Drive by a school zone light at random in the city of New Orleans on a weekday and there’s about a 50 percent chance it works. And that’s an improvement. The number of broken lights has slowly dropped in three field surveys by The Lens, but the city hasn’t come close to repairing them all, as a city official promised in July.

For the first time since 1999, the state does not have a standardized-testing contractor, forcing it to manually check and refine 640,000 scores on the new, controversial tests given this spring. State, school and district results will be available before the BESE primary election.