Teacher pay in a competitive market: A hedonic wage estimate for charter schools in New Orleans

In post-Katrina New Orleans, Louisiana, there is a growing concentration of charter schools. The Recovery School District (RSD) has oversight of the majority of these schools. To explore charges from community advocates that RSD charter schools restricted admission and provided inadequate services for students with disabilities, the following questions were asked: Were students with disabilities admitted equally to charter and traditional schools in New Orleans? and How were the services for students with disabilities the same or different in charter and traditional schools? A case study research design that included both traditional and charter RSD schools was used. Data were gathered through examination of relevant reports from school entities and popular media. Additional data were gathered through interviews with district personnel and traditional school, charter school, and community disabilities advocates. Analysis of resultant themes indicated evidence of selective practices as well as differences in education provision for students with disabilities.

RAND researchers found many similarities between charter and traditional schools in New Orleans but greater satisfaction among charter school parents with their children's schools, as well as more perceived choices.

Four years following the decimation of the New Orleans Public Schools by Hurricane Katrina the city has been described as the center of a unique urban public school reform effort. This effort is a combination of events that transpired just before the storm and those that have occurred as a result of it. In particular some claim that the emerging public school configuration seeks to be one that is comprised entirely of charter schools, thereby allowing public schools in New Orleans to become a “system of schools” as opposed to a traditional school system. While a fundamental operating principle of charter schools is increased student academic achievement in exchange for school autonomy and innovative practices, an additional responsibility of the charter schools in New Orleans is identical to that of their counterpart traditional public schools: the provision of special education services in accordance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. Accordingly, this article presents an overview of the seminal reform events that have occurred to date and discusses the potential implications of this reform effort with respect to the provision of special education services.

Changes in the education system following Hurricane Katrina have received considerable attention from scholars in recent years. However, the role of Catholic schools is often overlooked in such discussions of school reform, which most often concentrate on the dramatic changes in the public school sector. This oversight is significant given that some segments of Catholic schools are devoted to serving populations similar to those targeted by emerging charter schools. At the national level, Catholic schools have struggled with declining enrollments and waves of school closures since the mid-1960s. This article aims to consider how well these national trends map onto the case of New Orleans. The authors discuss both how Catholic schools in New Orleans responded to Katrina and how they have changed in the midst of ongoing educational reforms in the city. They suggest that in spite of the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city as a whole, the storm and ensuing changes in the provision of public education have had, with a few notable exceptions, little independent influence on the organization of Catholic schools in the city. Rather, Catholic schools in the city are faced with many of the same challenges being faced by Catholic schools across the United States.

In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

In this article, we explore how White supremacist ideologies operate in “no excuses” charter schools. Drawing on critical race frameworks and qualitative data collected in two “no excuses” charter schools in New Orleans, we illustrate how anti-Blackness, White saviorism, and colorblind racism are taken up through hiring practices, discipline policies, and school culture. Collectively, these constructs are used in efforts to justify the mistreatment of Black students. We argue that it is the presence of an elite network of entrepreneurial organizations that have gained power over schools through corporate reform that allows for this unbridled racism.

Drawing on ethnographic data, this article critically analyzes pedagogy in “no excuses” charter schools in New Orleans. Employing Ladson-Billings's framework for culturally relevant pedagogy, the author describes the level of academic rigor, cultural competence, and critical consciousness development across classrooms. This study provides empirical evidence that within a market-based system, the purpose of schooling shifts toward the production of assessment data at the expense of culturally relevant practices.

The effects of performance-based school closure and restart on student performance

In cities across the United States, working–class communities of color find themselves struggling against inequities deepened by state disinvestment. Students at the Center—a writing initiative based in several public high schools in New Orleans over the last decade—has been a part of this struggle and embraces a pedagogy rooted in the voices, cultures, and histories of traditionally marginalized youth, their families, schools, and neighborhoods. Through collections of student writing and digital media, young neo–griots have produced counterstories that call into question dominant narratives about race, schooling, and neoliberal policy. This article draws upon student counterstories, teacher interviews, and classroom and community observations as the means for critically analyzing the implementation of racially–inspired neoliberal reforms, such as decentralization, charter schools, market–based educational choice, and targeted disinvestment in pubic infrastructure, in New Orleans—the experimental front for such policies in the United States. While more accelerated and extensive due to the vacuum created by displacement and destruction after Hurricane Katrina, the reforms are not wholly distinct from those elsewhere. Thus students’ counterstories shed light on the ‘legitimacy’ of such policies nationally and globally and reveal the necessity of building solidarities between the South within the North and the Global South. More immediately, students and teachers challenge the aspirations of neoliberal elites in New Orleans who seek to elide their history, close their school, and reinvent their neighborhood.

Perceptions of Charter and Traditional Schools in New Orleans

Dyslexia is among the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in children, yet despite its high prevalence all too frequently goes undiagnosed. Consequently dyslexic children all too often fail to receive effective reading interventions. Here we report our findings from a study using a teacher completed evidence-based dyslexia screener to first screen then test predominantly African-American children in grades kindergarten through second grade in two inner city public charter schools in New Orleans. Almost half (49.2%) of the children screened as at risk for dyslexia and of these the majority were found to be dyslexic on more detailed testing. Our results suggest that large numbers of African-American students with dyslexia may be overlooked in schools.

William Frantz Public School (WFPS) in New Orleans, Louisiana, played a significant role in the story of desegregation in public K-12 education in the United States. This story began in 1960 when first-grader, Ruby Bridges, surrounded by federal marshals, climbed the steps to enroll as the school’s first Black student. Yet many subsequent stories unfolded within WFPS and offer an opportunity to open the discourse regarding systemic questions facing present-day United States public education - racial integration, accountability, and increasing support for charter schools. In this article, these stories are told first in the context of WFPS and then are connected to parallels found in other schools in New Orleans as well as other urban areas in the United States.

Teachers are returning to schools during the COVID-19 pandemic under the weight of unprecedented stressors to engage a student body that has also experienced stress and trauma. In this study, we examined how confident 454 teachers (55% Black) from 41 charter schools in New Orleans, Louisiana, were in their ability to address students’ social-emotional needs upon their return to school. Results showed that Black teachers were more likely to report a greater sense of efficacy in addressing students’ needs. Both Black and White teachers identified the top three resources needed to assist students: mental health supports, trainings, and in-class resources.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school board fired nearly 7,500 teachers and employees. In the decade that followed, the city created the first urban public school system in the United States to be entirely contracted out to private management. Veteran educators, collectively referred to as the “backbone” of the city’s Black middle class, were replaced by younger, less experienced, white teachers who lacked historical ties to the city. In A Burdensome Experiment, Christien Philmarc Tompkins argues that the privatization of New Orleans schools has made educators into a new kind of racialized worker. As school districts across the nation backslide on school integration, Tompkins asks, who exactly deserves to teach our children? The struggle over this question exposes the inherent antiblackness of charter school systems and the unequal burdens of school choice.

Unified enrollment (UE) systems were designed to improve efficiency, equity, and transparency in school choice processes, but research has focused on efficiency gains. This study examines whether moving from decentralized enrollment processes to UE mitigates or exacerbates racial segregation that often occurs in choice systems. Specifically, we examine a subset of charter schools in New Orleans that had enrolled disproportionately high numbers of White students prior to entering UE. We find that UE entry was associated with increased enrollment of non-White students in these schools without offsetting declines in White enrollment, facilitated by schools also increasing total enrollment after entering UE. We find no meaningful impacts of UE on school accountability measures, student or teacher mobility, or student discipline.