Will New Orleans Become Known for Academic Excellence?

Ten years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, flooding much of New Orleans and leaving the city profoundly changed. But decades before Katrina, a slow, insidious devastation was taking place in the city’s schools. They were “pretty awful,” says Patrick Dobard, the superintendent of the Recovery School District, which many people think was started to facilitate recovery from Katrina. “But it was created two years before the storm,” he says. In overseeing the RSD, Dobard is supervising part of an education reform movement that can only be called historic. About 90% of students in New Orleans now attend charter schools. Whether or not the reforms are working for most school children in the Big Easy is still being debated, but change is definitely under way.

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The stats are pretty impressive. High school graduation rates have gone up by 21 percentage points in the last decade; the passing rate for third- through eighth-graders has increased by 80%. Today the city has fewer failing schools–only 7% are considered failing today compared with 62% in 2005. Now, 62% of students score at proficient levels on statewide assessments. In 2000,

only 25% did. Even more heartening: A decade ago, of the city’s 3,500 high school seniors, only 19% enrolled in college. Out of 2,600 seniors today, more than 51% enroll in college. The RSD asserts that New Orleans now exceeds Louisiana in graduating African American students, African American males, and students with disabilities.

The RSD and the New Orleans Parish Board celebrated in May the second annual Senior Shout Out at which college acceptances and scholarship awards are recognized by local political and community leaders. Mayor Mitch Landrieu, city council members, and school board members attended–all to signal to the seniors, the city, and everyone else that New Orleans is serious about preparing each one of its students for a bright future by investing in an education that overcomes the odds.

Although Dobard is pleased with the results so far, he acknowledges that there’s still plenty of work to do. “We’re just getting good. We’re not very good, excellent, or outstanding,” he admits. “We still have to move toward that because we want kids to have an excellent education going forward. Until we get to a system of schools in which every school is excellent, we still have a lot of work to do.”

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Although New Orleans is outperforming the state of Louisiana in some measures, the state itself is not a standout performer compared with other states. On the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, Louisiana’s fourth-graders ranked 50^th of the 50 states in math. Its eighth-graders ranked 49^th. Overall, Louisiana earned a grade of D-, a full letter grade lower than the nation as a whole, which admittedly wasn’t that great either: C-.

But Dobard thinks the reforms are working and he offers four reasons why:

1. A quality charter authorizing process. “Organizations have to go through a rigorous process to get their charter applications approved. There’s a very rigorous screening process.”
2. Very strong accountability measures coupled with lots of autonomy. “They have an initial five-year contract by when they have to meet academic benchmarks. In five years you have to move a school from an F to a D, then in the next five years from a D to a C. With the accountability, we give school leaders flexibility and autonomy to run their schools like their own individual school district, so they can set their own curriculum. They can set their own time of day for school, they can hire or fire a teacher, they can set their own salaries and pay scale.”
3. Great, high-quality teachers and leaders. “We have very good leaders and strong teachers. About 54% of our teaching workforce is minority. The teacher quality and leader quality is a huge piece.”
4. Nimbleness of our system in response to policy. “We created an enrollment system called OneApp to replace the former, very complicated process. Parents now have one application that lists all their choices. We use an algorithm that assigns students to schools based on parents’ preference. Charter schools serve special education students at a much higher rate than the city schools, as well as the state average. We don’t distribute money equally, we distribute it equitably. We’ve worked with schools that had high expulsion rates and put some restorative justice practices in place. This year, those schools have had no expulsions.”

Dobard, who has been in education for 25 years and spent 10 years in the classroom, is convinced that the improvements are real. The challenges might daunt someone who didn’t believe. There are large

numbers of children with post-traumatic stress disorder, “not from Katrina but from living in violent urban areas. New Orleans has a very high murder rate and crime rate. The stress of living in these neighborhoods is daunting.” He describes wrap-around services that are being developed and expanded to meet the social and emotional needs of affected children and teens.

He also battles low expectations on the part of some school personnel, children who are two and three grade levels behind, and cuts in mental health services. But he seems to have the support of the community.

“We are overseeing a $1.8 billion school reconstruction project. We’re still rebuilding schools after the destruction of Katrina. This may be the largest school reconstruction project in the nation’s history. We recently went to the taxpayers to seek an extension of an existing millage that we wanted to repurpose to allow for the creation of a fund that would be used for maintenance of these new buildings. Every millage increase has been shot down–people look at them as a new tax. Ours passed with an over 60% approval rating by the voters. They believe in what we’re doing.”