New Orleans' massive education gamble has paid off in higher test scores, according to Tulane University's Education Research Alliance for New Orleans.
"The reforms produced large academic improvements," alliance Director Doug Harris said. He presented his team's work Friday and Saturday (June 19-20) at the alliance's Katrina + 10 conference that examined the last decade and opened the door to the next.
After the storm, the state Recovery School District took over more than 100 long-struggling public schools. Many closed; almost all that still exist became independently run charters that enroll students from all over the city. The change has been central to the city in its recovery and inspired educators and policymakers nationwide. One can only imagine the economic impact of all the researchers, consultants, politicians and journalists who have showed up in New Orleans to see the reforms for themselves.
The result, among elementary and middle school students through 2012: Test score gains of eight to 13 percentile points, Harris said. A child who once scored in the 40th percentile is now just about average.
That may not sound like much, but it's "very rare to see movement like that," Harris said. "It's hard to achieve real gains." The improvements are bigger than those other studies have found for popular interventions such as shrinking class sizes or expanding preschool.
Unlike data put out by the state, the Tulane researchers controlled for various factors that might affect scores, including the trauma of loss and displacement, the change in the city's population and the schools children attended while they were gone.
The conference appears to be the biggest dedicated to New Orleans post-Katrina education. It attracted major national and local players. Some were opponents who questioned the reforms. But far louder was the self-questioning by the very people who championed the changes.
They came with costs, Marquette University Professor Howard Fuller said: "If you only concentrate on the fact that the schools are much better than they were pre-Katrina for a lot of kids ... I think you're going to miss a larger point."
Consensus has grown that the new system had a lot of problems at first. Some public schools excluded or mistreated challenging children. Some hired young teachers without a thought of making sure a decent number of them looked like the students they taught.
Several speakers thought those particular problems were well on their way to being fixed. But some have barely been touched, they said.
"We have to do more and different," Education Superintendent John White said. He noted that the public schools are still largely segregated. Almost three-quarters enrolled fewer than 10 white students last fall, according to state data. In addition, "We remain third in the nation as a metropolitan area for the number of disconnected 16- to 24-year-olds," who are neither working nor in school, White said. "We have to acknowledge these are realities."
Despite the gains, scores remain low. "At one point 60 percent of our kids were in the last decile statewide. Now it's 16 percent. That is a dramatic improvement," said Michael Stone, co-CEO of New Schools for New Orleans. But "we're trumpeting these gains that are getting us to the state average in a state that's 49th." Fewer than 20 percent of students have state test scores the country would consider proficient.
Harris said not all groups of students benefited equally. The achievement gap widened between the African American students and the few white public school students. He said it was because black students' scores plunged when they returned, likely because they experienced more trauma or attended bad schools or even no school in the Katrina year.
Fuller co-founded the Black Alliance for Educational Options and supports the reforms. Still, he said the firing of more than 7,000 public school employees, mostly African Americans, remained an open wound. He said black New Orleanians generally feel the reforms "have been to us, not with us," a disempowerment that threatens the schools' long-term success.
The research didn't show what worked and why -- a necessary step if New Orleans is to influence the rest of the country. The freedom from red tape that lets principals choose whom they hire and how they teach? The influx of disaster relief and philanthropy money? After the storm, New Orleans school spending shot up by $8,000 per student, Harris said. It has since fallen to $1,000 extra.
Has the city even focused on the right places to change poverty? "Students can't eat a test score," former Loyola professor Andre Perry said.
"If Louisiana were its own country it would have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate in Louisiana," Stone said. If that had gotten as much attention as education, "I think our city would be in a much healthier place."
Facing an avalanche of papers, articles and op-eds this summer examining whether the New Orleans reforms worked, Stone was one of many who said they were moving on to the next set of problems.
"I'm getting tired talking about where we were in 2005 and where we are now," he said. "I'm very excited to start talking about where we'll be in 2025."