Just four years after the deadly disaster unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, then U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called it “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”
While Duncan later apologized for the remark, the extreme transformation of the city and its schools in the wake of the floods has contributed to a local social and cultural erosion. As a native New Orleanian whose family has called this city home for over a century, I’ve witnessed this erosion firsthand.
The numbers tell a dark story of outside intervention masquerading as progress. The flooding destroyed 100 of the city’s 128 public school buildings. Afterward, the state superintendent of education dictated that no public schools would reopen for the remainder of the academic year. On top of the hurricane recovery, virtually the entire public school workforce—7,500 people—lost their jobs as a result.
In 2004, there were five charter schools serving about 2.5 percent of the public school students in the city. By 2014, more than seventy charters served more than 40,000 students, or 91 percent of the city’s students. Privately operated charter schools, though often recipients of public dollars, are not regulated nor legally accountable in the same way public schools are. Problems in these schools over the previous two decades have been numerous, such as a lack of nursing staff, inaccessible decision-making processes, and insufficient support for special education. Overall, the privatization of the New Orleans schools has represented the most radical transformation of an urban school district in American history.
The results? The school system in New Orleans has maintained a C grade on the state’s scale. More than 70 percent of individual schools received a C or D grade. Despite billions in investment and two decades of “reform,” the district still performs below the state average.
Just as troubling are the cultural costs. The mass firing of teachers shortly after the storm created a sharp decline in Black teachers, from 71 percent of the local teaching workforce in 2005 to less than 50 percent in 2015. In addition, teacher turnover has nearly doubled in that same time, largely due to new reliance on alternative programs with short-term commitments, such as Teach For America.
By 2013, one in three of New Orleans’s teachers were Teach For America corps members or alumni. For a generation now, a huge segment of children across a city with a culture rooted in centuries of Black tradition has been predominantly educated by young, temporary teachers from outside Louisiana.
Yet this same culture under siege generates massive wealth for its city. In 2024, New Orleans welcomed more than nineteen million visitors who spent $10.4 billion, an 8.4 percent increase from 2023’s $9.6 billion. Those visitors directly contribute to an industry that generates nearly 40 percent of the city’s operating budget. Without these New Orleans tourist dollars, Louisiana families would pay thousands of dollars more per year in taxes.
What draws these millions? Not our 110-degree summer heat nor our C-grade schools. People come to New Orleans for our culture—our food, our music, our rituals. These are the very values that have been undermined and stamped out by the systematic forces of disaster capitalism, as described by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine.
The same education “reforms” that Duncan celebrated in 2010 are today, in 2025, still being celebrated in the mainstream media as a “miracle.” And they have been exported nationwide. Cities across the United States have looked to New Orleans as a model for charter school expansion, teacher workforce displacement, and the dismantling of community institutions. Students are taught to pass standardized tests, while the deeper cultural costs are overlooked.
As I wrote in my recent book Beyond Resilience: Hurricane Katrina at 20, the people of New Orleans can no longer afford to keep giving without reciprocity. As the nation looks to the ongoing recovery of New Orleans, what happens next will ripple out to places far beyond our city limits.