New Orleans’ pioneering approach to charter schools is interesting enough, but an underrated aspect of that city’s educational transformation is the culture that has taken hold around it. Many of the education reformers working there take well-founded criticisms to heart, look for ways they can do better, and think seriously about what the future holds.
It’s an approach to reform that doesn’t exist in every community, and it’s visible in a recent blog series on New Orleans, hosted by the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Here are a few highlights.
Sarah Newell Usdin identifies the system’s biggest weakness.
Right now, the demographics of people involved with public education aren’t diverse enough to be truly public in my mind. We need to have much more vested interest from all different types of people in the public school system. And so we’ve got to figure out how to do a better job of having all the public own public education, even if they don’t choose to send their child to a public school, even if they don’t have a kid to send to school. I do think there’s way more engagement now than there was in the past, but I don’t know if it’s broad enough or deep enough to be sustaining.
In the coming years, choice and chartering might not just occur at the school level, Neerav Kinsland writes while pondering the future.
Charter Governance: The advent of micro-schools, course choice, post-secondary collaborations, and partnerships with companies may move charter governance from a model predicated on vertical, operational alignment to one based on overseeing a portfolio of educational opportunities.
Jamar McKneely describes the next set of improvements should look like.
That all kids have the opportunity to go to a quality school that focuses on academics and social and emotional needs of students. Hopefully, we will continue to expect more for what “quality” means. Our mastery percentage should be much higher, at least 30 percent, because then kids will have the opportunity to get into tier-one and tier-two colleges where they can graduate with a meaningful degree. Even in our high school, which has one of the highest graduation rates in the city, few students are on track to graduate from a rigorous university. We’re getting kids into college, but we still have to prepare them with the necessary skills to make sure they graduate college and impact their communities.
More on the center’s blog, here.
