Bill would transform Nevada’s struggling schools into charters

By Ian Whitaker

Tuesday, April 14, 2015 | 2 a.m.

When it came time for Nevada Superintendent Dale Erquiaga to draw up a plan to fix the state’s struggling public schools at Gov. Brian Sandoval's request, he turned to the man who spent four years overseeing one of the most controversial education policies in recent memory.

He called up Paul Pastorek, the former Louisiana state superintendent of education who helped oversee the state-run Recovery School District. The RSD converted hundreds of Louisiana’s public schools into privately operated charters, producing as many detractors as states eager to follow in its footsteps.

Now Nevada education officials hope a bill modeled after Pastorek’s approach in Louisiana will transform our own dramatically underperforming school system.

The nuclear option

When Pastorek was appointed superintendent in 2007, Louisiana’s Recovery School District had already been in place for a few years.

Started in 2003 but expanded exponentially in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the RSD began as a last resort to rehabilitate just a handful of low-scoring schools but eventually wrested hundreds of public schools from local districts — mostly those in devastated New Orleans — and converted them to charter schools.

The Recovery School District, the first of its kind, became a nationally cited case study in charter education and a lightning rod for the so-called “school choice” movement as Louisiana students began to show signs of improvement.

Since the '90s, school choice supporters have grown from a loud minority into a national movement that plays a wide field of issues. Private school vouchers and charter schools are one thing, but a Louisiana-style state takeover of low-performing public schools is a “nuclear option” that politicians are becoming increasingly comfortable with.

In addition to examining other states, Erquiaga and the state Department of Education consulted Pastorek for his advice on implementing a similar model here in Nevada. Pastorek even flew out a couple of times to meet face to face.

AB448, otherwise known as the Achievement School District (ASD for short), is what they came up with.

Two weeks ago, Pastorek spoke before the Assembly Education Committee in favor of the bill, and on Thursday, it cleared the committee along party lines.

“My approach is that kids can’t wait for adults to get their act together,” Pastorek said in an interview. “In Louisiana we had had chronic failure for years. Local districts and boards said they were going to fix it. Nothing had seemed to work.”

In Nevada, the ASD would take control over a number of failing public schools and convert them into charter schools. State dollars that had previously gone to the school district would now be directed to the charter management organization.

Taking schools away from districts that have run them for decades may seem harsh, but the climate in Nevada education is ripe for reform. Erquiaga says the ASD amounts to the state “drawing a line in the sand.”

“We’ve been at this now for over a decade,” said Erquiaga. “We can either start doing the work and make it acceptable, or we can start to intervene.”

Republicans, especially those in the Assembly, have latched onto the idea under the auspice of school choice rhetoric.

Unsurprisingly, the Clark County School District stands to be the biggest loser in the equation. In January the state released a list of 78 failing schools, 49 of which are in CCSD. A handful of schools from Washoe County and other rural districts also made the list.

Every year the ASD’s executive director would pick some of the schools on that list to be placed in the Achievement School District.

CCSD’s reaction to the plan has been tepid at best. They say they support the idea of an Achievement District, but are afraid that charter schools might try to push out low-performing students in order to make their scores look better.

The results of a recent survey of New Orleans charter school principals found that 25 out of 30 charters primarily responded to competition by ramping up marketing campaigns and treated improving academics as a secondary goal.

The same survey found that 30 percent of charters in New Orleans routinely tried to exclude certain students.

The bill that passed the committee would give priority to students already enrolled at a public school if it were replaced by a charter.

While critics point to 2014 data that show ACT scores for the RSD’s students were among the worst in the state, former Tulane University researcher Debra Vaughan said students in the district are better served today than in the past.

“It’s totally changed our local public school system,” Vaughan said.

Vaughan, who co-authored a study about the RSD for the Cowen Institute at Tulane, said a danger of the achievement district model is that it avoids addressing the problems that make school districts fail in the first place.

“If the state just takes over failing schools and charters them, there is no support for the local districts and what caused them to fail,” she said.

In 2008, only 28 percent of students in New Orleans scored at a basic level on Louisiana’s standardized tests. In 2013, that number rose to 57 percent.

If nothing else, the RSD has opened the floodgates for school choice advocates to question the traditional district model, which Pastorek said needs real “rethinking.”

The long term

But perhaps the biggest issue is what happens in the long term.

In Louisiana, nobody expected the RSD to grow as large as it did. Last year it became the country’s first all-charter school district and is one of the largest in that state by enrollment.

That’s something state education officials in Nevada want to avoid. The RSD is widely seen as having morphed into a bureaucracy with the same kinds of problems traditional school districts face.

“We have no desire to create a permanent school district,” said Erquiaga.

The proposed legislation, however, would let the schools themselves decide whether to reintegrate back into the school district, stay in the ASD or permanently convert to a charter school. That choice would be made by members of the school’s governing board, who are appointed by the charter company.

That raises the question of Nevada’s exit strategy. State education officials say they don’t want the ASD to become a permanent fixture like the one in Louisiana, but there’s nothing explicit in the legislation to stop that from happening.

Schools could choose to stay in the ASD at the same time more are being added, which could grow the district larger than originally anticipated.

“It sets the district up for long-term governance for sure,” Vaughan said.

Seth Rau, policy director at the education think-tank Nevada Succeeds, worked with AB448's authors. He said it’s more likely that the Nevada model will resemble the takeover of low-performing schools in Tennessee.

Tennessee’s Achievement School District currently runs 23 state public schools as charter schools. Most of those schools are in the low-income areas of Memphis, the state’s largest city.

“I could see the ASD getting to that size,” Rau said. “The ASD is a failure if it ever gets to 30 schools.”

Rau said it would take at least five years until the number of schools in an Achievement School District would reach double digits.

But the bill has to make it through the Legislature first. If it does, the state’s next step is finding charter companies to manage the schools it takes over.

“I don't care if you are a charter or a public school,” Rau said. “I care that you are a school that works for kids.”