A NYT Contributor Attacks the ‘Myth’ of New Orleans’ School Progress After Katrina. She’s Wrong

The misinformation, a-contextual data on New Orleans’ school reform will not stop. The latest edition comes from Andrea Gabor, writing in The New York Times that “it is more important than ever to accurately assess the results, the costs and the continuing challenges” of the New Orleans reforms.

One of the chief problems with commentaries that seek to downplay the success of New Orleans’ school reforms is a refusal to focus on measurable progress. Gabor’s piece is a case study in precisely that. She briefly acknowledges test score gains — based on Tulane economist Doug Harris’ rigorous research — before quickly downplaying them, pointing to the city’s low ACT scores and the alarming number of young adults in the New Orleans metro area who are neither in school nor employed (“disconnected youth”).

In fact, the average ACT scores in the city have gone up significantly — although without more sophisticated analyses it would be inappropriate to credit the reforms for these gains. The city also compares favorably to other urban districts that require all students to take the test. (Gabor does not mention that Louisiana requires all high school juniors to take the ACT, even those who do not intend to go to college.)

On the question of disconnected youth, there is no data available showing whether the problem has gotten worse or has improved in the New Orleans metro area since Hurricane Katrina. I confirmed as much with with Kristen Lewis, of Measures of America, which put out the report that Gabor cites. In an interview Monday, Lewis also emphasized the fact that New Orleans should be viewed in the context of the entire state — Louisiana is last in the country among all fifty states, and Baton Rouge actually has a slightly higher number of disconnected youths than New Orleans, particularly among black residents. Again, though, any inferences about school quality based on these numbers are entirely unsupported.

To say the city still has problems or that the schools could improve further is a truism. But as an indictment of the New Orleans reform, such claims fall short. And if the progress that New Orleans has made — Harris says he has “never seen an effect of this size before” — is not good enough, then what would be?

But when looking at cohort graduation rates — which measure the percentage of students starting ninth grade who graduate, and is thus unlikely to be affected by the number of disconnected youth — New Orleans has made significant progress. Graduations rates have increased from 54 percent in the 2003-04 school year to 73 percent in 2013-14.

It is absolutely true that after Katrina, the number of teachers in New Orleans who are black dropped precipitously, but the teaching force remains half black. Moreover, contrary to Gabor’s suggestion, supporters of reform are not celebrating the decline in black teachers, but trying to fix it. For example, a recent report from the pro-charter group New Schools for New Orleans acknowledges a “major teacher diversity problem.” To be fair, talk is cheap, but the data suggest that although newly hired teachers remain disproportionately white, more black teachers have been hired in recent years.

Here, Gabor simply assumes her premise — that the disruption inherent in closing a community school — is a bad thing. But when researchers from MIT looked at schools in New Orleans taken over by charters, they found large gains in achievement. That does not preclude the possibility that some students were made worse off by closing of traditional public schools — research on this question in other parts of the country is mixed — but Gabor shares precisely zero evidence to make this case.

To close her piece Gabor writes, “Privatization may improve outcomes for some students, but it has hurt the most disadvantaged pupils.” Previously she claims, “There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children.”

But Gabor’s “growing evidence” is fabricated. Harris found broad gains in achievement across New Orleans, and the writ large gains for the largely low-income, largely black students are a huge victory for anyone who cares about educational equity. There is simply no empirical evidence on offer suggesting that the New Orleans reforms harmed disadvantaged students in terms of achievement or any other educational outcome. None.

Gabor does cite research showing that disadvantaged students are less likely to enroll in the highest performing schools. This is a real problem and squares with evidence from other cities, but it falls far short of showing that disadvantaged students are actually worse off. Paradoxically some of the same research finds that disadvantaged students who do enroll in charters benefit the most. If Gabor’s concern is that too few of these disadvantaged students have access to charters, well, she should be praising their massive expansion in New Orleans. (For a more extensive discussion on this question including research from other parts of the country, see here.)

The heart of Gabor’s piece is this: “The New Orleans miracle is not all it seems.” Yet purveyors of the city’s reform explicitly say that no miracles have occurred — just real progress.