2017 & Prior Archives

New Orleans is an i3 Winner!

Posted on by Leslie Jacobs

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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Returning Schools to the Orleans Parish School Board: It’s BESE’s Decision

Posted on by Leslie Jacobs

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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New Orleans Dropout Rate Improves

Posted on by Leslie Jacobs

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 and got the 2008-09 dropout numbers for every school in Orleans parish. The 2008-09 data is the most recent year available because dropout 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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Evaluating New Orleans Charter Schools

Posted on by Leslie Jacobs

Charter school performance has recently been the subject of a number of reports. Some of the highlights:

1.     A national study of 36 charter schools in 15 states showed that on average students who won lotteries to attend charter middle schools performed no better in math and reading than their peers who lost the lottery and enrolled in regular public schools. At the same time, this federally commissioned study showed that charter schools were more effective when serving low-income, lower-achieving students (especially in urban areas) than they were serving higher-income, higher-achieving students.

Read more about the study in Education Week magazine.
Read the Mathematica study “Evaluation of Charter School Impacts.”

2.     Last month, the same research firm, Mathematica, found that KIPP students, most of whom are poor and from a racial minority, outperformed their peers in regular public schools. Read more about Mathematica’s KIPP study.

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RSD Schools Significantly Outperform Voucher Program

Posted on by Leslie Jacobs

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 the program, and the state pays the tuition.

As a district of choice, Orleans families have multiple education options, including the voucher program. There has been great focus on the reforms inside the Recovery School District (RSD) and the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). With the recent test score release, we now have data to begin evaluating the performance of voucher students. Continue reading →

High School Performance Conclusions

Posted on by Leslie Jacobs

If we look at the high school data from 2005 to 2010, we can come to certain conclusions:

  1. Significantly fewer students are forced to attend a failing high school. We are giving students better high school options.
  2. Our high school students are performing better on the GEE.
  3. We are doing a much better job getting our seniors to graduate.
  4. There is not sufficient data to accurately assess how well we are doing at keeping students in school. Since the data system to track students across all schools does not exist at the local level, the state needs to provide timely information so New Orleans can ensure that this important outcome is evaluated and any related issues addressed. It is a critical issue that is not getting the attention it deserves.