the New Orleans “failing school” narrative does not include these schools, and that whether they be direct-run or converted to charter schools, OPSB schools have test-score advantages over the “failing” RSD schools taken over by the state. Moreover, a number of OPSB schools are selective-admission charter schools (see also here and here), which gives even more advantage over state-run RSD schools (and which puts a snag in the “open school choice for families” narrative).

“It is the OPSB advantage that allows researches to combine post-Katrina, OPSB and RSD data and actually hide the lack of progress that state-run, all-charter RSD has made, all the while selling a generalized version of New Orleans market-ed-reform success to the public. I have seen this ploy in the past from the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) in its efforts to conceal low ACT composite scores of RSD schools that it was supposed to take over and reform right into higher test scores, and I am seeing it here in the Harris-Larsen study.

”OPSB schools are not only chiefly responsible for the results in the Harris-Larsen study; OPSB schools are concealing the mediocrity (at best) that was the RSD, state-takeover-charter-conversion experiment…”

As it happens, David Leonhardt of the New York Times today published the second part of his two-part encomium about the apotheosis of the New Orleans schools, due entirely to the miracle of the market. Ironically, his article is titled, “A Plea for a Fact-Based Debate About Charter Schools.” Ironic, because he swallows the charter propaganda whole. He apparently doesn’t know that the “miracle” was the result of merging the RSD scores with the OPSB scores. He never acknowledges that 40% of the RSD schools are failing and segregated. He is right, however, that it is time for a fact-based debate about what happened in New Orleans, and his two articles did not contribute to that debate.

Watch the illusionists. Great tricks. Don’t be fooled.

Mercedes Schneider, high school teacher in Louisiana with a doctorate in statistics and research methodology, has some lessons for New York Times’ columnist David Leonhardt about the sham of charter schools in New Orleans.

One way to look at the takeover: The charter schools with a white majority are rated A or B. The charter schools that are almost completely black are rated D or F.

Another way to describe this: Separate and unequal.

Which game shall we play: Follow the Money or Connect the Dots?

Only two days ago, the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University released a glowing report about the privatization of public schools in New Orleans.

Only one day later, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the team a grant of $10 Million to continue their work on market-driven school choice.

With $10 Million, maybe they will get around to checking with researchers who don’t agree with their findings, such as those I cited in this post.

And I hope the team at Tulane-ERA will answer this puzzle:

Louisiana is one of the lowest scoring states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (“The Nation’s Report Card”). Its scores declined significantly from 2015-2017. New Orleans is the largest school district in the state. If its results are amazing, why did the state drop to 48th in the nation in 8th grade reading and 50th in the nation on the 8th grade math on NAEP? This doesn’t add up.

David Leonhardt writes for the New York Times. In today’s newspaper, he writes about the miraculous results of the charter takeover of New Orleans. Leonhardt bought every phony claim made by the charter industry because he did not interview any critics. This is not good journalism.

He did not interview Mercedes Schneider, the Louisiana researcher-teacher who has written many times about New Orleans and who debunked the New Orleans Miracle here. In addition to teaching high school students in English, Schneider has a doctorate in statistics and research methodology. If Leonhardt had interviewed her, she would have explained that the average ACT scores for charter schools in New Orleans are low and stagnant.

He did not interview Professor Andrea Gabor, the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College, who debunked the New Orleans miracle in her brilliant new book “After the Education Wars.” If he didn’t have time to read her book, he could have prepared for his trip to New Orleans by reading her article in “The New York Times” about the myth of the New Orleans “makeover.”

He did not interview Professor Kristen Buras of Georgia State University, who debunked the New Orleans Miracle in her book, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance. Her latest article, written with veteran New Orleans Educator Raynard Sanders, is here. Its title: “History Rewritten: Masking the Failure of the Recovery School District.”

In a report published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2012 (in which she dissented about charter school “miracles”), Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University called New Orleans “the lowest-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest-performing states.”

He did not interview the many parents who have complained about the fact that 40% of the charter schools are rated D or F, and that these failing charters are more than 90% black.

He did interview the people who have made a career selling the New Orleans Miracle. He fell for every boast they made.

Did anyone tell him that Louisiana is one of the lowest scoring states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (“The Nation’s Report Card”), and that its scores declined significantly from 2015-2017? New Orleans is the largest school district in the state. If its results are as amazing as Leonhardt thinks, why did the state drop to 48th in the nation in 8th grade reading and 50th in 8th grade math on NAEP? Maybe he can explain this in another column.