Wilborn P. Nobles III

Marc Lacey, national editor of The New York Times, sat down with Michael Hinojosa, the superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District, and Patrick Dobard, the chief executive of New Schools for New Orleans, to discuss what their cities have done to create better outcomes for public school students.

The education leaders agreed the nation’s schools need to improve. But, Lacey said, they don’t necessarily agree on the solution. He pointed out, for example, that Dobard, former superintendent of the state-run Louisiana Recovery School District, participated in New Orleans’ decision to “bet the house, the car and the family dog on charter schools.”

Today, nearly all public schools in New Orleans are charter schools. More than 90 percent of New Orleans’ 48,000 public school students attend one of more than 80 schools run by a charter organization. The locally elected Orleans Parish School Board oversees 78 public schools, but it directly runs only two.

Hinojosa called New Orleans “a system of schools” rather than a school system, and said most districts are somewhere in between. Dallas, for instance, provides a mix of charters and traditional public schools. Dallas also “copied from the charter schools” to create different types of specialized schools like magnet schools, early college programs, single-gender schools and dual-language schools, Hinojosa added.

He also said Dallas’ approach to education differs from New Orleans’ because Dallas still provides neighborhood school options to parents. In comparison, Dobard pointed to New Orleans’ centralized enrollment system, which was created during his time as recovery school district chief, to allow families to pick their desired school regardless of the distance from the students’ homes.

“We agree in many respects, but how we’ve approached it has been different,” Hinojosa said.

The panelists also discussed how a charter-based system can lead to school closures when charters fail to show satisfactory academic and financial performance. Henderson Lewis Jr., superintendent of the Orleans Parish School Board, recently announced it would close five schools at the end of this school year to reduce the city’s number of failing classrooms.

Hinojosa pointed out that closing a school is “very traumatic to a community.” In the most recent New Orleans closures, some residents have opposed the decisions because they can prevent parents from enrolling their children in schools near home.

“People care about our business because we deal with their two most prized possessions: Their kids and their money; so they’re going to be very engaged in what we do,” Hinojosa said.

Dobard stressed that closing a school was “one of the most difficult things to have to do” as schools chief.

“I didn’t take it lightly,” Dobard said. “Children should not have to languish in chronically underperforming situations.”

The Louisiana Legislature created the statewide Recovery School District in 2003 to intervene at the state’s lowest performing schools. The Recovery School District’s role includes merging or closing schools, or transforming a school into a charter.

Dobard became the superintendent of New Orleans’ Recovery School District in 2012, seven years after the Louisiana Legislature expanded the recovery district’s role post-Katrina by shifting control of more than 100 of the city’s low-performing public schools. Dobard helped transform the agency into a district that oversees independent charters.

Dobard also pushed for the 2016 law in Louisiana to transfer the New Orleans Recovery School District schools back to the Orleans school system this year. Dobard stepped down from the Recovery School District last year.

He said New Orleans’ public schools had seen some accomplishments: The city’s graduation rate had increased from 54 percent to 73 percent since 2004, and the college entry rate had risen from 37 percent to 61 percent.

Even so, the district as a whole this year maintained a C letter grade in the state’s annual school performance scores. Likewise, only 29 percent of New Orleans students are achieving a “Mastery” rating or above on state assessments in English language arts and math combined.

Friday’s panel also tackled segregation as a topic that affects achievement gaps. Lacey stressed “we still have a segregated education system in our cities,” and both of the educators agreed.

“There’s so much prosperity in Texas but some of our families aren’t at the table,” Hinojosa said.

New Orleans public schools began desegregation in 1960, spurring white-led riots and a mass exodus of white families in the 1960s and 1970s to private schools and suburban public schools. Dobard, the Recovery School District’s first black superintendent, said that some charter schools were focusing on bringing diversity to the decentralized system. However, he said segregation was still an issue because “a quarter of school-aged children” in the city enrolled in private schools.

Dobard also said most of New Orleans’ public schools were still primarily attended by the city’s most impoverished students and urged more middle-class families to participate in public schools.

“There’s no one solution,” Dobard said. “But there’s really some conversation about what we want to become.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/us/is-an-all-charter-school-system-really-the-way-to-go.html" id="0cfbec82-e4fb-3e9a-ad66-5af0c6c5e916">The New York Times</a>.

Is an All Charter School System Really the Way to Go?

NEW ORLEANS — Educators nationwide want to reduce the achievement gap — the disparity in test scores, grades, and educational attainment — between lower-income and minority students and their peers. The question, of course, is how to do it.

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Wilborn P. Nobles III

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Is an All Charter School System Really the Way to Go?