Charter and Direct Run Schools of the Recovery School District (RSD) and Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) Comparison of High Stakes Tests and Dropout Rates

The city of New Orleans has embarked on an historic experiment reinventing its schools -- once considered among the worst in the country -- from a centralized, single district model of education to a two district model in which both the Recovery School District (RSD) and the preexisting Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) both operate direct run and charter schools. This restructuring has been hailed by some as one of the best things that ever happened to education in New Orleans. The issue that prompted this research was the efficacy of the basic assumptions underlying the stated purposes of the creation of the Recovery School District (RSD) alongside the pre-existing Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). Essentially, the basic notion was that the RSD could improve the education of public school students, resulting in enhanced achievement and greater persistence in school, and that charter schools would be a significant aspect of the RSD to enhance the effectiveness of public education. Thus, hypotheses were constructed to test differences on performance indicators between school districts (OPSB vs. RSD) and types of administration (charter vs. direct) for the following four dependent variables: 1. Drop-out rates for 8th graders, 2. Drop-out rates for 11 th graders, 3. The Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) scores for 8th graders, and 4. Graduation Exit Examination (GEE) scores for 11th graders;The percentages of drop-outs and the percentages with "failing" LEAP and GEE scores were analyzed in (2X2) ANOVAs with type of administration and school district as main effects and the total enrollment in 2010 as a covariate process before the main effects in performing the ANOVA with the general linear model. Under this approach, the significance of the difference between the drop-out rates of charter and non-charter schools in the OPSB and the RSD were tested in a two-step hypothesis-testing procedure using the F-ratio to test the statistical significance of the association and Eta-squared to test the strength of the association between type of school and school district with the percentage of students dropping out and failing the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP), (8th graders) and the Graduation Exit Examination (GEE), (11th graders) which are part of Louisiana's criterion-referenced testing (CRT) program and are high-stakes tests.;Overall, the results substantiated that while charter schools have been successful in out-performing directly administered schools in both the OPSB and the RSD, the RSD has brought no significant improvement in terms of drop-out rates or student performance on LEAP and GEE. Analyses of LEAP and GEE scores generally, yet inconsistently, substantiated superior performance in the OPSB and by charter schools in both districts. In particular the analysis indicates consistently better performance in charter schools in the OPSB compared to charter schools in the RSD. Therefore, while there is evidence of the effectiveness of the charter school innovation generally, there is no evidence of superior efficacy of the RSD. The charter schools that appear to have better performance in many instances are in the OPSB, which generally outperforms the RSD.