The following is an analysis of the recently proposed EBR School System Strategic Plan. Thanks to Noel Hammatt for providing me with a paper pointing out some of his and other researchers major concerns with this plan. The link below connects you to the actual plan now awaiting school board approval.
A special citizens and school board committee has just submitted the final draft of a proposed strategic plan for the East Baton Rouge Parish school system. This plan is a poorly thought out attempt to have EBR participate in some of the latest education reform fads without regard to what really works. It contains several major proposals that I believe are contrary to sound educational practices. These tactics could harm rather than improve this struggling school system.
The EBR school board members that took office in 2011 decided that a citizen's committee should be appointed for the purpose of revising the district's strategic plan. This new plan was intended to be a reform plan aimed at boosting student performance and the school system's ranking among public school systems in the state. The final result is a highly impractical plan that mostly ignores the real issues in the school system while scapegoating and needlessly punishing many of the professional educators of the system.
During the past 25 years the EBR system, once a leader in the state, has declined significantly mostly because a self perpetuating flight of upper and middle class students from the system and a corresponding erosion of public support. Now that many parents have pulled their children out of the school system, it is becoming more difficult to maintain citizen involvement and continued funding for the school system. Even so, the school system has managed to produce academic results in some areas that are commendable. Most observers agree on the success of the gifted and talented and magnet school programs.
The school system however, is now comprised of over 82% students classified as high poverty. If you have regularly read this blog you know that many education researchers find that such a student composition produces huge challenges to any school system. We would expect that any strategic plan would have as a main focus the goal of attracting back the thousands of students who have fled to private schools, and some of the families that have moved to neighboring parishes to escape the school system.
The fact is Baton Rouge, like many other high poverty urban school districts, is plagued by many incidents of disruptive behavior and disrespect for authority by some students at many of its schools. Many parents are reluctant to send their children to the public school in their community because they fear for the safety of their child and because fights, bullying, truancy, poor discipline, and classroom disruptions make it difficult for students to receive a good education. Many parents feel that teachers and administrators lack the authority to impose discipline, order, and a healthy learning environment in their public schools. If a child cannot qualify for one of the magnet schools or gifted programs, his/her parents have little hope that regular schools can provide a good education. Those are the issues members of the public expect the school board to deal with effectively. Those are the critical issues that should be addressed in any strategic plan for the school system.
Instead, the proposed strategic plan presented to the EBR Board last week contains one major goal with few practical strategies for accomplishing this goal. The primary "bold goal" proposed is to upgrade the EBR system performance so that it moves up to the top ten of the rankings of public school systems in Louisiana by the year 2020. The bold goal also promises to implement school choice for all families.
The plan authors expect to accomplish this "bold goal" partly by implementing the new state value-added teacher evaluation plan and by firing the lowest rated 25% of the school system's teachers and rewarding the top 25%. The plan makes it clear that teachers and principals will be retained primarily on the basis of their student performance statistics. Such a plan apparently assumes that the low performance of many EBR students has occurred mostly because of lazy or incompetent teachers and principals rather than the negative impact of an extremely high poverty rate of the students enrolled in the system. This is like a hospital deciding to fire the doctors who work in the intensive care unit because many of the patients there are seriously ill. It is like blaming the Louisiana health care system because so many of our citizens lead unhealthy lifestyles. The major flaw in this plan is that there is absolutely no evidence that firing and replacing a certain percentage of teachers improves student performance! Take a look at the latest results on "miracle" schools by Gary Rubinstein.
Many of the teachers in EBR already feel like they are under siege by state and federal school authorities who blame them for not being able to use their classrooms to correct some of the major problems of our society. They are sick of being forced to teach to the state tests in a way that inhibits the creativity of teachers and destroys much of the joy of learning for students. Many teachers feel that they are not properly supported in maintaining discipline and that some students who behave very poorly in school are coddled and allowed chance after chance to disrupt the education of other students. Teachers will surely see this evaluation and dismissal system based upon factors over which they have no control as an attack on educators by their own school board. This ensuing destruction of teacher morale will only cause further decline of the school system. Did the committee consider the impracticality of firing and replacing 877 teachers? (That's the 25% mandated in the plan. Will the school system go back to hiring ill suited Phillipino teachers?) What if after damaging the careers of all those teachers, the school system finds that the replacements do not produce any better results?
The proposed plan also recommends the implementation of site based budgeting which could be just an unnecessary headache for principals. When you add this extra duty to the huge burden of the new teacher evaluation system, (now every teacher will have to be completely reevaluated each year using a complex new system) principals may end up neglecting important duties such as campus organization, discipline strategies, critical parent involvement projects, and faculty team building strategies.
One weird component of the strategic plan would tie priorities for school physical plant improvements to a "school climate scorecard" (this is really just an opinion survey of teachers about the effectiveness of the school staff). What possible connection could there between staff effectiveness and the school physical plant? Apparently the committee believed that the school climate referred to air conditioning and heating.
The part of the proposed plan that would provide incentives for effective teachers to teach in high need, low performing schools is commendable, but will possibly be nullified by the requirement that teachers are to be dismissed based on the performance of students. There is no indication at this time that the state value added teacher evaluation will make fair allowances in its rating system for teachers who teach in low performing schools.
My opinion as an observer and retired educator who once taught in EBR is that the most important action that could restore faith in the EBR school system is for the school board to initiate a program aimed at restoring order, student safety, and respect for teachers, principals, and students in all schools. The present system makes it almost impossible for school authorities to deal effectively with a serious incidence of disruptive and violent behavior in schools which is a spillover of an increasingly violent and lawless community (Check the youth murder statistics in Baton Rouge). The proposed plan gives lip service to safety and order but offers no practical solutions.
The strategy #5 to: "Create in each school a safe and supportive environment that promotes academic excellence, healthy choices, and personal character and responsibility" will not occur unless teachers and principals are given full authority to maintain proper discipline in each school with a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles. Many middle and high school teachers believe the PBIS system is ineffective and needlessly bureaucratic for those age levels. Often by the time the system allows real action to be taken to correct a seriously disruptive student, major damage has been done to the classroom environment and valuable instruction time has been lost. I am not suggesting that only high poverty students be held accountable for proper behavior. It should be understood that all students, rich and poor are expected to behave properly in school.
New principals should be provided intensive training in building a positive school climate in part by implementing effective discipline techniques and by establishing effective communication systems with parents. All administrators need to know how to abide by state and federal rules while still effectively maintaining order and and a productive atmosphere in their schools.
Every effort should be made to encourage positive parental involvement in schools. At the same time, support of law enforcement and the courts should continue to be sought to enforce school attendance and truancy reduction. There have been commendable efforts in this area by the present superintendent and the local DA. These should be continued and reinforced. I guess one of my major concerns with this new plan is that it gives no credit to local administrators and teachers for the many successful programs now in place.
Support of the business community should be sought for developing programs of mentors for at risk students combined with a program that shows the connection between success in school and a good job in the future. The school system needs to develop more good career training programs that are connected with productive careers that require various levels of training instead of focusing mostly on college prep training. (Presently only a small fraction of school system graduates, as indicated by ACT scores, have any chance of succeeding in 4 year colleges).
A plan such as the one used in Iberville Parish for the establishment of special high-expectation math-science and art academies should be considered. Enrollment would be available to all students who meet rigorous requirements of academic performance and discipline. The difference between such schools and magnet schools is that they are basically open enrollment (school choice). Students who do not meet the strict discipline and performance requirements within a specified time period however, lose their right to remain enrolled. This program in Iberville has been shown to attract many students who had previously moved to private schools. The school board should also investigate the possibility of establishing it's own virtual charter school aimed at attracting students whose parents want to guide their children's education from a home environment.
I believe that if the above elements of a strategic plan were written in plain language, adopted, and properly implemented, the school board could count on enthusiastic support from employees and the community for revitalizing the Baton Rouge public school system. I am very much concerned that the new proposed strategic plan will only result in further deterioration of the school system.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
Jindal Toys With Merit Pay
See this Baton Rouge Advocate story for a report on a Jindal speech to CABL (Council for A Better Louisiana) where he thrilled his supportive audience with the possibility that teacher merit pay could be the next "bold reform" he may propose for public education. The Governor naively repeats the false assumption made by many uninformed education reformers that the quality of teachers is the most important factor in improving student performance. I know it is shocking to many "reformers", but in many high poverty schools, the quality of teachers makes very little difference. (Click here for a recent article on the real problem at salon.com) That's because other factors are so overwhelming in their negative impact that many of the efforts of good or even great teachers are inconsequential! Considering the fact that over 60% of Louisiana's public school students are high poverty students, the governor, CABL, and other non-educator reformers are attacking the wrong problem.
Once you read the Advocate article above, I hope you will take the time to read the Advocate reader comments I have reprinted below. Based on their insight about education issues, I suspect that most of these commenters have experience in a real classroom. I don't agree with everything they say here, but I feel that for the most part these observers make it clear how impractical the governor's proposal would be. These comments also tell us a lot about the level of frustration in the education community with the dabbling of amateurs like Jindal, Bill Gates, and John White.
Comment by spqr - Friday, December 09, 2011
No one wants to hear that quality education is available. Like sheep, they believe what they read in newspapers and what comes from the mouth of a governor owing political favors to those wanting such changes in public education. What do we do with the army of students who do not want to learn? What do we do with the masses of uneducated parents, some with criminal records, who do not care for their children? What do we do with the overage population at school only to eat lunch and cause trouble in the face of weakening discipline policies designed to keep kids in school while disrupting instruction? Over crowded classes. Gangs. Drugs. Apathy. Sex. Violence. Disrespect for authority. Refusal to do homework. High absentees (The truancy program is a joke). Welfare. Poor political leadership. Out of touch, but well-meaning educational groups that think they know, but don't know they don't know. Unfunded mandates. School boards members with no teaching experience. Federal bureaucracy. Inflammatory anti-public education editorials written by the rich business classes. Frozen teacher salaries. In the middle of it all trying to help the students achieve are the middle class teachers. And they are despised by the Jindal administration. And the public buys it.
Comment by timesright - Friday, December 09, 2011
Jindal said one of the current problems is that “we treat all teachers the same with our one size fits all system.” What an interesting statement when one test is to fit all students. Not surprising that this "let's reward our effective teachers" is the very next Jindal mantra. Monetary incentives are not why teachers are in the classroom. They wouldn't be there in the first place if that were the case. Comments by spqr are right on. A governor who has been spoon fed the things to say and the media who seems to be eating from the same dish are bringing to the table a public who is offered only one choice from the menu. That choice being anything that gnaws away at teachers and public education. Let's keep teachers and public education on the menu.
Comment by squiggly - Friday, December 09, 2011
The only thing Jindal's plan will accomplish is to increase cheating, by teachers and principals, on standardized tests. What these idiots don't understand is that they are dealing with social issues in the public schools and not teacher/school quality issues. Rating schools and teachers based on standardized tests is a flawed concept because the tests are flawed. I personally know kids who have attended schools that are rated D and F schools, but who nevertheless score above average on the ACT and went on to finish college. If the schools were really bad, how could that be possible. The answer is those kids came mostly from a middle class background. In actuality, what the schools are being rated on is the economic and cultural background of the majority of the students who attend said schools; after all that is what standardized tests measure, not how intelligent the student is or what they are taught in school. Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs is what's at play on this issue. Instead of arbitrarily rewarding teachers for fake achievement, that money would be well spent on hiring a group of psychologists and sociologists to figure out how to motivate under privileged students to focus on doing well in school in spite of the hand that has been dealt to them in life.
Comment by bigfatman - Friday, December 09, 2011
Senario : Teacher A teaches honor students at a magnet school. Teacher B teaches low achieving ,over age, socially promoted students. Teacher A gets rewarded because students do well on testing. Teacher B gets the shaft because students showed poor advancement. Evaluations!!!! Where's the fairness????
Comment by mava06 - Friday, December 09, 2011
Bigfatman is absolutely correct. As long as some teachers have classrooms filled with students who bring their baggage to school and other teachers have students who get to school ready to listen, behave and learn, the deck will always be stacked. It's been my experience working in more schools than I can count as an itinerant teacher that teachers of the tough kids work many more additional hours both at school and at home for minimal gains, but gains nonetheless. Teachers who have the "easy" kids typically leave school much earlier because their jobs are somewhat easier. Any growth by the difficult kids should be rewarded, but the current assessment system labels them as "failures" for not making arbitrarily high and unattainable gains. Those teachers who are working the hardest will not necessarily be rewarded for their hard work. Neither will their students. Until the system fully accounts for individual differences and rewards the hard work it takes to take kids from nothing to anything more than they came with then Jindal's idea will stink to high heaven. Just another non-educator making decisions. All people who make decisions for teachers should be contractually required and obligated to spend a number of days actually trying to teach and they should have to do it in the tough schools right before Christmas or spring break or the end of the school year. They should be required to be successful doing it by turning in good test scores. Would Mr. jindal like to have businessmen and politicians telling his doctor how to practice medicine on him and his children? For that matter, where do HIS kids go to school? I can almost bet they don't go to public school.
Comment by redstickhornet - Friday, December 09, 2011
Ok, what I want to know is why should there be more Jindal involvement in this? WHAT TRACK RECORD of success does our state have in rewarding the right people or punishing the wrong people in ANY INDUSTRY or sector in this state? What successful model of oversight and accountability has Jindal developed? How many of us want to work in a profession where the LA legislature devises the pay scale, evaluation, and incentives? What is fundamentally conservative about about some of Jindal's education policy. Education is such a political football in this state. This needs to stop. What other professions would endure this? Are professors at LSU/SU etc. going to be evaluated using value-added analyses? Are physicians and other health care professionals going to submit to value-added? I could go on and on, but I know there is no need.
Comment by Traveler - Friday, December 09, 2011
Many certified educators are necessary to support the work of the classroom teacher. These 'ancillary" certified educators include, but are not limited to, guidance counselors, librarians, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, social workers, physical education coaches, art teachers, and music teachers. Ancillary teachers have no "official" rolls, because they do not teach a core subject----but try running an effective school system without them! At present, there is no plan for evaluating these employees. Since they are not considered "accountable" for the results of students' standardized test scores, there is no plan for how to reward them for students' progress or "punish" them for students' lack of progress. This is just one more example of how poorly thought-out the new teacher evaluation system is. Yet the legislature and BESE approved this half-baked plan!
Once you read the Advocate article above, I hope you will take the time to read the Advocate reader comments I have reprinted below. Based on their insight about education issues, I suspect that most of these commenters have experience in a real classroom. I don't agree with everything they say here, but I feel that for the most part these observers make it clear how impractical the governor's proposal would be. These comments also tell us a lot about the level of frustration in the education community with the dabbling of amateurs like Jindal, Bill Gates, and John White.
Comment by spqr - Friday, December 09, 2011
No one wants to hear that quality education is available. Like sheep, they believe what they read in newspapers and what comes from the mouth of a governor owing political favors to those wanting such changes in public education. What do we do with the army of students who do not want to learn? What do we do with the masses of uneducated parents, some with criminal records, who do not care for their children? What do we do with the overage population at school only to eat lunch and cause trouble in the face of weakening discipline policies designed to keep kids in school while disrupting instruction? Over crowded classes. Gangs. Drugs. Apathy. Sex. Violence. Disrespect for authority. Refusal to do homework. High absentees (The truancy program is a joke). Welfare. Poor political leadership. Out of touch, but well-meaning educational groups that think they know, but don't know they don't know. Unfunded mandates. School boards members with no teaching experience. Federal bureaucracy. Inflammatory anti-public education editorials written by the rich business classes. Frozen teacher salaries. In the middle of it all trying to help the students achieve are the middle class teachers. And they are despised by the Jindal administration. And the public buys it.
Comment by timesright - Friday, December 09, 2011
Jindal said one of the current problems is that “we treat all teachers the same with our one size fits all system.” What an interesting statement when one test is to fit all students. Not surprising that this "let's reward our effective teachers" is the very next Jindal mantra. Monetary incentives are not why teachers are in the classroom. They wouldn't be there in the first place if that were the case. Comments by spqr are right on. A governor who has been spoon fed the things to say and the media who seems to be eating from the same dish are bringing to the table a public who is offered only one choice from the menu. That choice being anything that gnaws away at teachers and public education. Let's keep teachers and public education on the menu.
Comment by squiggly - Friday, December 09, 2011
The only thing Jindal's plan will accomplish is to increase cheating, by teachers and principals, on standardized tests. What these idiots don't understand is that they are dealing with social issues in the public schools and not teacher/school quality issues. Rating schools and teachers based on standardized tests is a flawed concept because the tests are flawed. I personally know kids who have attended schools that are rated D and F schools, but who nevertheless score above average on the ACT and went on to finish college. If the schools were really bad, how could that be possible. The answer is those kids came mostly from a middle class background. In actuality, what the schools are being rated on is the economic and cultural background of the majority of the students who attend said schools; after all that is what standardized tests measure, not how intelligent the student is or what they are taught in school. Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs is what's at play on this issue. Instead of arbitrarily rewarding teachers for fake achievement, that money would be well spent on hiring a group of psychologists and sociologists to figure out how to motivate under privileged students to focus on doing well in school in spite of the hand that has been dealt to them in life.
Comment by bigfatman - Friday, December 09, 2011
Senario : Teacher A teaches honor students at a magnet school. Teacher B teaches low achieving ,over age, socially promoted students. Teacher A gets rewarded because students do well on testing. Teacher B gets the shaft because students showed poor advancement. Evaluations!!!! Where's the fairness????
Comment by mava06 - Friday, December 09, 2011
Bigfatman is absolutely correct. As long as some teachers have classrooms filled with students who bring their baggage to school and other teachers have students who get to school ready to listen, behave and learn, the deck will always be stacked. It's been my experience working in more schools than I can count as an itinerant teacher that teachers of the tough kids work many more additional hours both at school and at home for minimal gains, but gains nonetheless. Teachers who have the "easy" kids typically leave school much earlier because their jobs are somewhat easier. Any growth by the difficult kids should be rewarded, but the current assessment system labels them as "failures" for not making arbitrarily high and unattainable gains. Those teachers who are working the hardest will not necessarily be rewarded for their hard work. Neither will their students. Until the system fully accounts for individual differences and rewards the hard work it takes to take kids from nothing to anything more than they came with then Jindal's idea will stink to high heaven. Just another non-educator making decisions. All people who make decisions for teachers should be contractually required and obligated to spend a number of days actually trying to teach and they should have to do it in the tough schools right before Christmas or spring break or the end of the school year. They should be required to be successful doing it by turning in good test scores. Would Mr. jindal like to have businessmen and politicians telling his doctor how to practice medicine on him and his children? For that matter, where do HIS kids go to school? I can almost bet they don't go to public school.
Comment by redstickhornet - Friday, December 09, 2011
Ok, what I want to know is why should there be more Jindal involvement in this? WHAT TRACK RECORD of success does our state have in rewarding the right people or punishing the wrong people in ANY INDUSTRY or sector in this state? What successful model of oversight and accountability has Jindal developed? How many of us want to work in a profession where the LA legislature devises the pay scale, evaluation, and incentives? What is fundamentally conservative about about some of Jindal's education policy. Education is such a political football in this state. This needs to stop. What other professions would endure this? Are professors at LSU/SU etc. going to be evaluated using value-added analyses? Are physicians and other health care professionals going to submit to value-added? I could go on and on, but I know there is no need.
Comment by Traveler - Friday, December 09, 2011
Many certified educators are necessary to support the work of the classroom teacher. These 'ancillary" certified educators include, but are not limited to, guidance counselors, librarians, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, social workers, physical education coaches, art teachers, and music teachers. Ancillary teachers have no "official" rolls, because they do not teach a core subject----but try running an effective school system without them! At present, there is no plan for evaluating these employees. Since they are not considered "accountable" for the results of students' standardized test scores, there is no plan for how to reward them for students' progress or "punish" them for students' lack of progress. This is just one more example of how poorly thought-out the new teacher evaluation system is. Yet the legislature and BESE approved this half-baked plan!
Monday, December 5, 2011
White: "Charters Are the Answer"
Former state superintendent Paul Pastorek at least gave lip service to the idea that some traditional schools could be acceptable to the State Department of Education. Incoming superintendent White by contrast is a "one trick pony". He plans to tell the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board ( I suggest educators read this revealing Advocate article very carefully) that the one solution to improving schools is to convert as many low performing schools as possible into charters. Charters in White's mind are the be-all and end-all for improving schools. According to the Advocate article, he wants to bring "the New Orleans strategy" to Baton Rouge and other school districts with low performing schools. He would like to convince the local school boards to convert all low performing public schools into independently run charters. The only problem with that solution is that if they follow the New Orleans strategy, the Baton Rouge schools would be adopting an inferior system!
The truth is that even though the RSD has had control of three fourths of the student population in New Orleans for five and a half years, that school system is still performing below all school systems in the state except for St. Helena (which is already partially controlled by the Recovery District). If all RSD schools (some do not have scores yet because of reorganizations or new start ups) would be given an SPS score, over 50% of the New Orleans Recovery District schools would be rated as "F" by the state's new letter grading system. (The official percentage receiving F is 46.5%) The average ACT score for RSD graduates is below 16, indicating that very few such grads have a chance of getting a college education. The only "success" here is a slick public relations spin pulled off on the news media and much of the general public by the charter school promoters.
Just how did so many elected leaders and some of the major news media come to believe that the New Orleans Recovery District and its charter schools had "saved" the troubled New Orleans public school system? Some of it is wishful thinking. Everyone wants to believe that by simply teaching smarter and harder, and just letting competition and the free enterprise system work, any population of underperfoming students can experience success. Unfortunately most of the perceived success of RSD and its charter schools is a cruel hoax. How was it done?
Much of the false perception, is caused by focusing on a small minority of the charters that have demonstrated pretty good performance by recruiting the best students in the Recovery District. The New Orleans Recovery District is different from other Recovery schools because the special law forming it allowed it to take in some higher performing schools and student populations. These few "successful" schools have then been marketed by the charter advocates as typical of the success that can be obtained by charters. The problem is that this handful of schools has no more of a typical student population than the magnet schools found in most large school systems. So out of the 71 RSD schools that have been assigned scores, only 5 schools or 7% of the total have qualified for a "B" on the new letter grading system. There are no schools in the Recovery District that qualify for an A. Those 5 "B" schools are succeeding at the expense of many of the direct run RSD schools and other charters that have to take the lower performing and discipline problem students rejected by the high performing charters. As a result, approximately 50% of all the other schools in the New Orleans RSD are rated as "F" and another 40% are rated as "D".
The second strategy used by the charter school supporters to claim dramatic success is the use of percentage improvements in the School Performance Scores (SPS) compared to other public schools. By using percentage improvements instead of point increases, the RSD schools which started with low base scores are able to artificially magnify their progress. For example, if we compare a school in the Recovery District with an initial SPS score of 50 to one in EBR for example, with an initial score of 100, and both schools are able to improve their SPS by 10 points, the percentage improvement calculation makes it appear that the RSD school had double the success of the EBR school. That's because going from 50 to 60 SPS seems to be a gain of 20% while going from 100 to 110 SPS seems to be a gain of only 10%. Never mind the fact that the EBR school was already performing at double the rating of the RSD school when the comparison started. Many educators believe it is a greater accomplishment to take a school from an SPS of 100 to an SPS of 110 than for the 50 SPS school to gain 10 points. Average scores in low performing schools can be increased dramatically just by getting students to guess at questions on the LEAP that they normally would not have bothered to answer! That's why it makes no sense to compare schools using percentage improvements rather than actual performance.
John White is quoted as saying that some of the charter management organizations would like to expand to Baton Rouge because they are running out of "real estate" in New Orleans. That's not true. There are a number of schools in New Orleans that have no charter managers and are still run directly by the RSD and there are plenty of low performing charters. Those represent much "real estate" available for chartering. The truth is that the charter organizations do not want to charter these schools because they are filled with the low performing students they have already rejected. What the charters are looking for is virgin "real estate" where they can use their marketing budget (funded with taxpayer dollars) to draw the best students away from the regular public schools. Most public schools don't get to use marketing to draw the best students that are motivated and have supportive parents. Public schools are expected to serve the educational needs of all students. I believe part of the reason the Advance Baton Rouge charters failed was because their managers sincerely attempted to serve the same at risk student population inherited from the previous schools instead of trying to attract mostly high performers. (Also as I have stated before in this blog, they didn't have a clue about how to run a school)
There is a much fairer way to way to compare the East Baton Rouge system to the New Orleans Recovery District schools: A recent demographic study determined that East Baton Rouge Parish now has the greatest concentration of high poverty citizens in the state. Yes, even more poverty than New Orleans. (Don't forget that after Katrina, many of the highest poverty citizens from New Orleans settled in Baton Rouge instead of returning.) What does that have to do with schools? Well it turns out that a measure of poverty of students using the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch is the most reliable indicator of school performance. So if we want to compare the performance of students in New Orleans with those in Baton Rouge, it makes sense to compare their performance according to poverty. Also, since most of the schools in the New Orleans Recovery District were taken over five-and-a half years ago, a direct comparison seems reasonable. Here are the results from the State Department website. The average SPS for free or reduced lunch students in EBR was 76.6 compared to 69.1 for RSD students. Using the percentage method, that's a 10 percent advantage for EBR. The SPS for paid lunch (non-poverty) students for EBR averages 118. For the New Orleans Recovery District, that number is 81. This is a 46% advantage for EBR! A comparison of Black and White students in the two districts yields basically the same results with EBR outperforming RSD by a large margin. So EBR students outperform all categories of students in the New Orleans Recovery District by a large margin using the percentage comparisons of SPS.
East Baton Rouge has a higher poverty concentration than New Orleans, yet 14.5% of its schools are still rated as A or B schools by the state, while the New Orleans Recovery District has only 7% of its schools rated as B, and no schools rated as A. Why would EBR School Board members want to adopt the New Orleans model anyway?
This is the kind of leadership we can expect from John White when Jindal rams through his appointment as State Superintendent. He does not need a deep understanding of the principles of education or even knowledge of what it takes to run a successful school. His basic approach will be to invite all the charter operators to come in and grab as many public schools as they care to manage. He will then just sit back and pull their charters if they can't produce the minimum SPS, and start a new round of bidding by new charter managers. Pretty soon, most schools will be segregated into high poverty and low poverty, with very little opportunity for the high poverty students to break out of the cycle of low performance.
I believe public schools could do much better than this if we let real professional educators concentrate our best practices and solutions on the schools that need the most help. Unfortunately it may take years of mismanagement of our schools before we wake up.
Correction added 12/8/11. Upon double checking the schools in RSD for the comparison above, I found that I had inadvertently included three schools that are run by the Dept. of Corrections instead of the RSD. Also the comparison with EBR included all the RSD schools, not just the New Orleans RSD. Making the necessary changes would change the percentage of D and F schools a little but if we consider that there are several previously failing schools in New Orleans that do not have reported SPS scores but are likely still failing, the percentages would remain basically the same.
The truth is that even though the RSD has had control of three fourths of the student population in New Orleans for five and a half years, that school system is still performing below all school systems in the state except for St. Helena (which is already partially controlled by the Recovery District). If all RSD schools (some do not have scores yet because of reorganizations or new start ups) would be given an SPS score, over 50% of the New Orleans Recovery District schools would be rated as "F" by the state's new letter grading system. (The official percentage receiving F is 46.5%) The average ACT score for RSD graduates is below 16, indicating that very few such grads have a chance of getting a college education. The only "success" here is a slick public relations spin pulled off on the news media and much of the general public by the charter school promoters.
Just how did so many elected leaders and some of the major news media come to believe that the New Orleans Recovery District and its charter schools had "saved" the troubled New Orleans public school system? Some of it is wishful thinking. Everyone wants to believe that by simply teaching smarter and harder, and just letting competition and the free enterprise system work, any population of underperfoming students can experience success. Unfortunately most of the perceived success of RSD and its charter schools is a cruel hoax. How was it done?
Much of the false perception, is caused by focusing on a small minority of the charters that have demonstrated pretty good performance by recruiting the best students in the Recovery District. The New Orleans Recovery District is different from other Recovery schools because the special law forming it allowed it to take in some higher performing schools and student populations. These few "successful" schools have then been marketed by the charter advocates as typical of the success that can be obtained by charters. The problem is that this handful of schools has no more of a typical student population than the magnet schools found in most large school systems. So out of the 71 RSD schools that have been assigned scores, only 5 schools or 7% of the total have qualified for a "B" on the new letter grading system. There are no schools in the Recovery District that qualify for an A. Those 5 "B" schools are succeeding at the expense of many of the direct run RSD schools and other charters that have to take the lower performing and discipline problem students rejected by the high performing charters. As a result, approximately 50% of all the other schools in the New Orleans RSD are rated as "F" and another 40% are rated as "D".
The second strategy used by the charter school supporters to claim dramatic success is the use of percentage improvements in the School Performance Scores (SPS) compared to other public schools. By using percentage improvements instead of point increases, the RSD schools which started with low base scores are able to artificially magnify their progress. For example, if we compare a school in the Recovery District with an initial SPS score of 50 to one in EBR for example, with an initial score of 100, and both schools are able to improve their SPS by 10 points, the percentage improvement calculation makes it appear that the RSD school had double the success of the EBR school. That's because going from 50 to 60 SPS seems to be a gain of 20% while going from 100 to 110 SPS seems to be a gain of only 10%. Never mind the fact that the EBR school was already performing at double the rating of the RSD school when the comparison started. Many educators believe it is a greater accomplishment to take a school from an SPS of 100 to an SPS of 110 than for the 50 SPS school to gain 10 points. Average scores in low performing schools can be increased dramatically just by getting students to guess at questions on the LEAP that they normally would not have bothered to answer! That's why it makes no sense to compare schools using percentage improvements rather than actual performance.
John White is quoted as saying that some of the charter management organizations would like to expand to Baton Rouge because they are running out of "real estate" in New Orleans. That's not true. There are a number of schools in New Orleans that have no charter managers and are still run directly by the RSD and there are plenty of low performing charters. Those represent much "real estate" available for chartering. The truth is that the charter organizations do not want to charter these schools because they are filled with the low performing students they have already rejected. What the charters are looking for is virgin "real estate" where they can use their marketing budget (funded with taxpayer dollars) to draw the best students away from the regular public schools. Most public schools don't get to use marketing to draw the best students that are motivated and have supportive parents. Public schools are expected to serve the educational needs of all students. I believe part of the reason the Advance Baton Rouge charters failed was because their managers sincerely attempted to serve the same at risk student population inherited from the previous schools instead of trying to attract mostly high performers. (Also as I have stated before in this blog, they didn't have a clue about how to run a school)
There is a much fairer way to way to compare the East Baton Rouge system to the New Orleans Recovery District schools: A recent demographic study determined that East Baton Rouge Parish now has the greatest concentration of high poverty citizens in the state. Yes, even more poverty than New Orleans. (Don't forget that after Katrina, many of the highest poverty citizens from New Orleans settled in Baton Rouge instead of returning.) What does that have to do with schools? Well it turns out that a measure of poverty of students using the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch is the most reliable indicator of school performance. So if we want to compare the performance of students in New Orleans with those in Baton Rouge, it makes sense to compare their performance according to poverty. Also, since most of the schools in the New Orleans Recovery District were taken over five-and-a half years ago, a direct comparison seems reasonable. Here are the results from the State Department website. The average SPS for free or reduced lunch students in EBR was 76.6 compared to 69.1 for RSD students. Using the percentage method, that's a 10 percent advantage for EBR. The SPS for paid lunch (non-poverty) students for EBR averages 118. For the New Orleans Recovery District, that number is 81. This is a 46% advantage for EBR! A comparison of Black and White students in the two districts yields basically the same results with EBR outperforming RSD by a large margin. So EBR students outperform all categories of students in the New Orleans Recovery District by a large margin using the percentage comparisons of SPS.
East Baton Rouge has a higher poverty concentration than New Orleans, yet 14.5% of its schools are still rated as A or B schools by the state, while the New Orleans Recovery District has only 7% of its schools rated as B, and no schools rated as A. Why would EBR School Board members want to adopt the New Orleans model anyway?
This is the kind of leadership we can expect from John White when Jindal rams through his appointment as State Superintendent. He does not need a deep understanding of the principles of education or even knowledge of what it takes to run a successful school. His basic approach will be to invite all the charter operators to come in and grab as many public schools as they care to manage. He will then just sit back and pull their charters if they can't produce the minimum SPS, and start a new round of bidding by new charter managers. Pretty soon, most schools will be segregated into high poverty and low poverty, with very little opportunity for the high poverty students to break out of the cycle of low performance.
I believe public schools could do much better than this if we let real professional educators concentrate our best practices and solutions on the schools that need the most help. Unfortunately it may take years of mismanagement of our schools before we wake up.
Correction added 12/8/11. Upon double checking the schools in RSD for the comparison above, I found that I had inadvertently included three schools that are run by the Dept. of Corrections instead of the RSD. Also the comparison with EBR included all the RSD schools, not just the New Orleans RSD. Making the necessary changes would change the percentage of D and F schools a little but if we consider that there are several previously failing schools in New Orleans that do not have reported SPS scores but are likely still failing, the percentages would remain basically the same.
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