What Effect Did the New Orleans School Reforms Have on Student Achievement, High School Graduation, and College Outcomes?

The New Orleans school reforms rep­re­sent the first time in the last cen­tu­ry that the tra­di­tion­al U.S. gov­ern­ment-dri­ven sys­tem of K‑12 school­ing has been com­plete­ly replaced by a mar­ket-dri­ven one. In 2005, in the wake of Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na, the state took over almost all of the city’s pub­lic schools from the local school dis­trict and then turned them over to non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions. These char­ter schools had auton­o­my over per­son­nel deci­sions and almost all oth­er mat­ters and were held account­able to the state through per­for­mance-based con­tracts. Instead of assign­ing stu­dents to schools based on the neigh­bor­hoods they lived in, the new sys­tem allowed fam­i­lies to choose schools from across the city, and schools began receiv­ing fund­ing based almost entire­ly on the num­ber of stu­dents they attract­ed. This study builds on our ear­li­er analy­sis where we esti­mat­ed the effect of the entire pack­age of mar­ket-based reforms on test scores through 2012. Our method entails essen­tial­ly sub­tract­ing the improve­ments in New Orleans from those in a care­ful­ly matched com­par­i­son group of stu­dents, schools, and dis­tricts else­where in Louisiana, and adjust­ing the result for any remain­ing demo­graph­ic dif­fer­ences between the groups. Here, we use this method to exam­ine a wider range of out­comes through 2014. We find that for New Orleans: The reforms increased stu­dent achieve­ment by 11 – 16 per­centiles (depend­ing on the sub­ject and analy­sis method). The reforms increased the high school grad­u­a­tion rate by 3 – 9 per­cent­age points. The reforms increased the col­lege entry rate by 8 – 15 per­cent­age points. The reforms increased the col­lege per­sis­tence rate by 4 – 7 per­cent­age points. * The reforms increased the col­lege grad­u­a­tion rate by 3 – 5 per­cent­age points. For high school grad­u­a­tion and col­lege out­comes, the effects are all in the range of 10 – 67% over where New Orleans stood just before the reforms. The reforms also improved all out­comes for dis­ad­van­taged stu­dents and reduced edu­ca­tion­al inequities for high school and col­lege mea­sures. It is very unusu­al to see pro­grams and poli­cies improve all of these out­comes. We cau­tion that these sub­stan­tial effects are unlike­ly to arise in most oth­er school dis­tricts because New Orleans had sev­er­al advan­tages over oth­er dis­tricts in mak­ing the reforms work. Nev­er­the­less, the fact that New Orleans improved so much, in such a short peri­od, on so many mea­sures means that the city’s expe­ri­ences are wor­thy of attention.

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