A major player in the city's public education system claims the Orleans Parish's two-year old voucher program isn't working, putting Catholic schools in the area back into the overall education debate.
Leslie Jacobs (through her organization, Educate Now!), a former member of the state's Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and candidate for mayor of New Orleans, challenged the program of offering "vouchers" to students of low-performing public schools so they could attend Catholic and other private schools, saying test scores of those students are significantly lower than those attending public schools:
On the website for her nonprofit group, Educate Now, Jacobs said the standardized test results of third- and fourth-graders attending private and parochial schools with state-financed vouchers raise "serious concerns." But others, including State Superintendent Paul Pastorek, questioned Jacobs' use of LEAP tests to reach her conclusions.
The list of schools in the sidebar of Da Paper's article consists of a whole bunch of Catholic and Christian schools where students can use vouchers. The article explains the system:
The voucher program for low-income New Orleans elementary school children was approved by the state Legislature two years ago with strong backing from Gov. Bobby Jindal. About 1,200 students received vouchers worth about $7,400 apiece in the 2009-2010 school year, and enrollment will increase to almost 1,700 this fall.
The schools operated by the Archdiocese of New Orleans are the 800-pound gorilla in the room that often is not addressed when discussing public education in the city. Catholic education has a rich and successful history in New Orleans, but the schools have also been problematic for the public system. In a city which had (pre-storm) a population breakdown (roughly) 60/40 black/white, why was the breakdown of public school students 95/5? Where did all the white kids go to school? Simple, Catholic and other private schools.
The overwhelmingly Catholic population of New Orleans and its suburbs found a great way to avoid the issues of school desegregation and busing. Catholics institutionalized de facto segregation by building elementary schools in most of the church parishes in the archdiocese. These schools were true "neighborhood" schools in that a parish could simply refuse to accept "out of parish" students. That meant all-white neighborhoods in the city and suburbs could reject black families with a straight (and totally legal) face. "Oh, sorry, you don't live in Our Lady of the Swamp Parish, and we just don't have the room for your children." To give you an idea of how entrenched Catholic education is in New Orleans, compare it to other cities. In many cities, parents send their kids to Catholic schools because they need more motivation/discipline/attention than one can get in public school. In New Orleans, there are specialized Catholic schools for children who don't get enough motivation/discipline/attention in the "regular" Catholic schools!
One of the biggest complications in this alternative school system has been how public schools are financed. Families with kids in Catholic schools resented having to pay both tuition and property+sales taxes funding public schools. As a result, trying to get any sort of increase in millage is above and beyond the normal tax resistance one finds when trying to pay for schools. The combination of the storm and the election of a reactionary/religious-conservative governor, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (R-Kenner), emboldened the already-conservative state legislature to approve a voucher system two years ago. Orleans Parish schools have become quite the petri dish of experimentation since the storm that vouchers in the mix isn't surprising. The main limiter on the voucher program is that students had to have attended one of twenty-one schools identified as poor-performing.
Two years later, however, the scores don't look good for the Catholic system. Naturally, proponents of vouchers say the existing data is premature, but Jacobs has decided to publicize the deficiencies of voucher students. An ardent supporter of the Recovery School District and its charter schools, Jacobs' opinion is well-respected. That she is willing to throw down with Jindal on the voucher issue is an interesting political development.
In terms of the role of Catholic education in the city, having any light shined on the performance of Catholic students is problematic for the archdiocese. Parents of today's elementary school students aren't of the same mindset as their parents. With real household income shrinking more often that growing, Catholic school tuition is more of a financial burden. The prospect of better public schools that are already paid for by tax dollars is offering a lot of food for thought for those parents. The skin color of the kid sitting next to theirs isn't even on their radar in many cases. Without significant increases in tuition, the local parish school won't be able to attract teachers of the level of today's charter and "magnet" schools. As more Catholic families discover this, the Catholic system will continue to shrink.
And that can only help the public system.
