Dive Brief:
- At a conference last week hosted by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, economists, school leaders and teachers' union representatives examined the city's school overhauls and the potential applications for other districts.
- But in an Education Week post, Charles Taylor Kerchner, a researcher at Claremont Graduate University, argues that New Orleans' model won't work for larger, higher performing districts like Los Angeles and should be considered within its own context.
- New Orleans' graduation rate has risen since Hurricane Katrina but still remains lower than Los Angeles Unified School District, a decade after the district overhaul began.
Dive Insight:
New Orleans' reforms, which involved turning a large percentage of the city's schools over to charters and firing the city's teaching force, have proved extremely controversial. According to Kerchner, they were only possible, thanks to the physical and political destruction of the city's existing schooling systems.
"The New Orleans reforms require politically trashing the existing school district and its teachers," says Kerchner. "The old institution has to be declared unworkable, illegitimate, and a barrier to the educational civil rights of children."
He also said that firing the teachers of Los Angeles is not a viable option, given the relative strength of the city's teaching force and civic institutions.