Supporting the Ecosystem of Education in New Orleans

A talk with Dana Peterson, CEO, New Schools for New Orleans

In previous articles, we have gotten an overview of education and the challenges faced by teachers at the elementary school, middle school, and high school levels. If you zoom out from there, we get to the roles of system and district administrators whose job it is to address the challenges or barriers to success that schools may face. From there we then get to the level of the policies and approaches that impact where money and resources come from and how they are allocated. This is the ecosystem of education. Like any ecosystem, everything is interconnected and each part of it plays its own role in the common goal of providing quality education for students and improving the educational environment that teachers and students exist in. This is the role that my cousin Dana Peterson plays in the New Orleans education ecosystem.

Dana Peterson is currently the Chief Executive Officer of New Schools for New Orleans – a non-profit education philanthropic and advocacy organization – and has previously served as an Assistant State Superintendent of the Louisiana Department of Education and the Deputy Superintendent of External Affairs for the Recovery School District. Dana’s career in education has primarily been from a policy and advocacy focus and has been shaped by the unique circumstances of the New Orleans school system. When he first got started in education as a volunteer, he began living in New Orleans with his wife Karen Carter Peterson who was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. With a spouse in public office, Dana saw up close the impact of public service and began to think intentionally about how to contribute meaningfully to communities in his new hometown.

In 2008, he began serving on the board of Firstline Schools, a mission-driven homegrown non-profit organization that started one of the first charter schools in the city prior to Hurricane Katrina. Charter schools are public schools that for the most part function independently of the normal bureaucratic controls of the school district it is located in. As Dana explained, that independence or autonomy gives charter schools flexibility that traditional public schools do not normally have. With that flexibility, charter school administrators have the ability to make decisions about curriculum, staffing, and resource allocation on their own and in turn make them and implement them faster. The prevalence of charter schools in New Orleans arose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when the governor and state legislature passed a state takeover of more than three quarters of all public schools in the city because of persistently low student outcomes, financial mismanagement, and corruption.  Like many urban public-school systems around the country, New Orleans Public Schools faced a myriad of challenges - many the result of decades of racist, segregationist public policy.   However, in New Orleans, schools also struggled mightily to overcome mismanagement, inconsistent leadership, indifference.  In the years prior to Hurricane Katrina damaging nearly eighty percent of buildings in the district’s portfolio, the New Orleans Public Schools had eight superintendents in ten years, and five chief financial officers in five years – before the district’s finances were taken over by an outside consultant.  Student academic outcomes suffered as a result.  Based on state test results, New Orleans ranked 67^th out of 68 school districts in Louisiana; only 54 percent of students graduated high-school on time; and despite enrolling roughly 9 percent of the state’s public school students, the city was home to 44 percent of the state’s lowest performing schools.

Following the aftermath of the storm, in tandem with the effort to rebuild the city, there was also an opportunity to completely overhaul and reform the school system. By 2014, the city had closed down all of the public schools in favor of this new model of charter schools. This allowed the schools to re-open quickly and efficiently as residents began to return to New Orleans. As Dana served on a charter school board a few years after the hurricane he found himself becoming more and more engrossed in his role until he found that he was dedicating himself more to that position than he was his day job. It was then that he found his calling.

The Charter School Model

When discussing what advantages the charter school model brought to the district, he stressed two words: freedom and flexibility.  Schools have the freedom to make decisions specific to their own circumstances and the flexibility to adapt more rapidly to meet the unique needs of their students. This freedom and flexibility puts educators in schools in control of key levers for success. In particular, schools have been able to deploy resources allocated to them in non-traditional and creative ways and it’s this aspect that Dana points out that has led to the amount of recovery that has taken place within the wider school district.  As an example, this was especially critical in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the money pushed down to school districts from the federal government in response to the pandemic, charter schools in New Orleans were able to hire extra reading interventionists, tutors, and counselors to address the needs of the students – and often more rapidly than traditional schools. This has led to schools in New Orleans collectively being one of the top five parishes in the state in returning to pre-COVID academic levels.

In New Orleans, parents also exercise freedom and flexibility in important ways. With the emergence of charter schools in the city came an equally unique approach to student enrollment. Seeking to shed the effects of historically inequitable housing patterns, students in New Orleans are not defaulted to the school closest to their home. Families seeking a new school must apply by selecting schools they prefer from across the city; there are no automatic assignments based on residence. This policy is meant to level the playing field among families, many of which can’t afford to move into neighborhoods that are traditionally home to the highest performing schools.

What also makes this model of charter schools unique is the accountability that schools and their administrations face. Dana contends that New Orleans is one of the only places in the country where schools are consistently held accountable for student academic performance. If students aren’t meeting the district’s standards in a particular school, when the contract for running the school comes up for renewal, that organization can lose the privilege of educating students. This engenders a sense of urgency in the schools to make sure the student needs are met and outcomes improve.

Assessing School Performance

In this way, standardized testing is an important aspect for evaluation and assessment for the performance of a school. Across the country, the standard set for students to meet represents a bare minimum that students need to meet. When students are consistently not meeting that standard, in this system, there is accountability for that. Some teachers contend that standardized testing is disruptive to their school year and forces them to teach toward the test which makes it difficult overall for them to teach their students as they see fit. But when these tests can lead to direct action to address issues such as reading proficiency or low math scores, in this context, it can be very important for the constant effort to improve schools and school systems. In assessing why a school isn’t meeting these standards, they may find that the conditions for teachers and the overall environment in the school needs to be addressed and improved and this can have a positive effect on the teachers as well.

This kind of rapid response in New Orleans’ school systems is especially important because they deal primarily in addressing the needs of students from communities that have far fewer resources and suffer from the effects of poverty. As Mary Kenzer, Bonita Peterson, and Morgan Guess have pointed out from their years of teaching, this aspect is one of the most important parts of their jobs as teachers. Many of their students struggle due to the disadvantages from simply not having the basics such as breakfast or lunch, or school supplies, or having parents with the time to assist their children with their homework every night. As Dana says, the experiences from dealing with fractured systems of society are appearing in the classroom. This makes teaching a very difficult and draining job as Mary, Bonita and Morgan have all pointed out.

The Role of Policy and Advocacy

This is where the roles of people like Dana, who work toward a policy and advocacy agenda play an important part in the lives of the students and teachers. He has pointed at that despite the doom and gloom surrounding the state of education today in the United States, the biggest positive is that there is more debate than ever about the different approaches to education policy. There are many paths that an individual school or district can take that were not available in previous eras. Dana stresses that a good healthy education ecosystem and environment has a diversity of different elements and approaches.

Policy and approaches are not just limited to the actual education, but the whole educational environment. The goal of an ecosystem approach is also to ensure that that other systems, healthcare, criminal justice, are more aligned with the deploying of their resources to address the needs that kids have. Interacting with all the different agencies and bodies that can contribute to improving the lives of the students. An example Dana gives is helping schools better leverage Medicaid reimbursement for school-based health services. In recent years more school-based services are eligible for federal reimbursement. But as he notes schools are not built in a way to interface with a heavily bureaucratic system such as Medicaid, but in New Orleans a large percentage of the children in the schools qualify. There have been efforts to better braid together public and private resources to come up with unique solutions that schools and students can benefit from. During the pandemic, it became acutely aware that schools needed more resources to deal with the trauma students endured and address their mental health challenges that brought on by the isolation related to school closures. Just last year, in response, the New Orleans City Council allotted $10 million to partner with the local children’s hospital to hire mental health counselors to support schools.

The Ecosystem of Education

When you begin to see all of these different approaches to improving schools, you can start to see an aggregate portrait of work being done to improve society. Dana says one of the most fulfilling aspects of his work is seeing how education can improve the trajectory for an entire family. Just one child going on to higher education can have a ripple effect not just for them, but for their family around them and their future children. When this happens across multiple families, education can begin to change the trajectory of an entire neighborhood. Dana says that education can remove many barriers for success, and this makes it imperative that public systems work better for the well-being of the public.

This can be a difficult task though and for many the enormity of the issues faced can seem insurmountable. Dana compares focusing on public education in isolation to the myth of Sisyphus who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity. If it’s just a school board or a school district independent of other systems affecting kids and families, you can only move the boulder so far. However, an ecosystem approach to education can transcend this Sisyphean task  when there is broader alignment and collaboration. This needs to be from the top down and bottom up. We need parents to be involved not just in the education of their child, but also the education policy debate. When parents voice their concerns more and more on policy, they are not just advocating for their own child but their neighbor’s child too. What resources does the community need, and not just a single household? Active parents create better outcomes for children across the board. Teachers do their part by creating a rigorous learning environment. The role of system and school administrators is to recruit, develop, and retain quality teachers. Educational policy seeks to make sure that this entire ecosystem functions and that money and resources are allocated to meet the needs of students, teachers, and administrators. When describing the effort it takes to address the Sisyphean task of education, Dana conveyed the following:

There’s no greater collective action that we could take than to ensure that we have a strong public school system. And I would define strong as one that is demonstrating in its schools year over year that it is developing and supporting young people and improving their academic outcomes. If we were to grow by ten percent next year in the number of students that meet the state’s standard in reading and math, is that going to create a city with more equitable outcomes overnight? No. But that type of consistent growth over a number of years almost  certainly would. If we’re able to generate those type of results year after year, in less than a generation we can transform New Orleans to a place that is not only one of the most culturally relevant in the world but one in which more people are prepared to share in the economic and civic benefits of that culture. The way we get there is by more people joining forces to push that rock up hill. Teachers can’t do it alone. School and system administrators can’t do it alone. Parents can’t do it alone. We need an ecosystem in which everyone is rowing in the same direction.