Notwithstanding the great public relations
machine that the charter school movement uses, scholars continue to debate the
role of charter schools in the United States. Research suggests that charter
schools are more
segregated than traditional public schools, do
not typically outperform traditional public schools in terms of academics
and have
a slew of issues in terms of financial accountability. Why, then, are
charter schools achieving such popularity within minority populations? It’s
mind-boggling! Let us be clear about one thing: the charter school experiment
in New Orleans must work! The charter school movement must not only work in the
superficial assessments created by and advanced by the state of Louisiana,
through the state’s Department of Education and Recovery School District. The
charter school movement in New Orleans must succeed on all levels. The state of
Louisiana continues to report
gains in student achievement on state assessments while the
state continues to falter in national assessments. This is reason enough to
be a skeptic of the charter school movement’s stated role in the advancement of
student achievement in New Orleans’ public schools, but tales of charter school
success in Louisiana, and chiefly in predominately Black and poor New Orleans, are
suspicious for a variety of other reasons. The School Performance Scores for
Louisiana’s public schools are comprised mainly of scores on state assessments.
The scores do not contemplate or give enough attention to other important areas
of student achievement, such as graduation rates, dropout rates, attendance
rates, suspension rates, expulsion rates, enrollment in special education and
gifted programs, matriculation and completion of college, or any of many other
academic indicators that are potentially more compelling and important
assessments of student achievement and
equity for Black students. We know these areas are critical to the assessment
of student achievement for Black students. In the most glaring recent example, a
15-year old student was shot in killed on the streets of New Orleans. It is
beyond reasonable to correlate the amount of time a student spends out of
school (for suspension, expulsion or general absenteeism) to the number of
opportunities that these youths have to be involved in these deadly encounters
as well as encounters with the police. To not make these connections, is
foolhardy and ignorant, at best. In the words of a close friend and colleague,
“Dead kids can’t take tests.” This comment is dead on (no pun intended) because
New
Orleans has led the nation in murder rate nearly half of all years over the
last 25 years. The reality is much more bleak for young,
Black males. Murder victims over this time were almost exclusive Black and
male. Furthermore, nearly 55% of the murder victims were under the age of 30,
with close to a fifth being school aged. The reality is that our schools must
be more than testing zones. They have to be providers of hope, saviors of the
city; they must be transformative. For these reasons, I am openly critical of
assertions that student achievement is trending upward in the New Orleans
Public Schools. I am even more skeptical of the attestations that the charter
school movement is responsible for the growth in student achievement in New
Orleans. In the words of my advisor during my time at Penn State, “I don’t
think your data can support these claims.” Charter schools – at least in New
Orleans – are outrageously secretive although they operate with public funding.
It is nearly impossible for educational researchers, especially those already
pigeonholed as anti-charter, to gain access to the statistics needed to
adequately measure the effect of charter schools on New Orleans’ predominately
(and almost exclusively) Black student population. Herein lies the problem and
greatest barrier to moving the agenda from school improvement to the creation
of transformative schools.
Despite
these problems with charter schools, it is beyond time to reassess our
loyalties and disloyalties to the charter school movement in New Orleans. For
some time, I have agreed with my middle-class, liberal White friends; the
charter school movement will collapse on its own. The model is simply not
sustainable. This, however, comes from a place of privilege. We can stand by
idly because we are not direct stakeholders in this matter. Although I am a
graduate and former employee of the New Orleans Public Schools, I have no
children in the New Orleans Public Schools. Furthermore, if things get too
terrible in New Orleans, I can relocate with relative ease. My position as a
professor allows me to work from various locations and at varying times: to be
honest, even the distant commute to neighboring Mississippi would not be too
much to overcome in my line of work. My friends have the resources to send
their children to private schools. Of course, New
Orleans leads the nation in the percentage of students enrolled in private
schools. The Archdiocese of New Orleans estimates that a whopping 44,000
students are enrolled in its schools in New Orleans! The New Orleans area has a
unique history of flight from public schools, which includes White flight to
the suburbs and middle-class Black flight to private schools. Needless to say,
there is a large degree of disinvestment and distrust in the public schools of
New Orleans. My friends do not particularly need the public school system; they
are more than capable of affording the cost of the elite private schools in the
New Orleans area. Charter schools were supposed to fix this. Charter schools
were supposed to result in better performing public schools with more attention
to equity. Instead, charter schools have resulted in the population of New Orleans
sharply divided. Some parents endorse the charter school movement (of course,
anything beats the old New Orleans Public Schools) while other parents complain
that the charter school movement has ripped away Black parents’ stronghold on
education policy and politics. My research into charter school board
demographics supports the latter view: Whites dominate membership on appointed
charter school boards in the all charter district, leaving Black parents
virtually powerless in education policy and politics. Parents
have fought for the rights to their schools but have been generally
unsuccessful. Of course, parents of students in schools managed by the popularly-elected
Orleans Parish School Board do not have these problems. These parents send
their children to schools with a majority Black school board. The
popularly-elected school board is severely limited in its reach because the
majority of schools in New Orleans are managed by predominately White appointed
charter school boards.
There
is a brutal reality overlooked in the charter school debate in New Orleans; if
our charter schools fail, then we fail our children. For the sake of a
generation and our future, we must save the charter school movement in New
Orleans. The charter school ship has sailed in New Orleans, and we must see
that the ship reaches a pleasant destination at all costs. Both sides will have
to lay down their arms. Charter schools must become open to honest and
impartial criticisms that are aimed at improving the reform movement to make it
more equitable in achieving its stated goals of quality education for all
students. Charter schools may start this process through the sharing of data that
will enable educational researchers to better gauge the successes and failures
of the charter school movement. Opponents of the charter school movement must
make concerted efforts to identify, research and promote the reforms that are
working equitably. There are examples of attempts at equitable reforms in New
Orleans. We need not create a false dichotomy: the charter school movement can
coexist with movements towards greater educational equity. To their credit,
charter schools have been successful at converting low-performing schools into
mediocre schools. This is, admittedly, though less than equitable means in some
cases.
Where
do we go from here, though? What does reform 2.0 look like for New Orleans? Can
we get mediocre schools to become exceptional schools? Through concerted
collaboration, inclusive policymaking and equity-based actions, we can save the
charter school movement while saving the education of an entire generation of
students. The challenge is no longer to raise test scores; we must now alter
lives!
by Steven Nelson
Steven Nelson is a visiting assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of New Orleans
