The city of New Orleans used the tragedy of the Katrina hurricane to totally revamp their school system. No one denies that it needed revamping badly, it was a failing school system by any measure of the words.
And the way the new school system is set up, most of the children in New Orleans go to charter schools. It was 60% charter last year and 9 more schools switched to charter over the summer so an even greater percent will attend charter schools this year. There is a long, but interesting article in Newsweek on the subject. New Orleans's Charter-School Revolution
On the one hand many of the schools seem to be better, and test scores are up. On the other hand New Orleans still performs below the rest of LA.
Is this a model that other school dictricts should look at for bringing the free market into education? Is this the wave of the future?
Well, that depends on a few things. The story doesn’t make it very clear what other variables have changed.
I also happen to think that a lottery is an even worse method than geographic districting for determining which kids go to good schools and which ones don’t.
Charter schools, in my anecdotal experience, tend to work for about the first three to five years, then close up for unforeseen circumstances and reasons.
It seems like such a radical alteration of the American public school system. I find it fascinating to see it tried on a large-scale basis. But this was really the perfect opportunity to try it. The school system was terrible in the first place and on top of that they were in large part destroyed by the hurricane.
And I think it’s great that instead of just rebuilding the same structure, they took a mighty leap and changed things drastically in order to shake things up. and hope for a better result.
I have 4 kids and one goes to a charter and three are in public schools, so I see both sides and there are things I like about both kinds of schools. But I think you have to be choosy when trusting your kid to a for-profit charter school. My son goes to Basis charter school which was voted Newsweek’s #1 school in the country. But there are also a lot of dumpy charters that are just out for a buck and don’t really care about eduction.
If the students are intelligent and motivated the results will be good. If they are not, the results will be bad. The quality of the students means quite a bit more than the quality of the schools.
Yup. I would hazard a guess after reading stories like today’s front page article for the Washington Post, Uneven Katrina recovery efforts often offered the most help to the most affluent, that part of the reason schools are performing better is because the poor have been unable to move back to New Orleans at the same rate as the affluent. Since students from poor families tend to perform worse academically, it seems likely that part of the performance increase in students is a change in student demographics rather than the result of some change in the schools themselves.
New Orleans is a socially depressed area and the parental structure normally relied on to keep kids on the right track is lacking. It takes a structured environment to compensate for this and it doesn’t matter if this is done with public, charter, or private schools.
You’re not wrong but that leads to the question, do you want the schools experimenting on your children? Just because somethign is bad, doesn’t necessarily mean the alternative is better. Oh it might be, but it might be as bad or worse.
Right. But how hard is it to get test scores up if you close a bunch of low-income housing projects or relocate a bunch of students temporarily and the ones that return change the demographics so the student body as a whole is more affluent? I’m not saying this happened, but from what I’ve read it definitely is a possibility.
In addition to the Washington Post article I mentioned earlier, Spike Lee’s follow-up to When the Levees Broke just aired on HBO and contains a segment on the NO schools where he interviews both those that think the schools are now better and those that disagree.
Having been one of the people who oversaw the removal of old, moldy crap (everything that wasn’t nailed down basically) and the delivery and setup of new stuff, I can say with some authority that the New Orleans Parish School District pre-Katrina was woefully pitiful in terms of facilities and equipment. The schools I was in charge of had no flood damage,and little in the way of wind damage; they’d just been closed for a year (this was Aug 10 - Sep 8 2006)
I can’t believe that a school district that’s reduced to half-assedly fixing desks from the 1940s as late as 2005, and where even the new schools were considerably run down and dilapidated, that the education was anything less than very sub-standard.
Case in point… one school (Rabouin High school) had graffiti outside the front door that said “Fuck Scool”. Nice, huh?
So you’re blaming the students themselves? Not the lack of engaged stay-at-home mothers, not teachers unaccountable to anyone to keep their jobs; just, “oh that kid’s a bad seed.” Real nice.
I don’t think that stay-at-home mothers are absolutely necessary, but involved parents are required. Kids have to learn to pay attention to adults, to MIND adults, and to get along with their peers. A child who doesn’t know how to sit quietly and listen isn’t going to do well in school, no matter how intelligent s/he is.
And yes, there are other factors. But when my daughter was in grade school, I worked full time. And my husband and I each listened to her read, and we both helped her with her homework, and I took her to her tutor after I got off work. She’s dyslexic, and she needed that tutor. When she played an instrument in the school orchestra, Bill and I both showed up to every frigging recital. We took pictures of all the students, and made enough copies to send to school so that the teacher could have one, and also every student could have one.
On the other hand, my husband’s sister didn’t give a damn about how her kids were doing in school. She figured that it was ENTIRELY up to the school to look after her kids’ education, without any effort from her. If her kids were failing, she didn’t supervise homework or try to get them other help. Unsurprisingly, her kids dropped out of high school. Our daughter graduated from high school, junior college, and then college with high honors.
