That brings me to this report, authored by Neerav Kingsland, one of the central architects of New Orleans’ education system. In it, he describes how the system works and looks at preliminary results. I recommend reading the whole thing, but my quick reactions are as follows:

1. The academic results are really encouraging. The graph above (from page 3) shows the progress that New Orleans has made, nearly closing the gap between the city and the rest of the state. I can’t think of any big-city system anywhere that comes that close to the state’s average. Can you imagine if Kansas City or St. Louis achieved at the same level as the state as a whole? Clearly this system can drive improvement.
2. That said, Kingsland is open about the fact that New Orleans is far from perfect. Just getting closer to the average of one of the lowest performing states in the union is not good enough. New Orleans still has a long way to go toward becoming a world-class system of schools, and to his credit, Kingsland is honest about that.
3. On another note of caution: New Orleans has a lot of things going for it that might be hard to replicate. As Kingsland points out, a constellation of nonprofits, advocacy groups, educators, civic leaders, and others have come together to help make this system work. There was also a huge infusion of social capital post-Katrina; individuals moved there specifically to help rebuild and improve the city. We have not seen similar levels of comity and commitment in the Show-Me State.
4. Missouri would have to make several key shifts to make our big city systems look like New Orleans’. The majority of schools in New Orleans are overseen by a statewide Recovery School District that functions very differently from your standard school district. It does not operate schools, or at least does not want to operate schools over the long term. It is designed to be a funder and a regulator, with independent charter organizations operating the schools themselves. There has been an unsuccessful effort to create such a district in Missouri, but it would be possible to try and pivot a shrinking school district like Kansas City into a regulator-funder like the RSD. If charter schooling spreads outside of Kansas City and St. Louis, given the number of small districts that it might disrupt, some kind of state-wide district model might be necessary.

All in all, New Orleans is a hopeful example. It was able to move a district that was one of the worst in the nation meaningfully forward. No one would say it is anywhere close to where it needs to be, but it appears to be on the right track, which is more than we can say for most districts (including those in our own back yard).

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As Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, notes in the video:

People like autonomy in the abstract, but they get real nervous about it. If any one of a hundred or a thousand schools does something goofy, there’s always a natural temptation to say, “Well, we’re for autonomy, but let’s have a rule that doesn’t let you do X.”

Over time, Hess suggests that these regulations mount. If not checked, the decentralized charter market could become a bureaucratic morass. So what is the right level of regulation? And is it possible for a decentralized school system to resist what Neerav Kingsland, former CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, calls “death by a thousand regulatory cuts”?

If you have seven minutes, you should check out the video.

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Is placing centralized power in the hands of government bureaucrats always a bad thing, or is it possible that centralized power can help facilitate market reforms? That is the question I explore in my latest case study, “Decentralization Through Centralization: The Story of the Recovery School District.” In the paper, I look at Louisiana’s Recovery School District, the nation’s first all-charter school district.

Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) has been granted significant authority to intervene in local public schools. With this power, BESE has put in place strong centralized accountability measures that rate individual schools. When a school is identified as academically unacceptable, BESE can close the school and utilize the school building. Through the Recovery School District, BESE can operate a school in the building or authorize a charter to use the space.

Unlike most government agencies, however, BESE and the Recovery School District have used their authority to encourage an educational market built on choice. Essentially, they have used centralization to create, quite possibly, the most decentralized school system in the country.

Louisiana’s Recovery School District is an intriguing model to consider for Missouri. I encourage you to check out the paper and explore how this type of system might work in the Show-Me State.

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This strategy of promoting decentralization through centralization is spreading. Thus far, Louisiana’s turnaround has inspired Tennessee, Michigan, and Virginia to adopt similar models.

This paper explains how the Pelican State came to be a bastion for school choice and a model for other states. Specifically, it details how Louisiana has been able to develop a robust school choice system through the state’s Recovery School District (RSD). It is clear from this review that New Orleans would not be the school choice model that it is without the vast authority that has been placed in the hands of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

Read the full case study: .

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Holding schools individually accountable for performance would change the fundamental structure of Missouri’s public school system. Instead of a special advisory board taking over an entire district, it could target individual schools that are struggling. In this way, state intervention under SB 125 could be more focused and efficient.

However, switching accreditation from districts to schools would benefit families in accredited districts as well, because it would illuminate their options. For example, there is a wide achievement gap between two elementary schools in the Raytown C-2 School District — Eastwood Hills and Blue Ridge Elementary Schools. If they had been evaluated individually and given letter grades under Missouri’s accreditation system, MSIP5, Eastwood would have received an “F” and Blue Ridge would have earned an “A.” Just a 10-minute drive separates these two schools.

Saint Louis Public Schools Board Member Katherine Wessling endorses a school accreditation system:

Given that most families would prefer to educate their children in the best possible environment that is closest to their home, the switch to accrediting schools rather than districts will give families better information and will also relieve concerns from neighboring districts that they will have to accept influxes of students with little warning or time to prepare.

Individual school evaluations and parent choice are the basis of education reforms in several other states. Ranked No. 1 in the country for school choice, Louisiana’s statewide Recovery School District (RSD) changed the fundamental structure of the New Orleans public school system. Every school in Louisiana is evaluated annually, and the RSD may take over schools with unacceptable performance scores. It can close schools, run them directly, or re-open them as charter schools. Additionally, Louisiana publishes these annual performance scores. This transparency facilitates school choice, particularly in New Orleans, where families can rank all their public and charter school choices in the city on one application. This targeted, market approach has doubled the percent of RSD students who pass the LEAP, Louisiana’s standardized test.

Evaluating public school systems by district obfuscates the reality of a school’s performance. Missouri ought to be asking how each individual school is doing. By holding each school accountable for its own accreditation, Missouri can more effectively meet the needs of every student.

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After Hurricane Katrina, the RSD ramped up its operation in New Orleans. The district takes over failing schools, operates some schools directly, and authorizes others as charter schools. The system that one chief of staff described to me is one that allows schools autonomy in exchange for accountability. The RSD is actively working to put the structures in place for choice and competition to work, while ensuring students in poverty or with special needs are being served.

The system that the superintendent from Missouri described to me is very different. He views the system as being optimal when the district has sole control of all the public schools in the area. Rather than letting those schools be autonomous, he wants to develop the “best practices” and implement them throughout the entire district.

I believe the superintendent from Missouri has the best of intentions. He wants to make sure his system meets the needs of students, but I think his system has a fatal flaw in that it is built around a leader. When a good leader is in place, the system may work well; but when an ineffective leader is in place, the entire system can fail.

The RSD’s model builds the system by aligning incentives in the right direction. This includes giving school administrators the power to lead through autonomous schools and giving parents the power to choose. In this system, an individual school may fail, but the system as a whole moves ever forward because the incentives are aligned in the right direction.

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Since 2007, the proportion of students in the district scoring “basic” — essentially at grade level — or better has now more than doubled from 23 percent to 48 percent, rising faster than any other district in the state.

Test scores from students that still fall under the Orleans Parish School Board, which held onto a small group of high-performing schools, improved as well, with 82 percent of students scoring basic or better, up 2 percentage points from the year before.
[…]
Still, the proportion of RSD students scoring at basic proficiency in state testing climbed 5 percentage points to 48 percent this spring from the year before. That figure combines results from state LEAP, iLEAP and graduation exit exams.

The latest results compare with growth of just 1 percentage point to 66 percent across the state as a whole.

The 16 schools that remain under the Orleans Parish School Board, some of them magnet schools with admissions requirements, continued to perform well above the state average.

This last bit undermines the oft-repeated notion that charter schools only prosper by “stealing” the best students from public schools. New Orleans’ experience shows that all schools can improve when parents are allowed to choose the schools that best fit their students’ educational needs. There’s a great deal of evidence that charter schools in Missouri improve educational outcomes, but in order to realize gains anywhere close to what New Orleans has witnessed, Missouri will have to allow for expansions of both the number and the geographic scope of charter schools.

Link via Marginal Revolution.

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In most public school systems in America, students attend the school for which their neighborhood is zoned. But in the five years since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has created a school system unlike any other in the country. “We used Katrina as an opportunity to build—not rebuild, but build—a new school system,” says Paul Vallas, the outgoing superintendent of the Recovery School District, which, authorized by the state to turn around failing schools, took over most of New Orleans’s schools after the storm. Last year more than 60 percent of the city’s students attended charter schools; this year nine additional schools switched to a charter model, so that number will be higher. Vallas calls this new paradigm an “overwhelmingly publicly funded, predominantly privately run school system.”

In 2005 Orleans Parish was the second-worst-performing school district in the state, and in some schools 30 percent of seniors dropped out over the course of the year. In 2003 one high-school valedictorian failed the math portion of the state exit exam five times and could not graduate. Things were different at the charters: at New Orleans Charter Middle School, which in 1998 became the city’s first charter school, parents would put their head in their hands and cry if their child’s name didn’t come up in the admissions lottery.

In New Orleans today, students and educators have unprecedented leeway to mold educational experiences. Students can apply to and, if accepted, choose to attend any of the […] 46 charter schools or 23 “traditional” schools. The vast majority of schools have open-enrollment policies that allow any student to attend, regardless of past academic success. (Schools with more applicants than spots hold lotteries.) The prevalence of charters means that in most of the city’s schools, educators can choose how their schools are run. Even in traditional schools, principals have unusual autonomy over the hiring—and firing—of teachers, since the city’s teachers’ union lost its collective-bargaining rights.

So far, the experiment appears to be working. Before Katrina, two thirds of students were attending schools deemed failing by state standards, notes Leslie Jacobs, a New Orleans education-reform advocate; in the 2010–11 academic year, she says, it will be less than one third. “The fact that we haven’t gotten everything right yet shouldn’t take away from the fact that we’re getting a whole lot more right,” she says. New Orleans schools are still performing below the state average on achievement tests, but according to Jacobs’s analysis of state data, the gap between New Orleans and the rest of the state has basically been cut in half.

Obviously, that’s far from perfect, but it’s more improvement than the city saw under the old regime. I also think that the teacher union’s loss of collective bargaining rights is a big reason that charters schools have the chance to succeed in New Orleans. Public school teacher unions typically act as a special interest groups hell-bent on stopping any kind of competition to the public school model, so they lobby for laws restricting options like vouchers, education tax credits, and charter schools. Missouri, for instance, has fairly strict rules on charters requiring them to have an academic sponsor and restricting their operations to the cities of Saint Louis and Kansas City.

Still, students in Missouri’s charter schools can be expected to outperform their public school counterparts over time, according to a study by Standford University’s Center for Research on Education, which my colleague Josh Smith blogged about last year. If Missouri offered an even more welcoming environment to charter schools — by, say, letting them operate anywhere in the state — we might be able to come closer to matching the impressive gains of the New Orleans’ schools. At the very least, the research shows that charter schools can replicate the academic accomplishments of public schools at a much lower cost, which is still a net benefit over the status quo.

Again, the evidence shows that schools are like most other institutions in that they perform best when their stakeholders have alternatives and choose which establishment to patronize.

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More than half of New Orleans schoolchildren attend charter schools, and more are on the way. That’s making teachers at some traditional public schools nervous.

The main cause of concern identified in the article is that children with disabilities and behavior problems will be left in the traditional public schools, while “better” students go off to charters.

If I were a parent of a disabled child, I would hesitate to send him or her to the Recovery School District. Can you imagine sending disabled children to a district where they’re considered a liability, to be “diluted” with “good” students to the greatest extent possible?

If the district is really worried that disabled children are being left behind, it should work to form more charters specifically for disabled students.

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Just as encouraging is the finding that scores jumped from 2007 to 2008 within all school types, including campuses run by the Recovery School District, the Orleans Parish School Board and dozens of independently run charter schools.

[…] the quality of education New Orleans’ children are getting is improving. And for the first time, parents have numerous educational choices.

This diminishes the credibility of those who predict imminent doom and gloom with the opening of each new charter. As the editorial points out, it’s not possible to prove that charters directly caused the rising test scores and other positive developments in the New Orleans education market. But it conclusively shows that progress is possible even with a bunch of new charters in town — and charters don’t have to mean the end of life as we know it.

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