The Education Gadfly Weekly

A few days before Christmas, the Columbus Dispatch published a story detailing how Columbus City Schools (CCS) plans to spend over half a million dollars to “evaluate conditions at its more than 100 buildings to help district officials consider which buildings might close and which ones to fix.”

It’s not a surprise that the district is considering closing schools. The topic has been coming up for years, and current superintendent Dr. Angela Chapman mentioned at a board meeting in November that district officials would discuss plans to consolidate schools.

It’s also not inherently bad news. School closures are complicated, and it’s absolutely crucial for the district to gather feedback from families and community members before they make any big decisions. But district officials also can’t keep ignoring steadily declining enrollment. Between 2017–18 and 2022–23, for example, CCS saw a 10 percent drop in enrollment, a loss of roughly 4,000 students. Right-sizing will be difficult but likely necessary, given that the district serves fewer students today. Consolidating schools could in fact help improve both the district’s finances and its ability to serve students well.

Unfortunately, the Dispatch piece doesn’t acknowledge that Dr. Chapman is right to insist on the district developing a long-term plan. The story does, however, contain a thinly veiled jab at school choice by John Coneglio, the president of the Columbus Education Association. The article notes that Coneglio has “watched a significant number of Columbus City students move to charter and private schools over the years.” Coneglio later adds, “You cannot close your way to success. Stop managing the slow decline of Columbus City Schools.”

Pairing these statements together sends a pretty clear message: The reason CCS is consolidating or closing schools is because it’s lost a significant number of students to charter and private schools. If those pesky (non-union) alternatives didn’t exist, Columbus wouldn’t be in this predicament.

According to a recent analysis from Fordham, Columbus does indeed face stiff competition from schools of choice. Among the nation’s largest school districts, Columbus ranks sixteenth—tied with the Los Angeles Unified School District in California—in terms of facing the most competition. As of 2019–20, roughly 36 percent of the district’s students, more than one-third, are enrolled in non-district schools. A closer look indicates that it’s largely charters driving the competition. The percentage of district students attending private schools slightly decreased between 2010 and 2020, while the percentage of students attending charters is significantly larger and increased over the time period.

For school choice opponents, it’s easy to point the finger at charters when the district is contemplating building closures. But blaming charters overlooks several important facts.

First, CCS has been putting off dealing with under-enrolled schools for years. A piece published by the Dispatch back in May 2018 noted that, according to district staff, many buildings were “under-enrolled, underutilized, in poor condition and unpopular among students.” Months later, a November editorial blasted the board of education’s decision to essentially ignore “all but the easiest” recommendations from a facilities taskforce charged with identifying which buildings to close. To wit: “The district has too few students in too many buildings. This isn’t a matter only of wasting money; it hurts programs, especially at the high-school level, when there aren’t enough students to justify certain classes or to field strong extracurricular programs.” These points were ignored, and the district refused to downsize its facilities footprint. Now, that lack of action has come home to roost.

Second, it’s important to recognize that no district—including Columbus City—is entitled to students. Families have every right to send their children to the school that will best meet their needs. Interestingly, the CEA has no problem with that when parents choose traditional districts. Every year, hundreds of families move out of Columbus and into surrounding cities like Dublin, Pickerington, Gahanna, and Upper Arlington. They do so for a variety of reasons, including that these districts are higher performing academically. School choice of this nature is accepted as normal, isn’t blamed for district downsizing, and is even considered a sign that parents are engaged and invested. But families who make the very same decision not to send their kids to CCS and opt for a charter or private school instead of uprooting and moving homes are villainized as the reason why the district must close buildings. It’s never the district’s fault for failing to improve or transform itself into a more attractive option. Instead, it’s the fault of charters for offering families and students what they want and need, and parents for doing what’s best for their kids.

Third, there are at least a dozen studies that have examined student-level data and found that competition from charter schools has positive or neutral-to-positive effects on traditional public school achievement. Furthermore, the most recent national analysis from CREDO indicates that students who enroll in charters benefit from a boost in achievement. Ohio-specific research has produced similar findings. Together, these studies make it clear that charters benefit both the students who attend them and those who remain enrolled in districts. If students and academic outcomes are top priorities, then increased competition from charter schools is a good thing. Charters don’t deserve blame if the impact they’re having on students is positive. If, however, the priority is protecting a system instead of people, then charters are indeed blameworthy.

By doing nothing in 2018, district officials exhibited a troubling “lack of leadership.” The CEA blaming schools of choice for CCS enrollment woes that persist in 2023—and recently insisting that right-sizing the district is the wrong move—reflects a similar lack of leadership. It’s easy to point fingers at families acting in the best interest of their children, and at other schools that are serving their students well. It’s even easier to assert that the focus couldn’t possibly be on offering every student a “world-class education” until after the district’s infrastructure received an “overdue reinvestment.” Blaming everyone and everything instead of looking in the mirror seems to be the name of the game here in the capital city. But it’s not fair. It’s not right. And it definitely doesn’t put students and families first.

Last year, state legislators enacted reforms that require Ohio schools to follow the science of reading, an approach to literacy instruction that emphasizes phonics along with knowledge-building curricula to support comprehension. Starting this fall, all public schools must adopt high-quality curricula aligned to the science of reading, as well as discontinue three-cueing methods, a hallmark of debunked balanced literacy programs.

These approaches are vastly different. Balanced literacy encourages children to guess at words based on context clues, such as a picture or the first letter of a word. Phonics, on the other hand, takes a systematic approach by teaching students letter-sound relationships, allowing them to read words, regardless of their surrounding context. (For a refresher on the major divergences, see page 18 of literacy expert Louisa Moats’ 2007 Fordham Institute report.)  

Transitioning Ohio teachers to the science of reading will be no small feat. To support the shift, the state has required most teachers to participate in professional development (PD), and will provide stipends to do so. The PD requirement is arguably the most critical element of the overall reform package, but it’s also likely to be the most challenging to implement.

For starters, thousands of teachers will need significant retraining. Although we don’t know exactly how widespread balanced literacy and three-cueing have been in Ohio—a statewide survey of reading curricula is expected to be released soon—a 2020 national survey from Education Week found that 68 percent of K–2 teachers said that balanced literacy was their “philosophy of teaching early reading.” Just 22 percent said phonics. Meanwhile, a study last year by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) revealed that dozens of Ohio teacher preparation programs emphasize non-scientifically based reading practices.

Making implementation even more challenging is that teacher PD has long been saddled with a well-earned reputation for being mediocre and ineffective. Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten once remarked, “Low-quality professional development, frankly, feels like detention.” In Education Next, scholars Matthew Kraft and David Blazar pointed out that PD has historically been “dominated by daylong seminars” that have “little or no effect on teacher quality.”

How can Ohio avoid these pitfalls and instead leverage PD to drive instructional change? The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce recently took an important (and legislatively required) first step by announcing a partnership with Keys to Literacy to create a science of reading course for teachers. Keys to Literacy is a PD provider on a recommended list by NCTQ and has supported literacy efforts in Colorado, a state that has aggressively implemented scientifically based reading instruction. In sum, the department’s selection of a reputable PD vendor is a good start.

But it’ll likely take efforts beyond coursework to support a successful transition to the science of reading. That’s because simply building teachers’ content knowledge is not enough. It’ll also require a reboot to teachers’ day-to-day instruction, something that will require lots of practice and feedback. In fact, the main point of a pair of 2022 papers by Heather Hill and John Papay of Brown University is that effective PD must focus on “subject-specific instructional practices.” This includes “getting teachers to deploy new instructional methods in their classroom, often by providing detailed modeling, analysis, and even rehearsals of those new methods.” They also recommend a few ways to ensure that teachers can receive this type of hands-on support. One avenue is formal teacher coaching, which usually involves one-on-one guidance from an expert trainer. In their reform package, legislators wisely set aside funding for literacy coaches, but they will only be deployed in a limited number of schools. Thus, for most teachers, peer collaboration—another recommended form of teacher PD—might be the best way to receive additional development and support.

Hill and Papay make clear that this refers to “collaborating for improvement,” not just intermittent sharing stories or social supports. In other words, teachers should be directly learning from each other by providing peers with “context-specific” feedback on classroom lessons, regularly sharing instructional strategies, and following up to see how new ideas and changes played out in the classroom. Unfortunately, this type of robust collaboration is rare. For instance, a 2016 RAND Corporation survey revealed that just one in five teachers say they receive peer feedback on a regular basis (more than twice per month).

To make such professional learning possible, district and school leaders should strongly encourage peer collaboration. They can carve out time for teachers to work together and support efforts by teachers to assist each other as they implement new practices. State leaders should also actively encourage this form of PD. The Department of Education and Workforce should make sure that educators are informed of its helpful peer-coaching guide and short (five to eight hour) PD course about how to implement it. The department could go further and highlight schools that have leveraged collaborative models, or provide resources to support video-based analysis of classroom lessons that teachers can use.

Moving to the science of reading is going to be a heavy lift for many Ohio schools. Making sure that teachers receive effective PD—one that strengthens both content knowledge and instructional practice—will be critical for the success of Ohio’s literacy efforts and, most importantly, the success of students.

Powerful incentives compel policymakers to micromanage public organizations by imposing stifling directives, rules, and procedures, sometimes rendering those organizations rigid and ineffective. The incentive to micromanage tends to become stronger as political attention and conflict increase, and as our trust in government declines. Perversely, the sclerotic and ineffective public bureaucracies that micromanaging produces can lead to even more political conflict and distrust—a vicious cycle.

Thousands of public schools, particularly those in large urban districts, have been in such a cycle for decades. As small school districts consolidated into larger ones during the 20th Century, the scope of potential conflict in district politics expanded and school governance became more rigid, distant, and impersonal. Eventually, employee unions also began to use their newly acquired political clout to impose on districts extensive rules and procedures that protected their members’ interests at the expense of organizational effectiveness (not to mention the best interests of children and taxpayers). Federal and state policymakers also got into the mix. Primarily worried about the quality of public education, they imposed yet more directives on districts. This rapidly expanding bureaucracy made thousands of public schools practically unmanageable. Decision-making became prescribed more by rules than by the judgment of school and district leaders.

Not so long ago, these stifling arrangements were a central concern of the education reform movement.[1] Reformers sought to structure governance so that public schools operated more like private-sector organizations. First, they wanted policymakers to free schools from cumbersome rules regulating school inputs, providing school leaders with managerial discretion to best meet students’ educational needs. Second, they wanted the measurement and publication of student results so that managers could be held accountable, either through market forces (schools that did not attract students would not survive) or through state-imposed sanctions for missing performance targets. Both managerial discretion and disciplining mechanisms—market forces and state sanctions—were thought to be key ingredients for making schools effective organizations.

The introduction of public charter schools—which operate independently of politically fraught school districts—are the clear success story of the education reform movement (including here in Ohio). Although the nationwide positive impacts of charter schools are now well known, the purity of the New Orleans experiment makes it the most informative. The Big Easy was hit by a devastating hurricane that resulted in rare freedom from the shackles of local district politics. Nearly all of the city’s public schools were converted to independent charter schools, union-negotiated teacher contracts were voided, and school leaders had the authority to make personnel decisions. Information on students’ academic outcomes (and other school characteristics) became widely available to assist parents as they selected schools for their children, and schools operated on performance-based contracts with a state authorizer (not elected school boards). School leaders were suddenly far freer than before to manage as they saw fit, but they were also held to account for results. Substantial improvements in student outcomes followed, including higher test scores, reduced achievement gaps by income and race, and greater rates of high school and college graduation.[2] The charter school experiment, both nationwide and in New Orleans, is a remarkable testament to the validity of the central tenets of management-focused education reform.

Yet the political forces driving the bureaucratization of public schooling are powerful. There have been moments of pause—as in the creation of charter schools—but the general trend since this country’s founding has been toward the expansion of political conflict and the growth of stifling bureaucracies. Even in New Orleans, the political forces that incentivize policymakers to micromanage schools did not permanently recede. In 2018, despite remarkable academic progress (again, see here), New Orleans re-established its elected school board, albeit with less control over schools than in pre-hurricane days.

Indeed, the entire charter sector has been experiencing increased regulation. Although some regulation is needed to make sure that education markets work (e.g., parents and school authorizers need information on school quality, and government plays an important role in holding poorly performing schools to account and guarding against fraud), last year the Biden administration attempted to essentially regulate away new charter schools that posed a challenge to local districts. Meanwhile, teachers at KIPP Columbus—a beacon for those who seek to improve the life outcomes of economically disadvantaged students—voted to unionize. That school will now be subject to some of the same political pressures that have put a bureaucratic stranglehold on Ohio’s urban district schools. The political forces that made a mess of so many urban districts have charter schools in their sights.

Why don’t policymakers give school leaders managerial discretion?

Much research considers the value to policymakers (e.g., state legislatures) of delegating authority to administrative agencies (e.g., school superintendents and principals). The idea is that these local managers have better information on how various actions, such as hiring particular teachers or investing in particular programs, are likely to impact their students.[3] And they are also in a better position to respond to local circumstances, taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities (e.g., a partnership with a community organization to combat absenteeism) and, generally, directing their staff and budget toward their most productive uses. If policymakers’ and school leaders’ goals are aligned—and if school leaders are at least as knowledgeable as policymakers—then delegation theory indicates that policymakers should give district administrators complete discretion in managing their schools. Otherwise, their attempts to dictate how schools are run can only impede their effectiveness.

The problem is that the goals of policymakers and school leaders are seldom perfectly aligned. The more divergence there is between them, the more worthwhile it is for policymakers to intervene—even though doing so makes schools less effective than they could be because it prevents local administrators from using their expertise and knowledge of local circumstances. Unfortunately for public schools, this potential goal divergence gets worse as the number of policymakers and influential political actors multiply. As the scope of public-school politics expands in this way, policymakers face increased incentives to prescribe school leaders’ actions in ever greater detail. If they don’t, then other political actors may undermine their policy goals by exerting their own influence. These political incentives are even stronger when school employees’ expertise is limited.

This dynamic can be tragic, as those who care most about students’ academic outcomes must resort to suboptimal school bureaucratization. To illustrate how tragic, consider a case in which policymakers are clearly doing what is best for kids in the context of flawed district governance. Ohio policymakers felt compelled to require schools to implement phonics-based reading instruction, and to ban alternatives, because vested interests pushed questionable instructional methods into the state’s classrooms. From their perspective, the benefit of this action (improved reading proficiency) is worth the substantial costs it imposes by, for example, preventing principals and teachers from using a different approach for students who were likely to see few benefits from grade-level phonics instruction (e.g., gifted students who are already able readers). In other words, they have restricted local managerial discretion and, thus, contributed to the stifling public-school bureaucracy.

It’s hard to blame pragmatic lawmakers for securing improvements in student literacy when the evidence is so clear that phonics works for the average student. From the point of view of Ohio leadership, the benefits of micromanaging school operations (helping students attain reading proficiency, which is critical for their future success as well as Ohio’s as a whole) are worth the costs of school bureaucratization. Indeed, given how unhealthy many public-school organizations are, Governor DeWine and Ohio policymakers’ micromanagement may have been the best option for Ohio in the short term. But a healthy educational market (e.g., one in which parents and school leaders have easy-to-access information) and well-functioning school organizations that provide administrators with managerial discretion, should lead schools to eventually learn and adopt promising practices as the evidence becomes available—without state mandates.

Perversely, limiting managerial discretion through the accumulation of rules likely makes educational employment less attractive, making it more difficult (and expensive) to attract good school and district leaders.[4] Which in turn means that we may have less talented teachers with inferior judgement and expertise.[5] Which in turn means that the value to policymakers of giving them managerial and instructional discretion declines. And as the competence of school personnel declines, the incentives to micromanage their work—prescribing in detail how superintendents, principals, and teachers should do their jobs—increases. Which makes their jobs less appealing. And round we go.

How to escape the negative feedback loop of political conflict and bureaucratic sclerosis

The political conflict and distrust that feed school bureaucratization are arguably greater today than at any other time in our nation’s history, as local district politics are now enmeshed in state and national politics. The economic and cultural stakes of schooling are high and nearly everyone—advocates and policymakers at the local, state, and national levels—is trying to impose their will by prescribing rigid rules and procedures that public schools must follow. Massive declines in student achievement and attendance since 2020 should make us more focused than ever on making schools effective organizations, but the political incentives to micromanage public schools with ever more red tape is overwhelming.

Despite these trends, I’m optimistic that we can rediscover our focus on creating an environment that encourages effective schools, as opposed to micromanagement through bureaucracy. First, the success of charter schools provides strong evidence that managerial discretion, free from politics, can be a recipe for success. We don’t have to work on faith, as education reformers initially did. Second, the logic of managerial discretion is intuitive to Americans and, particularly, to Ohioans. It’s in our DNA, and the logic of school-level managerial discretion still seems to enjoy bipartisan support. Reminding the voting public and policymakers of this logic from time to time could go a long way, particularly when short-sighted political impulses tempt us to micromanage.

Even with this latent public and political support for minimizing bureaucracy, we likely need “commitment devices” that will prevent policymakers from undermining schools’ managerial discretion when tempted to do so. Such a device could consist of policymakers making a public pledge to delegate managerial discretion to schools, so that limiting that discretion would be more costly for them down the line. It’s like when one declares that they are on a diet or quitting a vice, hoping that this heightens the social consequences of failure. But a more formal commitment mechanism is probably necessary. For example, perhaps Ohio legislators could adopt a formal resolution of “one in one out”, which would require them to eliminate a regulation every time they impose a new (worthwhile) one, such as mandating phonics-based education.[6] Indeed, to address the bureaucracy problem, we might start with a “one in two out” approach. These sorts of devices are useful in that they remind all of us of the bureaucracy problem whenever we feel inclined to micromanage.

I encourage folks to read Aaron Churchill’s recent Fordham report that details Ohio regulations ripe for elimination, such as requirements for step-and-lane teacher compensation schedules, cumbersome evaluation procedures for teachers and administrators, and superintendent licensure rules. Importantly, state policymakers are also in a position to limit the extent to which local district politics contribute to dysfunctional school bureaucracies. They can bypass district electoral politics by continuing to nurture the charter sector, as the Ohio General Assembly recently did by increasing funding to public charter schools. And to protect public schools from other political forces that have a vested interest in micromanaging them, they can make another attempt to reform teacher collective bargaining.

Reasons for Optimism in Ohio

The political incentives to micromanage schools are strong. We all feel them as we watch school systems make bad choices that affect our kids and, consequently, our state’s economic prosperity. Fixing the school bureaucracy problem requires restraint, humility, and a long-term perspective. Fortunately, I believe Ohio has the type of leadership that appreciates the problem and possesses the intestinal fortitude to clear the path for school leaders. Their work on Senate Bill 168, which is focused explicitly on reforming education regulation, is a testament to that. I’m just trying to do my small part as a Buckeye to provide a gentle reminder of the value of restraint when it comes to regulating the management of our public schools, and to encourage state policymakers to commit to such deregulation through a formal mechanism (e.g., “one in one out”) that will keep this issue on the legislative agenda going forward. When we support the “science of reading” mandate, we must acknowledge the tradeoff we are making. The mandate will likely improve education for the average student and, thus, benefit all Ohioans. But it does contribute to the bureaucracy problem. Our longer-term goal should be to pair these short-term fixes with policies that will create healthier school organizations in which school leaders have room to manage. 

What is the impact of teacher salary increases on recruitment and retention? A new report gives us an interesting on-the-ground look using data from Washington State.

As the result of a state Supreme Court verdict in 2012, huge changes were ordered to the way education is funded in the Evergreen State. That funding—an additional $7 billion allocated over four years—began flowing in earnest in 2017. Most of the money was earmarked for teacher salaries, and that’s where the vast majority of it went. Local teachers unions across the state negotiated huge raises for their members, moving the average inflation-adjusted teacher salary from twenty-first highest in the nation to eighth highest. By 2019–2020, the state was sixth highest.

This significant expansion of state funding for teacher salaries over time allowed a group of researchers, led by Min Sun of the University of Washington, to estimate the relationship between teacher salaries and labor markets. They use a combination of sources to build their models: administrative files, state-level data, legislative reports, and statistics from the American Community Survey (ACS)—including data on teachers’ years of experience, job assignments, salaries, benefits, and full-time-equivalent (FTE) status—between the 2013–14 and 2019–20 school years. The start of the 2018–2019 school year marks the divide between pre- and post-treatment.

As expected, the majority of districts experienced increases in teacher salary post-treatment. These increases generally ranged between 1 and 25 percent, though a handful of districts went as big as 50 percent thanks to the influx of state cash. On average, base teacher salaries statewide increased by roughly $18,000 per year—from just under $60,000 to nearly $80,000 annually. Despite efforts to avoid districts substituting state funds for local funds—including a cap on local levy dollars—districts who relied less on state funding to start with still boosted salaries the most. Thus, pre-treatment disparities between high-paying and low-paying districts remained about the same pre- and post-treatment. Interestingly, there was no clear pattern in the quantitative data as to how any district would allocate the raises. Some of them frontloaded, giving larger increases to novice teachers, while others went the opposite direction to give more money to their veterans. Overall, however, the longer a teacher’s tenure, the larger their salary increase.

Pay bumps appeared to significantly reduce teacher turnover in all districts—between 3 and 5 percentage points—in the first year after treatment. Effects were especially strong for teachers with eight years of service or above. Hiring patterns showed largely null effects, except for a small but statistically-significant increase of .08 percentage points in hiring of so-called “junior teachers” (those with 4 to 7 years of experience) for every $1,000 increase in base salary post-treatment.

That is as far as the quantitative analysis goes. But the analysts also provide qualitative data via case studies. Interviews with a cross section of district staffers and teachers union representatives in five districts are used to tease out the mechanisms by which the funding changes translated into the varying outcomes seen in the data. Interviewees from both groups said that teachers unions at the state and local levels coordinated quickly and collectively to communicate a unified goal of raising teacher salaries as their top or sole priority following the court’s decision. Some district leaders expressed interest in using a portion of the new discretionary state funds in other areas, such as curriculum purchases and professional development, but union negotiators quickly set their sights on the full amount of the increase. As such, districts ended up putting the vast majority of their new revenue into salaries. Local union negotiators reported being well-informed by state union reps about how much was coming, and thus how much of a raise their districts could afford. Additionally, the longevity of tenure on both sides of the negotiating table seemed to matter. More veteran teachers on the union side equaled a higher salary boost overall (and, probably not coincidentally, a boost that was more likely to be backloaded in favor of veterans). More veteran administrators on the district side equaled a lower salary boost overall. This is anecdotal evidence from a small subset of districts, and so is not generalizable beyond their borders, but it would help explain the seemingly “patternless” quantitative findings.

Overall, this research indicates that state efforts to boost teacher salaries can impact who stays in the classroom and for how long, but also that specific local factors can distort any straightforward relationship between salary and the labor market. As schools and districts across the country address teacher pipeline issues, this analysis may give some context to salary-based recruitment and retention efforts.

SOURCE: Min Sun et al., “The Effects and Local Implementation of School Finance Reforms on Teacher Salary, Hiring, and Turnover,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (December 2023).

A new report from the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice adds to the robust literature on school choice in New Orleans, shedding light on the ways in which the centralized enrollment system in the Crescent City has grown and evolved, as well as focusing on any potential disparate impacts to both enrollment and student achievement based on race.

When the education system was restarted following Katrina, city leaders were required by the state to institute an almost entirely charter school environment. While the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) still existed in name, the few schools under its control were run by charter management organizations (CMOs). The great majority of schools, also operated by various CMOs, were part of what was known as the Recovery School District (or RSD). Individual schools in both networks controlled their own application and enrollment processes, and parents applied directly to them. School staff were responsible for upholding laws regarding non-discrimination, and for holding lotteries when applications exceeded available seats. Non-network schools (charter and private) operated full or partial magnet programs with various selective criteria. However, enrollment gaming by schools was rife, and a lawsuit followed.

In an effort to make application easier and more transparent for families, in 2008, the RSD launched a centralized enrollment system for its schools, allowing parents to rank their choices among RSD options. Four years later, the RSD moved to an online system called OneApp, adding an algorithm that placed each applicant in a single seat based on families’ rankings, seat availability, and a set of school-determined student priorities. The OPSB joined OneApp the following year. Independent schools were invited but not required to join. Various policy changes were enacted over time to bring all public schools into the OneApp system, voluntarily or otherwise, and participation was universal by 2022.

Researchers Jane Arnold Lincove and Jon Valant exploit the incremental addition of New Orleans schools to OneApp—as well as the fact that selective-admission schools were allowed to keep their criteria in place after joining OneApp—to assess whether entry into centralized enrollment can be empirically associated with demographic shifts in the city’s public schools. They use restricted, student-level administrative data provided by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) to aggregate data to the school-by-grade-by-year level. This includes all publicly-funded schools in New Orleans from 2007–08 through 2019–20.

The researchers measure the racial composition of each school or grade as the share of nonwhite students in LDOE’s fall enrollment counts. The percentage of Asian and Hispanic students in the data is very small—more than 95 percent of nonwhite students in the data identify as Black or multiracial (which the authors say likely includes one Black parent in most cases)—so while they are included in overall nonwhite data, they are excluded from subgroup analysis. The comparison, then, is a group of schools that had more than 15 percent White student enrollment prior to the 2012–13 school year—called “focus schools”—with the remaining schools whose student bodies were between 86 and 100 percent nonwhite prior to 2012–13.

We learn that the entry of schools into the centralized enrollment system was associated with a small but significant increase in Black and total nonwhite enrollment. Specifically, entering OneApp led to an increase of 0.7 percentage points in nonwhite enrollment per year in focus schools from their pre-OneApp mean of 60.4 percent—actually reversing pre-Katrina trends.

Effects were more pronounced at entry grades such as kindergarten and ninth (moving from middle to high school), with the former showing the strongest effects. Interestingly, analysts found no evidence of corresponding declines in White enrollment in these schools from either student exits or reduced demand among new families. Instead, focus schools increased their total enrollment after entering OneApp, allowing them to enroll more nonwhite students while largely retaining their already-enrolled White and nonwhite students. It seems likely from the specific grade level effects and the slow incremental boost in nonwhite enrollment that schools maximized seat availability for new students at entry grades.

Finally, various analyses of focus schools’ accountability scores, value-added test performance, student and teacher mobility, and student discipline rates showed insignificant or null effects of entering OneApp. That is, student outcomes across a range of measures did not change, even after several years of changing demographics in their schools. Robustness checks were made by running the analyses again after increasing the nonwhite percentage of focus schools to 25 percent and by running the analyses on individual focus schools with the largest student populations (which could have skewed the overall effects seen in earlier analyses). The results indicated minimal variation in outcomes.

The researchers are quick to note important limitations of their work, including a lack of generalizability to other contexts and that increasing racial integration in schools—even when desirable to expand opportunities—should not be deemed synonymous with achieving increased academic quality. What they do conclude, however, is that a centralized, near-universal school choice system like that in New Orleans likely increases transparency and reduces the enrollment barriers that families must navigate to find their best fit, including those based on racial composition of school buildings.

The OneApp system successfully opened more opportunities for Crescent City students of color in schools where they had been underrepresented before—likely due to residential assignment patterns—and these opportunities were acted upon without triggering an outmigration of White students or changing the academic outcomes in destination schools. These victories by school choice over archaic, address-based school assignment schemes are small but important. They should not be ignored.

SOURCE: Jane Arnold Lincove and Jon Valant, “How Has Centralized Enrollment Affected New Orleans Schools?” National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (December 2023).