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The Storm
The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school system—an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance....The floodwaters, so the talk went, had washed this befouled slate clean—had offered, in a state official’s words, a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent public education.” In due course, that opportunity was taken:...Stripped of most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired all 7,500 of its teachers and support staff, effectively breaking the teachers’ union. And the Bush administration stepped in with millions of dollars for the expansion of charter schools—publicly financed but independently run schools that answer to their own boards. The result was the fastest makeover of an urban school system in American history.
That's from The Atlantic just over a year ago. Guess what? It's working. The storm is coming.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on May 13, 2008 at 07:30 AM in Economics, Education | Permalink
Comments
hmmmmm....interesting.
Posted by: sa at May 13, 2008 7:46:19 AM
Since lots of people--poor people especially--left New Orleans and haven't come back, it's hard to see these figures as pointing clearly to "quality of instruction" as the main cause.
Posted by: Alan Gunn at May 13, 2008 7:54:20 AM
Alan, that was my first thought too. But N.O. did re-elect Mayor Nagin; I'd say most of the under-educated are back.
Posted by: Tom at May 13, 2008 8:22:08 AM
@Tom: Nagin is republican I belive.
@Alan: My thought exactly: you can't speak of a random selection of students. In econometric terms: the estimate of the effect of 'breaking the teacher's unions' is severly biased.
Posted by: JSK at May 13, 2008 8:42:54 AM
@JSK: Mayor Nagin a Republican? I don't think so...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Nagin.
Posted by: Dave Richardson at May 13, 2008 9:02:36 AM
This looks like it has the potential to be evidence in support of more school privatization and such. But unless you get a study of some sort to look at changes from demographic to demographic, you're going to be looking at a pretty biased sample.
Assuming when you looked at the remaining students, you generally found they were wealthier and "more white", you'd have to take a different approach. One way would be to track individual students and look how their test scores changed from year to year (or from 4th grade to 8th grade or whatever) and how the sudden conversion to charter schools effected this relative to some other control group of students in some other major southern city (Atlanta?).
Posted by: mraver at May 13, 2008 9:27:09 AM
At no time is the epistemological admonishment "correlation is not causation" more a propos. I strongly doubt that the New Orleanian's that fled and did not return were a representative, randomly chosen cross-section of public school students. I don't have the data, but one wonders how the exodus rearranged the demographic composition of the student body.
Posted by: Marshall at May 13, 2008 9:30:56 AM
I agree that the solution to improving education involves teachers, parents, and students. Here are my three solutions to improving education that would require very little money:
1) SEND YOUR CHILDREN TO SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Too many kids miss school for “education trips” to Disneyland. I am not saying that vacations during school should be banned, but some kids cannot handle the time missed. I even had one student stay home for the release of Halo III with parental support. What signal is that sending to the student?
2) Allow teachers to punish students. I am not saying corporal punishment, but something/anything to end the student-led anarchy in today’s schools.
3) Quit badmouthing teachers around your children. I an NOT saying that you cannot discuss your issues with the school, but too many kids show up with no respect for the school or its teachers. How do you expect your child to succeed in school if they have adopted your disdain for the teachers?
One more thing. Teachers do not get paid vacation. We work all year. Do lawyers only work when in front of a jury? Do teachers only work in front of students? Both have lots of planning to do a good job!
Posted by: Eric of PA at May 13, 2008 9:35:49 AM
Ditto to Alan. To Tom's point, there was a large exodus of lower class into cities like Baton Rouge and Houston. Many of the ones who were permanently displaced out of the city did not have the resources to return, and it is part of the story as to why the footprint of New Orleans is now smaller. I suspect there's a selection story in this.
Posted by: jason voorhees at May 13, 2008 9:40:24 AM
Alan,
Do you have any evidence that the people left in New Orleans who attend public school are richer than the people who attended public school there before the storm? My gut reaction is if anything the opposite -- those with the least resources are the least likely to have relocated.
Posted by: Josh at May 13, 2008 9:43:33 AM
While we await some unassailable evidence on school choice, can anybody tell me why school privatization (while subsidizing those who can't afford schooling, of course) isn't better than the status quo?
Posted by: josh at May 13, 2008 9:50:17 AM
Josh, as you point out, the data is not yet in on school choice, voucher systems, etc., so the answer to your question lies in the data from test cases. The problems for evaluating such programs lie in self selection. For instance, if there are some charter schools in a district, and parents have to apply to them, then you get a school filled with the kids of parents willing to put out the extra effort to apply and participate in such a school. So, even if the instruction were worse at such a school, test scores would likely be better. Econometric studies that properly control for all of these issues have been mixed, with no clear outcome.
Outside of the data, there are other more normative reasons to not jump at privatization. First, many would argue that privatized schools would allow the wealthy to have better schools by paying the mark-up over subsidy necessary for elite schools. There would then be less pressure for subsidy increases and we would see a greater level of inequality between schools. The notion there is that kids ought to not be subjected to weak schools just because they are born into poor families. The current system already punishes kids for that, especially in inner city situations. Lower income kids in exurban districts benefit greatly from the current public system, since there is intradistrict income mixing there and few kids in such areas go to private schools. Second, and a better reason in my opinion, is that private schools are more likely to blur the seperation of church and state. Many people do not want their tax money to go to schools that are sponsored by or sympathetic to religions that they don't approve of. The state could micro-manage exactly what schools teach, how they recruit, who they accept, etc., but that would end up being unpopular and a scape goat for any performance issues.
Posted by: liberalarts at May 13, 2008 10:12:14 AM
The Atlantic article gives a figure of 75% of NOLA students being eligible for free/reduced lunch in 2004.
Current numbers from Teach For America's site -- http://www.teachforamerica.org/corps/placement_regions/greater_new_orleans/schools.htm -- give 99% eligible in Orleans Parish, 66% in Jefferson, and 78% in St John. I'm not sure what the extent of the New Orleans school district is, but it is at least obvious that public school students in NOLA are not richer on average now than they were pre-Katrina.
Posted by: Josh at May 13, 2008 10:15:09 AM
@Josh
For a number of reasons that are, of course, best laid out in Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom." However, one of the basic reasons is that teachers are one of the only positions running in which effectiveness is not fiscally rewarded. Teachers are largely paid by the number of years they've been in the school system (and to a much, much lesser extent by the level of education they've attained). Moreover, the teachers themselves have relatively little control over the curriculum, and this leads to students often being taught things they don't need (see most of English), and abandoning things they do (sentence diagramming is awesome).
Posted by: Mdesus at May 13, 2008 10:16:19 AM
Josh - My sense was it was the least well off who were permanently displaced. I know, for instance, that Houston, Jackson Mississippi, Atlanta, Baton Rouge all received waves of lower class individuals. But I don't know of hard data, just anecdotes. But, the March CPS included a set of questions in 2005 on migration related to Katrina that would enable one to answer that easily.
Posted by: jason voorhees at May 13, 2008 10:18:20 AM
@liberalarts
First, many would argue that privatized schools would allow the wealthy to have better schools by paying the mark-up over subsidy necessary for elite schools. There would then be less pressure for subsidy increases and we would see a greater level of inequality between schools.
Because this isn't exactly what is happening in the current system. Yeah Exeter and Compton Central are really on par as institutions. Moreover, while urban schools tend to be worse this is not always so. In fact in the most densely populated parts of NYC the schools tend to be best. Really all the best schools in NYC have independent admissions committees. Is your argument that these problems (all those you named exist in endemic proportions) would be exacerbated? This I don't understand.
Posted by: mdesus at May 13, 2008 10:23:04 AM
I realize my previous comment did not have much to do with this post, but I figured that some teacher bashing will come up at some point, so I though I better get it in.
Another comment: I am a public school teacher who is started to agree with the ideas of privatizing school.
Posted by: Eric of PA at May 13, 2008 10:27:24 AM
mdesus -You clipped the part off where I said that the current system allows exactly what is argued may happen under privatization. And I put that because this is not really my argument but _an_ argument. Currently in cities, the well off go to very good schools (either private like Exeter or public like those in elite suburbs) and the poor mostly go to very bad public schools. Would privatized vouchers change that? In smaller cities and towns it is different (where I live), with income mixing occuring in fairly good public schools. In my kids schools, we have families on welfare all the way up to kids from strong 6 figure income families, kids who drop out of school at 16 and kids who go to Princeton. Were we to move to an all voucher system, there would probably be less mixing in the small town and exurban areas too. Pressure to control local property taxes would keep the voucher value low, with the better off finding it cheaper to pay the mark up for better private schools than to pay the higher property taxes to make all schools better funded via a higher voucher. In other words, the current system is redistributive, with the middle class who are in the public system willing to accept the redistribution in order to improve the schools for their own kids, who are grouped in with the poor kids in a single public school budget. I am not sure how this would shake out. Is redistribution good? That answer is normative, and thus not proveable but rather political. Is redistribution in a school system more justified than other forms of cash redistribution? Again, political and not proveable.
Posted by: liberalarts at May 13, 2008 10:52:10 AM
By the way, here is a related question. We typically compare our school results with those of other countries, and the outcome is usually that we are falling short. Most or all of the countries have public school systems, so what are they doing that we are not, and if it is our government control that weakens our outcomes, why isn't that a problem in other countries? In all other matters, we (the USA) usually suggest that their governments are more inefficient than ours (France, Italy, Japan, etc.), so why are schools flip flopped there? Do other countries have local control? Is it all socio-economic? I honestly don't know and would be interested in what other people have to say about that.
Posted by: liberalarts at May 13, 2008 10:57:28 AM
Here is an article that has many of the facts that are being speculated about. Before the storm there were 60,000 students vs 32,000 today and the return rate to Catholic school was double the return rate to the public schools. This would indicate that not only has the number of students has decreased, but the returning students have different demographics.
http://www.districtadministration.com/newssummary.aspx?news=yes&postid=17167
Posted by: joan at May 13, 2008 10:58:08 AM
we can already see the stratification in our society between rich kids whose families can afford to move to places where other rich families live, or send their kids to expensive private schools to make sure they go to school with only kids from rich families. Privatization and vouchers will merely accelerate this process.
Wealth also creates other potentials. Poor parents are forced to work, and so are not able to participate in the education of their children. In wealthier families the mom, dad, or sometimes both, are able to achieve a 'better work-life balance' and participate in the education of their kids. This fact alone creates enough incentive for private schools to use price discrimination to keep the poor working family kids out, and thus raise their test scores simply using demographics, and not better teachers.
@liberarts, my feeling is that if more conservative christians in the US actually lived in a place like the UK where religious institutions can receive public funding, as long as they adhere to a centrally administered national curriculum, they would be more open to the idea of this. As long as we only offer one-size-fits-all public schooling, this will be used by both conservative and liberal politicians as a hot-button issue for years to come,
Posted by: darin london at May 13, 2008 11:00:12 AM
I clicked through and found Teach for America, and Wendy Koop, the founder. They seems to work miracles.
Posted by: Matt at May 13, 2008 11:02:58 AM
mdeus,
First, English is something most students don't need? Last time I checked, people need to read and write fairly competently for most of their lives in order to be effective workers, citizens, etc. In fact, one could pretty persuasively make the case that more people need high-school level reading and writing skills more than they need high-school level chemistry, physics, or even math skills.
Second, like many libertarian advocates of so-called performance-based teacher pay, you seem to elide the whole question of how performance is measured. (And you also neglect to consider that a teacher's pre-tenure period is effectively that type of evaluation period. But back to measurement...)
How does one measure teacher performance? Student tests? Who designs the tests? What do the tests measure? Do we create a situation in which some states dumb down the tests, which we have now? Do we have some teachers simply teaching wrote memorization for the test and therefore possibly arriving at better scores than teachers who teach more creatively, but who put less stock in the test? What about a situation where one teacher only teaches to the test and another does that and then some? Would they both get paid the same if their respective classes score roughly the same on the test, even if one's students actually learn much more? Is an effective teacher one whose students meet "x" average score? Won't that just encourage teachers who want to make more to teach in high-income areas, since that's correlated with high achievement? Or will the testing track individual students' performance from year-to-year and reward teachers for improvement? What happens if a teacher inherits a class that already has high scores, leaving little room for improvement? What about the fact that since curricula, etc. differ from year-to-year, one needs to find some way to control for that so that teachers who teach "easy" years don't get unduly rewarded?
Or what about having principals or fellow teachers doing the evaluation? But what happens if the principal has a personal grudge against the teacher? Or the fellow teachers represent the teacher-in-question's overachieving nature? Does it just become a popularity contest?
As I think the above makes clear, there's good reason why teachers' unions have advocated for seniority based pay.
That being said, I'm not totally opposed to considering some type of performance pay, but only if it complements, not replaces, performance pay, and if it's something a lot more complex and nuanced than the naive test-based pay suggested by many proponents.
In any case, it's far from the panacea that many suggest.
Posted by: J at May 13, 2008 11:04:56 AM
In that second-to-last 'graph, I meant "...but only if it complements, not replaces, seniority pay..."
Posted by: J at May 13, 2008 11:08:45 AM
@liberarts
in the UK, the state sponsored school system is rigorously managed at the federal level. There is school choice based on the fact that you can send your kid to any school that you can physically deliver the kid to at the schools designated start time. With the trains and bus systems (not that great, but much better than in the US), this makes it much easier to shuttle kids around to different schools if the one in your city (or village, hamlet), isnt up to par. As I stated above, people can also choose to send their kid to a publicly funded Church of England, Catholic, Baptist, Secular, Islamic, Hindu, etc,. school, but these must meet rigorously enforced mandates and follow a national curriculum. This means that the christian school would need to teach evolution as part of the national science curriculum, but could offer electives for creation science as well for those children seeking to avoid the inconvenient facts that they are being forced to learn in the science class. The very wealthy can elect to send their kids to elite public (e.g. private) schools, such as Eton, which are not regulated like the state sponsored schools.
So, the fact that conservatives argue for local control, and vouchers as the solution to our problems despite evidence from every other country whose children perform better than ours is truly a conundrum.
Posted by: darin london at May 13, 2008 11:15:37 AM
