John Merrow’s documentary, Rebirth: New Orleans, does a great job of capturing the core elements of the transformation of this district after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. The film follows administrators, teachers, and some students in highlighting the struggles and successes of revamping an entire public school education system in New Orleans. One of the dilemmas addressed in this film is the divide that the charter school movement is creating. This divide was perhaps even creating a moral predicament within the New Orleans charter schools.
While the charter schools seem to be working, the non-charter schools in New Orleans were still having problems. Charter schools were producing higher test scores on state tests while non-charter schools were producing test scores even lower than they were before Katrina. Political scientist Lance Hill, and others questioned this movement and accused charter schools of deliberately excluding students who were more likely to bring down test scores than others. This seems to draw on the morals of the administrators within these charter schools. The students who are more likely to bring down these test scores are the ones who need more academic support in the classroom. If they are being excluded from taking the test they are most likely also not receiving as much help in the classroom as they need. How are these students supposed to improve if they are not given the chance?
Another moral dilemma this film addresses is the difference in disciplinary codes within charter schools and non-charter schools. This difference permits charter schools to expel students based on low performance. Hill states that this poses the problem of “advantaging one student by disadvantaging another” (Merrow, 2013). While the students who are high performing now have more academic help and attention as they lose a classmate, where does this classmate go? These low performing students are now at risk at being overlooked in a non-charter school with less resources or ending up on the high-crime streets of New Orleans.
In order to get these “great schools” and transform the public school system, students who need support and extra attention are being pushed out and made to believe that they are not good enough. What does this say about the charter school movement in New Orleans? While these schools are producing higher test scores what are they doing to the more at-risk population of children in New Orleans?
Comments
15 responses to “Moral Dilemma in Rebirth: New Orleans”
Amanda,
You bring up a lot of ideas that I have been thinking about in regards to the disciplinary practices of a lot of charter schools. Suspensions and demerits at these schools are so common, and the kids who are being pushed out of the schools because of consistent disciplinary issues usually need the most help. I really don’t understand the efficacy of taking children out of school for misbehaving (essentially giving him/her a vacation), which only ends up putting them even further behind. If they’re behind in the first place, and acting out because of it, then pulling them out of school doesn’t help them at all. If the intention behind their misbehavior is to escape a negative stimulus (like learning a subject they find boring or too hard), then releasing them from class is reinforcing that behavior.
Also, you’re taking the child out of a safe zone and placing them in the company of other people who are out of school. These people can be peers that dropped out, unemployed neighbors, gang members, or a slew of other negative influences. If they have a supportive home environment, that’s one thing, but some of these students don’t, and most of their parents aren’t even home during the school day anyways.
I think that a common theme in many of our posts is that school reform is targeting the wrong set of students and completely leaving out the students that may need the most help (ex: students who grew up in extreme poverty, students with behavioral problems, or students with disabilities). What is school reform really solving by targeting the well-performing students who, in my opinion, would probably excel enough to pass by in any school system or setup?
Why this may seem too simple, I feel like school reform should simply switch its focus to targeting students who are the most challenging and need the most help. How will they perform best? Is intense discipline what they really need? What can be done to address any out-of-school factors that are a setback for these students? Can the answer of school reform really be as simple as a new frame of mind?
Amanda, I find your very last question interesting to me. The charter schools in New Orleans are creating a great divide among the communities. Students who attend the charter schools and are successful there are being praised and idealized for their high test scores. Students at the charters who are not doing well and eventually leave are seen as unruly and misbehaved. The third group of students would be those who never attended the charters to begin with. This could be because they did not have a parent to fight for them to attend, they previously had too many discipline problems to try to attend a charter, or they simply didn’t want to go to the charter schools. What do you think is the dialogue between these three groups of students? Do you think their is tension and a sense of “have’s and have not’s” among them?
Courtney, I would say I too do not understand the full reasoning behind suspensions. Sending a student home when they should be in school is not going to promote learning. I do think, though, that there is more behind why schools have suspensions than you are implying here. Many schools use suspensions not only for the kid in trouble but also for the other students to learn that a certain behavior will not be accepted. Schools are use suspensions to take the disruptive students out of the classroom so that the other students can have a more peaceful learning environment. I also think schools probably use suspensions to shame students into hopefully better behavior in the future. From the sounds of it, however, it does not seem like this disciplinary method is working at in the the New Orleans charter schools.
Hannah,
I like that you posed this question of there maybe being tension between these three groups of students. I think that there is definitley tension there. If one student didn’t have the support to attend a charter school yet one of their good friends did, I could see this causing some resentment. The student in the charter school would have much less time to spend with the friend who attends the less time consuming non-charter school. Maybe even developing feelings of jealousy would form from the student who didn’t have the opportunity to attend a charter. Because of the close-knitness of the New Orleans community, I can absolutely seeing some tension forming between those who attend charter schools and those who don’t.
Mckenzie,
I think that this idea of a new frame of mind is a great one. Instead of leaving behind the students posing the most problems, schools and teachers should focus on these students the most in order to make sure they can get the best education possible. Right now we are too focused on the ones doing well so that we can boost our standardized test scores and school reputations but while we do this, students are falling through the cracks who might’ve had the chance with more attention and support. However could this really work? Or would more attention for these students just cause complaints by parents on a lack of attention on their “star” student? What is the compromise we could make between these two groups of students?
I think this raises the point that has crossed my mind multiple times this semester, and that is, what is the point of school reform? In my mind, school reform should be an initiative that benefits each and every student in that specific district. It should not target one school, one class, or one race, but rather ALL of the students as a whole. I think this movie demonstrates perfectly how reform does not demonstrate these aspects however. New Orleans literally had the opportunity to start completely over after Hurricane Katrina hit, and still we have these students who are being pushed out. In my mind, these students are the ones who need the most attention and the most change in their lives so that they too can succeed. While school reform obviously targets certain aspects in order to produce visible change, I think that one aspect it should be mandatory to focus on is those students who are not performing. Instead of making there to be a way to push out students, I think there needs to be some sort of system implemented in order to make this change.
My post jumps back to McKenzie’s, is this idea too simple? Or more so, HOW do we make individuals WANT to make these sort of changes instead of pretending those challenging and failing students do not exist?
I agree with not having an understanding of taking a child out of school for a period of time when they misbehave. In my mind, these students are the most challenging and to even have them be in attendance at school is sometimes shocking in some cases. These misbehaved students are more than likely already on the verge of giving up, so why push them even further in that direction? While students do need to face consequences for their actions, I do not see how suspension is a good system especially for these children.
Why not try and keep these individuals in school as much as possible instead of forcing them out? Even if they have a bad test score, do we see it better to have one bad test score in our school then omitting that score all together? That is what it seems. It seems that those who are failing do not have a place within some schools.
Hannah,
I get what you’re saying in that there are other motives to suspending a kid besides just a punishment for that student. However, I think that even using suspensions to show kids what isn’t acceptable only works if the suspension is actually seen as a punishment for those kids. For the ones that really enjoy school and learning, it definitely is. But for the kids that don’t see the point of school and are acting up the most, I don’t see them thinking that suspension is a punishment, or even a threat.
Amanda-
You bring up an excellent point and, what I believe to be, one of the biggest challenges of current school reform: it’s hard to find a middle ground. On one hand, the needs of less well-off, low performing students needs to be addressed. On the other hand, the needs of “superstar” students also needs to be accounted for. It seems nearly impossible to address the education needs of both of these groups of students (and all students in between) without separating them into different school environments, which is against the clause of “equal a education”. However, I have to ask is equal education actually what needs to happen. As a parent of a student on either side of the spectrum, I believe I would be in favor of schools separated by different abilities allowing my student to receive the individualized, unique attention they need. Any thoughts?
I agree–this is a very difficult line to walk. We don’t want to disadvantage anyone through education, so how do we give everyone a great experience?
In my experience, students have often been given a choice (or been tested into) various levels of a class. This may come in the format of ‘regular’ vs. honors/AP/IB classes, particularly for middle and high school students. I had a similar experience in elementary school, where students were sorted into various levels of math class, which allowed the teachers to more efficiently focus on material at an appropriate level for each group of students. This type of system may be somewhat of a solution for this question. Another thought I had was if smaller class sizes in general would be helpful. This would allow the teacher to focus on all students a little more, so breaking students up by level would be less necessary. Does anyone agree or disagree, or have other thoughts for solutions?
Melinda, I like your point here. What is really the goal of school reform? It sometimes seems like the umbrella of ‘school reform’ has been used as a catch-all for any change made in the schools–whether it is truly a reform effort or just an embellishment on the status quo. It seems to me that a true school reform endeavor would try to change the entire structure of the system, rather than a single school, student, or classroom.
I agree with all of the above comments. Coming from a public school where suspension was often used as a method of discipline, I can say that the students who were most often getting suspended, were the one’s that cared the least. In other words, after being suspended once or twice, students who misbehaved often look forward to suspension, since I meant time out of school.
My school also engaged in something we called In School Suspension (ISS). This practice made me question the use of suspension even further. Essentially, during ISS, students would sit in one classroom all day, often without supervision, and do their homework and nap instead of going to class. Why would this practice deter students from misbehaving? Most students who were disciplined with ISS were excited about sitting in a classroom and getting to nap for half the school day.
I agree with you Alex. School reform simply isn’t enough to fix the problems facing public education. I feel as though New Orleans in a good example of this. Even with all the school reforms that have gone on, there still exists a large disparity between the “haves” (charter school students) and the “have-nots” (public school students). As Amanda pointed out, this system tends to push out low-performing students, and students will special needs. It seems as though, given the current state of education, the only way to improve education nation-wide is to create a more equal playing field for everyone.
Good questions, McKenzie. The ideas you brought up really made me think about this issue a lot.
I still can’t help but go back to thinking about what we talked about in class that the biggest issues for low-performance students exist outside the classroom. School reform must depend on steps taken to address poverty, violence, and other influence prominent in most low-income areas. Perhaps this would diminish the unfairness of the selection process that charter schools implement.
An interesting idea could be to have an independent agency or organization administer random lottery assignments to various charter schools so that the power of choice is taken out of the hands of charter schools. What makes a school “good” should not just be the test scores of the students but the quality of teachers. Therefore, schools that are truly “good” should be able to succeed even if the student body represents varying levels of academic ability.