Four years into a radical re-making of public education in New Orleans, parents in that city are mostly bullish on the patchwork system of independent charter schools and state-run public schools, according to a new survey from Tulane University.
Sixty-six percent of the public school parents who were polled--their children had to be enrolled in either a public charter school or traditional public school to be included--reported that they either “somewhat agree” or “strongly agree” that they had good options to choose from when deciding where to enroll their children. An even higher number--85 percent--said their child had been placed in the school that was the parent’s first or second choice.
Since Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters upended New Orleans in 2005, researchers at the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University have tried to capture through surveys how city residents and parents feel about the dramatic changes to the public schooling landscape there. A majority of public school students in the city now attend independent charter schools, while most of the rest are enrolled in the city’s schools that are operated by the state-governed Recovery School District.
Here’s the Times Picayune‘s write-up on the survey results.
