New Orleans Schools, 10 Years After Katrina: Beacon Or Warning?
On Sept. 15, 2005, two weeks after Katrina and the levee breaches, I drove with my parents into New Orleans. It was my 25th birthday.
We used my press pass from The Village Voice to get past a military checkpoint so we could assess the damage to their home near Tulane University. It turned out to be minimal: a few slate tiles off the roof, tree limbs downed, a putrid refrigerator full of rotting food to drag to the curb.
I stayed on as the city blinked back to life in fits and starts. Most public schools remained officially closed for months. New Orleans students descended on schools in Houston and Baton Rouge. Many missed months of classes. Some never went back. Thousands of teachers were pink-slipped.
Makeshift one-room schoolhouses popped up — I volunteered for a few days at one run in a room at Loyola University.
Even as the debris was being cleared, there were those who saw an opportunity. At the time, New Orleans was the second-lowest-ranked district in the second-lowest-ranked state in the country.
"I feel optimistic for these kids from the Orleans Parish school system," Robin Delamatre, a family friend and a veteran New Orleans educator, told me back then."These poor children may come from a failing system to a school system that will really support them."
A decade is a natural moment to pause and look back. Our NPR Ed team spent lots oftime over the past school year trying to find out what has happened to the kids from the Orleans Parish school system. Today, that system is, for all intents and purposes, no longer. Almost every student in the city attends a charter, private or parochial school.
We looked at:
The pros and cons of an all-choice system.
The saga of one student who attended a total of five schools during and after Katrina.
The recent influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America.
The struggles of alternative schools, which take students who aren't successful elsewhere.
And, teachers passing down the city's musical traditions.
Today, New Orleans is a "portfolio model." The role of the Recovery School District is largely to coordinate, not to run, a variety of schools. There is a centralized application process called the OneApp, and a centralized expulsion board. The RSD has been especially active in taking over schools deemed underperforming: Since the schools reopened, 16 New Orleans schools have been completely closed and another 30 have been reorganized, out of just 90 in the city total.
The changes have brought a new sense of excitement and possibility around education in the city.
On a visit back home this month, all over town, at bus shelters and local cafes, there were fliers and posters advertising schools — with vegetable gardens and maker spaces and computer classes, yoga and meditation and foreign-language immersion.
There's no higher concentration anywhere in the country of education-related nonprofits, philanthropies and startups.
Some see a success story. Others are raising an alarm.
Tracking Progress
The most recent set of research reports, issued in July by Douglas Harris of the Education Research Alliance, confirms what the state, city and other organizations have repeatedly said: "The performance of New Orleans students shot upward after the reforms."
It's not just about higher test scores. The researchers find that, "relative to the state as a whole, the New Orleans high school graduation rate and college entry rate (among high school graduates) rose 10 and 14 percentage points."
Not only that: "The number of suspensions and expulsions has dropped since the reforms."
And, Harris and his co-authors conclude, "We are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time."
Now the question that many are asking is: Can New Orleans really be a model for other cities? Urban districts pursuing some version of the portfolio model include New York, Chicago, Denver and Baltimore.
Harris cautions that repeating the city's improvements won't be easy, for two reasons. One is that in New Orleans, the schools performed so badly before that there was nowhere to go but up.
The second is the disaster itself. The storm and its aftermath did what no democratic authority or education advocate could do: Shutter every school and focus national attention on the city.
Philanthropic money poured in. And self-described Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals came from all over the country to help rebuild. In a relatively small school system, there were enough to make a difference.
Attracting that kind of talent and energy to labor hard for low wages is exceedingly difficult. Elsewhere in the country, the reality instead is big teacher shortages.
At the same time, there are those who are determined that what happened to New New Orleans Schools, 10 Years After Katrina: Beacon Or Warning? : NPR Ed : NPR:
