Even 20 years on, Hurricane Katrina remains an icon of American dysfunction. It led to almost 2,000 deaths and left more than $100 billion damage after all the levees crumbled, leaving the world stunned by horrific scenes of floating corpses, fleeing families and flooded New Orleans streets. The immediate response exposed lingering racism, with lurid claims of cannibalism and exaggerated reports of lawlessness in a largely black city. Tens of thousands of people were trapped without food or water, and even today New Orleans’ population remains significantly lower than before: the rising tide damaged or destroyed more than two thirds of homes.
Yet five years after Katrina smashed into this fabled city, President Barack Obama’s respected education secretary hailed the storm as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”. Arne Duncan’s words were crass. But — as we can see clearly two decades later — they were true. For the winds and rain that lashed the city also shattered the systemic inertia and stifling bureaucracy that had betrayed generations of children, unleashing a schools revolution unmatched anywhere for its radicalism and scale.
New Orleans had one of the worst-performing public school systems in America before Katrina. Young lives were being betrayed by low expectations, dreadful teaching, incompetent officials, crumbling infrastructure and corruption.
Today it is still a struggling city in one of the nation’s poorest states. It is shedding jobs in its biggest industries including tourism, despite the throngs of visitors out partying on Bourbon Street or munching beignets in the French Quarter, and its population is shrinking. Yet it offers important lessons about education involving parental choice, school autonomy and accountability that extend far beyond the Big Easy.
The breaking of those levees smashed a mindset that sanctioned failure. Surveying the devastation that left just 16 out of 128 schools intact, and about a third of school buildings destroyed, state legislators took a massive gamble: they sacked all 7,000 teachers, side-lined unions, invited ambitious all-comers in to run their schools, and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children. This drastic move was backed by rigorous assessment of their performance, resulting in at least 50 of the remaining 75 schools being shut down or handed to new operators over the following years.
Now, a new report by experts at Tulane University has analysed scores of studies conducted over more than a decade into this bold experiment. And it concludes this daring act of liberation from local bureaucrats, converting all New Orleans schools into charter schools — publicly-funded, but with freedom and flexibility to set curriculums in line with contractually-agreed goals — was a huge success. “It’s the largest, broadest and most sustained improvement we’ve ever seen in a US school district with substantial improvement everywhere we have looked from test scores and parental satisfaction through to college access and reduced involvement in crime,” says Doug Harris, professor of economics and director of the Education Research Alliance.
That sounds pretty definitive. Yet Harris admits that when he started to study the reforms and track their outcomes with colleagues, back in 2012, he was a sceptic. But the data — which includes the value-added metrics vital for a city where almost one-third of children grow up in poverty — was persuasive. Before Katrina, New Orleans sat at the foot of most key rankings in Louisiana, the second worst US state for education. Almost two-thirds of its schools were judged failing. And the city ranked near bottom nationally in reading and maths, with 19 out of every 20 high school seniors testing in school exit exams below basic proficiency in English and maths.
Yet things quickly changed. New Orleans has gone from being one of the country’s worst school districts — with graduation rates 18% below the national average — to middle of the pack with graduation rates rising nearly 20 points in the scheme’s first decade. Improvements have plateaued, but they have been sustained, dipping in Covid amid school closures before recovering sharply. “We’ve leapfrogged thousands of school districts,” Harris says, “which has never been seen before.”
“After Katrina, New Orleans became a magnet for ambitious educationalists, innovative entrepreneurs and idealistic philanthropists.”
As the professor points out, the reforms were courageous, controversial, and “ugly” at times — imposed, as they were, by legislators in the state capital Baton Rouge. “It was not pretty to see them put in place on a majority-black city in a majority-white state,” says Harris, pointing to the history of voting disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South. There was a decline in the number of African-American teachers — who fell from 71% of the workforce to fewer than half a decade later, before rebounding slightly — while the number and pay of managers soared. Rehired teachers faced longer hours and lower salaries.
Initially, critics on the Left said “the rhetoric of reform often fails to match the reality” with advances coming at expense of disadvantaged students. Then they claimed the city’s undeniable improvements resulted largely from extra cash pouring into the system. The Tulane report accepts money was a factor, but argues the reforms fuelled public support for higher spending on education, since local people could see the results at last. It adds that, before 2005, when the system was infamously dysfunctional, schools were “ineffective in converting school resources into improvement” — meaning that increasing education spending without the post-Katrina reforms would likely have failed.
Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me five years later how he moved to Louisiana from New York at the age of 26 to set up a school, starting out in a refurbished building with 120 pupils aged between 11-15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests, and won a national medal in recognition of its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents,” explaining how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.
Kleban was far from alone. After Katrina, New Orleans became a magnet for ambitious educationalists, innovative entrepreneurs and idealistic philanthropists seeking to improve lives of disadvantaged children. And many of those teachers who lost out in the post-hurricane purge ended up being offered options to return.
Among them was Deanna Reddick, a single mother starting out on her teaching career when Katrina struck, resulting in evacuation with her daughter to Baton Rouge followed by closure of her school. Today, she is the school leader in charge of almost 1,000 pupils at KIPP Morial — one of nine campuses in the city under the umbrella of the Knowledge is Power Programme, a network of 278 public schools in 21 states. When first hired there in 2006, the algebra teacher was struck by the transformed educational atmosphere, vastly different from her previous school.
“You could tell when you walked in that everybody was on the same mission,” she says. “Everybody was working towards the same thing for every single student in that building. My lens expanded — I wasn’t just concerned with what was happening in my own classroom. There was a team dynamic. We are only as strong as our weakest classroom.”
Reddick admits she feels under constant pressure to deliver, knowing her school, which has a strong emphasis on creative arts, might close or be handed to a new provider if she stumbles. Yet she says she never wants to rest on her laurels. “I want to feel that sense of urgency when I walk in the building every day. We have no time to waste.” And her emphasis on results and the pressure to perform for pupils does deliver change. The Tulane report found that enrolment of non-white pupils increased in higher-performing schools, while — against expectations — there was also an increase in the diversity of school options available for parents and pupils.
Kleban left his three-school group in 2016, after winning an election to join the city’s school board. Seven years later, it wound down operations after their charters were withdrawn. Curiously — and despite often-strong cultural ties to communities — such rapid churn in schools isn’t having the deleterious impact one might expect, suggesting that the closure of bad institutions can be a wise move. “In America — and probably in Britain too — there is often strong local attachment to schools, yet if they’re not working they need to be replaced,” argues Professor Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “Sometimes even parents stay loyal to a school failing their kids. But a school district has a duty to provide the best schools by whatever means it can.”
Harris and Hill — having both followed the New Orleans experiment closely — believe it shows why the Left should be much less in hock to demands of teaching unions and the Right far more cautious about the idea that vouchers alone can lift school standards with their absolutist faith in the market. Indeed, the Tulane report suggests Louisiana’s embrace of vouchers actually had a “negative effect on school outcomes”. It argues that they may have drawn students out of the city’s publicly run charter schools, now a proven success story, and into private schools that may be less good than generally thought with “positive outcomes driven by the demographics of those who can usually afford them”.
Given the successes, should the NOLA experiment be replicated elsewhere? Even before Katrina, there were thousands of charter schools across America, including five in New Orleans. But no other district has been desperate enough to push the idea quite as far (although an elected school board was given back overall control again in 2018). There have been sporadic attempts to mimic the New Orleans revolution in places such as New York, Chicago and Indianapolis, but most efforts were either experimental, pusillanimous or petered out after the ouster of their political patrons. A similar — if much less drastic — approach based on choice, autonomy and accountability, with academies and free schools, was adopted successfully to drive up standards in Britain. Sadly, though, Labour’s education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, seems determined to undo 30 years of political consensus, which has again shown the benefits of devolving decision-making to schools, in a bid to suck up to the unions.
Local politics remains messy, to say the least, in New Orleans with the mayor LaToya Cantrell indicted last week over wire fraud, obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury after an investigation into her alleged affair with a former police officer. And the city has some of the worst urban poverty rates in America. But its radical and largely unique school experiment does offer hope for the future. As Reddick puts it, “‘I am a true believer that every one of my students — no matter where they come from, no matter where they live, no matter what trauma they might have suffered — that they can be successful.’” And since Katrina, she says, there has been a new urgency around education. Then Reddick echoes the infamous words of Arne Duncan all those years ago. “When I think about education — and it sounds horrible to say — Katrina was one of the best things that happened to New Orleans.”
