After Hurricane Katrina decimated large swaths of Louisiana, state officials accelerated their takeover of New Orleans’ lowest-performing schools.
They put 100 schools into a state-run district, and within a decade, the state closed all of them and replaced them with charter schools.
The New Orleans school system is still feeling the impacts of Katrina, 20 years later. Aubri Juhasz of WWNO in New Orleans said the schools were underfunded and in bad shape before the storm hit.
“Like other urban school districts, things started to go downhill after white flight picked up in the [1970s],” Juhasz said. “The schools were neglected, financially mismanaged, and by the [1990s], corruption was a big problem too. The buildings were falling apart, and some schools didn’t have enough textbooks, toilet paper.”
5 questions with Aubri Juhasz
What were New Orleans schools like before the hurricane hit?
“Test scores in New Orleans were among the lowest in Louisiana when the storm hit, and only about half of all students graduated from high school on time.
“The storm hit, buildings were destroyed, teachers and students were displaced, and in that pause, state officials took over most of the city’s public schools and eventually turned all of them into charter schools. The state then gave control of those schools back to the city in 2018, and that’s the main reason that we ended up with a public school system today where all but one of the city schools is a charter school.”
Why did they open charter schools specifically?
“If you think back to the early 2000s, back then they were really popular, they were this bipartisan idea with lots of support behind them, and to remind folks, these are free schools. They’re publicly funded, but they’re run by private boards, and they have to answer to local or state school boards. And in Louisiana, they also have to operate as nonprofits.
“The idea here is to empower individual schools to make their own decisions and empower parents to decide where to send their kids, inserting competition into public education. Schools got more freedom in exchange for strict accountability. If an operator doesn’t meet renewal standards like test scores, officials can decide not to renew them, give the school to another group, or shut it down completely.”
How did families in New Orleans react to this change?
“It was a huge change. Many, many opposed the move. Teachers lost their jobs in the transition. The names on school buildings were changed, which, you know, this legacy was washed away to some extent.
“Twenty years later, there’s still a lot of hurt, and that really continues to kind of color the way that people feel about charter schools in the city. But it also really depends on the charter school in particular, you know, because these schools are all run independently. They’re doing their own things. Some are making big mistakes, some aren’t.
“And some of these charter groups, especially in the early years, they weren’t from here, but then you did have other schools where they were locally rooted. It was the staff at the school forming their own charter group. Some by choice, but others because they really had no other choice as the system started to go all charter.”
What did parents whose children faced school closures think?
“Let me introduce you to Danielle Smith. Her daughter, Kyla, has a learning disability, and Smith says at school, she didn’t always get the support she needed, but when she got to high school at Living School, things were really different. The school’s slogan was, ‘learn by doing.’ Students tended banana trees in biology. They started their own businesses. Everyone was learning at their own pace, Smith says, and Kyla really thrived.
“People really loved the school, but it wasn’t renewed because its test scores were too low.
“When the city school board made its decision to close Living School, they acknowledged that it didn’t feel fair because the school was helping students, and you know, they want schools to try new things like that school was doing. But it’s obviously hard to expect schools to take risks in a system where there’s really high stakes accountability. And that kind of brings us to where we are today, 20 years later. People have always questioned whether the harm of closing schools outweighs the gains.”
Going forward, what options does the New Orleans school system have?
“It probably has to try something different, something new. It has to keep changing, and some school board members want the school to run some schools directly again, like it did before the storm. The system actually isn’t all charter at the moment because the district opened its own elementary school last year. So, we have one more traditional school.
“Others say the system’s strength is in how closely it regulates charter schools, and there’s a fear that if they start running more schools themselves, their attention will be split and that they’ll stop doing a good job supporting charters and holding them accountable.”
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Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Grace Griffin also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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