The Recovery Trends in New Orleans

• In Event: Lifting All Boats With a Multisector Approach: Lessons From New Orleans

Abstract

At the start of the school district recovery in 2005 almost two thirds of New Orleans students attended schools deemed academically unacceptable. By 2010 that number shrank to 17 percent. But some observers doubt whether these gains are occurring across all sectors of the city’s schools. In this opening presentation, we will describe the overall performance trends in New Orleans elementary schools from 2006 – the first full year of school after Hurricane Katrina – through 2010. We will then show how performance trends differed across the various school sectors in New Orleans.

Using school level performance on the state’s standardized LEAP assessments we estimate multivariate time series trends for the district as a whole and specific sectors within the district. These estimates control for the student composition, enrollment size, and age of schools (a concern given the large number of new schools in the city).

For the purposes of these analyses we define five different sectors of schools operating in New Orleans: (1) traditional district schools overseen by Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), (2) charter schools overseen by OPSB, (3) traditional district schools overseen by the RSD, (4) charter schools overseen by the RSD, (5) charter schools overseen by the Algiers Charter Association.

These analyses show that, overall, New Orleans schools saw significant and positive trends in the percent of students scoring at basic or above (the standard required to progress to the next academic level) in fourth grade reading and math. Performance averaged, 2 percent per year improvement in reading and over 3 percent improvement per year on math. The linear trend models, however, indicate that trends differed substantially across the sectors examined, particularly in math performance. For example, in the fully controlled models, estimated trends are highest for RSD charter and traditional schools with trends for OPSB charters significantly lower showing flat to negative trends.

These results reveal uneven performance gains across the New Orleans school sectors. Interestingly, the differences do not seem to fall along the charter and traditional district school divide but instead along governance lines with OPSB schools under performing both charter and traditional schools overseen by the RSD and Algiers Charter Association.

Author

• Betheny Gross, University of Washington