The Charter School Experiment: A case for action
24th January 2022 · 0 Comments
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
Part IV
The all-Charter School Experiment in New Orleans is flawed and failed,” says Louisiana State Senator Dr. Joseph Bouie, Jr., the former chancellor of Southern University at New Orleans.
A few of the 76 schools in the NOLA-Public Schools are successful. Still, the methodology and teaching strategies leading to those schools’ high school performance scores were not replicated by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) at failing charter schools. Instead, failing charters were closed, and new charter management groups got contracts to take over the schools and occupy publicly-owned facilities with public tax dollars.
“Our all-Charter system experiment has not only failed, but audit findings confirm it is also completely flawed,” Bouie wrote in “A Moral Imperative and Case for Action,” a position paper he disseminated citywide to inform the public about the state of education in New Orleans.
“After spending six billion dollars of the taxpayer’s money to become the only all-Charter system in the state, a staggering 73 percent of our children are not functioning at grade level compared to 67 percent in 2005, when the state took over our 100 schools. Superintendent Henderson Lewis said, ‘When you look across all grade levels and subjects in Orleans Parish, just 27 percent of students tested at grade level in 2019.’ This is the fourth year of stagnant or declining test results,” Bouie explains.
“This 15-year flawed experiment has yielded no best practices to improve student and school performance, no state protocol for Charter Law compliance, and no student performance improvement. It has, however, yielded other devastating consequences for our children and community,” the legislator says.
Bouie says the findings of a 72-page Stanford University report, “Whose Choice? Student Experiences and Outcomes in the New Orleans School Experiment’ and the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s report on the charter school system in Orleans Parish are “distressing.”
Stanford researchers found that 26,000 New Orleanians between the ages of 16-24 are counted by the Census as disconnected because they are neither working nor in school.
Bouie believes those displaced citizens were “subjected to the New Orleans flawed and failed Charter experiment and are now victimizing the community with carjackings and various violent crimes.”
The Louisiana Legislative Auditor found that the charter operators failed to collect data on best practices over the 15-year existence of the all-Charter experiment. The system’s law stipulated that best practices should be replicated.
Raynard Sanders has over forty years of experience in teaching, educational administration and community development. As a principal, he developed the first high school DNA lab in Louisiana and created The Creole Cottage Project. In this innovative school-to-work program, his students built and renovated houses in the school’s community and sold them to first-time home buyers.
Dr. Sanders also served as professor and director in the Master of Arts in Urban Education Program at Southern University at New Orleans. Most recently, his work has been around educational equity and the privatization of public education.
Sanders is working with Dr. Bouie to return the schools to the locally-elected Orleans Parish School Board. He shared his perspective on education in New Orleans with The Louisiana Weekly.
“It’s been a total disaster in every area,” says Sanders. Now we have the worst test scores since 2006, the lowest ACT scores, and the lowest NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores.”
“Charter schools have no accountability and, fiscally, charter schools in New Orleans have more fraud than existed in the OPSD (Orleans Parish School District),” Sanders says, while pointing to a 2015 study by the Center for Popular Democracy, which found fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement not only in Orleans Parish’s charter schools but in charter schools, nationwide.
Ironically, allegations of financial fraud were the state’s justification for taking over the Orleans Parish Public Schools.
Dr. Sanders also spoke to unintended consequences resulting from the charter school system. “The system is spending $40-$50 million a year on transportation because of the move from neighborhood schools. Our children are out all hours of the morning waiting to be bussed to schools outside of their communities.”
As for the “One App” school enrollment program, “You could have three children going to three different schools despite request to have them attend the same schools,” Sanders continues.
“The salaries are off the chain. Charter school administration costs triple what a public school administration costs,” he explains. Some administrators make over $100,000 per year.
The educator also took issue with the lack of diversity among top charter school managers. “Ninety percent of the charters are run by white people and 90 percent of white students go to the best schools.”
New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) is a pro-charter school non-profit that works to sustain charter schools by providing grants and curriculum support. The group works closely with the Louisiana Department of Education. The organization claims that the number of Black teachers in the all-charter school system increased to 53 percent in 2018.
However, the charter school system is still having a problem retaining teachers. Last October, NSNO received a $14.3 million federal grant by the U.S. Department of Education to address teacher retention and recruitment in some of the city’s largest charter systems.
Although NSNO’s executive director, Patrick Dobard, is Black, the NSNO is one of the organizations founded by Sarah Usdin, a former Orleans Parish School Board member.
NSNO and several organizations like it, for example, Educate Now, founded by Leslie Jacobs, and several Tulane University-affiliated education research organizations were founded by white people to run a charter school system where at least 78 percent of the students are black. These organizations are getting grants and private donations to do what the Orleans Parish School Board and the NOLA-PS superintendent should be doing. They’ve created a niche in the charter school movement that allows them to control public school funding.
The kids are billable goods,” says Sanders. “They’ve turned our schools into profit centers. Outside corporations are also contributing to the charter school system.”
“We’re at the point where every charter school is public funded, privately run, and making all the money without accountability,” Bouie says.
Dr. Bouie and Dr. Sanders are not the only ones concerned about the lack of accountability or oversight of the all-charter school system in New Orleans.
In mid-December 2021, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cordona and Congressman Troy Carter visited New Orleans schools and met with parents who expressed their concerns about the charter school system. Four of the six parents told Cordona they wanted to go back to neighborhood schools, that Teach for America placed unqualified teachers in schools, and the One App process doesn’t offer school choice.
Bouie issued a call to action two years ago to release “A Moral Imperative and Case for Action” because the state continues to support an education experiment that produced unintended consequences. The charter school system, he says, injected steroids into the school-to-prison pipeline. “Some of our children are only reading at the 6th-grade level when they graduate from high school.
Loyola University Law Professor Bill Quigley has been an outspoken advocate for public schools for the past two decades.
In a 2017 article written for the AlterNet and reprinted by Salon magazine, the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center executive director wrote, “Though there are spots of improvement in the New Orleans charter system, major problems remain.”
“Many of these problems were on display in New Orleans when the NAACP, which last year called for a moratorium on charter schools until issues of accountability and transparency were addressed, held a community forum in New Orleans on charters. The New Orleans hearing, which can be viewed here, featured outraged students, outraged parents, and dismayed community members reciting a litany of the problems created by the massive change to a charter school system. The single most powerful moment came when a group of students from Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools took the podium and detailed the many ways the system has failed and excluded them from participating in its transformation.”
In a New Orleans Tribune article, Quigley also wrote about de facto segregation in the charter school system.
“NOLA reforms have created a set of schools that are highly stratified by race, class, and educational advantage; this impacts the assignment to schools and discipline in the schools to which students are assigned. Fully 89 percent of white students and 73 percent of Asian students in New Orleans attend Tier 1 schools.
“However, only 23.5 percent of African American students have access to these schools. And whereas 60 percent of students who are above the poverty line (i.e. those who can pay for their school lunch) attend Tier 1 schools, only 21.5 percent of students whose family income is low enough to be eligible to receive a free lunch have access to these schools. Not only do Tier 1 schools rank as the best in the city, they consistently rank among the best schools in the state of Louisiana.”
Quigley also quoted a New York Times article, “The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover,” “The New Orleans miracle is not all it seems. Louisiana state standards are among the lowest in the nation. There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely and, thus, are no longer included in the data.”
“If the charter school system is so good, why is everybody jumping ship,” Bouie asks. Patrick Dobard is leaving the NSNO, and NOLA-PS Superintendent Henderson Lewis is stepping down. Sarah Usdin declined to run again for the Orleans Parish School Board.
Bouie and Sanders want a moratorium placed on chartering and rechartering schools, a return to neighborhood schools, the elimination of the One App Central Intake System, and funding for remediation studies. Bouie is planning a series of community hearings to rally support for the total return of all schools to the public school system.
This article originally published in the January 24, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
