Taking a closer look at Charter Schools
18th January 2022 · 0 Comments
By C. C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
Part III
Studies of the nation’s first all-charter school district indicate that the charter experiment has failed. Parental choice, for most families, is non-existent, many schools are stratified by race and class, racial inequities in staff salaries and student expulsions exist, and several charter schools have failing school performance scores.
Only 27 percent of Orleans Parish charter school students tested at grade level in 2019. State Senator Dr. Joe Bouie Jr., a social scientist and former chancellor of Southern University at New Orleans, decided to find out why students were failing four years in a row.
“We chose the charter approach to deal with reforming failing schools,” Bouie says. “They (Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), the Recovery School District, and Charter Management Operators) were supposed to promote efficacy and follow the intent of the law,” he adds.
After reviewing the constitutional law that created the charter schools, Bouie determined that the state was “not following the law.” He asked the Louisiana Legislative Auditor (LLA) to investigate if the BESE and the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) followed legislators’ intent to replicate best practices systemwide.
Thomas Cole, a temporary legislative auditor, shared the audit results, Identifying School Practices That Impact Academic Outcomes in Orleans Parish Charter Schools, with State Senate President Patrick Page Cortez and State Representative Clay Schexnayder, Speaker of the House.
The purpose of the audit was to determine whether NOLA-PS (New Orleans Louisiana Public Schools) and LDE (Louisiana Department of Education) analyzed the academic outcomes of charter schools in New Orleans to determine which school practices have positive results and which do not.
“The law authorizing the creation of charter schools in Louisiana states that the legislature’s intention was to allow school boards to establish innovative independent public schools, determine which innovative practices yielded positive results for student achievement, and replicate those practices in other schools,” the auditor wrote.
“We found that while both NOLA-PS and LDE use standardized test scores as required by state law to analyze charter schools’ academic outcomes, they do not consider whether specific practices are responsible for positive outcomes.”
The auditor suggested that the NOLA-PS and LDE may want to “consider analyzing data from the past 15 years to help determine which education practices resulted in positive outcomes and which ones resulted in negative outcomes.”
The report also recommended that NOLA-PS and LDE “use the information from the retroactive review to help identify practices that result in positive outcomes in charter schools with the goal of replicating these practices.”
State Education Superintendent Preston Cade Brumley responded to the LLA via a letter. He acknowledged that there are “areas of improvement to be considered in our authorization practice,” but also said there were general misunderstandings within the auditor’s report that he wanted to clarify.
Brumley was appointed state Education Superintendent in May 2020 and assumed office on June 8, 2020, following the resignation of former superintendent John White, a controversial, pro-charter school proponent who some educators thought lacked the credentials for the state’s top education post. Before being appointed to the position by former Governor Bobby Jindal, White ran the Recovery School District (RSD) with a bachelor’s degree in English. He earned a master’s degree in Public Policy the same year he took the top education job.
“The conclusion that the LLA has made that an authorizer (BESE, LDOE,) can replicate best practices in charter schools is not consistent with the autonomy provided to charter schools and the role of the charter school authorizer in contrast with the non-profit charter board,” Brumley wrote. Translation: It’s not BESE or LDOE’s job to replicate best practices because the charter schools have unrestrained autonomy to do whatever they choose.
The state superintendent skirted the law’s intention to have “a mechanism by which experimental results can be analyzed, the positive results repeated or replicated, if appropriate, and the negative results identified and eliminated.” Instead, he quoted the remainder of that section: “The best interests of students who are economically disadvantaged shall be the overriding consideration in implementing the provision of this chapter.”
“There is no evidence-based data to show what accounted for the positive outcomes at certain schools. We don’t know what the charters did,” Bouie adds.
Indeed, ACT 91, the so-called 2016 “Unification” law mandating the return of the public schools to the NOLA-PS in 2018, allowed the charter school experiment to continue unchecked, without interference by the local authority.
“The local school board shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction in the areas of school programming, instruction, curriculum, materials and texts, yearly school calendars and daily schedules, hiring and firing of personnel, employee performance management and evaluation, terms and conditions of employment, teacher or administrator certification, salaries and benefits, retirement, collective bargaining, budgeting, purchasing, procurement, and contracting for services other than capital repairs and facilities construction.”
Essentially, the charter system remained independent and unaccountable to its primary stakeholders: parents and students.
After offering a “clarification” of what he perceived to be misunderstandings by the LLA, Brumley wrote about areas in “authorization that we can improve upon and plan to do so.”
“It is our intent to replicate a best practice that was led by NOLA Public Schools and develop application standards that are not only aligned with national best practice but embeds Louisiana charter specific evidence for success as criteria. It is the intent of this process to determine the practices that lead to positive student outcomes and evaluate applicant responses based on the evidence of innovations in Louisiana charter schools that are leading to positive student outcomes.”
Brumley’s commitment to bring the state into compliance with the law’s dictate to replicate positive outcomes in the future is the LDOE covering itself, Senator Bouie says.
“I think the state should correct the unintended consequences of the charter schools’ failure to properly educate New Orleans’ public school students. The state should find money to give children in New Orleans extra support for remediation because of the failed and flawed experiment going on in New Orleans.”
The state senator called ACT 91, “institutionally flawed.”
“For 15 years, we have had a failed and flawed education system,” Bouie adds. In 2019, nearly half of New Orleans public schools were failing.
Bouie compares the all-charter school experiment, the Tuskegee Experiment, and Jim Crow. He maintains that the only reason the Orleans Parish public school system was the target of the charter school experiment is that the student body is predominately Black.
“It is the worst, most egregious act under the guise of a state-sanctioned experiment against our Black children since the Tuskegee Experiment. Black folk, in particular, can’t let this go on for another year without doing something to stop it. If we don’t do it, history will reflect that we have abandoned our children. It’s a moral imperative. This is our civil rights challenge for the 21st Century,” Bouie stresses.
Next Week: The Charter School Experiment Part 4 – The Reckoning – A Case For Action.
This article originally published in the January 17, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
