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"An out-of-state billionaire is pairing with a suburban Philadelphia one to try to destroy public education," said one critic.
As pro-public education groups plan a rally at the Pennsylvania State Capitol, educators and advocates on Friday criticized hip-hop icon Jay-Z's company Roc Nation over a campaign backing a proposed school voucher program in the commonwealth.
The campaign's "Dine & Learn" events in Philadelphia this month are intended to share information about the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success (PASS) or "Lifelife Scholarships," as supporters also call them. If approved by state legislators in the next budget, the program would put tax dollars toward "education opportunity accounts" for certain families to send their children to K-12 private schools rather than low-performing public ones.
"Just to be clear for those not in Pennsylvania, the legislation Jay-Z is supporting here is a Republican-led effort to gut public education."
"We have enjoyed such a special connection with Philadelphians, so we've made it our mission to invest in the long-term success of the city's changemakers," Roc Nation managing director of philanthropy Dania Diaz said in a statement. "Impact starts with the students and with awareness. We want to empower the youth and families with the knowledge to pursue their scholastic dreams, make their voices heard, and become the leaders of tomorrow."
While the campaign led to multiple headlines about "How Roc Nation Is Helping Underprivileged Students in Philadelphia Get Into Private Schools," some critics of putting tax money—in this case, potentially tens or hundreds of millions of dollars—toward private school tuition expressed disappointment and frustration on Friday, just weeks away from Pennsylvania's June 30 budget deadline.
"This ain't it," said the American Federation of Teachers Pennsylvania (AFTPA) on social media, posting a photo of Jay-Z—whose given name is Shawn Carter—with suburban Philadelphia multibillionaire Jeffrey Yass, a Republican megadonor with a history of using his money to push for school vouchers and the defeat progressive political candidates.
"Don't get it twisted, PASS is a Yassified school choice/school voucher bill," one social media user wrote.
Other critics also mentioned Yass. Phil Gentry, an organizer with West Philly Coalition for Neighborhood Schools, referenced reporting that the billionaire is being considered as a potential Treasury secretary if former Republican President Donald Trump beats Democratic President Joe Biden in the November election.
"Just to be clear for those not in Pennsylvania," Gentry noted, "the legislation Jay-Z is supporting here is a Republican-led effort to gut public education, spearheaded by future Trump Cabinet member Jeffrey Yass."
Challenging the framing of some of the news coverage about the Roc Nation campaign, Philadelphia public interest lawyer Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg said, "As Pennsylvania is on the verge of transforming the most inequitable school funding system in the nation, an out-of-state billionaire is pairing with a suburban Philadelphia one to try to destroy public education instead."
The attorney highlighted that the hip-hop
billionaire's company is pushing for vouchers as Democrats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives are "working to pass a $5.1 billion transformation" to help the commonwealth's poorest school districts, sharing a report from the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
Urevick-Ackelsberg also circulated criticism from New York Times Magazine journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones, who said that "voucher programs have not been shown to improve results for poor Black children because most cannot get into high-quality private schools."
"Read the fine print. All of the money is coming from taxpayers," she continued. Roc Nation's "involvement is to convince poor Black parents to leave the public schools."
While PASS advocates argue the program will not take money from public schools because it "will be fulfilled by government funds from a separate line item and will not reduce the overall budget to public education programming," Hannah-Jones pushed back.
"It is a lie that these programs do not take from public school funding. Fewer kids in the classroom means fewer dollars to the school," the journalist stressed. "This is a windfall to the city's private schools at the expense of the public ones that most kids attend."
Citing research by Michigan State University professor Josh Cowen—the author of The Privateers, a forthcoming book on school vouchers—Hannah Jones added: "Stop playing with us. Not only do students who go to private schools on vouchers not perform better, 1 out of 5 [leave] the private school and actually see improved academic results by returning to the public school."
Other critics referenced an award-winning sitcom created by Philadelphia-born writer and actress Quinta Brunson, with National Press Foundation fellow Bradford William Davis saying that a "new Abbott Elementary villain just dropped."
Dena Driscoll, a
parent in the city, said that "Jay-Z is like 'defund Abbott Elementary' and for real though my actual Philadelphian children's public school. Lifeline Scholarships mean most of our children are left to drown."
The battle over including the program in Pennsylvania's 2024-25 budget follows a similar fight last year. As the
Capital-Starreported in May: "The PASS program was initially supported by Gov. Josh Shapiro during partisan debates over the state budget last year, but House Democrats opposed it. While the version of the budget that passed the Senate included funding for the voucher program, House Democrats refused to pass it unless Shapiro agreed to veto the item. Ultimately, that's what happened."
When the Democratic governor
unveiled his budget proposal in February, he called school vouchers "unfinished business."
While Roc Nation is now behind the push for PASS, people across Pennsylvania continue to organize against school voucher programs. AFTPA pointed out Friday: "We're literally holding a rally on Monday against this. Join us!"
The
rally, planned for noon local time on June 10, will involve "a coalition of pro-public education labor unions, organizations, and advocates," organizers said in a statement. Parents, students, retirees, and group leaders "will speak on the need for the General Assembly to fulfill its constitutional duty by funding public education and rejecting any effort to divert funds away from public schools through private school vouchers."
Vouchers for private education—religious or otherwise—are not a cost-free policy that simply adds on another education option for children—they are instead an intentional attack on universal public education, one of the crown jewels of U.S. society.
Since the early 2000s, many states have introduced significant voucher programs to provide public financing for private school education. These voucher programs are deeply damaging to efforts to offer an excellent public education for all U.S. children—and this is in fact often the intention of those pushing these programs. In this post we argue that:
Universal public education was perhaps the most important reason why the United States became the richest country in the world in the 20th century. As Claudia Goldin, the most recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, has written:
At the dawn of the twentieth century the industrial giants watched each other cautiously. The British sent high-ranking commissions to the United States and the United States sent similar groups to Britain and Germany. All were looking over their shoulders to see what made for economic greatness and what would ensure supremacy in the future… Earlier delegations focused on technology and physical capital. Those of the turn-of-the-century turned their attention to something different. People and training, not capital and technology, had become the new concerns…For the twentieth century to become the human capital century required vast changes in educational institutions, a commitment by governments to fund education, a readiness by taxpayers to pay for the education of other people’s children, a belief by business and industry that formal schooling mattered to them, and a willingness on the part of parents to send their children to school (and by youths to go). The transition occurred first in the United States and was accompanied by a set of “virtues” or principles, many of which can be summarized by the word “egalitarianism.”
In the 21st century, unfortunately, too many policymakers seem determined to squander this legacy by starving public education of money and legitimacy, often in the name of “school choice.” Their central claim (when they bother to make one with any clarity) is that public provision of goods or services is ineffective by definition and that a dose of private, market-like competition will lead to better schooling outcomes for the nation’s children.
This claim is weak on its logical face, as the conditions needed for market competition to lead to better outcomes clearly do not exist in the educational realm. Take just three obvious examples. First, unlike other goods and services, there is no option to forego education entirely. In other markets, if the private sector is doing a poor job at offering attractive options for a good or service, people can just consume other things. But the United States—rightly—mandates basic education for all kids. Second, competition works well when the cost of switching providers is small. If you get tired of prices or goods at Whole Foods, you can shop at Giant. By contrast, switching schools is an extraordinarily costly decision in time, administrative burden, and severed social networks. Third, competition works well in markets when a transaction only affects the buyer and seller—and not unrelated third parties. But if third parties are affected by a transaction (think of pollution affecting third parties when I decide to buy gasoline for my car), then private markets will fail to match costs and benefits. Universal schooling generates positive spillovers to society at large, meaning that individuals would be inclined to underinvest in education relative to the full benefits it provides.
To the degree any evidence is mobilized in support of the view that public education needs market-like disruption through “school choice” instruments like vouchers, it generally relies on outdated research claiming that public schools already have “enough” funding, and that additional resources would not generate better outcomes. If one believed that the level of public education resources was sufficient, then strategies aimed at changing the composition of these resources or how they were mobilized—say through privatization via vouchers—might make some sense.
But this is wrong on several fronts.
First, newer research with better methods confirms that more money for public schools does improve educational outcomes. And not only does more money improve schooling outcomes for children, it also has the largest beneficial effects on the performance of particularly disadvantaged students.
Such spending is not random and depends on a number of factors that are correlated with student success. For example, spending in a given district might rise as higher-income families move into the area and property values increase. These higher-income families might also be able to provide greater in home resources that will aid their children’s academic performance. Simple correlations between the level of district spending and student success might hence show a positive relationship, but the causality would not necessarily be running from district spending decisions to student success; both might instead be driven by a third variable, which is simply the level of family resources on average across the district.
Running the opposite direction, much school funding is explicitly compensatory, targeting students facing greater socioeconomic disadvantage to attempt to even out total resources (both in home and public) available to students for academic success. But if this greater spending targets students with fewer in home resources, it could show a negative relationship between levels of spending and student performance, but again will not be reflecting the causal effect of this spending.
The new research has overcome this key challenge in empirical assessments of the relationship between school spending and student outcomes: It found natural experiments that allow truly exogenous changes in school spending to be identified, and hence the effects on student achievement to reflect the causal effect of this spending. The exogenous changes that allowed for these examinations were largely court-ordered school finance reforms (SFRs).
For example, Jackson, Johnson, and Persico (2016) examined the impact of school finance reforms between 1972 and 2010, and found that a 10% increase in school spending for 12 years lead to increases in high school graduation rates, 7% higher wages, and 10% higher family incomes in adulthood for children from districts that saw the spending increase. Gains were concentrated among students in high-poverty households. Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach (2018) similarly found that a $1,000 increase in per-pupil spending for low-income districts would reduce the test score gap between low- and high-income school districts within a state by roughly 0.18 standard deviations (SDs) following court-ordered SFRs, or by nearly 40% of the baseline gap.
In short, the evidence indicates that public schooling in the United States simply needs more resources to deliver even better student achievement—not some radical disruption in how it is delivered and by what institutions.
Second, vouchers don’t lead to better student achievement. Several high-quality studies have investigated the impact of recent voucher programs and have found notably worse outcomes for student achievement. In the first two years following Louisiana’s Scholarship voucher program, student achievement in language arts and math both decreased by as much as 0.34 SDs. In Ohio, under the Ed Choice program, students who went to private schools with a voucher performed worse than they would have had they remained in public schools. In Indiana, students that used the Indiana Choice Scholarship voucher program experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 SDs in mathematics.
The promise of vouchers improving educational outcomes rests on assumptions that the private sector is always and everywhere more efficient than public providers of goods and services. But the private schools that expand or are created in response to the introduction of voucher programs are often of very poor quality. In the case of Milwaukee’s longstanding voucher programs, for example, researchers found that 40% of private voucher schools failed or closed down within the program’s first 25 years. Parents often belatedly realize that these schools are no improvement relative to public schools; this has lead a large share of students that took vouchers to return to public schools shortly after. In Milwaukee, nearly 20% of kids left voucher programs every year, with most coming back to public school.
It would be bad enough if the introduction of vouchers simply funneled some students into poorly performing private schools for a stretch of time. But vouchers also affirmatively drain resources from the entire public education system—resources that would reliably produce better outcomes for children if they had stayed in public schools. Paradoxically, while vouchers are associated with significant drains from public school resources, they could actually boost the total fiscal cost of state support for education over time by shoveling more and more resources to (poorly performing, on average) private schools.
Arizona provides a cautionary tale. Arizona’s 2023 universal voucher program was forecast to cost $33 million in the first year and $65 million in the second. Instead, the program ended up costing $587 million in the first year and is projected to cost upwards of $708 million in 2024 fiscal year. Even smaller programs tend to be dramatically underestimated.
Part of this unexpected cost was the subsidy offered to parents who had already enrolled their kids in private schools: 75% of the first wave of applicants to the Arizona program were parents of students with no history of public school attendance, who could now tap taxpayer money to pay for their children’s private schools. Much of the cost of vouchers is essentially a subsidy for parents (many of them affluent) who never intended on using the public school system.
Other states have followed this pattern of introducing programs promised to be small and seeing them balloon in size. New Hampshire’s 2021 Educational Freedom Account was estimated to cost $300,000 in the first year and $3 million in the second, but in reality the bill cost $8.1 million in the first year, $14.6 million in 2022, and $25 million in the 2023-24 school year.
The rise of vouchers in the past 15 years represents an affirmative effort to erode public education by starving it of needed funding. Voucher proponents often want voters to think these programs simply broaden the suite of options enjoyed by parents and students. But the data tell a different story: Where significant voucher programs have been instituted, the resources available to public school children have decreased. Again, highly persuasive recent research shows that public school resources are crucial on the margin, and that more public resources reliably improve student achievement and economic outcomes later in life—while fewer public resources reliably harm education. Voucher programs that starve public resources for education are therefore deeply damaging.
Figure A shows state and local per-pupil funding levels in 2007 and 2021 (expressed in 2020 dollars) for states that passed substantial voucher programs during the period (defined as having >1% of enrolled students using vouchers by 2021) as well as for states without any voucher programs. In 2007, the average difference in per-pupil spending between these two groups of states was around $900 (higher in states that did not subsequently pass significant voucher programs). Between 2007 and 2021, voucher programs grew significantly in one set of these states. By 2021, states without voucher programs were spending $2,800 more per-pupil—essentially more than tripling the spending advantage they had before the rise of voucher programs in the 2010s and early 2020s.
The failure to increase per-pupil funding leads to the erosion of public education services in all forms: everything from school meals, extracurricular activities, mental health and counseling services, vocational and technical programs, and investments in teacher quality and pay. It is also worth noting that flat per-pupil educational spending—even in inflation-adjusted terms—is effectively a decline in the quality of education over time. Take the example of teachers: In a growing economy, simply keeping real pay constant for teachers means that their pay, relative to other skilled and credentialed professionals, is declining. This decline in relative teachers’ pay (even with absolute pay levels flat) will put downward pressure on the quality of the teaching labor pool, as more and more people who could have been excellent teachers decide to choose higher-pay occupations.
Stagnant spending in states with significant voucher programs has also left education funding in those states substantially below measures of funding adequacy. In school finance research, adequacy is defined as the level of funding needed in a district to ensure students reach an average level of student achievement. For the measure of adequacy used below, the outcome is achieving the national average of test scores. Adequacy measures account for needs that differ by district depending on influences like the socioeconomic status of the student population.
State constitutions mandate sufficient education funding for students to have access to an adequate education, regardless of students’ economic or social circumstances. For example, students in high-poverty districts will need more education funding than students in low-poverty districts to achieve the same outcome because they live in neighborhoods where there are fewer resources available to help them succeed. Several court cases in recent decades have found a constitutional responsibility for states to provide such adequate funding.
Figure B relies on total per-pupil spending data from the School Finance Indicator Database to assess the adequacy of school spending for states with large voucher programs and states without any voucher program, comparing the gap for students in medium-, high-, and highest-poverty districts in our two groups of states in 2021. A negative gap implies that state spending is inadequate, and students are not receiving the resources required to meet average academic achievement levels. Regardless of poverty status, states with substantial voucher programs in 2021 are not spending enough to meet students’ needs.
For medium-poverty districts, the adequacy gap is negative, but quite small in schools without a voucher presence (roughly $220 per pupil). In medium-poverty districts of states with a significant voucher presence, however, the adequacy gap is negative and very large—with actual spending lagging adequacy measures by $3,750 per pupil. In high-poverty districts, even states without vouchers have large adequacy gaps—roughly $2,200 per pupil. But these gaps are double the size in states with significant voucher programs—roughly $5,400 per pupil. Finally, adequacy gaps are shamefully large in both states without vouchers ($8,500 per pupil) and in states with significant vouchers ($11,900), but the difference remains quite high.
These results clearly show that school financing is far from perfect in states without voucher programs, but is far worse in states that have introduced these programs.
Vouchers are not a cost-free policy that simply adds on another education option for children—they are instead an intentional attack on universal public education, one of the crown jewels of U.S. society. Vouchers make no coherent economic sense, and the evidence shows that vouchers harm student achievement and expose state budgets to large future obligations that are hard to forecast, even while they divert spending away from public education. Our analysis shows that states that have introduced significant voucher programs over the past decade and a half have experienced significant declines in per-pupil spending relative to states without voucher programs. In short, the data clearly show that choosing to implement vouchers programs takes funding away from public education. The public spending declines associated with the introduction of vouchers will reliably cause significantly worse educational outcomes and will harm kids in high-poverty neighborhoods more than kids in low-poverty neighborhoods.
The rise of vouchers is especially damaging given that we now know what does boost educational outcomes: more spending on public education. Leaving these potential gains on the table and promoting voucher programs instead of investing in public education demonstrates that kids’ education is not a priority.
As the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, you can count on seeing a lot of glowing stories about the great education progress made in New Orleans since a natural disaster killed nearly 2,000 people, emptied a beloved city, and gave public school reformers what they always wanted: a "clean slate" to have their way unencumbered by the messiness of school boards, local politics, and the voices of teachers and parents.
It really was the "best thing that could have happened," to use Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's now infamous quote, if you were a fan of creating something that would have little to no consequence for your family.
You'll also hear many more politicians and pundits touting the NOLA model of education reform for school districts everywhere else.
You should be very suspicious of this marketing campaign.
Advocates for the NOLA model claim it has gotten "results," but what passes for results is subject to a mad game of interpreting data in a way to make a case rather that to reveal any real truth. Reform advocates like to say they've created a better system, but it is a system that seems void of democracy and deaf to the voices of teachers, parents, and students who have to live with the system. And to those people who initially backed the plan for NOLA school reform - but who demurred from becoming blatant propagandists for it - there now appears to be a sense of frustration and disappointment with a realization that there's a long way to go before this product should go to market.
A Top Down "Solution"
First, a refresher ...
After Katrina, as NPR reported recently, "an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed," and in "a series of quick decisions," all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city's schools were handed over to a state entity called the "Recovery School District" which is governed by unelected officials. Only a "few elite schools were ... allowed to maintain their selective admissions schools."
One reason this action was able to take place so quickly is because it was planned in the immediate aftermath of the storm while the city was in complete disarray. As an article in The Times-Picayune reports, a "lost bit of history" recently surfaced revealing a hidden chain of events that sealed the fate of New Orleans public schools.
After the storm, Mayor Ray Nagin was reluctant to open schools "anytime soon," and the state education department told local school officials there would be no state funding available for locally run schools.
This essentially made charter schools the only early option, which Sen. Mary Landrieu could help make possible with federal funds. The U.S. Department of Education had money to start charter schools, but nothing to reopen traditional schools. So, the School Board opened the first charter schools, and by the beginning of 2006, "the structure that still holds today was set," with an elite group of selected admission schools, privately operated independent charter schools, and the vast remainder of schools operated by the state-run Recovery School District, which would convert those schools to charter management.
What's wrong with this of course is that the people of New Orleans - especially those most chronically disempowered and underserved - had little voice in the remaking of their schools and are still virtually without democratic representation in their schools today.
As NOLA public school parent activist Karran Harper Royal explains, in an interview with the journal Rethinking Schools, "I'm no defender of the status quo; before Katrina we had problems, but there were also successes. Having an elected school board created ways for the public to participate. When Katrina hit, I was serving on the search committee for a new superintendent. For years I served on the disciplinary review committee. ... Charters purport to give parents and teachers greater power ... But you have little real voice."
This is where advocates for the NOLA education model interrupt to say, "But this is about the kids ... Look at the results!"
Data Obscura
In addition to the glowing rhetoric about "progress" in New Orleans since the storm, you should get ready to be hit by an onslaught of data, lots and lots of data, "proving" the case.
But engaging in an analytic discussion about that data can be like arguing with your teenager about whether or not he cleaned his room - it depends on how you look at it.
On any given day in the ongoing narrative about New Orleans schools, you see a headline "New Orleans school changes worked" alongside another "The New Orleans Model: Praised But Unproven." Often such contrasting articles will make their case using the very same statistics.
When you get past the headlines though, you find you're lost in a maze of evidence that could lead to multiple conclusions. For instance, in the article praising what's happened in New Orleans, you learn that some of that "progress" in NOLA RSD is associated with student demographics in the city have changed, significant amounts of critical data have been left out, and huge gaps in achievement between low-income kids and their more well-to-do peers remain.
The second, more skeptical appraisal finds "there are positive signs," but at the expense of some really disturbing outcomes, including a recent report that "found one-third of principals acknowledged trying to exclude certain students and woo others to boost test scores."
Engaging with a NOLA RSD official, as I have, can be an excruciating exercise in disassembling a Rube Goldberg contraption to see if you can refit the parts into something that goes straight from point A to B.
For instance, claims about increases in percentages of students on grade level in NOLA RSD have to be held in light of the fact the state changed the formula and scale for measuring grade level performance from 2012-2013, which artificially inflated the district's performance. Declarations about the schools scoring better on state A-F report cards should be recast with the understanding that State Superintendent John White changed the scoring system to help engineer that "improvement."
Classroom teacher and historian John Thompson goes through this frustrating exercise as well on the popular blogsite Alexander Russo's This Week in Education. Responding to an article "How New Orleans Made Charter Schools Work" for Washington Monthly, Thompson calls out the article's claims that charter schools in the district receive less per student funding. Turn out, what they failed to include in their calculation is the "additional $3,500 per student funding provided for post-Katrina schools."
Even a statistic as seemingly simple as high school graduation rates becomes a slippery eel in the hands of NOLA-style reform propagandist, as researcher Adam Johnson found when he looked into the matter. On his blog, he painstakingly recounts his personal quest to find the source of an often-cited "fact" that NOLA RSD graduation rates improved 50 percent, from 54.4 percent to 77.8 percent, from 2004-2013. His search led him to the discovery that "graduation rates date back to 2005 only." The 54 percent is a complete fabrication that got passed around, like in a game of telephone, from a dubious source through a series of politicians and media folks wanting to tell their version of the New Orleans story.
Louisiana schoolteacher and author Mercedes Schneider took this search further. She finds, that the "50 percent improvement in graduation rate," based on the erroneous pre-Katrina metric, masks the fact New Orleans RSD graduation rates experienced a steep drop between 2011-12 and 2012-13. Further, the gap between graduation rates for NOLA RSD and Louisiana in general is widening.
Don't Buy It
In the Politico article cited above, reporter Caitlin Emma finds, "Mayors and governors from Nevada to Tennessee have sought to replicate the New Orleans model by converting struggling public schools into privately run charters."
The latest state to buy the NOLA snake oil is Georgia, where Governor Nathan Deal has pushed through an initiative to create a new state agency to take over struggling school districts and do to them what Louisiana did to New Orleans. An op-ed in a Georgia news outlet sounds a word of caution about this.
J. Celeste Lay, an associate professor of political science at Tulane University, explains that the great sucking sound you hear from NOLA is the siphoning up of public tax dollars into private pockets. "The principal at my nearby charter school makes over $300,000 per year, a 246 percent increase from her salary before the school was chartered. For-profit management companies charge schools 15-20 percent of school revenue. Taxpayer dollars go into hefty administrator salaries and corporate profits instead of reducing class sizes, upgrading facilities, or recruiting and maintaining high-quality teachers."
And about those "great results?" "The average ACT score of NOLA RSD's class of 2014 was 15.7," she notes, "far lower than the minimum entrance requirements at LSU and other public universities. Reform advocates tout growth in these scores, but such growth is neither entirely linear nor significant."
"Education reform in New Orleans," she concludes, "provides more of a model of what not to do."
Other cautious observers of the NOLA model highlight the pitfalls of a top-down takeover model that too often leaves the interest of poor and working-class families behind.
Speaking at a recent conclave for researchers and policy mavens focused on the New Orleans education story, Marquette University professor and school choice advocate Howard Fuller remarks (on video) that the "positive things" that have happened have "happened at a cost." The "cost" he describes includes a general sense of community disempowerment in which parents and kids feel they lack control over some decisions being made about their education destinies. "There's no uniform opinion," he states, about what has been accomplished in New Orleans and how the schools district should go forward from here.
Another school choice advocate and former New Orleans charter school operator, Professor Andre Perry, who had some involvement in forming the New Orleans school district we see today, is harsher in his assessment. In an interview with freelance writer and education commentator Jennifer Berkshire, he says, "The improvements - and I do think there are some improvements - are so marginal when you consider the investment ... And by the way, the improvements may not even necessarily be because of the reforms."
Perry also sees the "many nefarious ways" that advocates for the NOLA model present their case for closing gaps and showing gains, and he questions whether those statistical measures are over-emphasized compared to other important values - including community empowerment, democratic engagement, inclusion, and racial diversity.
His conclusion is, "You don't ever want to oversell something ... When you're constantly saying 'now is better than the past,' or 'now is worse for the future,' it's just not a helpful argument if you're really sincere about making change."
So what are the lessons to be learned from New Orleans style education reform?