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Charter schools aren’t measuring up to their promises.
Ambitious goals were not uncommon in New Orleans charter schools, but rarely achieved.
By Katy Reckdahl
The Hechinger Report
In 2008, a few years after Hurricane Katrina, school officials in Louisiana asked aspiring charter-school leader Andrew Shahan to consider taking over the failing Dr. Charles Drew Elementary School in New Orleans’ Upper 9th Ward.
Shahan submitted a 170-page application, outlining his plans for Drew, which he renamed Arise Academy, an acronym for the school’s key values: Achievement, Respect, Innovation, Service and Enthusiasm. In his application, Shahan predicted that Arise’s test scores would increase by 10 percent each year over the course of five years, starting at 40 percent “proficiency” on state tests and stair-stepping up each year, until its students reached 80 percent proficiency in the school’s fifth year.
At the time, the projection seemed realistic. “I saw projections like that in other applications,” said Shahan. “They completely made sense to me.”
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