New Orleans Becomes An All-Charter School City

The last of New Orleans’
government-run schools (five of them) closed this week, and when
the school year starts in September, every student in the public
education system will be attending one of the 58 charter schools in
the city. 510 out of the school district’s 600 employees will
 be gone by the end of the week. The public education system
in New Orleans has been run by the state’s “Recovery School
District” since Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005. At that
time, the state took over 102 of 117 schools in the city, the
“worst performers.” Those with skin in the public school game
aren’t pleased,
as the Washington Post reports:

“They [charter school providers] don’t answer to anyone,” said
Sean Johnson, the dean of students at Banneker [Elementary, one of
the public schools that has just closed], whose father attended the
school while growing up in the Black Pearl neighborhood. “The
charters have money and want to make more money. They have their
own boards, make their own rules, accept who they want and put out
who they want to put out.”

According to the Post, before the Recovery School
District took over in New Orleans, the elected Orleans Parish
School District was bankrupt and $71 million in federal money had
gone missing. The high school graduation rate was just 54.4 percent
before the state took over; by 2013 it was 77.6 percent. And while
those numbers compare the pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans
population, data limited to the post-Katrina  population is
improving too. In 2007 for example, only 23 percent of students
were at grade level for math. That’s up to 57 percent. In the
meantime, while the Recovery School District is about to have just
90 employees, the failing Orleans Parish School District had more
than 7,000 before the state took over. It may be more difficult now
to use the public education system for personal enrichment as a
jobs program, but the system should also be working a lot better
for actual students as it’s supposed to.