VID: Is Regulatory Creep Killing School Choice in New Orleans?

“Will Regulation Ruin School Choice in New Orleans?,” written
and produced by Todd Krainin. About 8 minutes.

Original release date was December 10, 2014 and original writeup
is below.

Here’s the paradox of pre-Katrina New Orleans: For its 10
million pie-eyed vacationers trolling the sticky streets of the
French Quarter, the city was a pulsating, profit-making pleasure
dome. For a few bucks, the city would happily serve up just about
anything you could scarf down.

Yet right across the Mississippi River, the Orleans Parish
School Board made the Department of Motor Vehicles look like a
model of efficiency. A toxic swamp of fraud and incompetence, the
school board was tilting on the edge of bankruptcy, when Hurricane
Katrina wiped out much of the city, taking the bureaucracy with
it.

School choice swept in as a replacement, and nine years later,
test scores and graduation rates are on the rise. With red tape
cut, and the teachers union largely out of the picture, the quality
of public education has made steady gains in the Big Easy. “We’re
going to be the first mostly black city to outperform its mostly
white state in the history of this country,” says Julie Lause,
co-founder of Crescent City Schools and principal of Harriet Tubman
Charter School in Algiers.

New Orleans could turn out to be the greatest turnaround story
in the history of American public education. But the nation’s first
all-charter district is fragile, and the reforms behind its success
could be pushed back—or even reversed over time. “It’s something we
have to be very careful of,” warns Neerav Kingsland, a school
choice advocate with New Schools for New Orleans. “A system like
this could be undermined by a death by a thousand regulatory
cuts.”

The city’s charter school system continues to struggle to find
the right balance between regulation and autonomy. Although the old
education bureaucracy has been drastically downsized from the
pre-Katrina era, the new system retains a byzantine bureaucratic
structure. And new regulations are chipping away at some of the
freedoms enjoyed by students and schools alike.

Some rules address issues of equity, while others set limits on
the very idea of school choice. The school board has standardized
the application procedure for all charter schools. Student
discipline procedures are now adjudicated at the state level, with
common standards for suspensions and expulsions at every charter
school. More controversially, students can no longer transfer to
another charter school after six weeks into the semester—a
prohibition that seems to strike at the very notion of school
choice.

Can libertarian concerns about freedom find a balance with
progressive notions of fairness—without threatening nine years of
hard-won educational gains? So far, the progress in New Orleans is
hard to deny, and has silenced most critics.

But there is much more to be done. Today, only a few New Orleans
schools have earned Lousiania’s highest marks for quality
education. Many charter schools are on the verge of failing, and
some will have to be closed. “We’re not yet there, we’re not yet
perfect,” says Lause. “We aren’t an A-school system yet. But I
think we’re on the way.”

Produced, edited, shot, and narrated by Todd Krainin.

Runs about 7:30 minutes.

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