New Orleans offers lessons for Philadelphia’s ‘portfolio’
by Katie McCabe
Photo: Dale Mezzacappa
A classroom in the now-demolished Abramson High School in New Orleans in May 2006, eight months after Katrina hit. A charter school now operates on the site.
As the Philadelphia School District continues its shift toward portfolio management for its public schools, it makes sense to look at another city at the forefront of this movement: New Orleans, where I spent the summer of 2011 working for the Recovery School District (RSD).
The RSD is the state-led entity that took over 75 percent of the public schools in New Orleans in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina. Its implementation of the portfolio model has important lessons for Philadelphia in two main areas: how to have robust oversight of its diverse group of school operators, and how a well-funded education nonprofit can play a role in promoting this model.
Since it started, the RSD has made significant changes to the way it manages