Was the remaking of schools in New Orleans a great success or a hoax? Is I John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, analyzes the conflicting narratives here.

Like Diane Ravitch, who explained that there was “No Miracle in New Orleans,” I was upset by Ian Birrell’s Washington Post article which agreed with Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who “boldly said that the hurricane was ‘the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.’” I felt better after she cited Gary Rubenstein who explained that Birrell was an international reporter who probably didn’t know “that there has been an ongoing battle over education reform in this country where the ‘reformers’ have all kinds of tricks for misrepresenting data to advance their agenda.”

During the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I had been reviewing previous research on the take-over and charter-ization portfolio model of the New Orleans schools. I had been invited to two conferences held by the Tulane Education Research Association (ERA), and to crash at the home of CEO Neerav Kingsland, who arranged for me to visit many schools and interview numerous district leaders.

My memories of the resulting conversations are very similar to the narratives documented in 2012 by Anya Kamenetz, who was then a reporter with National Public Radio.  Kamenetz investigated the evidence for both – that the portfolio process could a “Beacon” for hope in high-challenge schools, or a “Warning” about test-driven, competition-driven school reforms.

She reported on both the large increases in test scores, as well as the effects of segregation by choice, the misuse of test scores, and the inevitable results of a system where 45,000 students were trying to get into 18,500 slots. The damage done by those behaviors was mostly inflicted on the low-performing Recovery School District (RSD).

Then, interviewing the ERA’s Douglas Harris, she found that he had “bad news” for the higher-challenge RSD. He acknowledged that there had been several years of swift improvement, followed by a plateau this past year.” Harris said, “The increasing trend in scores is not all achievement.” He explained, “People were taking these scores as gospel. They had completely bought into the idea that scores equal learning.”

Kamenetz then explained:

Harris isn’t talking about outright cheating — though more than a third of the city’s schools were flagged by the state between 2010 and 2012 for cases of plagiarism, suspicious levels of erasures [of failing grades], and similar indicators.  … He means something subtler: a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice. “You’re learning how to adjust the curriculum, teach to the test.

Kamenetz then cited a professor at North Carolina State University, who had observed and interviewed teachers at “a ‘KIPP-like’ charter school in New Orleans. She reported that:

There aren’t many projects, discussions, or kids reading literature. They are really teaching what will be tested at the exclusion of all other materials. I had a science teacher tell me that if there was an earthquake in New Orleans, she wouldn’t have the time to cover it if it weren’t on the test. … 

There is extreme effort to control, rather than engage, students in the classroom,” she says.

Sarah Carr exemplified the same type of objective nuance in her book Hope Against Hope, which acknowledged several positive results while documenting the “human cost” of failures.  Carr was sympathetic to the argument that failing schools need to be closed down, but she concluded, “at some point there needs to be some degree of stability.” For instance, only about 10% of Teach for America teachers remained in their school for five years. And she observed:

There were some kids I saw that, even a couple of years out from Katrina, were still getting bounced from school to school to school as they were closed or transitioned out or taken over by different operators. She then concluded that to the extent that NOLA reforms were a success story, “it’s a story of micro-level successes.”  

Around that time, when it seemed like even the fervent believers in evaluating teachers using test-growth models were acknowledging that it had failed, Doug Harris and I had similar exchanges over two points. First, why should we believe that test-score increases, especially in the first years of the unregulated NOLA takeover, represented increased learning?

Second, English Language scores surged for three years, 2007 to 2010, but stagnated until 2014 when growth declined to what it was before Katrina. 

Harris argued that that plateau was evidence that the learning was real because previous gains didn’t disappear.

I was far more impressed by Rutgers’ Bruce Baker’s evidence as to how and why the ERA’s models were “problematic” when trying to account for demographic changes. Baker noted that after Hurricane Karina “citywide school census had plummeted from 65,000 to 25,000,” meaning that. “There’s just way too much that changed as a result of the storm in students’ lives to make confident comparisons.” Baker concluded, “The main drivers of improvement” were “increased school spending and a less impoverished student population post-Katrina.”

Then, and now, I concluded, that the ERA would need to be as transparent as possible in analyzing future outcomes if it sought to back up their viewpoint. Plus, I remained frustrated by their failure to accept the burden of proof as to whether running controls on test score metrics, especially for poor children of color, provided accurate estimates regarding increases in meaningful learning

In 2025, Harris’ and Jamie Carroll’s 20th anniversary reportincluded the chart we discussed about the decline in output growth since 2024. But their conclusion is:

The New Orleans reforms led to large gains in average student achievement and increased rates of high school graduation, college entry, and college graduation in the first decade after they were implemented. Student outcomes have stabilized since then.

But, recent reports seem to be excessively focused on post-Covid increases in outputs, and it would hard for me to understand a connection between those gains and the test-prep, the teacher-firing, and school closing approach from a dozen years before.

Reading recent studies, I have only found one chart on outcomes from 2014 to the Covid pandemic.  The Louisiana Department of Education, Data Library, Date & Reports, 2016-2024 District Performance Scores in 2015-16 were 84.9 for New Orleans. By 2018-19, they were down to 67.8. 

The historian in me wonders if there would have been a different discussion if the ERA had featured a graph showing big gains from 2007 to 2010, which correlated with so many opportunities to manipulate data and significantly increased funding, followed by stagnate growth for nearly a decade.   

To Harris’ and Carroll’s credit, in 2025, they noted, “There were additional troubling signs of inequity in the first several years of the reforms: schools apparently selected students rather than students choosing schools. The expulsion rates increased 1.5 – 2.7 percentage points (140-250%) in the early years.” 

Harris and Carroll found increased segregation by race and income in high school, but not elementary schools. And they noted a 2019 policy change that “prioritizes admission at most elementary schools for applicants who live within a half-mile of the school. We find that this gives White and high-income students an advantage in securing a seat at high-demand schools.”

They note the decline in pre-K availability prompted by the district’s choices, as well as less of a focus on the arts during the first decade of the reforms, and in 2018, arts educators reported feeling ignored and under-resourced compared to educators in tested subjects. And Harris and Carroll explain the problems that vouchers created. 

As was true previously, Harris and Carroll were careful to warn against the belief that similar reforms would have worked in different times and places.

But, Harris kept praising “growth” measures that account for where students start at the beginning of the year. These accountability measures, however, almost surely contributed to the finding:

Heavy workload is a top reason why teachers leave New Orleans schools; teachers reported working an average of 46 hours per week. This combination of less preparation, lower job security, less autonomy, and higher workloads—to go along with lower salaries (see Conclusion #4)—would increase turnover in any city and any occupation.

Above all, I couldn’t understand why they still supported mass school closures and takeovers, that had supposedly:

Driven essentially all of the post-Katrina improvement. This was especially true in the first decade after Katrina; low-performing schools were replaced by higher-performing ones, which gradually lifted average student achievement.

Harris and Carroll acknowledge that, “it could be that students attending schools that are closed or taken over experience negative effects.” While they noted that “support to students in closed schools helps them end up in better schools the following school year,” even though providing such support to all remains a challenge.

And they don’t deny the harm done by failing to listen to school patrons, and reducing the percentage of Black teachers from 71% to 49% by 2014, as well as the reduction in teachers’ experience, and an increase in turnover.

At least Harris and Carroll conclude:

Local leaders will have to address remaining distrust among key stakeholders and disagreement about the roles of the district and other key actors. State control of New Orleans schools ended in 2018, but the local district did not regain many of the powers that it held pre-Katrina, including school staffing, curriculum, and instruction. … New Orleans created an entirely new type of local school district. Strained relationships and confusion about roles among the district, school leaders, and the community remain. 

My reading of the ERA’s twenty-year evaluation of New Orleans’ market-driven reforms is that I wish they would return to Harris’ previous acknowledgement that those who had imposed them “completely bought into the idea that scores equal learning.”

On the other hand, the 2025 report may be good for public relations, persuading some corporate school reformers and international journalists, but it’s not going to persuade school patrons to have more trust in their reward and punish model.