Of the various changes that post-Hurricane Katrina education reform has brought to New Orleans, critics have said that the most disruptive is school closures, which can happen when charter schools get failing grades and lose their charters to operate.
But according to a study published Tuesday by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, an initiative of Tulane University, nearly all of the improvement in local schools' performance over a recent 14-year period was due to charter authorization.
Put another way, New Orleans students' average test scores have improved over time because the state has regularly closed or taken over failing schools and replaced them with higher-performing ones.
“There are two main paths to improving the city’s schools: improving the ones we have or replacing them,” said Douglas Harris, director of the Education Research Alliance and the study's lead author. “Our findings suggest that we’ve been more successful with closing and taking over low-performing schools.”
But the study's authors — Harris, Lihan Liu, Alica Gerry and Paula Arce-Trigatti — warned that the success has limitations and that the extreme measure of closing underperforming schools is unlikely to produce the same level of results as in the past.
In fact, the study noted that student performance in New Orleans peaked around 2013, and that between 2014 and 2016, most schools either stagnated or started to decline.
The authors said the biggest changes in education in New Orleans happened due to the proliferation of charter schools, performance-based contracting and school choice, reform efforts that are now 15 years old.
The study analyzed data from 2002 to 2016.
Researchers looked at how elementary and middle schools evolved over time. The goal was to understand how schools improve students' standardized test scores.
Consistent with past research, they found that fewer students now are in schools with low scores, compared with 2002. As the state- and locally run districts eliminated their lowest-performing schools, the average quality increased.
Test scores improved more quickly when low-performing schools were handed over to a whole new set of educators, rather than when schools tried to reform internally, the authors said.
“School closures and takeovers should be a last resort, but they also show some promise when schools are consistently low-performing," Harris said.
While the city's schools have improved considerably since before Katrina, the progress eventually stalled in most of them.
The researchers found that the average New Orleans charter school improved from its first to its second year, but that school performance remained mostly flat in the years after that.
In recent years, reform advocates have attributed stagnant grades to tougher standards implemented on the state level.
The study also examined factors beyond test scores to better understand how the city’s schools have evolved.
The researchers found that schools on average advertised more extracurricular activities after reforms took hold, and that there was more variety in schooling options.
Charter schools have long been touted as being innovative, meaning that they can offer STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), arts-based or other kinds of specialized curricula to differentiate them from competitors.
In all, the researchers said the data could provide valuable information to NOLA Public Schools. The district, formerly known as the Orleans Parish School District, brought all local schools under its wing about a year ago. This summer, New Orleans became the first major city in the country to operate only charter schools.
The study noted that the city's education leaders face challenging decisions about their role in the charter school movement, especially when deciding whether to renew poorly performing charters and give them more support, or else to take them over and shut them down.
The authors also said New Orleans public schools still face numerous challenges.
For instance, they said, reform can be limited by bureaucracy and political motivation because schools are still bound by district and state rules and because advocacy groups fund school board candidates.
The report also said test-based accountability, along with other policies that are intended to promote higher student performance, can have negative side effects.
In New Orleans, researchers said they found evidence of unhealthy competition between public schools. They highlighted a 2010 lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center claiming that children with disabilities were being shut out.
"Closure and takeover alone cannot produce a high-quality education system," the authors said.
