‘Complex and unique educational landscape’
This latest BRAF report dissects the East Baton Rouge Parish school system. While still the second largest traditional school district in Louisiana, it has steadily declined in enrollment over the past half century. That decline coincided with the racial integration of the school district, a divisive 51-year-long federal desegregation case, suburban outmigration and the rise of nontraditional public and private school options.
East Baton Rouge schools currently educate barely half of the school-age children in the parish. The rest of the parish’s students are enrolled in breakaway school districts in Baker, Central and Zachary, independent charter schools, private and parochial schools as well as a diverse mix of homeschools and other nontraditional schools.
The school system has responded to this decline by launching an ever growing variety of magnet and other specialized schools and programs.
“Baton Rouge has a complex and unique educational landscape, one marked by significant disparities, but also by immense potential for positive change,” writes Chris Meyer, BRAF’s president and chief executive officer, in the introduction to the new report.
Meyer, who took over BRAF in late 2021, spent the previous decade leading the nonprofit New Schools for Baton Rouge, which recruited and provided financial and other support for several current and former charter schools.
Broken down by high schools
The Baton Rouge Area Foundation centers its latest analysis around the parish school district’s 11 traditional high schools and their respective elementary and middle feeder schools. Based on state-issued letter grades, the report divides these schools into three groups: A high schools, C high schools and “D-or-F” high schools.
Baton Rouge Magnet and Liberty, the district’s two A-rated high schools, and their feeders educate 17% of the nearly 40,000 children in the district — almost all are magnet schools with selective admissions. The C high schools and their feeders educate 26% while the D-and-F schools educate 41%.
“We cannot ignore the fact that more than 40% of our children are enrolled in D- and F-rated schools,” Meyer writes. “The gap in school quality is stark, and too many families face difficult decisions when it comes to their children’s education.”
The decision to group local schools by high school feeder patterns grew out of scrutiny of a larger set of data on Baton Rouge that BRAF and its partner, Common Good Labs, a data analytics firm, has amassed as part of the Opportunity Data Project.
“Analysis of the unique dataset assembled for this research indicates that local students tend to spend most of their academic career in just a single track and are consistently surrounded by similar peers in their elementary, middle, and high school classes,” according to the report.
Charter diversity
The remaining 17% of students in East Baton Rouge Parish schools attend 13 district-sponsored, or Type 1, charter schools. These schools form a fourth and final group of schools in the school district, according to BRAF. They range from A-rated BASIS Materra to F-rated IDEA Bridge.
Unlike the other groups, there’s no overarching set of high schools for these schools. Only one Type 1 charter, Helix Mentorship Academy, had a high school graduating class this past spring.
Only about half of the charter schools in Baton Rouge are analyzed. Excluded are 15 independent charter schools. Charter schools are public schools run privately via charters, or contracts.
BRAF calculates averages for each group on four measures: third-grade reading, eighth-grade math, high school graduation rate and chronic absenteeism. For each measure, unsurprisingly, the higher the letter grade of the group, the better the average. These averages are also compared with averages for the state and for the East Baton Rouge Parish school system.
Reading and not reading
For instance, 44% of third-graders in Louisiana and 42% in the parish school system reached the state goal of reading at “mastery” or above.
Among A-rated schools, though, third-grade reading proficiency on average is 83%, nearly double state and parish levels. Among D-and-F high schools and their feeders, though, third-grade reading proficiency was much lower, at 34%. Charter schools were only slightly higher at 35%.
C-rated high schools and their feeders were 40% proficient in third-grade reading. While a bit below state and parish averages, BRAF singles out this group as having a relatively high performance “even though their student population has a significantly higher population of economically disadvantaged students.”
Feeder schools in Baton Rouge often perform better than the high schools they feed into.
The district’s three C-rated high schools in 2023 — Northeast, Scotlandville and Woodlawn — had 11 elementary and 2 middle schools serving as feeders. Only five of those 13 schools also had Cs. The rest did slightly better overall than a C. Third-grade reading proficiency ranged from 13% at Jefferson Terrace Academy to 62% at Woodlawn Elementary.
The six high schools with D and Fs — Tara High recently improved to a C — had 29 feeder schools. Of those, nearly half, 13, earned Cs and above. Third-grade reading proficiency ranged from 6% at Claiborne Elementary to 48% at Audubon Elementary.
The schools with the lowest literacy rates, according to the report, are ones where 90% or more of the students are considered “economically disadvantaged.”
Absent from school
Chronic absenteeism — percentages of students who missed 15 or more days of school in recent years — ranged widely as well. In the A-rated school group, only 5 to 7% of students missed this much school. In the D-and-F rated group, between 20 and 30% percent missed this much school.
BRAF opted not to calculate average 8th-grade math and high school graduation rates for Type 1 charter schools because “small sample sizes and variability across schools made it difficult to produce reliable or meaningful comparisons.”
These charter schools had better school attendance than the C-rated and D-and-F rated school groups, with between 13% and 17% missing 15 days or more of school. Like many magnet schools, Type 1 charter schools draw students from across the parish and don’t lose kids the way traditional schools do when children move from one neighborhood in Baton Rouge to another as they frequently do.
Recommendations
BRAF concludes its report with three recommendations:
- Expand and replicate A-rated schools and thereby increasing social mixing and allowing more students from poorer backgrounds to increase social capital and take advantage of specialized learning opportunities. BRAF cites the A-rated BR FLAIM — short for Baton Rouge Foreign Language Immersion Magnet — as a school ripe for expansion.
- Increase support and tutoring for “students at greatest risk of failing to read by third grade.”
- Reduce chronic absenteeism by adopting effective programs used in other cities such as additional support for the most at-risk students, reaching to parents and guardians of absentee children and mentorship programs.