Louisiana Moves up to Third in National Charter Ranking
Danielle Drellinger, The Times-Picayune
It’s National School Choice Week, and several organizations have released reports examining the state of the country’s charter schools. Louisiana remains a leader in the charter school movement, placing third in the National Association of Public Charter Schools’ annual charter law ranking. About 9 percent of Louisiana’s public schools are charters, which is above the national average. In all, almost 60,000 of Louisiana’s approximately 713,000 public school students attend 121 charter schools this year, according to state data.
Over the past decade, an average of 340 charters have opened per year in the U.S., according to a report released Thursday by the Center for Education Reform. But waiting lists have also grown, from an average of 233 students in 2009 to 277 students in 2012, showing unmet demand.
Nationally, charters remain much smaller than conventional schools and serve a poorer population the report says. Both types of schools have about the same share of special education students.
The percentage of disadvantaged students in charters could increase with a federal rule change announced Wednesday. The Education Department will now let charters prioritize disadvantaged students in their lotteries, if their state allows it, without losing federal charter school startup funds.
Michael Petrilli of the conservative Fordham Institute lauded the move. “Charter schools that want to be socioeconomically diverse sometimes struggle to maintain a healthy balance if they are forced to use a single random lottery,” he wrote in a blog post. “That’s because the best charters often become so popular with middle-class parents that they flood the lotteries and end up taking most of the available seats.”
The Education Department encouraged schools that change their lottery priorities to emphasize outreach and recruitment, so more disadvantaged families apply in the first place.
According to the Center for Education Reform, charters grew the most in states with strong charter laws.
That would seem to promise further growth in Louisiana, which moved from sixth to third in the National Association of Public Charter Schools’ charter law rankings, out of 43 places. Only Minnesota and Indiana placed higher. Neighboring Mississippi overhauled its laws in 2013 and jumped from 43rd in the rankings to 14th.
The rankings measure each state against the organization’s ideal charter law. According to the national association, strong charter laws set performance standards for schools, require states to collect data to monitor charters, exempt charters from collective bargaining agreements and allow for virtual charter schools, among other factors.
Louisiana received 167 points out of a possible 228 and led the country in ensuring a transparent application and review process for charter schools. The state law also scored high on allowing autonomy, exempting charters from many local school system regulations, not capping the number of charters and providing money to authorize and monitor schools.
Louisiana’s law does not ensure that charter schools have equal access to buildings, the report says, nor that charter students have access to extracurricular and interscholastic activities.
Christopher Lubienski, director of the University of Illinois Forum on the Future of Public Education, said the the national association’s report measured the wrong things. “These rankings reflect ideological desire, not empirical evidence, and simply are not linked to school outcomes,” he said. “In fact, experience and research show that many of the attributes NAPCS promotes are actually associated with school under-performance and failure.”
In a recent study, his team found schools with more autonomy had lower academic results, and virtual charter schools performed badly.
Lubienski suggested “ranking states by outcomes, rather than by how much they reflect NAPCS’s policy agenda.”
