Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans, Louisiana, in ruins, taking nearly 1,400 lives, washing away entire neighborhoods, and destroying the city’s public schools. As Ashana Bigard, a New Orleans parent and contributor to The Progressive, writes in her new book Beyond Resilience that in the disaster’s aftermath, parents expected to be partners in the rebuilding of their children’s schools. But while families wanted schools with science labs, arts programs, and strong community roots, they instead received “no-excuses” discipline policies and endless test prep.
Beginning in 2006, the State of Louisiana seized control of the district, pushed aside veteran Black educators, and handed the city’s schools to outsiders like Teach for America, New Leaders for New Schools, and the charter school chain KIPP. Nearly 7,500 teachers and school staff—most of them Black, and many with decades of service—were abruptly dismissed. They were replaced by a revolving door of young, mostly white recruits with little or no connection to the community.
The Gates, Broad, Walton, Fischer, and Bloomberg foundations, already enamored with charter schools, collectively invested an estimated $77 million along with other donors in rebuilding New Orleans’s schools between 2006 and 2013. It was clear to parents like Bigard that the future of their schools would be decided in boardrooms and philanthropic foundations far removed from their city.
By 2019, New Orleans had become the nation’s first all-charter school district. Now, at the twenty-year mark since Hurricane Katrina, some celebrate the New Orleans “miracle.” But those glowing reports rely almost entirely on the Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH)—an institute that receives millions of dollars in funding from many of the very same foundations that created the charter school system.
The closing of “failing” charter schools, a feature of the city’s model, is cited by REACH as the primary driver of test score increases between 2008 and 2014. According to data derived from the Common Core of Data (a database of the National Center for Education Statistics), of the 125 charter schools that opened in New Orleans since Katrina, sixty-one have closed, and others were taken over by different charter management organizations. Among the sixty-one schools that closed, the average lifespan was only six and a half years. Although some schools were closed due to low test scores, others were closed because of low enrollment and financial mismanagement, and still others closed amid scandal.
However, it remains unsettled whether the frequent school closures within the charter school system, known as “charter churn,” is truly the cause of the increase in test scores. Scholar Bruce Baker argued that a “significant reduction in concentrated poverty,” along with a dramatic increase in spending, were in fact the drivers of test score improvement. A 2015 study by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) concluded that the “constantly changing metrics,” which included “changes in both [test standards] and content,” resulted in different conclusions regarding the efficacy of reform. Noting that New Orleans was “one of the lowest-performing districts in one of the lowest-performing states in the United States,” the SCOPE study also concluded that New Orleans-style school reform, as it exists now, is not a model that should be replicated. Bruce Sacerdote, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, found in a 2012 paper that student evacuees who left the city permanently had higher test scores than those who returned to the chartered system.
The counter-narratives of Baker, SCOPE, and Sacerdote are more compelling in light of what has occurred since that first decade after Hurricane Katrina. Between 2015 and 2023, academic improvements plateaued. This begs the question: If charter churn and the replacement of failing schools with better schools is the secret sauce of success, then why haven’t test scores continued to rise even as churn has increased?
The second most cited piece of evidence for charter success is an increase in graduation rates, which rose from 54 percent pre-Katrina to 79 percent in the 2022-2023 school year. But that increase wasn’t unique to New Orleans. Nearly a quarter of Louisiana districts had graduation rates below 60 percent before the storm. Today, all but one of these districts have seen improvements of 20 points or more. Many had graduation rates that improved more than those of New Orleans, including six parishes—Louisiana’s name for counties—with increases exceeding 30 points.
The truth is that the all-charter experiment in New Orleans was built on the displacement of Black educators, the silencing of parents, and the infusion of foundation dollars with strings attached. As a result, students and families have faced disruption, instability, and hardship as charter schools open and close. Two decades later, the “miracle” is not what it seems. It is instead a cautionary tale about what happens when democracy is stripped from public education and governance is handed over to markets and philanthropies.
Still, organizations like the City Fund, which is amply financed with millions from many of the same billionaire-funded foundations that helped finance the remaking of New Orleans schools, are actively promoting the model in other cities.
Meanwhile, parents like Bigard, whose children bear the brunt of an experiment they did not ask for, can only dream of what might have been if resources, guidance, and community voices had been a part of rebuilding the city’s schools. The very same achievement results, or better, may have occurred with far less chaos and pain.