Lauren LeDuff was a junior at Warren Easton High School in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in August of 2005. Fleeing with her family, she finished the school year as a refugee in Houston, returning to Warren Easton for her senior year.
She returned to a transformed school.
The entire first floor of the 100-year-old massive three-story brick building had been gutted by water and mud. Half the building was still unusable when school began in the fall of 2006. Sawing and hammering echoed from downstairs and lunches were brown bag or delivered pizza.
But that was not all: The school’s name and mission had changed. Now it was Warren Easton Charter High School. It had a new principal, Alexina Medley, who was making sweeping changes. Uniforms, strict rules and an innovative program to get its students career- or college-ready followed.
The changes at Warren Easton so inspired Ms. LeDuff that she vowed to become a teacher and return to her alma mater.
“I told Ms. Medley before I left she’d need to fire somebody to make room for me,” said LeDuff, who now teaches English and communications at Warren Easton.
She was kidding, of course. No one was fired for her.
But in theory, it was possible. Like most charter schools, the new Warren Easton has no teacher unions and answers to no school district. Instead, it has its own charter with the state and its own school board that grants the principal sweeping authority to shape budgets, curriculum and mission, and to hire and fire staff.
It seems to be working at Warren Easton. With a charismatic and collaborative leader, morale of staff and teachers appears to be high, and the high-poverty student body is performing well on graduation and standardized test measures.
Not every charter school manages its autonomy so well, however. Critics point to less successful examples, including Ben Franklin Charter High School across town in New Orleans. There, they say, staff decisions were arbitrary, pay scales murky and morale poor and teacher turnover is high. Alleged mismanagement at Ben Franklin recently led its teachers to unionize.
These two schools represent each side of a double-edged sword: The charter school reality that the freedom to innovate also contains the power to mismanage or destroy. What makes charters exciting is dynamic possibility for leadership to change staff, refocus and create a new mission, but that dynamism comes with risk.
Charter schools are now a permanent and growing part of the American educational map. From school years 1999 to 2011, the percentage of public schools that were charters rose from 1.7 to 5.8 percent.
In urban schools serving underprivileged students, charters are disproportionately common. All of New Orleans’ public schools are now charters, while over half of Detroit students and roughly 45 percent of those in Washington, D.C., attend charters. These cities are leaders but not outliers: Many major urban areas are now upward of 20 percent charter.
As the charter trend expands, there is friction over how the schools are governed. Ben Franklin remains a rarity in its recent unionization. In 2012 just 7 percent of charter schools were unionized, down from 12 percent in 2009, according to the Center for Education Reform.
Critics argue that without strong teacher input, reflected in unions or some other institutional security, teachers and the schools will be at the mercy of bad leaders. Others argue that reverting to the fetters of traditional schools would squelch innovation, that real change requires strong leaders who take risks and that teacher voice can be respected without sacrificing bold leadership.
Coming home
Ms. LeDuff is among those who favor bold leadership. That’s not surprising. Ms. LeDuff is a 24-year-old who knows what she wants, and when she graduated from Warren Easton, what she wanted was to go back there to teach.
But first, she learned how not to run a school. She spent her first semester as a teacher at another high school in New Orleans operated by a charter school network that she declined to name: “It was horrible,” Ms. LeDuff said.
The school was very unorganized and salaries varied based on administrative whim. She was getting paid over 20 percent less than an equally qualified new teacher across the hall. Even worse, she said, the school made no effort to mentor her as a new teacher.
After one semester, she got her dream job at Warren Easton, where she now teaches 10th-grade English and a speech class and coaches the girl’s dance team.
Now starting her second year, she exudes confidence. She speaks passionately and carries a good-humored “no excuses” attitude toward everything, including herself.
Does she mind being on a one-year contract with no real job security?
“No,” she answers. “I sat in classrooms before with tenured teachers. You know what they did? They gave us crossword puzzles.”
Sweeping change
New Orleans took its deep plunge into charter schools after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The city’s schools were notoriously poor performers and the state had a weak educational reputation. The legislature seized on the hurricane to launch sweeping changes.
Warren Easton had been a high-performing magnet school with competitive admissions. After the storm, it switched to a take-all-comers model and its students now come from all over the city.
With 89 percent of its students on free or reduced lunch, Warren Easton is tackling some of the city’s toughest educational challenges. Ms. Medley is committed to getting each student college- or career-ready by employing strict rules and a careful four-year plan for each child.
Precisely dressed in a crisp blue suit dress, Ms. Medley has a slight accent that hints at her childhood in the Bahamas. Gracious but formal, she speaks with quiet understatement. But when she took over at Warren Easton, her velvet glove slipped onto an iron fist.
Some things had to change, starting with the matter of job security.
“A lot of teachers felt that the last hired should be the first to go,” Ms. Medley said. “It took us a few years to change that thinking.”
But Ms’ Medley also knew that without staff support, none of her changes would work. Those who work with her say that behind Ms. Medley’s quiet dignity is a willingness to listen, a skill and disposition that set her apart as a leader.
“You can go talk to Ms. Medley,” said Patrice Strickland, a guidance counselor at Warren Easton. “Her door is always open.”
Though she has the authority to fire, she has very rarely used it. Instead, she works with teachers to raise their performance.
“We send them to personal development courses and peer tutoring, and we do a lot of in-class observations,” Ms. Medley said.
She scores every teacher on both classroom observations and student test performance. Even teachers whose main subject matter defies testing, such as performing arts teachers, still must teach at least one tested class.
Warren Easton is not doing anything unique. Thirty-five states now require that student test scores weigh heavily in teacher evaluations, and the U.S. Department of Education has pushed hard in this direction.
But charters are different. Unlike traditional public schools, most charters lack tenure and most have merit pay, so low-performing teachers are always vulnerable.
In her first year at Warren Easton, Ms. LeDuff did remarkably well. All of her 10th-grade English students passed the state’s standardized test, and of 100 students only six scored “fair.” The remainder were “good” or “excellent.”
Ms. LeDuff is pleased with the results. Her confidence is high and she’s energized by the challenge, but there is no room to exhale. Those tests will be repeated every year.
Smarter charters
The picture at Warren Easton is very promising, concedes Halley Potter, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Century Foundation. But Ms. Potter worries that a school heavily dependent on the skill and good will of a charismatic leader could be vulnerable when leadership turns over.
Ms. Potter believes charter schools can enjoy stable leadership without sacrificing innovation. She recently co-authored with Richard Kahlenberg “A Smarter Charter,” which argues that teacher voice must play a key role to ensure charter school success.
Teacher voice, Ms. Potter said, need not require unions, though it may use them. What it does require is transparency and real consultation on salaries, work loads and curriculum decisions. She notes a variety of models of teacher voice, such as the Green Dot schools in Southern California that lack tenure but do formally involve faculty in key decisions.
Ms. Potter’s bottom line is charter schools that cannot motivate will serve students poorly, particularly if an unstable environment causes more experienced and higher-quality teachers seek greener pastures.
Teacher voice becomes particularly critical when principals change, as they often do. One recent report found that 71 percent of charter school principals leave their post within five years. The more authority rests with principals, Ms. Potter argues, the more disruption the institution will suffer when they leave.
Teacher discontent
As a case in point, Ms. Potter points to Ben Franklin High School that recently unionized in the wake of serious teacher discontent over poor leadership.
Like Warren Easton, Franklin is also now a charter. It’s a selective school, with competitive admission. And while 89 percent of Warren Easton’s students qualify for free or reduced lunch, only 39 percent of Franklin’s qualify.
But all is not well at Franklin.
In the last few years at Ben Franklin, teacher morale has plummeted. This is due, Ms. Potter said, to a lack of teacher voice and administrative transparency.
In one incident, the school amped up teacher workloads to save money without any effort to discuss the matter with the teachers. Murky pay scales also troubled the faculty.
Enormous teacher turnover followed, and those who remained felt they had no voice, said Natalie Rinehart, an art teacher at Ben Franklin.
One older teacher, whose length of service would require a higher salary, was shifted off the matrix as a cost-saving move, Ms. Rinehart said, and teachers began to fear that their job security hinged more on budgets than on performance.
Year-to-year employees who face retribution for speaking up do not feel safe, Ms. Rinehart said. The faculty who remained at Ben Franklin saw unionizing as a means to “ensure open dialogue without worrying about losing our jobs.”
“You need a safe environment,” Ms. Rinehart said. “Unionization could have been staved off if there had been more engagement with the teachers.”
Leadership and voice
Does unionization present a threat to a dynamic principal? Is it possible to secure teacher voice without sacrificing such leadership? Ms. Medley thinks the answers are yes and yes.
When things do go wrong, Ms. Medley said, it’s often because there is a short-circuit somewhere in the three-way relationship of the board, principal and staff. Some problems can stem from the board demanding contradictory things of a principal, she said. It may micromanage budgets or hiring decisions. Or the problem can be that the principal was a bad hire or poorly trained.
An effective principal backed by a good board would quickly address the teacher voice concerns that drive a school to unionize, Ms. Medley said. And, she argues, unionization is not a substitute for leadership.
Ms. Medley said everything begins with transparency: “I use a pay scale where everyone knows the exact expectations,” she said.
All salaries are public knowledge, and while all teachers at Warren Easton are on annual contracts, no one is let go without diligent efforts to fix the problem.
Ms. LeDuff’s brief time in charter school purgatory was not at Ben Franklin, but it could have been — right down to arbitrary workloads and lack of salary transparency. Not surprisingly, she also felt adrift — a new teacher with little support experiencing firsthand the crossfire of poor leadership and weak teacher voice.
“I’m not learning anything here,” Ms. LeDuff said to Ms. Medley on the phone one day.
“But you are learning something,” Ms. Medley answered, “You are learning how not to run a school.”
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