Sunday, August 29, 2010, 8:51 pm
Five years ago yesterday, the levees broke. Hurricane Katrina flooded roughly 80% of this city, causing nearly $100 billion in damage. The storm forced us to rebuild our homes, workplaces, and many of our institutions – including our failing public education system.
But from the flood waters, the most market-driven public school system in the country has emerged. Education reformers across America should take notice: The model is working.
Citywide, the number of fourth-grade students who pass the state’s standardized tests has jumped by almost a third – to 65% in 2010 from 49% in 2007. The passage rate among eighth-graders during the same period has improved at a similar clip, to 58% from 44%.
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Sunday, August 29, 2010, 10:57 am
In this edition of In the News:
- New Orleans Schools in the National Spotlight
- Vigil for Peace at N.O. College Prep on August 31st
New Orleans Schools in the National Spotlight
National coverage of the 5th anniversary of Katrina has included many stories about New Orleans public schools. We know we didn’t catch them all, but here is a sampling of the national news stories from the past week.
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Sunday, August 22, 2010, 11:28 pm
In this edition of In the News:
- Evaluating Reform Efforts
- “Value-Added” Study Measures Teacher Quality
- Both Ends of the Spectrum, from Gifted to At-Risk
- Louisiana Education News
- New Orleans Five Years After Katrina
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Monday, August 9, 2010, 11:10 pm
After Hurricane Katrina, state officials faced a choice: Take control of the schools in New Orleans or leave them in the care of the city’s notoriously troubled School Board. A takeover was risky. New Orleans Public Schools were among the worst in the nation. Most New Orleans legislators opposed state action. More daunting, any reasonable analysis would have put the state’s chance of success extremely low and of political embarrassment correspondingly high. Nowhere else in the nation had a state department of education ever assumed direct responsibility for operating local schools.
Yet state leaders, led by Gov. Kathleen Blanco and then-Superintendent Cecil Picard, had the courage to take the gamble. With legislative blessing, they moved decisively to expand the state-run Recovery School District – initially created to handle just a handful of failing schools – to include all but 16 schools in the city.
Five years later, it’s clear that gamble has paid off in ways unimaginable even to the most ardent supporters of the takeover. Read More »
Monday, August 9, 2010, 11:07 pm
In this edition of In the News:
- Taking Stock Five Years After Katrina
- School Facility Assignments
- Six i3 Grants Impact New Orleans
- Fewer LA Schools Rated Academically Unacceptable
- Special-Needs Students File Complaint
- CityBusiness Releases 2010 Education Guide
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Thursday, August 5, 2010, 12:00 pm
Yesterday, the Department of Education announced the winners of the highly competitive Investing in Innovation, or i3, grants. There were 49 winners from a pool of 1698 applicants nationwide. New Orleans own New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) is a winner! And they will receive over $28 million to support school turnarounds in New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville.
The selection of NSNO out of thousands of applicants is a validation of New Orleans education reforms since Katrina. The federal government looked closely at the success we are having and the improvement in student achievement, and decided to invest significant funds to expand our work in other parts of the country.
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Sunday, July 25, 2010, 12:10 pm
Before the end of 2010, the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) will have to determine if New Orleans schools will stay in the Recovery School District (RSD) or be returned to the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). Here is a brief review of the law governing BESE’s decision-making process and an outline of the steps involved.
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Monday, July 12, 2010, 11:45 am
In this edition of In the News:
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Sunday, July 11, 2010, 8:45 pm
Pre-Katrina, New Orleans had one of the worst drop out rates in Louisiana, and Louisiana had one of the worst drop out rates in the nation.
Educate Now! was curious to know how New Orleans is doing today. We hadn’t seen any drop out data for New Orleans since Katrina, so we contacted the Louisiana Department of Education and got the 2008-09 drop out numbers for every school in Orleans parish. The 2008-09 data is the most recent year available because drop out reporting lags a year. (The 2009-10 data will be released next spring.)
The Good News: We are better in 2008-09 than we were in 2004-05.
The Bad News: We are still above the state average and have a lot of room for improvement.
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