How Many Students Are Left In Failing Schools?

In yesterday’s Times-Picayune, there was an article about the dispute between the Recovery School District and Research on Reforms regarding the percentage of students attending failing schools now, as compared to the year before Hurricane Katrina.  The differing numbers that each group touted were not due to mistakes but to different means of calculation.  This post is an attempt to clarify how the RSD and Research on Reforms reached their separate conclusions.

There are two ways to go about calculating the percentage of students in failing schools in New Orleans pre- and post-Katrina.  You can either include students in “unscored” schools (those without a School Performance Score [SPS]) as part of the total number of students, or you can only include students in schools with SPS ratings.  I’m going to do both so you can see the difference.

Prior to the storm, most schools that were unscored were alternative schools.  Right now, most of our schools that are unscored don’t have an SPS because it requires two years of testing data.  They either haven’t been open that long or they only have the lowest grades and so they don’t do testing yet.  Once new numbers come out in October or November, we should see a significant decrease in the number of students attending unscored schools.  For now, these are the numbers we can calculate.

As you can see from the tables below, there are a number of ways of looking at the percentage of students in failing schools now as compared to before Katrina.  Using Research on Reform’s method of calculation, the number of students in failing schools that were taken over by the RSD in 2005 fell from 75% to 28%.  According to RSD numbers, 62% of all New Orleans public school students were in failing schools in 2004-2005.  That number is now less than 18%.

No matter whose method you use, one thing is indisputable.  The percentage of students attending failing public schools in New Orleans is significantly smaller than it was in 2004-2005.

Students in Unscored Schools Included in Total

Students in Unscored Schools Not Included in Total