Leonhardt: A better way to run schools
NEW ORLEANS
Twelve years later, Nigel Palmer still remembers the embarrassment of his first days as a fourth-grader in Monroe, Louisiana. He was a Hurricane Katrina evacuee from New Orleans, living with his family in a La Quinta Inn, 250 miles from home. As soon as the school year began, he could tell that the kids in his new school seemed different from him.
They could divide numbers. He really couldn't. They knew the 50 states. He didn't. “I wasn't up to par,” he quietly told me. It's a miserable feeling.
Until the storm, Palmer had been attending New Orleans public schools, which were among the country's worst. The high school graduation rate was 54 percent, and some students who did graduate had shockingly weak academic skills.
After Katrina's devastation, New Orleans embarked on the most ambitious education overhaul in modern America. The state took over the system in 2005, abolished the old bureaucracy and closed nearly every school. Rather than running schools itself, the state became an overseer, hiring independent operators of public schools - that is, charter schools - and tracking their performance.
This month, the New Orleans overhaul entered a new stage. On July 1, the state returned control of all schools to the city. The charter schools remain. But a locally elected school board, accountable to the city's residents, is now in charge. It's a time when people in New Orleans are reflecting on what the overhaul has, and has not, accomplished.
So I decided to visit and talk with students, teachers, principals, community leaders and researchers. And I was struck by how clear of a picture emerged. It's still a nuanced picture, with both positives and negatives. But there are big lessons.
New Orleans is a great case study partly because it avoids many of the ambiguities of other education reform efforts. The charters here educate almost all public school students, so they can't cherry-pick. And the students are overwhelmingly black and low income - even lower income than before Katrina - so gentrification isn't a factor.
Yet the academic progress has been remarkable.
Performance on every kind of standardized test has surged. Before the storm, New Orleans students scored far below the Louisiana average on reading, math, science and social studies. Today, they hover near the state average, despite living amid much more poverty. Nationally, the average New Orleans student has moved to the 37th percentile of math and reading scores, from the 22nd percentile pre-Katrina.
Douglas Harris - a Tulane economist who leads a rigorous research project on the schools - just released a study, with Matthew Larsen, another economist. It shows that the test-score gains are translating into real changes in students' lives. High school graduation, college attendance and college graduation have all risen.
One example: In most of Louisiana, the share of 12th-graders going directly to college has fallen in recent years, probably because of budget cuts to higher education. In New Orleans, Harris and Larsen report, the share has jumped to 32.8 percent, from 22.5 percent before Katrina.
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.
“It puts decisions really close to the school site and the students,” Towana Pierre-Floyd, the principal of KIPP Renaissance High School, told me. Victor Jones, an English teacher at G.W. Carver High School, says, “We don't have to wait to make changes when we know changes need to be made.”
Jones and his colleagues recently decided that their ninth-graders needed more writing practice than they were getting from their literature-heavy curriculum. But the teachers still wanted to expose the students to great books. So they combined two curriculum plans to get the right mix, cutting down on novels without eliminating them. The students now read “Lord of the Flies,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Parable of the Sower,” Ray Bradbury short stories and journalism about terrorism, among other things, and also do more writing than they used to.
Crucially, all of this autonomy comes with accountability: Schools must show their approach is working. They are evaluated based on test scores, including ACT and Advanced Placement, and graduation rate - with an emphasis on the trend lines. Schools that fail to make progress can lose their contract.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: