But the transformation of the centralized 65,000-student New Orleans system of neighborhood schools into a post-Katrina network of primarily independent public charter schools competing for students citywide has valuable lessons for today’s education policymakers who are facing declining student achievement, a shortage of teacher talent, and the need to design school choice systems that are fair and deliver high-quality educational options.
Controversial and beset by problems that eventually required substantial interventions, the New Orleans reforms nonetheless led to significant improvements in academic outcomes in the city’s long-struggling public school system.
New Orleans public schools were plagued by problems before Katrina slammed into the Louisiana coast on Aug. 29, 2005. The district’s students were among the lowest achievers in Louisiana, one of the nation’s lowest-performing states. Only 56 percent of the district’s students earned high school diplomas — 10 percentage points below the state average. Superintendents lasted an average of 11 months in the decade before Katrina. The FBI indicted 11 district leaders for corruption in 2004. Upwards of half of New Orleans’ Black students lived in poverty and the city’s murder rate was among the nation’s highest.
Katrina made landfall early on a Monday morning, only days into a new school year for New Orleans students. Some 110 of the city’s 126 schools were damaged, many beyond repair. A RAND Corporation study found that the majority of Orleans Parish students spent the 2005-06 school year out of state or in Louisiana private schools. Only about a third of the city’s students returned for the 2006-07 school year.
With the New Orleans educational system in shambles, Louisiana leaders moved quickly. Within three months of Katrina’s landfall, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, worked with the state Legislature to hand control of most New Orleans public schools to a Recovery School District that the state had created two years before Katrina to turn around low-performing schools throughout Louisiana.
Under a strategy championed by Leslie Jacobs, a local insurance executive and member of the Louisiana state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education who had served on the Orleans Parish School Board, the recovery district would, within a decade, reconstitute 90 percent of the city’s schools as public charter schools. They would be open to every New Orleans student to give families trying to put their lives back together as many school options as possible. But they would be privately operated. “Families won’t come back without good public schools,” Blanco said at the time. “The state will redesign the schools as an overdue gift to our children.”
Starting Over From Scratch
The rebuilding and redesign of the New Orleans educational infrastructure would involve millions of dollars in federal and philanthropic funding and substantial support from a wide range of national education organizations that saw the post-Katrina New Orleans education landscape as a “greenfield” opportunity to rethink an urban school system from scratch.
Support for the remaking of the New Orleans school systems wasn’t universal, however. The state takeover was opposed by Black New Orleans Parish representatives in the Louisiana Legislature, who sought to preserve the New Orleans school system as an important source of power and employment for the city’s Black community. And there was an outcry in the Black community and among teacher leaders when the city school district’s 7,500 employees were fired in early 2006 in the wake of the state takeover, including 4,300 teachers, the majority of whom were Black, a move that cast a pall over the city’s school reforms for years.
“Politicians are taking advantage of a catastrophic tragedy to do things they never would have dared if the people of New Orleans were in their homes,” said Steve Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers at the time.
The replacement of traditional public schools with charters, together with the firing of thousands of predominantly Black educators in a high-profile city, intensified national opposition among teachers’ unions and defenders of traditional public education systems to the school reforms of the early 2000s.
Stronger Outcomes
Importantly, however, the reforms worked. Student achievement, high school graduation rates, college matriculation and other student outcomes improved markedly in the decade after Katrina, according to the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, a research center established at Tulane University in 2014 under the leadership of education economist Douglas Harris. The city’s results moved from at or near the bottom of Louisiana school systems to near statewide averages.
The percentage of New Orleans eighth-graders scoring “basic” or above on Louisiana’s standardized reading test, for example, surged between 2004-05 and 2012-13, from 26 percent to 71 percent. The district’s high school graduation rate climbed from 56 percent to 73 percent over the same time period. And college-entry rates rose from 20 percent to 55 percent.
But it wasn’t easy to gauge the results of the Katrina reforms, largely because enrollment in the New Orleans schools changed dramatically in the wake of the hurricane. Two years after Katrina struck, the citywide school census had plummeted from 65,000 to 25,000, not all of whom were enrolled in local public schools prior to Katrina.
That made simple pre- and post-Katrina comparisons of results inadequate. Instead, researchers employed a complicated strategy of comparing the post-Katrina performance of New Orleans students to that of students with similar demographics from elsewhere in Louisiana whose schooling had been disrupted by Katrina but who hadn’t experienced the New Orleans reforms.
Treasure and Talent
The opportunity to re-create an urban school system made New Orleans a magnet for education reformers, a place uniquely attractive to public school-choice advocates, educational entrepreneurs, principals, and teachers eager to lend a hand in the city’s recovery, as well as major foundations already funding a national campaign to raise education standards, improve teacher quality and expand school choice.
In addition to $1.8 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to replace the city’s school infrastructure, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Doris and Donald Fischer Fund, the Walton Family Foundation, and other donors contributed some $77 million to the revamping of the New Orleans school system between 2006-07 and 2012-13, according to one estimate.
Those foundations had played a central role over the previous decade in creating a series of nonprofit organizations designed to help staff the nation’s public schools and expand charter school options for students in low-income communities, including Teach For America, The New Teacher Project, New Leaders for New Schools, and the Knowledge is Power Program charter school network, now known as KIPP: Public Schools.
The nonprofits launched and staffed many of the emerging charter schools, working with local organizations that included New Schools for New Orleans, a charter school incubator that continues to play a substantial role in supporting the city’s charter schools, and teachNOLA, a teacher-training program affiliated with The New Teacher Project. Many of the school-level educators who responded were young, idealistic but inexperienced and not Louisiana residents. And they were disproportionately white, lowering the representation of Black teachers in New Orleans from 71 percent the year before Katrina to 49 percent by 2013-14.
“New Orleans needed reform,” said Andre Perry, who led a charter school network in post-Katrina New Orleans for several years and is now a Brookings Institution scholar. “There was a window of opportunity that opened to rush reform. But in many ways, [reformers] did not recognize the people, the talent, and the democratic processes of New Orleans. They wanted to short-circuit that, because they felt it was getting in the way of true change. And yes, it was getting in the way of true change. But you can’t just ignore people.”
The Importance of School Accountability
Not surprisingly, researchers were eager to learn the source of students’ greater success in the wake of the New Orleans reforms. Increased funding? Changes in teacher quality? School choice?
Harris estimates that the recovery district over the years closed or reconstituted with new leadership at least 50 public charter schools, an astonishingly high percentage of the city’s roughly 75 charters. He and his colleague concluded that the accountability system was the single largest contributor to student gains, outpacing the impact of increased school funding and other factors. The results were especially strong in the first decade after the reforms, when many low-performing schools were replaced by higher performers, they found.
But the school reconstitutions and closures weren’t without challenges, especially for students at the failing schools and their families. At the same time, researchers found that it wasn’t always easy to find charter operators willing to take over troubled schools rather than opening new ones from scratch. And the churn of school closings and new openings was no less disruptive to teachers.
A 2020 Education Research Alliance study found that school closures significantly increased the likelihood of teachers leaving the public education sector, including high-performing educators. “Evidence from New Orleans strongly indicates that entering teachers do not contribute more to student test score growth than exiting teachers,” the authors wrote.
While giving New Orleans’ charter schools autonomy to choose their own curriculum, staffing, and teaching methods and then holding them strictly accountable for results yielded improvements in school performance, it was increasingly clear that the strategy was leaving many students behind.
Evidence emerged that schools were cherry-picking families, admitting those with strong academic records but discouraging or later expelling low performers, those with discipline problems, and students with disabilities because they lowered schools’ academic standing or were expensive to educate. Some schools provided students with transportation; others didn’t, to save money. Schools had different processes and timelines for enrolling students. Suspension and expulsion practices varied widely.
Special-education students were particularly hard hit. In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations filed a federal class action lawsuit against the Louisiana Department of Education and the Orleans Parish School Board on behalf of some 4,500 New Orleans students with disabilities, arguing they were being denied admission to schools because of their disabilities and punished for behavior related to their disabilities.
Rather than defend the problems in the system they had created, Louisiana education leaders leaned into them, reducing schools’ autonomy and restoring a degree of centralization in the city’s school system to level the playing field for students and families.
They introduced a centralized, computer-driven application system borrowed from New York City that took student placements out of the hands of schools, making it harder for charters to manipulate their enrollments. They established a citywide student code of conduct and uniform expulsion guidelines. And they launched a new, more equitable school funding formula that provided baseline funding for every student and additional dollars for students with unique needs, such as English learners and those with disabilities.
In 2018, Louisiana officials returned control of the New Orleans public schools to the Orleans Parish School Board, the local board that had been largely sidelined in the 13 years since Hurricane Katrina, managing only a handful of legacy schools. The Recovery School District relinquished to the board the many charter schools it created, forming a new, combined system called New Orleans Public Schools.
Under the new model, the board would manage the centralized services the recovery district had created, but charter schools would retain autonomy over staffing and other day-to-day operations. Last fall, the new leadership opened its first school, the only non-charter school in the city. While still well below pre-Katrina levels, student enrollment reached 43,000 last year.
Improvement in student outcomes slowed in the second decade since Katrina and the city’s students lag statewide averages. Recently released Louisiana data found that 24 percent of New Orleans students in grades three through eight scored “mastery or higher” in math, compared to 33 percent statewide, and 37 percent reached that level in language arts, versus 43 percent statewide.
Still, New Orleans’ high school graduation rate rose from 73 percent in 2013-14 to 79 percent in 2022-23, and college enrollment rose from 55 percent to 65 percent. For their part, students’ parents and guardians graded the city’s public schools at about a C in a 2024 survey by Tulane researchers. Parents graded their own children’s schools higher.
The New Orleans reform experience is evidence that autonomy and accountability can be powerful catalysts of school improvement, that it’s possible to build more entrepreneurial delivery systems within public education, and that they can yield compelling results.
In responding to the inequities that resulted from an unregulated market, Louisiana education leaders demonstrated that it is possible to combine the strengths of market reforms in public education with necessary regulatory protections for vulnerable students. They showed that it’s possible to pursue excellence and equity in public education at the same time.
“Government needs to exist in a publicly funded education system, not to manage schools, but to regulate equity,” John White, who now leads Great Minds, a national organization that produces curriculum materials, told a conference on the New Orleans reforms at Tulane a decade ago. White had served as a top school leader in New Orleans and Louisiana. “When we realized that charter schools would be serving essentially every child, it changed the paradigm.”
In that sense, the New Orleans experience is a cautionary tale for the new federal tuition tax program, that beginning in 2027 is expected to funnel billions of dollars to families to use for private schooling, perhaps without any of the protections for students that Louisiana officials came to realize were so important to their work to rethink New Orleans’ schools.
This article is adapted from a report by FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Thomas Toch is FutureEd's director. Erik W. Robelen is an education writer.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
