Critics like to describe the overhauled New Orleans public school system, in which more than nine in ten students attend charter schools, as an experiment in “market-based” or “market-driven” education.
But to those who know it best, it’s something else entirely. It’s an attempt to use chartering to advance the cause of equity, by giving all parents their choice of schools and letting educators run them, while making sure students don’t fall through the cracks of a decentralized school system.
A recent report released by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools breaks down the features of the Recovery School District that enable charter schools to serve all students. It’s those features that make the New Orleans model so compelling.
Author Neerav Kingsland writes that while the system still needs work in some areas, it has helped raise student achievement, and is more equitable for students than geographic school assignment.
Public schools should not be the equivalent of neighborhood country clubs, and in New Orleans they no longer are. The broader community as well as individual students benefit from equitable city-wide access to public schools, because it creates a better public good.
Imagine if students in, say, Palm Beach County, Fla. could apply to the district’s sought-after school choice programs at the same time they applied to charter schools. Under a unified enrollment system like New Orleans’ OneApp, if they didn’t win a lottery for a magnet program in high demand, they could automatically enroll in a charter school instead. And because transportation was provided to all students, they would know that option was available, whether they enrolled in a district or charter school.
Right now, it doesn’t work that way. Florida school districts and charter schools largely operate on separate infrastructure, and wrangle over which services to provide.
New Orleans’ Recovery School District has made other changes, like a central expulsion office, aimed at ensuring charter schools serve all students.
Kingsland notes that in New Orleans, the district has achieved a “separation of powers.” It became a better regulator of schools when it decided to stop running them itself.
That might be far from the reality in Florida, where districts run the vast majority of schools and likely will for the foreseeable future. But there may still be lessons to be drawn from decentralized systems that let all students choose their schools, and create the infrastructure that enables them to do so.
As for the idea that a choice-based system is necessarily a “market-based” system, New Orleans’ unique breed of school reform now has a new foil in Nevada, which is preparing to launch an experiment in educational choice that will be much more market-driven.
