Arne, Katrina and Schumpeter [Why gov't school test scores have risen post-Katrina]

e21 ^ | 1/8/2010 | John O’Leary and William D. Eggers

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Remember that the schools in New Orleans were a tragedy long before Katrina.

...In the 1970s, Mickey Landry and his wife both taught in New Orleans. “We used to come home and joke that the best thing that could happen to the Orleans Parish school system would be for someone to blow it up and start all over again.”

Frustrated, Landry left New Orleans, but stayed in education, eventually running a prestigious private school in Colorado. Landry was lured back to post-Katrina New Orleans by the opportunity to run a school without the bureaucratic constraints of the old Orleans Parish school system.

Katrina, you see, had wiped the slate clean. Landry was given the chance to run a school, in this case the Lafayette Academy charter school, with much greater freedom than ever would have been possible under the pre-Katrina rules...

Mickey Landry had a free hand in retooling every aspect of his school. In just three weeks he hired forty-five new staff members, seeking out qualified teachers every place he could, including Craigslist. He rewrote the school’s charter, fixed the bathrooms, and had the walls repainted. When school started in the fall, he put the focus on teaching kids.

Two things gave Landry such freedom. The first change was a subtle but important change to state law that occurred prior to Katrina... The Recovery School District was a way to clear the decks. These schools brought with them only the buildings, the students, and their operating money. Teachers, principals, administrators, and all existing contracts were gone.

Prior to Katrina, the Recovery School District had taken over just four schools in New Orleans, a small breath of fresh air in a troubled system.

The second big factor was Hurricane Katrina...

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

You don't need to blow up the buildings. Just give parents vouchers, auction off the schools over the summer, and voila! True educational freedom --at half the current cost.

The New Orleans transformation described in the article is a half-way measure, since parents can't choose religiously-affiliated charter schools, and the per-pupil expenditures are fixed since, I assume, the overall school budget is the same. But this simple reform shows how beneficial a true voucher system would be.

[dalebert]

bump

[pointsal]

BTTT

[achilles2000]

NO schools couldn’t help but look better after the storm for the reasons described in the article, but the authors don’t know enough about what happened to correctly identify another major factor, which is that a significant part of the school-age welfare population was “deported” to Houston and other cities, where they promptly began fights and riots in the schools.

NO schools will revert to their old normal unless more fundamental changes are made. Without privatization the same old, same old will creep back in.

[JimRed]

No mention of the fact that the denizens of the projects and their offspring were the least likely to return? Fewer little thug-wannabees to deal with.