Dive Brief:
- As the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, opinions on how well the city’s massive education overhaul has fared are deeply divided.
- The Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, which is part of Tulane University, took a close look at the city’s test scores and found that nearly every group performed as well or better than they had before the storm.
- But critics cite an overwhelmingly white teaching force, increasing discontentment, and discrimination against English language learners.
Dive Insight:
What happened in New Orleans after Katrina is perhaps the most extreme example of school reform to date. In the wake of the hurricane, every public school employee was fired, and the state took over nearly all of the city’s schools and turned them over to charter operators. While other districts and states have implemented some piece of New Orleans' overhaul, few implemented all of them. As a result, the city has become a testing ground for whether reform works when taken to its logical end.
As test scores have risen, the calls for similar overhauls elsewhere have grown. But many who were involved in the early stages have become disillusioned and have spoken out against the course the reforms took. Others say the reforms can’t be sustained because of their antagonistic approach toward families and have questioned the validity of test scores. ERA says it took into account complicating factors in its analysis, but investigations in other school districts and at the national level have called into question nearly every quantitative measure by which to measure school quality, largely because of the incentives high-stakes environments offer to cheat or fudge numbers.