The assertion that New Orleans public schools are “better off” after 20 years of reform is delusional, at least from the perspective of a native New Orleanian and parent of three children who have attended both traditional public schools and charter schools.
Sometimes we hear that everyone knows that the charter reforms have fallen short. They tell us that it is a vast improvement over pre-Katrina schools and ask why we cannot just take the L and move along.
Here’s one reason. Rio’s story illustrates the human cost of the instability prompted by the reforms 20 years ago. He attended 12 different schools before graduating from a school that has since closed. Despite being later identified as gifted, he was shuffled through a fragmented system that failed to recognize his potential for years. Only through the intervention of the group Black Men Rising did he avoid becoming another statistic.
Rio’s experience reflects the trauma that many New Orleans public school students endure as they traverse multiple school closures, with some attending six or more schools throughout their education. Many graduate from schools that no longer exist. On the other hand, white children rarely experience such disruption.
Some researchers who see progress in the city’s post-Katrina school reforms often hold up school closure as an essential part of the system’s success, dismissing the role of stability in students’ lives.
Rio and many other New Orleans public school students have been left traumatized by multiple school closures. Organizations, parents, and activists also find it extremely frustrating. They work to build relationships with charter-school administrations, only to see the school’s administration change. And all too often, they have to start back at square one after the school shuts down or is renamed and is transferred to a new charter operator. When that happens, students scatter — and fall through the cracks.
Though we differ on some points of the report, economist Douglas N. Harris and Jamie M. Carroll of the Education Research Alliance of New Orleans call the notion of charter success into question in their report, The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons.
When parents feel understood — and when they don’t
The loss of community-rooted Black educators has severed critical bonds between schools and families.
About five years before the storm, a teacher and a friend of ours reached out for resources to help one of her students.
The child’s mother, who worked two jobs as a hotel maid and restaurant server, struggled to care for her seven children, because her shifts both went late and started before the children woke up. After the home’s washing machine broke, her nine-year-old son often arrived at school dirty and disheveled, because, despite the mother’s instructions, the children hadn’t washed their uniforms in the tub before they went to bed.
Though the mother worked tirelessly, her extremely low reading level meant she likely didn’t know how to apply for assistance programs that could have helped her family. Most importantly, she probably didn’t believe she qualified for help.
Her children’s teacher understood the family’s circumstances and worked to connect them with resources rather than simply reporting the situation to authorities. This kind of understanding has become increasingly rare in our reformed system.
Just four years ago, we encountered a similar situation that ended very differently. A family was reported to the Department of Children and Family Services multiple times for neglect. When DCFS attempted to provide services, the mother took her children and fled Orleans Parish, terrified that her children would be placed in foster care and abused as she had been. She moved them to a motel in St. Bernard Parish, leaving everything behind.
The children weren’t enrolled in school for nearly a year, when someone tracked them down and helped them return to the city and reintegrate into school. All of this trauma could have been avoided with local teachers who understood family dynamics, possessed cultural competency, and approached families with genuine empathy rather than punitive measures.
When we talk about teacher retention, we must understand that, at one time, New Orleans teachers taught in the same communities that they lived in. Most were career educators who taught generations of children, creating lasting bonds that extended far beyond the classroom.
Research has found that schools with larger numbers of Black teachers or a Black principal have greater representation of Black students in gifted and talented programs.
Black teachers, and teachers who live within communities, can better see the talents in their students— and the potential within their students’ families.
Teachers who empower children like me
Growing up, Ashana experienced this personally at a small school called New Orleans Free School. Here is my story above how that experience saved me.
As someone who is extremely dyslexic, I felt inadequate throughout most of my educational life until I encountered teachers like Woody, Janice, Jeanette, and Jim.
I know first-hand how a child’s life can be changed by educators who believe in them.
Jeanette and Jim have since passed away. May they rest in power — they empowered so many children to become powerful adults.
My teacher Woody still leaves encouraging comments under articles I publish for Progressive magazine, telling me he’s proud of me. He, along with the others, encouraged me and insisted I could be brilliant despite my spelling difficulties.
They told me that, despite my dyslexia, I could be a writer — that’s what editors were for. They emphasized that we all have different skillsets that we can develop, that none of us are perfect, but that we can practice and grow.
The encouragement didn’t end when I left Free School. The advice and support continued throughout my entire life, even until today. That’s what it means to have authentic relationships with your teachers. That’s what it means to be rooted in community.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity to send my children to that school to be educated by those incredible educators, as so many before me had. My school that had given me a love of learning was shut down.
Hasty post-Katrina reforms prompted erosion of Black teachers and Black board members
If you look at the top-down roots of reform in New Orleans, it’s clear that the opinions of families and teachers were not considered important.
Louisiana legislators expanded the Recovery School District’s (RSD) jurisdiction over New Orleans public schools by convening an emergency session right after Katrina, when most Orleans voters were still dispersed across the country and many were still searching for their loved ones. Executive orders removed the parent and teacher approvals that had been required for schools that converted to charters.
Subsequently, the Orleans school district terminated the majority Black teaching force that gutted the teachers’ collective bargaining unit, United Teachers of New Orleans (American Federation of Teachers, Local 527) and further removed obstacles for top-down reform. Meanwhile, the RSD denied charter authorizations to Black, locally run organizations, according to a study conducted by Kevin L. Henry, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
They also created a new board structure to sidestep the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). While NOLA Public Schools mandates that charter school governance boards include an alumnus or a parent, legal guardian, or grandparent — who is either elected or appointed — post-Katrina school reforms have obliterated democratic participation.
Because of that shift in decisionmakers, some believe that academic reforms were never the broader goal.
Black school boards have historically functioned as entryways for Black political leaders, writes New York University Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Service, Domingo Morel, in Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy.
Morel found that takeovers do not generally improve test scores or graduation rates and instead are really about removing political power.
In New Orleans, despite the much-ballyhooed “re-unification” of charter schools under OPSB, individual charter boards still maintained complete control of all aspects of school management, such as curricula, certification, salaries, school disciplinary policies, daily schedules and annual calendars.
So, even rhough the legislature technically handed control back to the locally elected school board, OPSB has virtually no control over schools and what families and children experience in those schools.
It is also worth noting that charter boards and their privately appointed board members typically convene in the middle of the day, creating another obstacle for participation from working parents, especially those who rely on public transportation.
Teachers and families treated as tools of reform
Some educators who were hired into this system found a broader dehumanization at work. Recently, Ashana advocated for a teacher who brought a doctor’s note to her school’s Chief Financial Officer, to document that she had a urinary-tract infection requiring bathroom breaks every 90 minutes. The administration’s response was to email her back offering reimbursement for adult diapers.
This example of denying teachers basic respect and humanity illustrates what’s happening throughout the system.
And if educators are treated this way, imagine the conditions faced by students and parents.
It’s sometimes difficult to explain what has changed within teaching staffs and within school administrations since the storm. When I hear reformers speak, I hear them talk as though this new charter system is the magic formula, no matter which kids enter it. They believed the reforms are so superior that they could create a new system unmoored from the community.
Since Katrina, the current “choice” system has created impossible decisions for families.
Consider the mother in New Orleans East who must choose each morning which of her two children to accompany to their bus stops, because the system doesn’t allow siblings to attend the same school.
As she explained to her young daughter, clutching a bright orange whistle for safety: “Today I’m going to stand with your brother, but tomorrow it’ll be your turn.” The little girl, frightened at the prospect of standing alone, pleaded with her mother, but was told, “I’m sorry, you know this is just the way it is for right now.”
This mother, tears in her eyes as her children clung to her legs, captured the cruel reality: “With this new choice system, I don’t get to choose to have both of my children sent to the same school. I get to choose which one I stand with every morning.” That’s no choice at all.
Cultural traditions are important to learning
Everyone now knows how post-Katrina school reformers in New Orleans filled classrooms with young, often white, unseasoned teachers from out of town. The recruited transplant charter school leaders lacked familiarity with New Orleans communities and overlooked the importance of music and arts education.
This grave mistake is often discussed, but not in the context of why it was made. Reformers prioritized the white experience — and school leaders continue to do so, even today.
Charter-school leaders could have chosen culturally relevant programs like the Algebra Project, in which the civil rights leader Bob Moses positions mathematics as a constitutional right.
Instead, “no excuses” charter schools doubled up on mathematics and literacy courses, centering test preparation rather than problem-solving. They chose the academy model, focusing only on classwork, without sports and arts and other extracurriculars that help children thrive.
Charter schools autonomy led to inequitable curricula, we believe. Research shows that charter schools, especially those that enroll low-income students, are less likely than traditional public schools to offer music and arts courses.
In New Orleans, we have seen how the handful of charter schools attended by white and middle-class children have robust offerings of music and arts.
Those schools generally do well, partly because cognitive skills and academic achievement increase when children partake in educational programs that involve playing musical instruments. Martin Gunn, a professor of public health at the University of British Columbia, found that students who were highly engaged in music were academically ahead of their peers. Musical instruction specifically enhances creativity in mathematics.
One charter provider’s website distinguishes campuses that enroll a higher percentage of white and middle class students from the one that serves a higher percentage of Black and low-income students. The former provides all students with classes such as General Art, Creative Movement, or Theater and Music. Similarly, at Willow High School, where most students are white and middle-class, teens are able to select a concentrated program of study in a chosen arts discipline.
While we applaud these unique programs, our notion of choice envisions Black low-income children enjoying these privileges as well.
Defining success
Since the reforms began, high school graduation, college entry, and college graduation rates have increased, but for who?
Black student enrollment in New Orleans public schools has decreased by 42% whereas white student enrollment has more than doubled. The experience of Black and white public school students is also vastly different: 70% of the city’s white children attend a handful of A and B schools.
For most kids, the current outcomes are not so rosy.
Tulane University’s Cowen Institute reported that 15.5% of youth ages 16-24 in New Orleans were disconnected from work or school, compared to 11.2% nationally. Youth incarceration has increased by 144%, and twice as many students are enrolled in alternative schools.
For us, these numbers do not add up as the image of success.
Do we measure school success by democratic governance, culturally sustaining and enriching programs, and stability? If so, then no, the reforms have not succeeded.
However, the New Orleans reforms can be considered a “win” if the goal was to create segregated cookie-cutter schools with no cultural footing, reductions in Black school leadership, and a population of Black youth who are shipped to different failing schools every year. At the same time, the data shows that most white families are able to enroll their children in stable K12 schools with enrichment programs.
It all depends on your definition of success — and who you believe should be given a chance to succeed.
Ashana Bigard is a longtime youth advocate and community leader from Amplify Justice and Erase the Board Coalition. Elizabeth K. Jeffers is an Assistant Professor in Education at the University of New Orleans. They envision democratically governed schools where representatives are elected by the people, and that cultivate and sustain cultural knowledge, and provide stability to be successful.
