October 5, 2010 – 11:03 pm
Fact: RSD charters are serving lots of students with disabilities and working to improve these services. In the 2009-10 school year, the 36 RSD charters enrolled 1,228 students with disabilities, falling just short of enrolling their “fair share” of special needs children by 76 students.
October 5, 2010 – 12:34 am
Fact: For many schools, only the name is the same. Comparing the performance of individual New Orleans public schools with the same name pre- and post-Katrina is not a valid analysis. Why? We shuffled the deck. Schools with the same name may: be in a different location have different grade configurations no longer serve the [...]
October 4, 2010 – 9:43 am
Fact: Since the state takeover, student improvement has more than doubled! Educate Now! compared the percent of students Basic or above in math and English on the 4th and 8th grade LEAP and the 10th grade GEE tests for 2000, 2005 and 2010.* (For other grades the state changed the tests, so we can’t compare [...]
October 1, 2010 – 9:14 am
Fact: Schools are doing significantly better than before the storm. Let’s compare pre-Katrina spring 2005 to now – fall 2010:
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 [...]
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 [...]
Pre-Katrina, New Orleans had one of the worst dropout rates in Louisiana, and Louisiana had one of the worst dropout rates in the nation. Educate Now! was curious to know how New Orleans is doing today. We hadn’t seen any dropout data for New Orleans since Katrina, so we contacted the Louisiana Department of Education [...]
Background Two years ago, Louisiana enacted the Student Scholarship for Educational Excellence Program, a pilot voucher program in New Orleans designed to offer students an alternative to attending a failing public school. The voucher program gives parents of eligible students in New Orleans the choice of attending non-public schools that have agreed to participate in [...]
Student performance continues to rise! The recently released 2010 Test Scores are great news for New Orleans. Across the city, student achievement continues to improve. For the third year in a row, more students passed the high-stakes LEAP tests. Significantly more students met the state proficiency goal of Basic or above. The Recovery School District (RSD) [...]
