Student performance has improved in the years since Hurricane Katrina, according to researchers at Tulane University. The Education Research Alliance released new findings on Tuesday.
The report looks at student performance on state tests. It finds a typical student's scores rose 8 to 15 points.
Douglas Harris is director of the Education Research Alliance. He says his team considered — and ruled out — several explanations for the jump. Like a change in the city's population.
"The concern is that the low performing students just may not have come back and scores may have gone up simply because of who came back, rather than because of the reforms," he says. "And we actually don't find any evidence of that."
Instead, Harris says, the change comes from what he calls a package of reforms: a large influx of money, a different teaching force, and the state's ability to close low performing schools. But he says other cities might not be able to replicate these reforms. Katrina ushered in large scale changes.
"It is politically going to be harder to do things like this in other places," he says. "But even if you could do it somewhere else, it's not clear that it would have the same effect. New Orleans is a pretty small district, especially compared to other large urban districts that we often compare it to. And it's easier to make a major change in a small place."
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