Responding To A Pandemic

The Cowen Institute has conducted annual polls on perceptions of public education in New Orleans since 2007. These polls have served to provide insight on how parents and the general public feel about the highly decentralized K-12 public education system in New Orleans. Over time, we have monitored views on a wide range of topics, including school quality, governance, and the prevalence of charter schools in the city. Additionally, each poll has included questions specific and relevant to the particular year in which it was conducted.

Given the ongoing tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s poll includes questions on how the pandemic has impacted New Orleans families and their ability to access education, including their experiences with:

• Remote and virtual learning

• Returning to in-person learning

• The response of our local school district, New Orleans Public Schools (NOLA-PS), and individual schools to the crisis

• The physical and mental health impacts of the virus

To capture the experiences and attitudes of a wide range of parents, we polled 1,000 public and private school parents and guardians in Orleans Parish, as well as those who home school their children. Public school parents and guardians made up the majority (78%) of our sample.

We hope this year’s poll provides insight into the educational experiences of New Orleans families during this unprecedented time. Prior to reading the report, it’s important to consider the following contextual features of New Orleans’ public education ecosystem:

• In the 2020-2021 school year, there are 83 total public schools in Orleans Parish: 76 of these are overseen by the NOLA-PS, 6 by the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), and 1 by the State Legislature.

• As of October 2019, there were 49,574 K-12 students enrolled in public schools in New Orleans.

• The city’s school system has no pre-determined enrollment based on where students live. Students and families apply to schools through a common enrollment system called OneApp and are then matched to a school based on an algorithm that factors in their preferences.

• The city’s schools serve primarily students of color (90%) and/or students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds (83%). The majority of public school students are Black (76%).

• As we pointed out in our 2019 State of Public Education in New Orleans report, enrollment in New Orleans public schools remains largely segregated along racial and socioeconomic lines. The relatively small percentage of White students in New Orleans public schools is largely concentrated in A and B schools and selective admissions schools (75% of White students attend an A or B school). Meanwhile, fewer than 5% of White students attend a D or F school. Conversely, almost half of Black and Latin/o/a/x students (45% and 46%, respectively) attend C schools, while another 30% of Black students and 20% of Latin/o/a/x students attend D/F schools. Less than a quarter (24%) of Black students and one-third (33%) of Latin/o/a/x students attend A/B schools.

• In fall of 2020, public school students were given the option of returning to in-person learning or continuing with virtual learning. Students who opted to return to in-person learning did so in a phased approach, in which younger students returned earlier than older students. According to NOLA-PS, roughly 60% of students opted to return to in-person school and 40%
opted to remain with virtual learning.

• Schools and NOLA-PS provided families with resources during the COVID pandemic. NOLA-PS distributed more than 10,000 computers and 8,000 hotspots, and individual schools distributed thousands more. Schools also distributed more than one million free meals to students during the spring and summer.

As in previous years, this report includes the overall responses of the parents and guardians we polled, as well as their answers broken out by race, socioeconomic status, and other important subgroups such as geographic location and education level. As with all of our previous polls, you can download the data and interact with a wide range of graphs on our cowendata.org website,
including a responses of public school parents for each question.

This is the 11th opinion poll on public education in New Orleans published by the Cowen Institute. The survey items were developed by the Cowen Institute in consultation with LJR Custom Strategies, a strategic research and consulting firm led by Principal Jennifer Johnson. The poll was administered via landline and cell phone to a sample of 1,000 adults who reside in Orleans Parish and are the parent/guardian/responsible party for one or more children who currently reside in their household and either attend a K-12 school or are home schooled. It was conducted from October 5-18, 2020 by LJR Custom Strategies.

Findings from the full sample are subject to a sampling error of plus or minus 3.1%. Subgroup analyses are subject to error of up to plus or minus 10%.1

Of those adults surveyed, 85% were reached by cell phone and 15% were reached by landline. 78% of respondents have at least one student enrolled in a New Orleans Public School, 16% of respondents enrolled their students exclusively in private or parochial schools, and 6% of respondents only home schooled their students. The sample was representative of the location of residence of the population of New Orleans: survey participants were grouped into five residential areas across the city based on zip code. Between 16-26% of respondents were polled from each of those five areas. Additionally, the sample was tightly aligned with the overall demographics of the city’s population by race, income, and educational attainment level: 64% identified as Black, 26% as White, 2% as Asian, 4% as Latin/o/a/x, and 2% as other. 40% of respondents had a four-year college degree or higher. 63% of respondents earned less than $75,000 annually, 21% earned more than $75,000, and 16% did not provide their annual income.

Throughout the report, unless otherwise explicitly stated, the data presented includes the full sample of parents who answered the question. A number of questions were asked only to a subsample of parents. We note those questions and provide the total number of respondents in the graphs

While the poll’s demographics are representative of the city as a whole, they are not representative of the city’s public school student population. As noted in the introduction, there is an over-representation of Black students in New Orleans public schools compared to the number of Black residents represented in the city’s general population. The demographics of survey respondents are in-line with the city’s population, but they do not mirror the families served by public schools due to polling constraints.

Additionally, after completing the poll, we discovered that the polling methodology did not ask for participants' gender identification. Instead, the respondent's gender was presumed by the interviewer. While we recognize that this has been standard practice in polling approaches for some time, we believe that it introduces unreliability into the gender variable and also fails to consider non-binary gender identities. For this reason, we decided to omit gender from our reporting. Failing to notice this before data collection was an oversight on our part and the absence of gender data is an overall limitation of the study.

When presenting findings along racial lines, we report findings according to the categories of White, Black, and other. These racial categories are limiting and fail to capture the racial and ethnic diversity of our city and its residents. However, we decided to include these response categories because our sample contains only 15 Asian and 42 Latin/o/a/x respondents, making it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about the responses of these groups in this survey.

Another limitation of the current research is the reliance on broad categories for certain subjects — for example, one question includes crime and criminal justice as a single category rather than breaking them out separately. Additionally, one important factor to keep in mind: the administrative side of the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) rebranded themselves as New Orleans Public Schools (NOLA-PS) in 2019. Some questions asked parents/guardians about their feelings on New Orleans Public Schools and it is not possible to know whether their responses were strictly about NOLA-PS as an oversight and governing entity, or public schools in the city at large.

Finally, parents and guardians were asked if their child(ren) attended New Orleans public schools, but it is impossible for us to know whether respondents interpreted that as a NOLA-PS school or public schools overseen by other governing entities in the city. Therefore, respondents are grouped into those with children at public schools in the city and those with children at private schools or who home school their children.