New Orleans' Nearly All-Charter School System Is Struggling, But Bobby Jindal Wants It To Be A Model

by Alice Ollstein
Posted on February 9, 2015 at 12:23 pm Updated: February 9, 2015 at 3:43 pm
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Louisiana Governor and likely presidential candidate Bobby Jindal (R) released his new "roadmap" for reforming K-12 education Monday morning, focusing on the importance of deregulating and privatizing public schools and holding up New Orleans' nearly all-charter school district as a model for the nation.
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"I'm proud we've increased the number of charter schools, nearly doubling them," Jindal told an audience on Capitol Hill. "I get so frustrated when people tell us to wait for incremental gains. We have seen remarkable gains."
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But new data calls the supposed gains into question. The class of 2014 graduating from the 90%-charter New Orleans Recovery School District scored so low on the national ACT test that they didn't meet the minimum requirements for Louisiana's colleges.
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According to numbers crunched by Louisiana public school teacher and doctor of statistics Mercedes Schneider, just over 6 percent of high school seniors in New Orleans scored high enough in English and Math to qualify for admission into a Louisiana four-year college or university straight out of high school. Five of the district's 16 high schools produced not a single student who met these requirements.
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