Amid the churn of school-improvement efforts in the United States, the unprecedented educational experiment in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed much of the city’s school infrastructure, has gradually receded from national attention, much like the flood waters that deluged The Big Easy two decades ago.
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 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 from the Gulf of Mexico on August 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. The hurricane killed nearly 1,400 people on the Gulf Coast and forced most of New Orleans’ 455,000 residents to abandon the city when levees failed, sending torrents of water through neighborhoods. 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, Governor 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 turnaround 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.”
Even before Katrina struck, the recovery district, operating under the aegis of the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, had taken control of five New Orleans schools and given them to outside organizations to run as charter schools. Post-Katrina, the board of education handed another 107 of the city’s schools to the recovery district to reconstitute as charters. “The logic of the reforms, initially, was driven by two main factors: a desire to get the local district out of the day-to-day management of schools, and the circumstances of Katrina that required getting rid of attendance zones and giving families choices,” said Douglas Harris, an education economist at Tulane University who has studied the New Orleans reforms extensively. “Charter schools were a convenient vehicle to accomplish both objectives.”
But 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 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. The move cast a pall over the city’s school reforms for years.
The takeover measure also drew sharp criticism from Louisiana’s teachers’ unions and community leaders. “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. As Leila Eames, a longtime New Orleans educator pre- Katrina who now serves as the vice president of the Orleans Parish School Board, recalled: “I spent some time in Houston after Katrina, and I was really shocked to hear [when I was there] that we had given away all of our schools, that they weren’t neighborhood schools anymore.” 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.
The post-Katrina reforms in New Orleans have been one of the most heavily studied urban education developments in the nation’s history. The research, together with a series of interviews we conducted for this report with former state and local Louisiana education leaders, researchers, and other stakeholders in the New Orleans reforms, yield valuable insights into the relevance of the extraordinary post-Katrina educational experience for today’s education policymakers.
Stronger Outcomes
Importantly, 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 8th-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. There were some 65,000 students in the city’s schools the year before Katrina struck. Two years later, there were 25,000 and they weren’t all 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. “We then applied a method called difference-in-differences, which involved comparing the trend in New Orleans to a matched sample of comparison students and districts,” Harris writes in his 2020 book, Charter School City. If the two groups were following the same path before the reforms were put into place, they would diverge afterward only if the policy changes had an effect, he explained.
To some, the complex statistical comparisons were problematic. “You have to accept that the comparison group is reliable in order to accept the findings and conclusions,” said J. Celeste Lay, a Tulane researcher unaffiliated with the Education Research Alliance. “There’s just way too much that changed as a result of the storm” in students’ lives to make confident comparisons, Bruce Baker, a Rutgers University education professor, has argued. The main drivers of improvement, he contends, are increased school spending and a less impoverished student population post-Katrina.
But Harris and his colleagues found that the poverty levels of New Orleans school-aged children hadn’t changed significantly after Katrina and that additional funding was helpful but not central to the reforms’ success. “Nowhere,” Harris told us, “has a 13-percent increase in school spending improved outcomes anything like we see in New Orleans.”
Treasure and Talent
The opportunity to recreate 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 & 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 non-profit 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. The Recovery School District conducted its own national recruiting campaign with newspaper, radio, and television ads, as did individual charter schools. 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.
Key leaders of the New Orleans education transformation were also from out of state and many had worked in the national organizations that helped staff the city’s new charter schools. In 2007, the state board of education brought in Paul Vallas as the first permanent leader of the recovery district. He had earned a national reputation for turning around urban school districts during six years leading the Chicago public schools and five years running the Philadelphia school system, where he launched 15 charter schools.
Vallas was succeeded four years later by John White, who, at 32, had already directed the New York City school system’s efforts to revamp struggling schools and launch new district and charter options under reform-minded chancellor Joel Klein. And he had served as executive director of Teach For America’s programs in New Jersey and Chicago. Four years later, in 2015, White became Louisiana’s state superintendent of education, supporting the New Orleans revival from Baton Rouge. He had started his education career teaching high school English through Teach For America.
The influx of entrepreneurial educators and the recovery district’s lowering of bureaucratic barriers helped speed the opening of new and redesigned schools. But the New Orleans teachers’ union and its state and national counterparts resented the influx of outsiders, including the many inexperienced teachers who lacked traditional teaching credentials. In 2007, they issued a report attacking what they called the “folly in pursuing a one-dimensional, ‘no experience necessary’ approach to teacher staffing in New Orleans.”
Research and Reform
Few local educational enterprises have been the subject of as much research as the New Orleans school reforms after Katrina.
The catalyst of the intense scrutiny was Scott Cowen, the president of Tulane University, which had been forced to close for a semester in Katrina’s wake after suffering more than half a billion dollars in damage. Cowen wanted the university to study the re-creation of the New Orleans school system and hired Harris, a University of Wisconsin-Madison education economist, to establish the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, a multi-million-dollar enterprise involving dozens of researchers from universities nationwide, funded by federal, state, Tulane, and philanthropic resources. Over the next decade, the enterprise would publish a wealth of research on topics ranging from student learning to school discipline, the teacher workforce, and the impact of school choice on students, schools, and families. Other researchers, in New Orleans and beyond, also studied the city’s reforms; some as contributors to the alliance, others independent of that enterprise.
To build trust for what would inevitably be controversial work, Harris created an advisory board for the Alliance comprised of a wide range of stakeholders in the New Orleans experiment, including representatives from the teachers’ unions, the Recovery School District, New Schools for New Orleans, and the Orleans Parish School Board. The board was active, providing guidance on research topics and feedback on report drafts.
Building credibility proved important to studying the New Orleans experience extensively, including the central question of whether the dismantling of a traditional urban school district would produce academic progress. To do the complex comparisons between New Orleans students and those in other parts of Louisiana who continued to attend traditional school districts after Katrina, Harris and his colleagues needed individualized student information from the Louisiana Department of Education, data that researchers didn’t get easily in Louisiana or other states. John White, who by then was running the agency, supported the alliance’s request. “We made a decision with our board to provide the data they needed to answer the questions that were central to the education policies of that day,” White told us. “There aren’t that many institutions that have license to study a place from so many different angles.”
The researchers’ intensive scrutiny of the New Orleans reforms put pressure on schools and reform leaders to perform. When positive results began emerging from the research, it lent support to the evolving choice-based system of New Orleans charter schools and the reformers building it.
The researchers worked hard to translate often hard-to-comprehend academese into language that state and local policymakers could comprehend, and that often led to policy changes. “We did a study of the New Orleans transportation system to gain insight into how long students spent on buses and what that meant for families’ access to schools across the city,” recalled Jon Valant of the Brookings Institution, a member of Harris’s research team. After the study, the Recovery School District issued new rules prohibiting very early morning student pickup times.
Researchers also highlighted the cultural cost of sidelining the New Orleans Black community in the rush to recreate the New Orleans school system. Huriya Jabbar, an education professor at the University of Southern California and a part of the research alliance, pointed to the loss of Black teachers, lower rates of charter school proposal approval among Black educators, and a lack of community voice. The latter, she told us, was reflected in large ways and small. When charter schools moved into existing buildings, for example, they often treated them as new schools without legacies, changing building names and abandoning traditions important to neighborhoods and alumni.
The reformers acknowledge the problem.
“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.”
Patrick Dobard, a New Orleans native who ran the Recovery School District from 2012 to 2017 and who is now a partner at City Fund, a philanthropy backing urban school improvement, agreed: “The state did do things to New Orleans, and not in concert with it, early on.”
To Harris, “the dominance of a small number of white leaders in [the reforms’] design, the firing of all Black teachers without cause,” as well as the pushing away of local Black educators in the charter authorizing process, hurt the cause of school reform in New Orleans and beyond.
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?
The Education Research Alliance concluded that holding schools accountable for their students’ results was the key driver. Under the Recovery School District’s authority, low-performing New Orleans schools were either reconstituted, closed, or required to bring in new leadership—steps that frequently improved the prospects for students in those schools, while putting pressure on schools citywide to up their game.
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.
The Challenges of the Marketplace
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.
There were “perverse incentives and pressures on school leaders” to use their autonomy to attract certain students and families and to exclude others to improve their competitive positions, Huriya Jabbar of the Education Research Alliance reported after interviewing 30 charter school leaders in 2012-13. Parents and community organizations resorted to protesting the inequitable policies outside of the Recovery School District offices, Patrick Dobard recalled.
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.
In 2012, the Recovery School District introduced a centralized, computer-driven application system borrowed from New York City known as OneApp. The system took student placements out of the hands of schools, making it harder for charters to manipulate their enrollments. Each family now submits a single form to the state for each child that ranks their school choices in order of preference. Assignments are made via computer algorithm and more than 90 percent of New Orleans students entering kindergarten and high school now receive one of their top three choices. Students receive admission letters without any contact from schools and there’s a central hotline for families with enrollment challenges.
The recovery district also introduced a new, citywide student code of conduct in 2012-13 that established uniform expulsion guidelines, banned expulsions for lesser infractions like not wearing school uniforms, and established a system for reviewing every expulsion by independent hearing examiners—who overturned 200 of 485 expulsions in the program’s first year.
The recovery district in 2007 had 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 2016, the formula became standard throughout the city’s public schools. And the recovery district required schools to provide bus service.
With reforms in place, the state and local education officials in 2015 entered a consent agreement in the federal class action case involving parents of students with disabilities, agreeing to hire independent monitors to observe how such students are enrolled, identified, disciplined, and served—resulting in expanded services and increased training for special-education teachers.
“We had to create a system of schools, and to create that system, we had to impinge upon charter autonomy,” said Leslie Jacobs of the reforms. “You have autonomy about what happens inside your building, but you don’t get to pick who comes in, and you don’t get to pick who you push out.”
Excellence with Equity
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’ parent 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.
The Katrina recovery also involved the dissolution of the New Orleans teachers’ union contract, the purging of teacher tenure, and indifference to traditional commitments to candidates’ credentials and seniority. Under the city’s charter model, schools and charter networks select their instructional materials and teaching strategies.
The strategy worked, if at the price of thousands of pre-Katrina educators losing their jobs, and despite the inevitable loss of some sense of community when long-standing neighborhood schools were replaced by charters available to students citywide.
Yet the troubling patterns of behavior among many New Orleans school leaders as they responded to competition in the early years of reform—burnishing their academic profiles by manipulating enrollment—make clear that the same incentives that autonomy and accountability create to produce strong outcomes also leave students at risk. It suggests that many students are likely to suffer in the absence of protections to counterbalance the inclination to leave many students behind in a highly competitive system. “Early on,” Harris wrote in Charter School City, “what was in many respects a free market yielded some improvements but also most of the problems that market theory predicts.”
But 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. “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.
Interviewees