Paul Vallas, superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District, right, chats with Sara Leikin, principal of the International School of New Orleans, in April.
In laying out his goals for the upcoming school year Friday, Recovery District Superintendent Paul Vallas kept returning to a common theme: first in the nation.
"We're the first 100 percent parental-choice system in the country, " he said, referring to the policy that any student can now attend any open-admission public school in the city, regardless of geography.
"We're the first 100 percent site-selected district, " he said moments later, referring to the practice by which all Recovery District schools, both charter and noncharter, now control hiring and promotion of their own faculties.
One more: "This the most dramatic expansion of alternative schools, I think, in the nation, " he said, announcing the opening of new programs for over-age and delinquent students. The expansion comes in the wake of a year when alternative schools were a trouble spot.
Though he hedged a bit on that last one, Vallas nonetheless wanted to drive home the cutting-edge nature of the New Orleans reforms. This year, he noted pointedly, the Recovery District will have more charter schools than noncharters -- 38, compared with 30 -- and he continues to grant more charter-like autonomy to the schools his administration directly manages.
"We've reached a tipping point, " he said.
The Recovery District took over most of the city's public schools right after Hurricane Katrina. The Orleans Parish School Board now operates just four schools directly, and oversees 12 charters.
Vallas to stay awhile
Speaking from a nook of the library at Edgar P. Harney Elementary School near South Claiborne Avenue, Vallas reiterated that he will remain at the helm of the district at least "one or two more years, " after recent flirtations with running for office in his home state of Illinois. By that time, he hopes that his pursuit of rapid conversion to charter schools, which will continue, will have obliterated any prospect for a return to a system resembling anything like what existed before the 2005 flood.
The strategy boils down to a simple transfer of power: giving schools, and groups of schools, their own clout, to borrow a phrase from his native Chicago. Charters, and clusters of charters -- such as those managed by the Algiers Charter School Association and the University of New Orleans-Capital One charter network -- will operate under direct contracts with the state board of education.
No turning back
Even if that changed, and charters were transferred to the oversight of the Orleans Parish School Board or another political entity, the charters will have strong constituencies to fight for retaining their autonomy.
Vallas summed up the endgame thus: "We will insulate the schools from bad decision-making later, " whether or not he remains in his job.
The strategy, in short, is to stabilize the Recovery District after a period of rough rebuilding, creating a durability to the charter reforms that was lacking in earlier efforts to improve city schools.
The key difference: The new reforms are structural, rooted in politics, power, personnel and money -- not the latest fads in instructional technique. Under traditional elected school boards, instructional programs tend to change often, usually with the appointment of a new superintendent -- which in pre-Katrina New Orleans, usually occurred amid political warfare. The constant churn meant the system could never sustain, or even fully implement, any particular set of reforms.
Vallas hopes to ultimately place academic decisions, in addition to hiring and spending, in the hands of dozens of nonprofit boards that hold relatively unchecked power over their schools. Each board, operating largely like a private school board, gets a five-year contract -- the charter -- which the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education can renew or revoke based on performance. The local School Board has similar contracts with its charters.
Charters coming for review
Many charters granted after Katrina are coming up for such a review soon, which will provide a key test of the political will of state regulators to close down public schools, often a controversial endeavor.
Vallas, working with his former elementary schools administrator, Gary Robichaux, already has launched a separate but related strategy for replacing weak Recovery District schools.
With Robichaux, Vallas recently helped launch a new organization that will take over the RSD's weakest schools.
No Excuses
Tentatively named No Excuses, the group was launched through a grant from the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans. It will operate under a charter, with Robichaux at the helm.
Robichaux plans to take over as many as 12 to 15 of the city's lowest-performing schools, which may include both charters and RSD-operated campuses, over the next few years. "We'll take the two weakest ones in the city as of June, " he said.
Likely candidates: Live Oak, Laurel, Harney, Reed, Johnson and Craig elementary schools, all with lagging test scores, Robichaux said. (Vallas, however, praised Harney's current principal at Friday's news conference.)
The revolutionary move toward private management of public schools will ultimately require government to take on a different role -- one more akin to an inspector general than a bureaucracy, Vallas and other charter advocates have said. So far, however, neither Vallas nor his boss, Paul Pastorek, have laid out a clear vision for how such an entity might work -- including whether it would be run by local elected or appointed officials, or a mix.
Pastorek said recently that he doesn't want the state to run schools forever -- but that doesn't necessarily mean he wants them returned to the Orleans Parish School Board, either.
"I'm in favor of returning the schools back to local control as soon as possible, " he said. "I've said that since Day 1. But I've also said since Day 1 that they shouldn't necessarily go back to the School Board. They should go back to whatever entity is prepared to handle the responsibility. We've created a different kind of school than what they are used to managing."
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Staff writer Sarah Carr contributed to this report.
Brian Thevenot can be reached at bthevenot@timespicayune.com or 504. 826.3482.