People have strong feelings when it comes to New Orleans public schools.
After Hurricane Katrina, the state took over most of the city’s schools and turned them into charter schools.
Today, the system consists almost entirely of charter schools, except for one new direct-run school, and for a time was all-charter.
For 15 years, the Cowen Institute at Tulane University has asked parents what they think of the city’s public schools. This year, they surveyed 1,000 public and private school parents and a small number who homeschool their kids.
“No one thinks this is the best system,” says Vincent Rossmeier, the institute’s policy director. “We see not huge levels of, like, overt negativity. But people aren't jumping for joy about any of this.”
While the percentage of parents who gave the city’s schools an A or B grade was similar to last year, far more parents gave schools a C, 45% up from 27%, according to the poll.
Meanwhile, the percentage who said the schools were failing dropped from 16% to just 2%.
Thirty-one percent of parents said they felt positive about the system, about the same share as last year. The percentage that felt negative dropped by half to 21%, and the percentage who said they felt neutral climbed nearly 20 points to 48%.
Education reporter Aubri Juhasz spoke with Rossmeier about this year’s results.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Aubri Juhasz: I want to start with a finding that jumped out at me. One of the questions you've asked almost every year that you've conducted the poll is for parents to grade New Orleans public schools. This year, while the percentage of parents offering public schools an A or B grade was consistent with last year, far more parents gave the schools a C. This is the part that really, really jumped out, the percentage of parents giving the schools an F dropped from 16% to just 2%. Does that feel like a significant shift to you?
Vincent Rossmeier: It does, and it also makes us wonder if 2023 was an aberration. We had never seen the D and the F get quite that high. The fact that it shifted so much more from the D to the F into the C range, I think it's a very interesting finding. You know, no one should be patting themselves on the back because parents are giving schools a C grade. But it's certainly better than the more negative assessments that we saw last year.
Juhasz: I think one of the things that I sometimes wrestle with is there's really polarized views when it comes to the schools and not necessarily a lot of people who are in the middle saying there's good and bad. I’ve heard from people who are like, “The all-charter system is so much better.” And then people who are kind of like, they hate this system and they, they want the whole thing to go away. So just to see so many people in the middle was notable to me
Rossmeier: Absolutely. I agree with the polarization and we see that in our poll findings. This may be something that we will talk about in more depth later, but one thing that we try to do is emphasize is that there are significant differences in respondents based especially on their socioeconomic status, their educational attainment and their race across these questions and that all of those things impacted their ability to access what they perceive as high-quality education options for their families.
Juhasz: Let’s talk about that right now. What do we know about these factors and the kids of schools that the children of these parents are more likely to be going to?
Rossmeier: Families with higher educational attainment might have more positive perceptions because they just have more options and have a greater ability to navigate the system. They might have the option that if they are unsatisfied with the options presented to them by the public system that they could even afford to go private, which isn't something that everyone can afford. We also just found with race pretty consistently Black and white respondents were the most negative, whereas Hispanic respondents had far, far higher positive responses across the board and were far more optimistic about issues facing the city and just public education in general.
Juhasz: We're coming up on 20 years since Hurricane Katrina. The Cowen Institute was started to analyze the dramatic shift in the city schools, that switch to the charter system. As we come up on this big anniversary, what is your main takeaway from all of these surveys?
Rossmeier: We have seen pretty consistently a sort of medium to, you know, like a C-level assessment. No one thinks this is the best system. We see not huge levels of, like, overt negativity. But people aren't jumping for joy about any of this.
I think a great example is we have asked pretty much every other year, not every year, but every other year about how respondents feel about charter schools. We ask, “Do you feel very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, or very negative this year?” Forty-four percent, the most, the plurality of respondents were neutral, 29% percent were negative and 24% were positive. The positive and neutral ratings were similar to when we last asked this question in 2022, but the negative responses were notably higher this year. They were 8% in 2022. So, there's just sort of a grouping in the middle on a lot of these questions.
But one thing I also always find fascinating is when we ask, “How do you feel about public education in general in the city?” And then we ask a follow up question: “What overall grade would you get the quality of education offered by your children's school or schools?” We saw far higher rates of positivity there than we do when we just ask the more general question with 42% percent of respondents giving it an A or B grade, which was similar to when we asked the question last year when it was 41%. And this year, the number who gave their schools a C grade doubled from last year, from 18% last year to 35%, so essentially doubling. That's just like an interesting phenomenon that overall people are more positive about the schools their kids actually go to than they are about public education in general in the city
Juhasz: Vincent Rossmeier is policy director for the Cowen Institute at Tulane University. Thank you so much for speaking with me.
Rossmeier: Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really, really enjoyed speaking with you.
