Leadership and voice: Two New Orleans schools illustrate the promise and perils of charter schools
By Eric Schulzke
Deseret News
December 4th, 2014
This story is part of the Deseret News National Edition, which focuses on the issues that resonate with American families.
Lauren LeDuff was a junior at Warren Easton High School in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in August of 2005. Fleeing with her family, she finished the school year as a refugee in Houston, returning to Warren Easton for her senior year.
She returned to a transformed school.
The entire first floor of the 100-year-old massive three-story brick building had been gutted by water and mud. Half the building was still unusable when school began in the fall of 2006. Sawing and hammering echoed from downstairs and lunches were brown bag or delivered pizza.
But that was not all: The school’s name and mission had changed. Now it was Warren Easton Charter High School. It had a new principal, Alexina Medley, who was making sweeping changes. Uniforms, strict rules and an innovative program to get its students career- or college-ready followed.
The changes at Warren Easton so inspired LeDuff that she vowed to become a teacher and return to her alma mater.
“I told Ms. Medley before I left she’d need to fire somebody to make room for me,” said LeDuff, who now teaches English and communications at Warren Easton.
She was kidding, of course. No one was fired for her.
But in theory, it was possible. Like most charter schools, the new Warren Easton has no teacher unions and answers to no school district. Instead, it has its own charter with the state and its own school board that grants the principal sweeping authority to shape budgets, curriculum and mission, and to hire and fire staff.
It seems to be working at Warren Easton. With a charismatic and collaborative leader, morale of staff and teachers appears to be high, and the high-poverty student body is performing well on graduation and standardized test measures.
Not every charter school manages its autonomy so well, however. Critics point to less successful examples, including Ben Franklin Charter High School across town in New Orleans. There, they say, staff decisions were arbitrary, pay scales murky and morale poor and teacher turnover is high. Alleged mismanagement at Ben Franklin recently led its teachers to unionize.
These two schools represent each side of a double-edged sword: The charter school reality that the freedom to innovate also contains the power to mismanage or destroy. What makes charters exciting is dynamic possibility for leadership to change staff, refocus and create a new mission, but that dynamism comes with risk.
Charter schools are now a permanent and growing part of the American educational map. From school years 1999 to 2011, the percentage of public schools that were charters rose from 1.7 to 5.8 percent.
In urban schools serving underprivileged students, charters are disproportionately common. All of New Orleans’ public schools are now charters, while over half of Detroit students and roughly 45 percent of those in Washington, D.C., attend charters. These cities are leaders but not outliers: Many major urban areas are now upward of 20 percent charter.
As the charter trend expands, there is friction over how the schools are governed. Ben Franklin remains a rarity in its recent unionization. In 2012 just 7 percent of charter schools were unionized, down from 12 percent in 2009, according to the Center for Education Reform.
Critics argue that without strong teacher input, reflected in unions or some other institutional security, teachers and the schools will be at the mercy of bad leaders. Others argue that reverting to the fetters of traditional schools would squelch innovation, that real change requires strong leaders who take risks and that teacher voice can be respected without sacrificing bold leadership.
