I wrote yesterday about the trend to take New Orleans all the way to being a totally charter school district.The same Times-Picayune’s on line article also mentions that only a few New Orleans high schools are not charter schools already.

That casts an important light on recent ACT college entrance test scores from the Louisiana Department of Education’s web site.

This graph shows the remarkable progress that is being made in Louisiana’s “Recovery School District” high schools in the Hurricane Katrina trashed part of the state. The 1.7 point increase in these scores since 2007 is remarkable, although the district needs to make much more improvement to be on track to getting most of its students ready for college and careers.

Still, to recover in this way after what happened in 2005 is encouraging.

Keep in mind, the Times-Picayune article says most of the high schools in this special school district are already charter schools. That kind of makes you want to try some charter schools in Kentucky, doesn’t it?

Data to create the graph comes from the 2010 and 2011 reports on the ACT in Louisiana.

The 2010 report has scores from 2007 to 2010 for the state’s “Recovery School District,” which comprises both schools in New Orleans and in the surrounding area that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The 2011 report was a little different. It breaks out the New Orleans Recovery School District high school results separately from other Recovery School District high school results.

However, data in the report allowed me to compute a weighted average score for the entire Recovery School District that would be consistent with the earlier data.

By the way, the 2011 report shows that almost all of the Recovery School District’s high schools are in New Orleans. Of 19 total schools identified within the entire Recovery School District system, only 3 are from outside of the New Orleans area.

In terms of headcounts, 738 of the 2011 Recovery School District’s high school graduates come from high schools within the New Orleans Recovery School District Area. Only 64 come from the three other high schools.

Furthermore, in 2011 the recovery school district’s ACT Composite Score average was 16.2, while the average for the three high schools outside New Orleans was only slightly higher at 16.4. The fact that urban New Orleans is keeping up with the surrounding area is certainly notable.

Based on what I see in the ACT reports, it is reasonable to say that the entire Recovery School District’s results over time should be largely about the same as those for the district’s high schools found in New Orleans.

By the way, Louisiana never tested 100 percent of its graduates with the ACT before 2011. Increasing ACT scores and graduate participation at the same time is an extra remarkable achievement.