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NOLA's post-Katrina reforms are working

  • Writer: Joanne Jacobs
    Joanne Jacobs
  • Aug 29
  • 3 min read

New Orleans' George Washington Carver High School, once rated "F" is now an "A" school.
New Orleans' George Washington Carver High School, once rated "F" is now an "A" school.

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city's schools are dramatically better on every academic measure, reports Beth Hawkins on The 74. Before the hurricane, New Orleans was one of the lowest-scoring urban districts in the country and the worst in Louisiana. Sixty percent of schools were "failing," according to the state. Now an almost all-charter district, zero schools are failing, and students are doing as well or better than the state average.


"The reforms significantly improved a wide range of student outcomes, on average and for almost every identifiable group — rich and poor, black and white, low and high-achieving," writes Tulane economist Douglas N. Harris in his 2020 book, Charter School City. "New Orleans is the rare case where we see large gains on a wide variety of measures, from test scores, and high school and college graduation rates, to parent satisfaction."


The "inconvenient success" of New Orleans' school reforms hasn't received enough attention, writes Ravi Gupta, who founded a charter network in the South and created a podcast called Where the Schools Went


The schools didn't enroll more affluent students, researchers found. They got better.


George Washington Carver High School was built in the segregated '50s, Gupta writes. By the time Katrina destroyed the school and its low-income community, it was a perennially failing school with graduation rates around 50 percent.


The state paid to rebuild Carver, but didn't award the charter to community leaders eager to revive "proud traditions of football, marching band and community connection." Instead they chose Collegiate Academies, an organization founded by Ben Marcovitz. His "schools were data-driven, disciplined, and relentlessly focused on college preparation," writes Gupta. "They were also run primarily by young, white outsiders through programs like Teach for America."


The district had laid off all its employees, including a cadre of veteran black teachers, when the money ran out. Most were not rehired by the new charters. There was lots of bitterness.


The new Carver "quickly produced strong academic results, posting some of the best algebra scores in the city," writes Gupta. But suspension rates were high.


In December 2013, 60 students walked out in protest, complaining there were too many rules. Three parents withdrew their children.


"For critics of education reform, this was the perfect story: test scores rising through harsh discipline and cultural suppression," writes Gupta. "The Atlantic ran not one but two major pieces on Carver’s discipline policies."


But Carver adapted to the criticism, "trained staff differently, built new programs, funded the marching band, and hired more teachers from the community." As suspension rates dropped by nearly two-thirds, the school continued to improve academically.


Last year, Carver earned an A for academic growth from the state and ranked second among all open-enrollment high schools in New Orleans for students achieving mastery on state exams. The year before, they had the highest academic growth in the state. Oh, and their boys’ basketball team? They’ve been to three straight state championship games and won back-to-back titles in 2022 and 2023. 

People in the community see the results, says Nell Lewis, the school’s director of culture. "We didn’t used to have academic success here. We had championships, but not college. Not like now.”


New Orleans created OneApp to make it easier for parents to apply to school. "The state stepped in to close failing schools, coordinate enrollment, standardize discipline policies and redistribute resources based on student needs," writes Gupta. "They also relied heavily on government-mandated standardized testing to gauge school quality."


Progressives don't like to acknowledge that the post-Katrina "transformation was built on the elimination of teacher tenure, the dissolution of union contracts and the replacement of neighborhood school assignments with choice-based enrollment," writes Gupta.


New Orleans is not a laissez-faire, vote-with-your-feet story, he adds. It took "limited but aggressive government intervention" to make the all-charter system work.


Closing low-performing schools -- always unpopular -- was a key to success, says Harris. "One way to think about it is that we went from being an F to a C. But I don't think this strategy gets you from a C to even a B."

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Aug 30
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Darren Miller
Darren Miller
Aug 29

I'm glad those students are being given a fighting chance at life. It's much easier to just hand out diplomas like candy and pretend there's no problem.

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