Louisiana’s 2015 District ACT Composite Scores

On July 16, 2015– the same day that the Senate passed its version of the ESEA reauthorization, the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015– Louisiana superintendent John White decided to release his version of the 2015 ACT composites for Louisiana school districts, as noted in a nola.com article by Jessica Williams.

He had only just released his version of the 2014 ACT scores five months earlier, in February 2015 with a wee bit of blindsided prompting that over the course of nine days took him where he really did not expect to go.

Therefore, White’s actually releasing 2015 ACT scores in 2015 is a good choice. That noted, bear in mind that these are only the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) district composites. School scores have yet to come.

Williams’ nola.com included this spreadsheet of the district scores, which she received from LDOE.

Here are the 15 districts with the highest 2015 ACT composites:

St. Tammany Parish, 21.5

Central Community Schools, 21.1

Orleans Parish (OPSB, not RSD), 20.9

Zachary Community Schools, 20.7

Ascension Parish, 20.6

Livingston Parish, 20.5

West Feliciana Parish, 20.5

Cameron Parish, 20.4

Vernon Parish, 20.4

Beauregard Parish, 20.3 

Lincoln Parish, 20.3

Plaquemines Parish, 20.1

West Carroll Parish, 20.1

Lafayette Parish, 20.0

St. Charles Parish, 20.0

For the composites of other districts, click on the spread sheet linked above.

And what about state-run New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD)?

Out of 73 Louisiana school systems listed, RSD ranks 70.

The LDOE-declared 2015 ACT composite for RSD:

16.6.

So, from 2012 to 2015, the LDOE-declared ACT composite for RSD has been

16.8–> 16.3–> 16.4–> 16.6.

It’s a MIRACLE!

Of course, it’s always helpful to combine RSD with OPSB and to focus on improvement, which is what is what RSD did in its July 16, 2015, press release.

Here is part of the spin:

New Orleans now ranks 35 out of 69 districts, moving up nine places in one year. 

One might think of it also as, “When OPSB is required to prop up state-run RSD, OPSB drops from 3rd to 42nd out of 73 school systems plus one OPSB-RSD amalgam, down 39 places in order to continue to market a state-run dud as always showing promise.”

On the spread sheet of 2015 district composite ACT scores, of course OPSB must be combined with state-run RSD so that OPSB’s 20.9 composite might be used to elevate RSD’s 16.6 to a shinier, combined OPSB-RSD composite of 18.8.

New Orleans’ post-Katrina state-takeover experiment does not produce miracles.

It does, however, disenfranchise many parents, alienate youth, and damage the black middle class.

Not impressive.

__________________________________________________

Schneider is a southern Louisiana native, career teacher, trained researcher, and author of the ed reform whistle blower, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education.

She also has a second book, Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?, newly published on June 12, 2015.