The meetings started in the 1970s, as many fortuitous things do in this town, over steaming bowls of red beans and rice.
Dedicated civil rights activists recognized that the promise of a hot meal—served in Dooky Chase’s upstairs dining room—could lure groups of people who might not agree with one another, to come together to help New Orleans’ Black community thrive. Education was a cornerstone of that vision.
As we approach the 20th anniversary of Katrina, I feel strongly that our city needs an educational reset. I never felt that more clearly than after attending a recent luncheon, hosted by the Bureau of Governmental Research, where author and consultant David Osborne touted New Orleans’ charter school model as a blueprint that should be applied to other government sectors.
His remarks reflected a troubling ideology that would subvert public involvement in public governance.
In the aftermath of a contentious presidential election and as we approach Katrina 20, it’s essential to reassess the hubristic, racially coded discourse undergirding this ideology, starting with the misleading narratives surrounding New Orleans’ educational “success story.” The notion that our 100% charter public school system represents a 21st-century model that should be replicated is deeply misleading and warrants critical reevaluation.
In the aftermath of the hurricane, it’s understandable that we felt an urgency to get our schools back up and running. Perhaps it was natural that, with an opportunity for reinvention, New Orleans became a magnet for ambitious reformers and “education entrepreneurs.” But now, an insular, well-funded network of education reform apologists are lining up to push a national narrative of New Orleans’ educational success.
The social engineering experiment of what became the only 100% charter public-school system in the nation has been a mixed bag. Any educator actually working in a school will be the first to say: We’re not done yet.
We need to help the education system reconnect to its history of Black educational excellence, to better support the students and community it serves. We need to ensure that the handful of private citizens running half of our schools have real community accountability. We need to address the folly of a decentralized system that produces winners and losers on the backs of children, where schools often compete by teaching to the test and struggle with cost inefficiencies of 68 schools outsourcing essential services such as transportation, food, and facility maintenance.
Here are four timely lessons on the hidden costs of New Orleans’ big bet on charter schools—and some thoughts on the role of a high-quality, well-resourced, Black education ecosystem in moving us forward.
A Blow to Black Talent
In the wake of Katrina, a bankrupted Orleans Parish School Board terminated around 7,000 public school staff members, including more than 4,000 teachers, the majority of them Black women. This mass dismissal eviscerated a workforce that was 71% Black, 78% female, with an average of 15 years of experience.
These teachers were deeply embedded in their communities and had dedicated their careers to navigating a chronically under-resourced education system. The decision to fire so many teachers shocked many in the community and sparked debates about equity and the value of seasoned educators. Their replacements were often younger, whiter, less experienced, and came from outside the community, which led to concerns about the loss of culturally relevant teaching and the erosion of community ties.
In a school system where more than 80% of children identified as Black/African-American, the percentage of Black educators in New Orleans plummeted from 71% in 2005 to 49% in 2014.
The mass firing of these veteran educators—nearly 5% of employed Black New Orleanians according to 2000 census data—severely impacted the city’s cultural, economic, and political fabric.
This shift raised critical questions about racial bias and the long-term sustainability of an education system alienated from the community it serves. Today, as we continue to struggle with Black teacher attrition, the dismissal of these educators stands out as a painful misstep that demands acknowledgement and repair.
The Community Cost
New Orleans now has 29 organizations operating 68 schools, each with its own unelected board. An analysis of 25 charter-school boards in New Orleans found that the Black proportion of charter-school boards was statistically lower than the Black proportion of the city’s voting-age population, and far lower than the proportion of Black public-school students.
Larger charter operators and their unelected boards have enormous say in our city’s schools.
In the 2023-2024 school year, seven individuals chaired the boards of 50% of our schools, overseeing decisions on everything, including curriculum, personnel, and budgets. This consolidates decision-making in just a few hands with no real incentives to ensure accountability to community concerns. If those hands are inept when it comes to the business of running schools (and too many are), it creates the conditions for financial mismanagement, including funds being siphoned off for personal gain, direct theft from the very students these schools are supposed to serve.
The post-Katrina education system in New Orleans has created barriers for community involvement. Publicly elected school board members have no authority to intervene in the day-to-day operations of any charter school. And the privately appointed charter school boards have no legal accountability to respond to community concerns. That undermines the checks and balances of public voice in public school decision making.
The Resource Equity Cost
The charter school model promised innovation and efficiency, but instead has exacerbated resource inequities. The Center for Learner Equity’s recent findings in this regard prompted the Orleans Parish School Board to create an agency that would centralize some special education services. While this is a step in the right direction, the endemic challenge of inflated costs and inefficiencies in our decentralized school system remains.
With 68 schools outsourcing essential services such as transportation, food, and facility maintenance, it is impossible to take advantage of economies of scale or to clarify where we are experiencing the best return on our investments. In the absence of centralized coordination, schools in New Orleans are spending as much as 40% of their total operating budget on transportation, diverting critical funds from instruction and teacher support.
With New Orleans schools facing an unexpected $36 million shortfall in their funding due to an accounting error, the need to address the cost efficiencies baked into our education model has never been more urgent.
The Academic Cost
Reform efforts in the post-Katrina era were intended to eradicate educational inequity by remaking the education workforce, shifting schools to private governance, infusing much-needed financial resources and introducing competition and choice. Despite some bright spots, it has largely failed to meet its promises for the majority of our children and families.
Initial gains in reading and math scores have plateaued since 2014 with COVID-19 only exacerbating the decline. Today, fewer than a third of New Orleans children read at grade level, a proxy for basic literacy. Even more disturbing is the disparity within the system. White students make up 10% of the enrollment in New Orleans public schools, but represent 44% of the enrollment in our A-rated schools.
While Osborne and other reform enthusiasts invoke cherry-picked data around college attendance, high school completion, and the decreasing percentage of failing schools to make their points, enormous gaps between Black and white student achievement remains. For example, LEAP Mastery among Black children in New Orleans has increased by 3% since 2023, but there is still a 54% gap between white and Black students’ LEAP Mastery scores. If the goal of our charter based reforms was to close achievement gaps, how well are we really doing?
Moreover, the city’s education marketplace—where schools compete for students and the funding that comes with them—has created an environment that rewards teaching to the test over cultivating the holistic student outcomes that matter to families. This creates a system of winners and losers, and distorts public perception of what a good school is.
Making Things Right
New Orleans faces immense education challenges rooted in systemic racism. But our city also has a powerful heritage of Black educational excellence, where there is a long tradition of historically Black K–12 institutions offering an HBCU-like experience to Black students.
Similar to HBCUs, these schools have punched well above their weight, fueling social justice movements, protecting cultural traditions, and graduating generations of leaders, educators, and entrepreneurs who form the bedrock of our community. The New Orleans post-Katrina education system, as a whole, has not prioritized understanding, preserving, or supporting the unique pedagogies and practices of these schools.
The opportunity is clear: National research shows better learning outcomes for Black children when quality educators who share their racial identity drive their learning.
In 2021, 40% of New Orleans’ A-rated schools had a teaching staff that was at least 60% Black. In 2023, Louisiana’s top elementary charter school was led by a veteran Black woman educator in New Orleans. What would be possible if we surged support to our frontline Black educators and schools wherever they are, be it in charter schools, traditional public schools, home schools, or early learning spaces?
While the days when the community gathered to organize over humble bowls of red beans and rice are no more, as we approach Katrina 20 New Orleans’ education leaders and community advocates need to tell a more honest story about where we are in addressing our community’s diverse educational needs. The myopic defense of charter reforms framed around misleading pre- and post-Katrina comparisons have not served us well. Working together is essential to leverage the lessons from Katrina and the power of New Orleans’ Black education heritage towards a more inclusive and responsive vision.
This is no time for victory laps. We’ve got work to do.
Adrinda Kelly is the founding Executive Director of Black Education for New Orleans (BE NOLA), whose mission is to support Black educators and Black-led schools. Their annual National Black Is Brilliant Summit builds community support, enhances professional development, and addresses systemic issues affecting local Black educators.