New Orleans Dumps Teachers’ Union.  Student Performance Rises.

Nick noticed this telling story. 

Good news in The Big Easy where over a year ago they broke the teachers union and basically started over with publicly financed but privately board run charter schools.  This year, testing of fourth and eighth graders have shown improvements by 12% and 4% respectively, in only a year.  They still have a long way to go, but this is real progress from a completely failed school system in a short turnaround time.  The major reason being given for this success is the quality of teachers they were able to attract.

Nick tips the ol’ hat to Megan.

In the comments of Nick’s post, Folkbum hypothesizes that the gains are due to the change in population.  I disagree with that.  While the population has changed, it is more likely that the criminal class would stick around.  Think about it.  Abandoned property.  Desperate people.  Depleted police force.  It’s ripe territory for crooks.  Furthermore, crooks tend to have fewer means to move and set up life elsewhere. 

In fact, the crime statistics are showing that New Orleans may be more violent than it was before Katrina. 

As of New Year’s Eve, the city’s murder total sat at 209, making it again a top contender for the country’s highest per-capita murder rate, a dubious title New Orleans held in 2006. A definitive per-capita rate for murders and all crimes remains elusive, because of varying estimates of the post-flood city’s still-changing population. But even by the most generous estimate, preferred by the New Orleans Police Department, the city’s murder rate is 67 murders per 100,000 people. Using another, lower population estimate cited by the city, the rate would be 71.

Compared with the nine other cities with the highest per-capita murder rates last year, New Orleans remains at or near the highest rate in 2007.

[...]

Complete fourth-quarter crime statistics won’t be made available for another month, but if trends from the first three quarters hold steady, then violent crime has increased, drastically in some categories. Indeed, the rate of reported assaults—a category that includes all nonfatal shootings—in the first three quarters of the year was on pace to equal or surpass the number of assaults in each of the two years before Hurricane Katrina, when the city’s population was far larger.

I think it’s safe to assume that crime rates would be a good indicator of the raw quality of the students who are attending the schools.  Yes, there are other factors, but generally speaking, kids who grow up in broken crime-ridden homes tend to do poorly at school. 

Yet, they are doing better than before.  Surely Nick is wrong and New Orleans’ new public school model is having no impact whatsoever on student achievement.