The Times Magazine on New Orleans Schools

In late 2006, Paul Tough wrote a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine about the challenges of educating disadvantaged children. Exploring--and in some instances taking sides on--the fractious debate over how much schools can accomplish for poor and minority students, it became one of the most widely-discussed pieces of education journalism in years. Now Tough is back with another in-depth article on the same topic, this time through the lens of education in post-Katrina New Orleans. The set-up:

The city’s disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood — many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city’s public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators...have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate — poor African-American kids — can achieve high levels of academic success.

In other words, New Orleans has become a kind of rare policy tabula rasa, a magnet for policy entrepreneurs and philanthropies eager to use the once-in-a-generation window of opportunity to transform urban education, rather than tinkering at the margins. This obviously raises the stakes for all concerned. Will it work? If not, does that de-legitimize the whole movement? Unfortunately, it also creates a dilemma for Tough as a writer, since nobody actually knows the answer to the central question the article poses. Five years from now, this will be the beginning to a fascinating story. Right now, it's a start without a finish.

Which is not to say the piece isn't valuable. As Tough notes, the governance structure in New Orleans is radically different than in most cities, close to the "portfolio district" model that's been proposed by people like CRPE's Paul Hill (an Education Sector non-resident senior fellow). In this model, elected officials don't so much run schools as manage them by choosing a mix of non-profits, charter school operators and others, setting performance standards, giving each provider a lot of discretion and flexibility, supporting under-performers and ultimately shutting down those that don't succeed. Or as New Orleans superintendent Paul Vallas says, "We put people in business and we take people out of business."

Clearly, the new education world in New Orleans is bringing a lot of talent and energy into a district that was, pre-Katrina, "disastrously low-performing," characterized by "a revolving door for superintendents...school officials indicted for bribery and theft; unexplained budget deficits; decaying building" etc. And it's hard to not to be impressed and moved by stories like this, about a returned hurricane evacuee and his mother:

Tony’s mother, Trineil, who is 31, was a product of [the dysfunctional New Orleans public school system.] Before the storm blew her family to Denver, she had never been outside of Louisiana, even for a day, and everyone she knew had been educated in New Orleans public schools. She was familiar with schools that didn’t work and educators who didn’t seem to care much. So it felt more than a little strange to her to be standing in her home with Hardrick and Sanders, two highly educated, impeccably dressed black professionals, listening to them describe what [their newly-formed charter school] Miller-McCoy had to offer her son.

“Ultimately, it’s my responsibility to make sure that you get to college,” Hardrick said to Tony. “You’re a sixth grader, and I’m standing in your living room telling Mom that if she will allow you to stick with me until 12th grade, you will be accepted to a four-year university.”

School wouldn’t be easy, she told him. He’d have to arrive each morning at 7:30 a.m., he’d have to wear a blazer and a necktie every day, he’d have to do his homework every night or stay until 6 p.m. the next afternoon to complete it. Hardrick handed Tony a copy of the Miller-McCoy Family and School Covenant, which she wanted him and his mother to sign, along with his homeroom teacher and Hardrick herself. All four people, she explained, had to make a commitment to get Tony to college.

“If you work hard and I work hard, we’ll get you there,” she said. “Is that fair? Are you ready to sign and shake and be officially welcomed to Miller-McCoy?”

Tony looked a little nervous, especially about the 7:30 part, but he nodded his head and said yes. Hardrick handed Tony a pen, and while he signed his name, she asked his mother if she had any questions. “I’m excited,” Petite said. “This is different. Y’all are taking time with these kids.”

What first sold her on Miller-McCoy, she said, was when the woman who answered the phone at the school told her that the boys would wear matching blazers with the school crest. “I said, ‘Blazers?’ I’ve never seen any kids running around in blazers except at St. Augustine” — a nearby Catholic high school — “and that’s where you pay to go to school. This is a public school, and they wear blazers and ties? I want that for my son. I do. I really want it for him. I know he can do it.”

Parental involvement is constantly invoked in education policy debates, in one of two ways: Either it's absence is an insurmountable obstacle that makes certain learning goals all but impossible (and thus school accountability schemes unworkable) or else it's presence creates huge advantages for charter schools like KIPP which obviate any claims that their success might be due to things like superior management, teaching, curricula, organizational culture, etc.

This anecdote suggests that parental involvement isn't set in stone; it is substantially a function of how schools choose to engage parents and what they ask from them. The large majority of parents, black or white, rich or poor, have an intense desire for their children to get a good education. What they don't all have in equal measure is an understanding of how to act on that desire, or the means to act on that desire. Did anyone from the New Orleans school district ever come to Trineil's house, express their commitment to and confidence in her son, pledge themselves to his well-being and ask her to do the same? Apparently not. Parental involvement isn't a fixed quantity; in many places it's an untapped resource. Recognizing and acting on that is what good schools--charter or otherwise--do.

The article also provides an interesting window on the perennial "Can schools do it all?" debate. While Diane Ravitch continues her late-career slouch toward the demography-is-destiny position, the state education superintendent, Paul Pastorek, offers a more nuanced take:

“It would be convenient to say that it’s a whole lot of other people who need to be part of the equation,” he replied. “But we have the job. And we have to do something.” Pastorek said he didn’t want to fall back on the excuse that he had heard from many other school officials, in Louisiana and elsewhere — that it was impossible to fix their schools until other social problems had first been corrected.

But then he switched direction somewhat. In many ways, he said, he was sympathetic to the Ravitch position. “If we want to really get kids to the level that we want to get them,” he said, “and we want to do it in a more efficient and effective way, then we would be well served if we took care of those kinds of problems — if we provided more resources to kids from conception to early childhood, if we took care of mental-health issues and physical ailments and teeth and eye examinations. Including, you know, where these kids go home to sleep at night. I’ve lived in this community a long time, and I can’t imagine how I could ever feel comfortable in neighborhoods that these kids live in at night. And yet they do, and we still expect them to do well.”

Pastorek paused for a moment. “So, now, can I solve all those problems tomorrow afternoon? Can I even get the attention of the people who have control over those things? Right now, in New Orleans, after Katrina, the answer is no, I can’t. But I can’t take the position that I can’t succeed unless I have those things. I have to take the position that we’re going to do it in spite of that. Now, will it be hard? Will I be less successful? Probably yes. But I have to take that approach, because I don’t have really any other cards to play.”

The idea that schools can overcome any external obstacle to student learning, no matter how high, is, on some unavoidable level, utopian. But it's not too much to say that schools can overcome many or even most such obstacles. And there's no way for educators to know ahead of time which students they can reach. Nor are educators in a position to solve all of the outside ills that beset their students. So the only effective attitude--the only moral attitude--is to start with the assumption that every child can be successful, to design schools that reflect this conviction, and not give up on it until the last possible moment. It appears that there are many more people in New Orleans who think this way than there used to be. That's reason enough to be optimistic that the story will end well.