With the establishment of the Recovery School District, about 80% of New Orleans schools are charter schools (Washington Post, 2013). Because these charter schools are not required to enroll students from a particular area or neighborhood, it is common for student populations within a charter school to be relatively diverse with regards to neighborhood when compared to traditional public schools. In fact, about one in four New Orleans students during the 2011-12 school year traveled more than 5 miles from home to attend school (Kamenetz, 2014). While this number may not mean much to those from suburban or rural areas, it is much greater than comparative cities with high population densities.
But so what? Does it matter that these students have to spend a few extra minutes on the bus every day to get to school? What’s the big deal? Actually, the issue is more complex than a longer commute. The identity of New Orleans is being completely changed by the new charter school system and not only in a good way either. Neighbor kids who are best friends from a young age and grow up together do not have a high chance of going to school with each other. Schools do not bring neighborhoods together anymore, but rather separate them. In fact, it can be argued that charter schools make neighborhoods more divisive as families compete for the opportunity to send their kids to the best charter schools. Families now must worry about what school their children are going to and the application process is extremely tedious too. And instead of going to school with their friends from down the street and knowing what school you’ll be going to, kids now must wonder if they’ll get into this school or that school and can only hope they’ll know some of the kids at whichever school they end up at. The school placement system has even placed siblings at different schools which extends the divisiveness to the family level as well.
The charter school system is damaging to the communities of New Orleans. Children growing up in New Orleans no longer identify with a certain neighborhood but rather with other kids who grew up in other neighborhoods and went to school with them. There is no sense of pride in the neighborhood sports teams/leagues nor is their a sense of community among the various neighborhoods. Families are not as neighborly or cordial to each other and may not even know the people who live around them. The sense of safety within neighborhoods will decrease and you are more likely to see strangers on your street.
However, it may be worth the sacrifice of neighborhood unity to achieve a better education system. Student performance has increased since the charter school system has been put in place. The test scores and data show that the charter schools have had a positive impact in academic achievement for the students of New Orleans. As argued above, this has come at the cost of community and neighborhood identity. Do you think the tradeoff is worth it? Is academic achievement worth more than a sense of community? What are the pros and cons associated with the different school systems? Is there any worth in neighborhood pride? Does this affect the pride of New Orleans as a whole?
Comments
15 responses to “Are charter schools ruining the communities of New Orleans?”
Hi Bryson, this post is really interesting because it gets at a topic that we have only touched the surface of–what is the value of having high scores and a loss of tradition and culture. We discussed in class how many traditional public schools in New Orleans focused more on culture, relationships, and the past while charter schools emphasized high scores, success, and college, most of which are far from home. I think the charter schools have a skewed perspective on the area they are in. The students need to be learning and that was not happening in the old system, but the tradition of New Orleans is being lost. I think a sense of community is essential for New Orleans, especially since many of the charter school and public school students alike will remain in the city even after graduating.
Bryson,
As Hannah said, I’m so glad you brought this topic up. During the construction of my last Movie Response Paper, I determined that I felt that the lack of community support was a major design flaw in a charter school system like New Orleans. Like you said, what ever happened to schools being the heart of a community? There is truly so much being lost in terms of community pride in exchange for potential academic achievement. Even if charter schools did achieve everything they set out to do and more, one has to wonder if a school system that puts a wedge is a community is really what a city like New Orleans, who has just experienced devastation, really needs.
Besides the impact of this or students, I also want to bring up the point of what charter schools have done with the employment of local teachers (i.e. firing all 7,500 local school teachers after Hurricane Katrina.) From an Economics standpoint, what does this loss of local jobs do to a communities’ economy? How about their community culture or spirit?
McKenzie, that is a great point you make about firing all the teachers. That is one quick way to lose a lot of community support for the new charter schools. I wonder how much that act affected the decision making process for parents looking to send their children to charter schools in the Recovery School District. Do you think parents who placed a higher value on community ties chose not to send their kids to the charter schools? Do you think the firing of the teachers increased the divide between the traditional public schools and the charter schools, especially as new teachers from outside New Orleans were hired?
Bryson,
I do think that firing the teachers could have had a huge impact on dividing the community between charter and traditional schools, as you suggested. With this in mind, it’s hard for me to believe (like we discussed in class today) that this New Orleans school system is the ‘silver bullet’ to education reform. To me, an issue like a community divide is a MAJOR issue. While charter schools may be producing better academic results, are they doing so in exchange for creating new problems. Can these problems even be fixed or is a new education ‘silver bullet’ in need of being created?
In the Rebirth: New Orleans film, the following quote from Lance Hill really stuck with me. ” The charter movement is creating excellent schools by creating worse schools.” Do you think it is also true that the charter school movement is fixing problems in education, while creating more problems (racial segregation, loss in community support)? What are your thoughts? Do you think changes could exist to solve these problems within New Orleans schools or do you think were still in need of an entirely new system of reform?
Bryson, I really liked your post because it made me think about how neighborhoods are affected by charter schools in a different way than I had been previously. I can relate to the post as well, because of my educational background. In elementary school, I never went to a neighborhood school. I first attended a co-op school that was mostly more affluent families from varying neighborhoods (who had the time to volunteer frequently in the classroom–the requirement of enrolling in this type of school). I then switched into a “Challenge Program” school that took students from across the district that had tested into this program. Though I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, I now realize that I had close to no neighborhood friends as a child. I didn’t know the kids my age because I never went to school with them. The friends I had at school, consequently, were from several surrounding suburbs; this meant that I rarely saw them outside of the school day or school year. When I went to middle school, I switched to the neighborhood school and all of a sudden I knew the people who took the bus with me. I could walk to people’s houses to see them, and I started to meet more of my neighborhood. From this experience, I do think that neighborhood schools can have a powerful community-building effect. Whether or not this is worth the potential segregation based on income and race, is still a question.
Hannah, I like your suggestion that parents who value community may not send their children to the charters. I think that this is definitely a possibility, especially with the influx of out-of-state TFA teachers into New Orleans. This also brings up the idea that we’ve spoken about in class of the New Orleans community feeling like young, privileged, white teachers are being sent into their city to “fix” their schools for them. This obviously creates a conflict that divides parents, students, and teachers alike. I think that if New Orleans would have been allowed to rebuild itself (without the major influences from outside sources like the state or charter chains) that a more equitable and community-based school system may have been formed. Do you guys agree, or do you think that New Orleans would not have been able to recover without others taking the lead?
Hannah,
I like your last point when you say that a sense of community is essential for New Orleans, especially since many of the charter school and public school students alike will remain in the city even after graduating. I also think that this sense of community-feel would be something that the city would like to accomplish since Hurricane Katrina destroyed what was once there.
I think it’s interesting that they had a chance to rebuild the entire school district, and the one thing that they failed to do was build a sense of community. While they may feel they are accomplishing this in their particular school, I think community is something that needs to be charished and it is just kind of missed out here, leaving students without those at home connections and friendships. I think those are important in a city like New Orleans.
McKenzie,
I think that the point you are raising is very interesting as well. While the students are losing the sense of community by establishing all of these charter schools, it was obviously lost when all of those teachers were unfairly fired. Like you said, the school should be the heart of the community and here it is not. For me, it was also fun to know the teachers at school and then be able to say hi to them outside of school if I ran into them like at the grocery store or somewhere like that. Here, the kids do not even know where these teachers are coming from since they are being placed there from outside sources like TFA. How can we keep this sense of community when we don’t even let the community contribute like they should?
Hannah,
I agree that the sense of culture and community is extremely important especially in a city like New Orleans that lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. Taking away this sense of culture from the students would be taking away their sense of security and home. Everything was taken from them when tragedy struck, their homes, their schools, and even some of their family. Providing these students with schools that don’t care or don’t emphasize the importance of culture but just that of test scores and grades does not seem like the best way to help these students succeed. However where is the balance? These grades are still important but there needs to be a better way to stress that rather than strict discipline and a lack of a sense of community in these schools.
Mckenzie,
I also thought of issue of the firing of local school teachers after Katrina. Where did these teachers go? Did they find new jobs or were they just hung out to dry? How could this have been a good idea when the city had already lost so much of its community?
These students had already lost homes and schools and now they were losing their community teachers too? If I had to put myself in the shoes of one of these students, why would I want to go to a school that had just fired all of the teachers I had been working with all my life. Some of these teachers were family members and family friends, and now they were put out on the street for no other reason than revamping the public school system.
The loss of these jobs could only have a negative effect on the communities’ economy and spirit. How were these students supposed to look past that?
Melinda,
I think it is interesting that you pointed out how in rebuilding an entire school district, the one thing they failed to do was build a sense of community. Especially in a time where they had lost so much as a community already, it seems as if that should have been one of the first things on these reformers minds; reestablishing the community of New Orleans.
While they felt as if they were helping students to succeed and improve academically by creating these strict and high performing charter schools, they were also contributing to turning some of the community against each other. We did not touch on this subject as much in class but the difference between the charter and non-charter schools definitely could cause some tension in the community. Charter schools were seen as better than the non-charter schools as were the teachers who taught inside of them. If students and faculty had friends at these other schools, what kind of relationship is this competitiveness fostering between them. These charter schools could possibly be causing more problems in the community rather than helping to reestablish the idea of community that was lost.
That’s a great quote, McKenzie. Very deep. I think the paradox of that quote does a great job of capturing the idea of perspectives. Some idea that someone comes up with can be seen as good or bad, depending on who is evaluating the idea. The same idea for one person can be a good one while it can be a bad one in someone else’s eyes. I think the charter school system being used to replace the traditional public school model of pre-Katrina New Orleans can be seen as good or bad, depending on from what perspective you view it. I wrote the original post from the perspective that it is bad. And it IS bad if you think about the loss of community and culture that is taking place as a result of it. However, it is also GOOD if you’re evaluating the charter school system from an academic point of view. There are two sides to this coin. Depending on what you think is more important, the tradeoff between academic success and community must be considered when deciding whether or not the change was good or not.
Thanks for bringing your personal perspective into this discussion, Alex. I think your story is a good parallel example of what is going on in New Orleans. Obviously the scenarios are different but the root of what you’re talking about is the same.
Considering Alex’s experience with attending the public neighborhood school compared to the other schools, now think about how New Orleans is an even more extreme case. Because of the urban setting and low-income neighborhoods, many people probably do not even own a car or use it sparingly (for financial reasons). Therefore, visiting friends outside your neighborhood would be even more difficult because of the limited availability of transportation. So this problem is magnified in New Orleans (or any large city) compared to suburban or rural settings.
Alex,
As I was reading through these posts, thinking was along the same lines as yours. Personally, I attended a public school. In fact my best friend from home was someone I met on my very first day of Kindergarten, and we live no more than a while from each other. In this way, I have lots of friends from school that I grew up with, and our sense of community was certainly something I enjoyed as a child.
I never realized how rare this circumstance was, especially at schools like Bucknell. Many students attend boarding schools, or private schools that are far away from home. I don’t know many fellow Bucknellians that have friends that were in their Kindergarten class. I have to think there is a trade-off, like Hannah was talking about before. Bucknell parents obviously saw greater potential rewards by placing their son or daughter is a prestigious institution, even if it meant they would be limiting the number of neighborhood friendships that he or she had.
Alex,
I’m not sure about the answer to your question above. To an extent, I would say yes, that New Orleans citizens, without the intervention of outside institutions would have created a more equitable and community-based school system.
However, New Orleans school systems before Hurricane Katrina were failing. While the mass firing of teachers does seem a bit drastic, those teachers obviously had a lot of room for improvement if they were let go to begin with. What would have stopped the same people from doing the same things they were doing before Katrina? If they couldn’t fix the problem before the storm, how do we know they could have fixed it after?