Perceptions of Charter and Traditional Schools in New Orleans

A mong other disruptions that Hurricane Katrina brought to New Orleans in 2005 was an upheaval of the city’s public schools. The system, which had already been struggling with poor student performance and financial mismanagement, suffered approximately $800 million in property damage, and 64,000 students were displaced. In the storm’s wake, New Orleans drastically reformed its public education system, replacing the existing local district with a decentralized, choice-based system of charter and district-run schools. The new system consists of two main school districts, the state-run Recovery School District (RSD), and the locally administered Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), each of which authorizes a large number of charter schools and directly operates its own “traditional” (noncharter) schools. Because New Orleans is the first U.S. city to carry out charter-based reform at such a scale, its experiences have widespread implications. These include the unusual opportunity to examine the operational, instructional, human-capital, and family-outreach policies and practices of charter and traditional schools within a fully choicebased system. To better understand the implications of the reforms, the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University asked RAND to partner with it in using a U.S. Department of Education grant to examine differences in policies and practices between charter and traditional schools in New Orleans. During the 2008–2009 academic year, RAND and Cowen Institute researchers surveyed New Orleans principals, teachers, and parents about their schools’ governance and operations, educational contexts, educator qualifications, and parental choice and involvement. Because the surveys were administered at a single point in time and respondents represented only a subset of targeted schools, the findings have limited generalizability, but they do illuminate Abstract