Category Archives: New Orleans

We are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time.

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In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans.

Over the past ten years, New Orleanians, with the support of the nation, rebuilt their school system.

The system is predicated upon three principles: educators operate schools, families choose from these schools, and government holds the schools accountable for performance and equity.

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The title of this post comes from Doug Harris’ article on his study on the New Orleans reforms. After summarizing the effects, which he estimates at .4 standard deviations, Doug writes:

We are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time.

Doug also notes that these reforms were accomplished at a significantly lower cost than reforms such as pre-k access and class size reduction.

Here’s a chart that tracks the progress of the reform impacts:

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To put this .4 standard deviation in context, the black-white achievement gap is about one standard deviation.

Over ten years, in the midst of chaos and a struggle to rebuild, New Orleans students and educators achieved an effect that is almost half the size of the black white gap in this country.

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The cynic in me assumes that this study will not change much.

After all, it’s just the latest in a series of studies and data analysis that clearly demonstrate that New Orleans children are now getting a much better education than they were before the storm.

Education reform is so polarized that an effort that radically increases student achievement for poor and minority students will likely continue to be dismissed.

The cynic in me wonders: How much do the glaciers have to melt? How much does the sea have to rise? How high do CO2 levels need to be? At what point does denial become a clear signal of scientific ignorance?

The optimist in me believes that these results will further build momentum for education leaders to engage in meaningful reform. Reform that hands power back to educators and families rather that simply shuffles the deck chairs.

Because let’s be clear, that’s what too many school districts are doing: they are shuffling the chairs while kids get screwed.

The realist in me knows that we that we have not yet proven that the New Orleans reforms can scale to other cities; that the reforms, despite all they achieved, included numerous and signficant missteps; that there is much we still don’t know; that there are decades of work ahead.

The realist in me also knows that we need to ensure that New Orleans schools continue to improve. And that this will be very difficult. The .4 standard deviation gain needs to become a one standard deviation gain.

But, after ten years of work, here’s a big shout of praise, admiration, and joy for New Orleans families and educators.

It’s only because of them that we can say this:

We are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time.

Amen.

Quite a Jump: NOLA ACT Scores Move from ~25th to ~40th Percentile

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ACT scores just came out for New Orleans.

In 2005, the ACT composite average for New Orleans was a 17.

In 2014, it was 18.8

Also, in 2005, the ACT was not required, so many fewer students took it.

In 2014, the ACT was required, so nearly all New Orleans students took it.

It is estimated that if all students took the test in 2005, the New Orleans ACT score would have been 16.

The ACT test has changed over time, so I dug up (what I think) are the 2005 percentile rankings and the 2014 percentile rankings (it appears that these numbers are not yet final).

In 2005, scoring a 17 put you at the 26th percentile in the country. Scoring a 16 put you in the 20th percentile.

In 2014, scoring a 19 put you at the the 42nd percentile in the country.

Given these figures, a rough estimate is that New Orleans has moved from about the 25th to 40th percentile in ACT scores.

If these numbers are right (let me know if I’ve made a mistake), this is incredible progress.

Over the next decade, I look forward to watching New Orleans catch and then surpass the national average.

Some more data below:

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The Hidden Connection Between Charter Schools and Equity

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The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools just released a report that I wrote…

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You can read the whole thing here (you can skim it in about 10 minutes).

I enjoyed writing the piece because it allowed me to reflect on what I believe to be the most overlooked part of the New Orleans reform effort: the fact that the reforms significantly increased equity, not just academic quality.

Some excerpts below…

…at the outset of the reform effort, New Orleans leaders failed to ensure that all schools in the city adopted equitable practices. Bad apples in the charter community denied enrollment to students with severe special needs and expelled students for low-level infractions. While these schools were in the minority, their practices brought into question whether or not the reforms could benefit every student.

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Undoubtedly, there are legitimate reasons to support neighborhood schools: families value school proximity, and a neighborhood school can connect the greater community to the children in the area. However, neighborhood schools also serve as the anchors of extreme inequality in access to public schools.

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In too many cities, the government turns a blind eye to the persistence of failing schools, thereby undermining any real hope for educational equity. In these cities, operating a school is the right of the incumbent: save for the most extreme circumstances, the school goes on.

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Ultimately, it is not a coincidence that there has been a direct relationship between the RSD reducing the number of schools it operated and the RSD increasing its effective- ness as a regulator.

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Various organizations—including the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and numerous community-based organizations—opposed the strategy of charter school expansion. Some were opposed to charter schools on ideological and policy grounds, others opposed the way charter schooling was implemented in New Orleans.

The differences in ideology and policy remain unresolved. However, at times, the social justice community’s calling out of unjust school actions and systems level inequities acceler- ated the implementation of equity solutions.

Perhaps, over time, New Orleans will become a model for how education reform leaders and social justice leaders can influence each other in a manner that is for the betterment of all children. At a minimum, charter advocates need to welcome a dialogue with social justice leaders as it will create positive pressure for change.

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Moreover, this bipartisanship has been sustained despite attacks from the flanks of both parties. The far left continues to levy accusations of privatization, while the far right bemoans the centralization of equity and accountability regulations.

Do read the whole thing.

Were the New Orleans Reforms Worth It?

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Times Picayune Headline from coverage of the Education Research Alliance conference

There was a reoccurring theme at the Education Research Alliance Conference: people admitting that student achievement had gone up but now asking “was it worth the cost?”

This is very important.

Numerous studies and data analysis have shown that the New Orleans results were real, but I do think Doug Harris’ study – if it holds up – will be the definitive research that puts to bed any notion that the reforms did not increase student achievement.

In case you missed his presentation, Doug found .2-.45 standard deviation achievement gains. In subsequent posts, I’ll try and put that in context, but for now it’s worth spending time on the rhetorical shifts that are happening.

Instead of fierce debates denying improvements,conversations shifted to whether the reforms were worth it.

This is an important question, and it’s a fair one.

Surely, there is some cost to reform that is too high. Weighing different values and interests will determine where one sets this bar.

In the case of New Orleans, the main cost discussed at the conference was how the democratically elected Orleans Parish School Board fired the teachers after Hurricane Katrina.

It is undeniable that this occurred and that it led to real harm in the lives of many people. I also think that it’s difficult to extrapolate what this might mean for other cities.

Katrina did not just disrupt the lives of teachers, it disrupted the lives of everyone. Hundreds of thousands of people lost some combination of their homes and jobs. All of this was devastating.

Other cities, thankfully, will be trying to improve education under very different circumstances.

As for the future of New Orleans, I think there is both a moral and pragmatic imperative to increase the number of teachers being drawn from within the city.

No one is thinking about this more than the leaders of New Orleans schools, and I’m excited to watch New Orleans educators reinvent what it means to recruit and develop teachers in a manner that empowers communities, children and adults alike.

My hope is that other cities will be able to learn from these innovations, and that these innovations will change the current calculus of the question: “was increasing student achievement worth the cost?”

I remain convinced that reform need not be a zero sum game between community empowerment and student achievement. People should not misread New Orleans history and draw an erroneous conclusion that this is the moral of the story.

My Remarks at the Closing Session of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans Conference

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Doug and his team at the Education Research Alliance put on a great and important conference. More importantly, they’ve done a lot of solid research. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be chronicaling the implications of the research as it is released publicly.

But for now, in case it is of interest, see below for my remarks.

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Over the past year, we’ve all had to watch the consequences of social injustice. In Ohio, Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy, was slain by police. In Baltimore, protestors demanded that we pay attention to police brutality and social decay.

Increasing educational opportunity will not solve all the problems of social injustice, but these problems will not be solved without increased educational opportunity.

All this is to say is that the stakes are incredibly high.

Children, many of them black, are dying in the streets.

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The following is taken from a presentation Doug Harris gave on his study on the New Orleans reform efforts.

“The results suggest that the reforms had large positive cumulative effects of 0.20 to 0.45 standard deviations. The reform effects are larger than the effects from other commonly discussed reform strategies, such as class size reduction and early childhood education.”

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New Orleans educators have done what no one thought was possible: they transformed a struggling urban educational system.

Classroom by classroom, student by student, they reinvented what public education could be.

We don’t know if their efforts can be replicated in other cities.

There are reasons to think they can: other cities will not have to grapple with trauma of Hurricane Katrina

There are also reasons to think it will be difficult to replicate these successes: it may prove easier to build new educational systems than it is to change existing once.

We simply don’t know whether the New Orleans successes can be scaled.

But what scares me is that we’ll never get the chance to find out.

There’s a very real chance that many educations leaders will look at this study, intellectually understand the magnitude of the effect, but then say: “I can’t support this because it’s not my kind of reform.”

I hope that this doesn’t happen. Because we can’t build tribes around our preferred educational approaches. The stakes are too high. If we’ve uncovered something that can be a partial antidote to the inequities that still plague our nation, then we owe it to our children to see if this antidote can work elsewhere.

As a country, we can’t turn away from what happened in New Orleans. We need to keep on studying it, we need to keep on making it better, and, most of all, we need to see if the reforms that happened here can be a part of righting social injustices across our country.

No One Knows if Charter School Districts Will Work

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A couple of impetuses for this post:

1. This Politico Pro article: The New Orleans Model is Praised but Unproven.

2. An idea from Taleb’s : it is much easier to predict what will vanish than it is to predict what will take it’s place.

3. Cowen’s First Law: “There is something wrong with everything (by which I mean there are few decisive or knockdown articles or arguments, and furthermore until you have found the major flaws in an argument, you do not understand it).”

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Here’s what I think we know:

1. The creation of a charter school district has led to significant academic growth in New Orleans, though absolute scores remain low.

2. New Orleans leaders have made plenty of mistakes along the way.

That’s really about it. And this is not to say that we know (1) with a 100% certainty. The New Orleans reform effort was not a controlled experiment. But nearly all of the data leads to this being a reasonable conclusion.

I would also venture this: not a lot has worked in achieving significant academic gains in urban school systems that serve at-risk students.

So the fact that New Orleans students have achieved such gains is very important.

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Here’s what I hope we will know ten years from now:

1. Other cities can also achieve academic growth by becoming charter school districts.

2. New Orleans can become an excellent school district because of becoming a charter school district.

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I often struggle to balance: being an advocate for an idea, attempting to implement an idea, and studying whether the idea is working.

In my work, I do all three very often, and it’s hard to do all three well at the same time.

When you’re advocating for an idea, it can be difficult to objectively study it, as your emotions get caught up in the communications effort.

When you’re implementing an idea, it can be difficult to (honestly) bullishly advocate for it, because you understand how hard the work is.

When you’re studying an idea, it can be difficult to advocate for it, because you understand how complicated the data is.

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In writing longer pieces I am often most successful at being disciplined: I am clear that the idea of charter school districts working is only a hypothesis, and that the goal of the next ten years of work should be to determine if this hypothesis is true.

On , I’m probably the least disciplined, though I’m working on this.

One last note, most people who actually work in New Orleans are pretty honest and disciplined in saying that the gains are real but they’re not good enough; we’ve made a lot of mistakes; we’re still trying to get better.

I think this mentality will take the city far.

New Orleans is a National Leader in Black Male Graduation Rates

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back lives

In New Orleans, 65% of Black males graduate on time.

In Nashville, it is estimated that 47% of Black males graduate on time.

In Washington D.C., it is estimated that 40% of Black males graduate on time.

In Atlanta, it is estimated that 38% of Black males graduate on time.

In New York City, it is estimated that 28% of Black males graduate on time [Note: via Joel Klein noted that Black male graduation rate in NYC is closer to 60%. Here is what NYC reports. It’s unclear to me how Schott’s report is so different than suggested actuals. Would be great if Schott verified their numbers.]

In Philadelphia, it is estimated that 26% of Black males graduate on time.

If New Orleans had been included in the Black Lives Matter: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, the city would have ranked 4th of the 57 major urban districts they analyzed.

More on the methodology that Schott utilized here. In certain cases, from what I gather, the foundation used estimates rather than actuals (which was I used “it is estimated” in the numbers above). If anyone has actuals for the above cities, I’ll edit the post to acknowledge this information.

It’s a tragedy that New Orleans could be ranked 4th with a 65% Black male graduation rate. In a more just world, New Orleans would be at the bottom of the list.

Erica McConduit, CEO of the Urban League of New Orleans, said this about the gains in high schools in New Orleans:

Considering the system-wide challenges encountered in providing quality high school options that meet the needs of all students, it is inspiring to see that progress is occurring, especially with our most vulnerable populations …We must continue to ensure that our K-8 schools are providing strong academic foundations and supportive interventions when needed so that students aren’t entering high school grade levels behind and are prepared for the rigor of college and career prep coursework.

There is also this:

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In 2005, 19% of New Orleans seniors enrolled in college.

In 2014, 51% of New Orleans seniors enrolled in college.

New Orleans over doubled its senior college enrollment rate in a ten year period.

All of these improvements have occurred while the percentage of economically disadvantaged students has been rising.

All that being said, neither high school graduation rates nor college enrollment rates are the end all be all of educational outcomes. Additionally, the overall graduation rate did not improve this year, which is a source of worry.

Ultimately, post-secondary graduation rates and employment data, when available, will tell us more.

But, with every year that passes, the data keeps pointing in the right direction.

Quasi-experimental data continues to prove that New Orleans charter deliver better results than their traditional school peers.

Comparisons with the state continues to demonstrate that New Orleans is increasing achievement at a faster rate than the state as a whole.

And, on terminal absolute measures, New Orleans students continue to achieve at higher and higher levels.

At the risk of being repetitive: Ignoring these results comes with the same risks as ignoring other scientific findings. Those who are most vulnerable to bad policy will suffer the most. In this case, as in most cases, those most vulnerable are those living in poverty.

Or to be more specific: Black males.