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Can Trump Send the National Guard to Cities or Not?

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2025 //
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I’m confused. Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not send the National Guard to Chicago. Okay.

But a few minutes later, he mobilized the Louisiana National Guard and ordered it to New Orleans, where serious crime is declining. Jeff Landry, the Republican Governor of Louisiana, was delighted that Trump was sending in the Guard.

Questions:

If the president can’t send the Guard to Chicago, why can he send it to New Orleans?

If Governor Landry thought that New Orleans needed the National Guard, why didn’t he mobilize them himself? Maybe it’s because the federal government will pay part of the costs. But if the need was urgent, it seems the Governor would have acted without delay.

Answers?

Categories Chicago, Disruption, Louisiana, New Orleans, Trump

What You Need to Know about New Orleans: The Stories Behind the Statistics

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2025 //
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Kristen Buras lives in New Orleans and has written several notable books about the charter school takeover of the city’s schools. After two decades at Emory University and Georgia State University, she currently works in New Orleans as a scholar-activist. She is cofounder and director of the New Orleans-based Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, a coalition with Black educational and cultural groups that melds community-based research and organizing for racial justice. Buras has written multiple books on urban educational policy, including Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance and What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.

Her latest report appears here:

The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on ‘Large Achievement Gains’ in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students

Buras’ latest report exposes how “Large Achievement Gains” in New Orleans’ charter schools mask persistent inequities

The National Center for Charter School Accountability (CCSA), a project of NPE, has released a new independent report, The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on ‘Large Achievement Gains’ in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students, authored by noted scholar Dr. Kristen Buras. The report delivers a penetrating critique of the widely circulated “success narrative” surrounding the charter-school takeover of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. It challenges the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA)’s claims of significant achievement gains. It reveals how shifting metrics, questionable data, and students’ lived experiences paint a far more complex—and troubling—picture.

The Stories Behind Statistics raises substantial concerns about the foundations of ERA’s conclusions. First, it details how Louisiana officials repeatedly modified the school performance metrics in ways that boosted the apparent success of charter schools, creating an illusion of dramatic improvement. Second, it questions the reliability of the data ERA relied upon, noting allegations, lawsuits, and documented violations—including grade-fixing, financial mismanagement, and other irregularities—that have occurred across the New Orleans charter sector. Third, the report underscores the longstanding lack of meaningful oversight and accountability for charter schools, which further undermines confidence in the performance data.

Finally, the report scrutinizes ERA’s surveys on teaching quality and school climate, demonstrating that the experiences of Black students—when examined at the school level—are far more negative than ERA’s brief suggests. To bring these realities into focus, Dr. Buras incorporates original qualitative research, including firsthand testimony from students and parents describing their experiences in New Orleans charter schools.

The Stories Behind the Statistics urges policymakers, researchers, and the public to look beyond celebratory headlines and examine the deeper structural issues that continue to shape the city’s all-charter experiment—issues that profoundly affect the educational experiences of Black youth and their families.

According to Network for Public Education President Diane Ravitch, “As cities and states across the nation look to New Orleans as a model of charter-school reform, this report cautions how important it is to dig deeper than surface metrics. Without transparency, accountability, and attention to student experience, reforms that appear successful on paper may in fact perpetuate inequities and undermine educational justice for students.” 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Hoax, Inequality, Louisiana, New Orleans

Carol Burris: Revisiting the New Orleans Hoax

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2025 //
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The mainstream media never tires of printing stories about the “miracle” of charter schools. A few days ago, the Washington Post published an article by Eva Moskowitz, leader of the Success Academy charter chain, titled “These schools are the answer to unlocking every child’s potential: Children born into poverty should not be consigned to failing schools.” The article was shameless self-promotion, announcing that she was expanding her brand into Florida.

But much to my surprise, readers were not buying any of her pitch. The comments following the article overwhelmingly criticized charter schools, saying they chose their students, they kicked out those with low scores, they excluded kids with disabilities, they were no better than public schools.

If all those readers get it, why don’t the editors at the mainstream media?

They still cling to the myth of charter success in New Orleans. NOLA has not been great for the students and their parents. But it has been a public relations coup.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, pulls back the curtain in The Progressive.

Her article: “The ‘Miracle’ of New Orleans School Reform Is Not What It Seems: The city’s all-charter school experiment is a cautionary tale about what happens when democracy is stripped from public education.”

After the hurricane, parents wanted well-resourced community-based public schools. Instead they got charters focused on testing and no/excuses discipline.

The entire “reform” project is based on the practice of “charter churn.” Of 125 charters that have opened since Hurricane Katrina, half have closed and been replaced.

Burris writes:

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.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Hoax, Louisiana, New Orleans, Parents

The Ultimate Debunking of the New Orleans Myth: The Human Toll on Black Students

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2025 //
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If you read only one article about what happened to the students, teachers and schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this is the one. Ashana Bigard is a parent of students in New Orleans. Elizabeth K. Jeffers taught in the NOLA district.

Turning New Orleans into an all-charter district may have raised test scores–although New Orleans is still a low-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest performing states–but as you will learn by reading this article, the transformation was a disaster for students, their families, their communities, and their teachers.

Please read!

This article was produced by Our Schools. Ashana Bigard is the director of Amplify Justice, an educational advocate, and author of Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20. A dedicated mother of three, she serves as an education fellow for the Progressive magazine’s Public Schools Advocate project and is a director-producer of numerous video and audio productions. Follow her on Bluesky @AshanaBigard. Elizabeth K. Jeffers, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans who began teaching in pre-Katrina New Orleans public schools. Her scholarship focuses on school choice and community-based inquiry. Her research has been published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Policy, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and other scholarly journals. Follow her on Bluesky @ekjeffersphd.

To mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, numerous articles and opinion pieces have appeared in prominent media outlets touting the supposed improvement of the city’s public school system since the storm.

Katrina’s immediate aftermath saw the state of Louisiana disempower the democratically elected school board by taking over the management of 107 out of 128 schools. This led to the termination of 7,600—mainly Black and women—teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, clerical workers, principals, and other permanent employees, and the eventual conversion of all of the city’s public schools into privately managed charters.

A Washington Post column, “‘Never Seen Before:’ How Katrina Set off an Education Revolution,” by British journalist Ian Birrell, proclaimed the transformation a “miracle.” Another opinion piece in The 74, “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools” by Ravi Gupta, the founder and former CEOof a charter school network, stated that the New Orleans school system shaped by Katrina was “a model that should theoretically appeal to both sides of America’s education debates. It delivered the academic results that reformers promised while addressing the equity and community concerns that critics raised.”

As proof of their arguments, both authors pointed to a June 2025 report, “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons” by Douglas N. Harris and Jamie M. Carroll of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Pulling from the data presented in that study, Birrell said the case for declaring New Orleans-style education reform a “remarkable success” is “pretty definitive,” and Gupta called this supposed success an “unequivocal conclusion.” As a longtime youth advocate and community leader and an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, who was a public school teacher in the city, we invite you to consider whether this data alone proves that New Orleans public schools and the families they serve are better off after 20 years of “reform.”

Although Gupta warns against “[falling] into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms,” we’d like to tell you about Rio, whose last name has been withheld for privacy reasons. Rio attended 12 different schools in New Orleans, many of which were shut down suddenly, before he finally graduated from a school that is now also closed. Rio’s story is not atypical of the human costs of the New Orleans school system, where closures are a defining feature and evidence that the disaster Katrina wrought on the schools is still happening.

Forced to traverse the fragmented charter system that has replaced the public system of neighborhood schools, New Orleans students are often traumatized by multiple school closures. Decades of researchattest to the academic, emotional, and economic harms that result from severing social connections that families, faculty, and staff have had with schools and with one another.

For instance, obtaining a job reference letter from a former teacher should be simple for students to do, but that task becomes an obstacle course for many young adults from New Orleans, like Rio. Black Man Rising, a national group providing outreach and mentorship for Black youth, had to intervene to help him obtain the letter that made the difference between him being able to financially support himself and being just another addition to the statistics of Black youth who are unemployed and incarcerated.

Rio’s story illustrates a central paradox of the New Orleans system: Black families and communities continue to be severed and displaced as a result of failed leadership at the federal, local, and state levels. While the storm may be over, the disaster continues. On the other hand, white children in New Orleans rarely experience school closures.

The near obliteration of democratic public schooling

In addition to severing families from their neighborhood schools and educators, Katrina reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation in ways that would shock most Americans.

New York University professor Domingo Morel contends in his book Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy that state takeovers do not generally improve test scores or graduation rates; instead, they are about removing political power, as Black school boards have historically functioned as entryways for Black political leaders.

In a similar vein, Louisiana legislators, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, passed Act 35 in November 2005, which expanded the state-run Recovery School District’s (RSD) jurisdiction over New Orleans public schools during an emergency session when voters were dispersed across the country and many were still searching for their loved ones. The new laws removed the parent and teacher approvals required for charter conversions.

State legislation also enabled the termination of the majority Black teaching force, gutting the teachers’ collective bargaining unit, United Teachers of New Orleans (American Federation of Teachers, Local 527), and further removing obstacles for top-down reform. Research conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kevin L. Henry and his co-author has shown how the “charter school authorization and application process” used in post-Katrina New Orleans “reproduces white dominance.” While another study published in the journal Urban Education points to how charter schools consolidate power “in ways that limit local Black political power.”

Consider the example of Kira Orange Jones, whose case perfectly illustrates how educational democracy has been dismantled. In 2011, Jones raised $478,000for her Board of Elementary and Secondary Education campaign—much of it from out-of-state donors connected to Democrats for Education Reform and charter school advocacy groups. Her opponent raised just $19,000, creating a 25-to-1 spending disadvantage. But the campaign money was just the beginning. Jones simultaneously served as executive director of Teach For America’s (TFA) Greater New Orleans chapter while sitting on the board that approved TFA’s $1 million state contract with Louisiana. When ethics complaints were filed in 2012, the Louisiana Ethics Board overruled its own staff’s recommendation that Jones choose between her TFA position and her board seat.

While NOLA Public Schools mandates charter school governance boards to include an alumnus or a parent, legal guardian, or grandparent, who is either elected or appointed, Katrina school reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation. Parents often don’t find out when school board meetings are happening, let alone have access to board members’ email addresses or phone numbers to voice concerns. Even local reporters who tried to obtain basic contact information for charter school board members have been stonewalled. There is no state requirement that charter school boards meet at times that are convenient for working parents to attend.

The absence of neighborhood schools is an additional obstacle for parents who rely on public transportation. And although charter schools seemingly returned to an elected school board in 2018, the public has virtually no control over individual charter schools, which maintain complete autonomy over curricula, calendars, certification requirements, contracts, and daily operations.

Shadow suspensions and ‘behavior problems’

Louisiana has long been among the states with the highest rates of student suspensions and expulsions, and Black students are more than twice as likely to be suspended compared to white students and receive longer suspensions for identical infractions, according to an analysis of 2001to 2014 figures by Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. In New Orleans, suspension and expulsion rates rose sharply after the storm but then stabilized. Nevertheless, some charter schools continued to suspend and expel high percentages of students.

But that’s just the official data. More recently, several parents have reported that their children are being sent home from school without receiving official suspension papers. Elizabeth’s field notes attest to students’ reports of one charter school network sending students to “the RC room” (restorative center) where they are forced to sit in cubicles, complete detention assignments, and write apology letters in a secluded room. This shadow suspension system allows schools to push out Black students without creating the paper trail that might trigger oversight or intervention. Children lose days or weeks of education in bureaucratic limbo, with no formal process and no recourse. And large numbers of students, often labeled as “behavior problems,” remain enrolled in alternative schools, rather than mainstream degree programs, according to state data.

Community-rooted educators replaced by managers

New Orleans teachers once lived in their communities. Most were career educators who taught generations of children, creating lasting bonds that extended far beyond the classroom.

Ashana experienced this personally at a small school called New Orleans Free School. As someone who is extremely dyslexic, she felt inadequate throughout most of her educational life until she encountered teachers like Woody, Janice, Jeanette, and Jim—two of whom, Jeanette and Jim, have since passed away. Woody still leaves encouraging comments under articles she has published, telling her he is proud of her. He, along with the others, encouraged her and insisted she could be brilliant despite her spelling difficulties. They told her she could be a writer. They emphasized that we all have different skill sets that we can develop, and that none of us is perfect, but that we can practice and grow.

This encouragement didn’t end when Ashana left Free School. The advice and support continue today. That’s what it means to have authentic relationships with your teachers. That’s what it means to be rooted in your community. Unfortunately, Ashana didn’t have the opportunity to send her children to that school to be educated by those incredible educators. The school that gave her a love of learning shut down.

The structure of charter schools severs critical bonds between schools and families. For instance, in her book Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20 Ashana recounts a teacher reaching out to her for resources to help with one of her students years before the storm. The child’s mother, who worked two jobs as a housekeeper and restaurant server, struggled to care for her seven children.

Her nine-year-old son often arrived at school dirty and disheveled because their washing machine had broken, and despite the mother’s instructions, the children didn’t wash their uniforms in the tub while she worked overnight shifts. Although the mother worked tirelessly, her extremely low reading level meant she was unaware of how to apply for assistance programs that could have helped her family. Most importantly, she probably didn’t believe she qualified for help. This teacher understood the family’s circumstances and worked to connect them with resources rather than simply reporting the situation to authorities.

This kind of close relationship between educators and families has become increasingly rare in the Katrina experiment. For instance, Ashana encountered a similar situation that ended differently. A family facing tough times was reported to the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) multiple times for neglect. When OCFS attempted to provide services, the mother, terrified that her children would be taken and placed in foster care as she had been, and having suffered abuse in that system, fled Orleans Parish with her children. She moved them to a motel in St. Bernard Parish, leaving everything behind. The children weren’t enrolled in school for almost a year until someone tracked them down and helped them return to the city and reintegrate into the school.

Somehow, punitive measures for Black parents and children have been equated with success—which raises the question: What exactly is the reform proponents’ definition of success, and what was the goal from the outset?

The current system has replaced community-based educators with a top-heavy administrative structure. New Orleans charter schools spend significantly more money on administration, even as teacher shortages remain high. For instance, InspireNola Charter Schools, which only manages seven schools, paid three executives a total of $667,000 for the fiscal year 2023.

Meanwhile, the constant “churning” of schools and the absence of a collective bargaining agreement have led to a larger system that dehumanizes teachers. In fact, the RSD required certified teachers who chose to return to their pre-Katrina schools to complete a “basic skills test” (akin to a literacy test).

But that was only the beginning of the disaster for New Orleans educators. One Black veteran explained to Elizabeth: “The RSD was bouncing teachers around like balls.” That is, the state takeover district issued letters labeling numerous experienced teachers as “surplus” when their schools transformed into charters. Many of these schools recruited inexperienced teachers who were expendable, accepted lower salaries, and could be programmed to adhere to the ideology of reform. The absence of collective bargaining power, arbitrary closures, and charter takeovers eventually led many career teachers to “choose” between commuting several hours a day to schools in outlying parishes and changing careers. Twenty years after the district’s purging of its unionized teachers (the United Teachers of New Orleans), only five of the city’s 90 charter schools are unionized.

In another example, Ashana recounts in her book about how a teacher whom she advocated for brought a doctor’s note to her school’s chief financial officer to document a urinary tract infection and request restroom breaks. The administrators emailed her to offer reimbursement for adult diapers. This example of denying teachers basic respect and humanity illustrates what is seen as a continual disaster. If educators are treated this way, imagine the conditions students face.

The cruel reality of ‘choice’

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 stop, because the system doesn’t allow siblings to attend the same school. She would have to explain to her young daughter, who is 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, pleads with her mother, but is told, “I’m sorry, you know this is just the way it is for right now.”

This mother, with tears in her eyes as her children clung to her legs, captured the cruel reality. With this new choice system, she doesn’t get to choose to have both of her children sent to the same school. She gets to choose which one she can stand with every morning. That’s no choice at all.

Propaganda masquerading as research….

I have quoted too much already. Open the link to finish this sobering and important article.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Disruption, Ethics, Fake, History, Hoax, Injustice, New Orleans, Students, Teachers

Jennifer Berkshire: The New Orleans Hoax Rises Again

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2025 //
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Jennifer Berkshire writes a blog called The Education Wars, where she explains the latest attacks on public schools by entitled billionaires and their lackeys. In this one, she reviews the revival of the New Orleans “miracle,” you know, the claim that turning almost every public school in the city into a privately run charter schools produced dramatic gains. Not true.

She wrote:

Ten years ago, I wrote a piece about some of the many unintended consequences of New Orleans’ charter school experiment. Wildly at odds with the narrative of success and transformation being peddled by the education reform industry, the story was among my first real attempts to do ‘serious’ journalism, and I’m still really proud of it. (For those of you who don’t know, I got my start chronicling the excesses of education reform on a humorous blog.) I learned a lot working on that story, including that writers have no control over whatever terrible headline gets slapped on their masterpiece… But it was in New Orleans that I really began to understand something essential about education reform. If the vision of what’s on offer is narrower than what the community wants, these top-down efforts to “disrupt” public education are doomed from the start.

The twenty year mark since Hurricane Katrina has ushered in a predictable wave of celebratory accounts of the New Orleans miracle. I recommend giving them a miss and spending some time instead with an eye-opening new book by parent advocate Ashana Bigard. (Full disclosure: Ashana is one of my favorite people in the world, not to mention among the most amazing organizers I’ve ever met.) Called Beyond Resilience, Ashana’s book opens with a scene of a meeting held in the period after the hurricane erased whole neighborhoods, and claimed the lives of some 1,800 people. The purpose of these gatherings, Ashana writes, was to give local parents the opportunity to envision the sort of education future they wanted for their children. 

What they dreamed of was so much more than their children had before, and more than they themselves had had before. Having seen what was offered to children in other places, they wanted that and more for New Orleans’ children.

Among their demands: fully equipped science labs, theater programs, curriculum rich in local history, career and technical education that prepared students for jobs in the trades. The list was long. It was also grounded in the harsh reality of New Orleans’ brutal poverty. Parents asked for kids to be able to bring food home when money was tight, for washers and dryers in every school because so many laundromats had never reopened. And they wanted swim lessons in order to give their kids a fighting chance against the next hurricane.

The enormous gulf between those wishlists, compiled on flip charts and dry erase boards, and what the parents ultimately got is the subject of Beyond Resilience. “What they gave us instead was almost a cartoonish representation of the opposite of everything we had asked for,” writes Ashana. “The charter school operators and organizations that supported charter school reform efforts would listen to parents, guardians and community members, and then create schools that looked more like juvenile jail facilities than schools.”Subscribe

No excuses

I first encountered Ashana through her work as an advocate for students and parents who were caught up in the draconian discipline practices that took root during the early years of the New Orleans charter school experiment. While the rhetoric was all about preparing kids, or ‘scholars’ in charter parlance, for college, Ashana was spending more and more of her time intervening on behalf of kids who were being treated like criminals. There was the boy whose mother couldn’t afford to buy him the shoes that the uniform required, so got suspended and then expelled. There was the five year old who was repeatedly suspended for eating crackers on the bus. And there were the countless students accused of the vague yet sweeping offense known as “disruption of a school process,” who ended up, not just kicked out of school, but arrested. These children, writes Ashana, weren’t treated as human beings,

but as criminals who had already committed crimes and would most definitley commit more crimes if they weren’t guarded and watched every second of the day.

Since I’ve known Ashana, her criticism of the city’s schools has been remarkably consistent. At its core is this belief: a model of schooling centered on harsh discipline is developmentally inappropriate, especially for young kids. Early in the book, she recounts being told by Ben Kleban, a hard-charging charter school CEO who embodied the no-excuses ethos, that his K-2 elementary school was so quiet that “you could hear a pin drop.” Ashana was aghast. These were kids who should be playing, talking and singing. “[H]e went on to tell me that these kids were different.”

These children are different. That was the refrain. These Black children in New Orleans, who had lost everything, who were sleeping in abandonded buildings, grieving the loss of family members, friends, and entire neighborhoods were ‘different’ and therefore didn’t deserve the same developmental considerations as other children their age.

In recent years, Ashana has been part of an effort called Erase the Board that seeks to bring traditional public schools back to New Orleans. The group’s demands echo the ones put forth by those parents and community members so many years ago—schools that are human focused rather than test and discipline centered, music and art classes, trained teachers, and trauma informed practices. But Erase the Board is also challenging a central tenet of the New Orleans model: schools that fail to raise test scores are closed. Of the city’s 75 charter schools, 50 have been closed or reconstituted at some point. While that churn is in large part responsible for producing academic gains, it has also proven deeply unpopular with parents, who hate school closures even when said shuttering is being done for ‘the right reasons.’ 

The constant opening and closing of schools is also highly disruptive to students, Ashana argues. She tells the story of one student who attended twelve different schools: half he was pushed out of over disciplinary infractions, the other half closed. “You have schools closing, teachers moving in and out. Kids need stability and that’s the opposite of what we’ve got. All you’re showing these kids is displacement.” Among Erase the Board’s demands is that failing charter schools be reopened as traditional public schools. “We estimate that, at the rate that charter schools close, we’ll have half our city back in seven years,” says Ashana.

Selling the vision

“‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution,” was the title of the puffed piece that appeared in the Washington Post recently. Penned by a British scribe who used to pen speeches for former UK prime minister David Cameron, aka Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, it’s the sort of breathless sales pitch that abounded in the first decade after the hurricane. These days, the ‘miracle’ talk is harder to find, in part because so many holes have been poked in the claims of success, as teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein notes here. And while New Orleans may have ended up with a system ‘never seen before,’ the reality is that the same forces are coming for its charter schools that now threaten all public schools. 

For one, there aren’t enough kids, especially when you consider that the model entails constantly opening new schools. Back in 2022, New Schools for New Orleans, an architect of the all-charter model, warned “that schools citywide were nearing a tipping point in terms of enrolling enough students to pay for a full array of academics and services.” And that was before Louisiana enacted its ginormous new school voucher program. In a system that is entirely focused on test scores, the appeal of attending a private school where kids don’t take tests seems pretty obvious. 

Indeed, at a time when the GOP has largely moved on from charter schools, save for the classical variety, and gone full voucher, the New Orleans experiment—expensive, interventionist, couched in the language of civil rights—feels like a throwback. So too does one of the animating beliefs driving the experiment: that kids in one of the country’s poorest cities could overcome poverty if they all went to college. Hence the frustration in the final puffish piece I’ll mention: edupreneur Ravi Gupta’s lament for the 74: “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools.” Conservatives aren’t keen on the model’s aggressive intervention, complains Gupta, while Progressives are squeamish about the fact that New Orleans’ success required wiping out the city’s unionized teaching force, which made up much of its Black middle class. 

Gupta implores us to focus on the ‘hard numbers’ and avoid what he calls “the tyranny of the anecdote.” But Ashana Bigard and her powerful new book show exactly why that perspective is so short sighted. Why, if the model is so successful, asks Ashana, does the city require so many alternative schools and programs to catch the kids who ‘fall through the cracks’? Why are there so many ‘opportunity youth,’ kids who aren’t in school or working? Indeed, if you expand the frame beyond the metrics of academic achievement, it’s hard to make the case that life for young people in New Orleans has improved, the conclusion I reached back in 2015. “The math ain’t mathin’,” is how Ashana put it when we spoke recently.

That there’s been so little laudatory coverage of New Orleans’ education revolution “reveals something broken about our politics and media,” insists Gupta. But I think the real reason is much more simple. The reformers who drove the experiment never recovered from the scene that plays out at the start of Ashana’s book, when parents and community members, some of whom had been pushing for reform in the city’s schools long before Katrina, envisioned what education in New Orleans could be. Today, the gap between that vision of possibility for the city’s kids and what was delivered remains a chasm. 

Two decades after hurricane Katrina, Ashana is still fighting for the schools New Orleans’ children deserve. The rebuilding is still happening, she writes in the book’s conclusion.

But it’s not about getting back to what it was—it’s about creating something that never existed: a New Orleans where all of our children can thrive, where our culture is respected and our people are valued, where love and justice aren’t just words but ways of life, where the billions generated by our creativity flow back to strengthen our communities. 

An eternal optimist, Ashana ends on a hopeful note, insisting that “That New Orleans is possible. That future is within our reach.” 

I hope she’s right.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Hoax, Lies, New Orleans, Parents, Propaganda

NOLA Parent: After 20 Years of “Ed Reform,” a $1 Billion Failure

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2025 //
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Ashana Bigard is a parent activist in New Orleans. From her perspective as a parent leader and as the parent of a child with special needs, the New Orleans experiment has been a very expensive flop.

She wrote this overview for Public Voices for Public Schools:

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, the nation’s most radical education overhaul has produced stunning inequality alongside modest test gains

As I sit in Bricolage Academy’s office, frustrated but trying to remain pleasant, I’m having the same conversation again about my son. He’s on the autism spectrum. He is high performing, extremely quiet, and sweet. Despite his IEP, he wasn’t receiving the required services. The special education coordinator had quit in frustration, the school counselor was cut due to budget issues, and my fifth-grader was falling through the cracks.

I’m not just any parent. I’m an advocate who has worked with the CEO since the school’s creation. I have written for national magazines about our system’s problems and challenged the school’s “diversity by design” narrative. Yet here I was, fighting for basic services. If this is my experience, imagine what average parents face.

The Numbers Don’t Add Up

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina replaced New Orleans’ traditional public schools with the nation’s first all-charter system, the grand experiment presents a troubling paradox. With half the students and double the funding, the system has achieved modest academic gains while disempowering the communities it promised to serve.

Before Katrina, New Orleans educated over 65,000 students in 126 schools. Today, just 47,667 students attend 70 schools–a 27% enrollment reduction. Yet per-pupil spending has exploded to approximately $17,000-$20,000, significantly above Louisiana’s state average.

“When you have half the students and twice the resources, you should see transformational results,” says Neil Ranu, a civil rights attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Instead, we see money flowing upward to administrators while classrooms struggle.”

The money trail is revealing. Charter CEOs earn over $200,000 annually, while average teachers make between $44,000-$55,000 if they stay long enough.

The Human Cost

The city’s teacher turnover rate of 28% for new educators doubles that of comparable cities. The displacement began when the state fired the entire education workforce after Katrina, including over 4,000 teachers with an average of 15 years of experience. The teaching force dropped from 71% Black to under 50%.

When ‘Success’ Crumbles

The system’s fragility became apparent at John F. Kennedy High School in spring 2019. On graduation day, 177 students walked across the stage. A month later, state auditors revealed nearly half were ineligible to graduate due to grade changes from F’s to D’s, improper credit recovery, and students taking unsupervised classes at home.

Antonio Travis, director of Black Man Rising, mentored several affected students. “There was shame, self-blame. Many felt they wouldn’t be successful in college.” Families canceled graduation celebrations, uncertain about the future.

The Illusion of Choice

Parents quickly learn that “choice” often means choosing between bad options, especially for children with special needs. At Benjamin Franklin High School, Louisiana’s top-ranked public school, students from minority backgrounds face significant admission barriers. The school serves 39% white students in a city where whites comprise only 10% of public enrollment.

Special Education Crisis

In 2010, ten families sued the state over charter schools admitting too few special-needs students and failing to provide proper services. The resulting federal consent decree remains in effect today, with monitors continuing to find systematic violations, including parents being excluded from meetings, services not being provided, and evaluations being denied.

Right now, Louisiana U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey is currently presiding over the dissolution of the special-needs consent decree related to New Orleans schools. Because New Orleans public schools have no oversight, and no unions to fight to ensure the law is followed, we, as parents of children with special needs, have to fight to get our stories to the judge so hopefully he will keep it in place.

Economic Verdict

For a system serving 84% Black students, the economic impact is devastating. The racial wealth gap has widened dramatically since Katrina. White households now hold 13 times the wealth of Black families–$181,000 versus $18,000 median net worth. New Orleans went from 67% Black to 57%, losing over 120,000 Black residents.

Missing Pieces

Walk through charter schools and notice what’s absent or insufficient. Arts programs have declined; fewer offer pre-kindergarten, and students average 35-minute bus commutes. Basic skills, such as cursive instruction—required by state law for signing legal documents—are often ignored. “The children only learn what’s tested,” observes one advocate. “Everything else gets cut.”

The Honest Assessment

As the 20th anniversary of Katrina approaches,New Orleans offers a sobering lesson. With unprecedented resources and freedom, the charter system produced modest academic gains alongside community economic decline and systematic exclusion of vulnerable students.

“When people ask if they should move out of the city for better education,” says one advocate, “my answer is: if you can afford to move, you should. This system is not built to support our children.”

The comment hangs like an indictment not just of a school system, but of a 20-year experiment that promised everything and delivered prosperity for some, displacement for others, and continued struggle for families who need excellent public education most.

Ashana Bigard is a fifth generation New Orleanian and lifelong resident of the Crescent City. A mother of three, Ashana is a tireless advocate for equity and social justice, especially in her work advocating for children and families in New Orleans and Louisiana. She leads the Education Justice Project of New Orleans, where she organizes and advocates for the rights of students and parents. Ashana is an adult ally advisor to United Students of New Orleans. She also serves as a Community Faculty member with Tulane University’s Center for Public Service.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Louisiana, New Orleans, Parents, Privatization, Special Education, Students

Mercedes Schneider Reviews A Powerful New Book

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2025 //
8

Mercedes Schneider reviews Kristen Buras’ new book about a Black high school that was closed against the wishes of the community it served. The book is What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press). Buras describes a school whose teachers went beyond the call of duty to help their students. If you care about education, if you care about social justice, you should read this book. I did not post the review in full, so please open the link to finish reading.

Mercedes Schneider writes:

I was born in 1967 in Chalmette, Louisiana (St. Bernard Parish), a suburb of New Orleans so close to the city that is is the actual site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.

I did not know that my father moved to Chalmette in the mid-1950s as part of the “white flight” from New Orleans. 

I did not know why the St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line was so starkly white on the St. Bernard side and black on the Orleans side.

I did not know that the black teachers at my all-white elementary and middle schools were part of an effort for local officials to dodge federal mandates to racially integrate the schools (as in integrating the student body).

(I do remember seeing what I think was one black student in the special education, self-contained classroom of my elementary school– such an unusual, remarkable event that it puzzled my young mind to see him as a student assistant in the cafeteria, and the moment remains clearly in my memory to this day.)

I did not know that when I moved to a more rural section of St. Bernard Parish as I started high school that the African-American residents “down the road” knew full well of the dangers of trying to reside in certain sections of the parish (namely, Chalmette and Arabi).

I did not know that the school-superintendent uncle of one of my favorite teachers tried circa 1961 to create an “annex school” near the Arabi-New Orleans city line in order to enable white parents in the city to avoid racial integration by using school vouchers from New Orleans to enroll their children in an all-white public school just across the parish line.

I did not know that the proliferation of parochial schools in New Orleans was fueled by white flight from the New Orleans public schools.

I did not know that the reason I attended an all-girls public middle- and high school was for local officials to try to sham-integrate the St. Bernard public schools but to keep “those black boys away from our white girls.”

There’s a lot that I did not know and did not begin to learn until I was in my twenties and started asking questions.

But there were a lot of lessons that many white adults in my life tried to instill in me, lessons that indeed needed some serious questioning:

“You know property values will drop if the blacks start moving into a neighborhood.”

“It is better for a white woman to have a physically-abusive white boyfriend or husband than a black one, even if he does treat her well.”

“Interracial marriage is cause for a family disowning a child.”

“The city is a wreck because blacks are lazy and destroy everything.”

As I began reading about New Orleans officials’ cross-generational efforts to obliterate the black middle class in New Orleans (by, for example, by destroying multiple black owned businesses in order to build both the Desire housing project in 1956 and construct Interstate 10 in 1966), I felt like I had been lied to for decades– and my views as a white child and young adult repeatedly manipulated in order to purposely cement in me a sense of white superiority that no amount of personal maturity would ever shake.

Nevertheless, I am happy to say that such twisted, misplaced superiority is indeed and forever shaken in me and shown to be the mammoth lie that it is– the very lie that happens to fuel the white saviors who would impose themselves on black communities– including the center of the community:

The community school.

The community should be the final word on its schools, and when it is, those schools are successful, even in the face of racially-imposed hardship and intentional, multi-generational deprivation of basic resources, including physical space, current textbooks, and even ready supplies of toilet paper. 

Such is the story of George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans– a school created as part of a school complex and housing project and build in New Orleans, Louisiana, to intentionally be a segregated school despite its opening post-Brown vs. Board of Education.

In her book, What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press), Dr. Kristen Buras offers to readers a detailed history and daily life of G. W. Carver High School in New Orleans, from its inception to its white-savior closure in 2005, post-Katrina, when the state of Louisiana refused to grant the returning Carver community a charter to operate their own school. Buras details what no pro-charter, education reformer discussed at any length as regards traditionally-black New Orleans public schools: the repeated, intentional, multi-generational, systematic fiscal neglect of both the schools and the black community in New Orleans.

In contrast, Buras not only discusses these issues; she brings them to life through her numerous interviews with Carver faculty and staff, a life that begins even before Carver High School opened its doors in the 1958-59 school year.

Right out of the gate, the community served by Carver High School– families residing in the Desire Housing Project– had to face the reality that the project homes were poorly constructed and were starting to fall apart due to a lack of concrete foundations on swampland, no less.

Indeed, the location of what was known as the “Carver Complex” was originally a Maroon colony for escaped African slaves in a backswamp area that 1973 Carver graduate describes as “really not made for residential living.”

Separate was not equal, but to the Carver community, it was theirs, and in the midst of profound racism, the faculty and staff at Carver High devoted themselves to their students and the students’ families, who also happened to be their neighbors.

What speaks loudly to the teacher commitment to Carver High students, as Buras notes, is their multi-decade commitment. Despite being chronically underfunded and under-maintained across its almost-fifty years pre-Katrina, Carver High School had a very low teacher turnover.

In What We Stand to Lose, readers are introduced to the precise and disciplined teachings of music teacher Yvonne Busch, who was known for offering free music lessons during summer break. Former student Leonard Smith produced a documentary about Busch, who retired in 1983 after a 32-years at Carver. We learn of the 38-year career of social studies teacher, Lenora Condoll, who wanted so much for her students to experience the larger world that she organized fundraisers to take her students on Close-Up trips to Washington, DC, and who, on a practical note, showed students that they could make a dressy wardrobe out of a few basic items, including her “black, cashmere skirt.” We meet Enos Hicks, head coach of track and football and athletic director once Carver High opened. By that time, Hicks had been teaching for twenty years already. When Hicks’ students saw “his bag of medals” for track and field, they believed that they, too, could excel and receive their own medals.

These are real teachers whose legacy is undeniable among Carver alumni. They inspired their students to hold their heads high in self-respect despite the cultural pressures and dangers to be pressed into a Whites Only mold of “forever less-than.”

Carver High School was at most 30 minutes from my own high school. I had no idea such quality against the odds was so nearby.

To continue reading the review, open the link.

Categories Bigotry, Closing schools, Creativity, Cruelty, Disruption, History, Injustice, Lies, Louisiana, New Orleans, Racism, Teachers

There Was No “Miracle” in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2025 //
7

This is the most important post you will read today or this week, maybe this month, if you care about the future of American public schools. It’s about the importance of honest research; it’s about debunking false narratives. It’s about the media printing inaccurate stories without the necessity of fact-checking. It’s about irresponsible journalism.

The Washington Post published an article loaded with inflated claims by a British journalist, Ian Birrell, about the “miracle” in New Orleans that followed the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Five years later, Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan boldly said that the hurricane was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” Birrell agrees with him.

In 2018, Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education allocated $10 million to fund the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University (REACH). In 2023, two of the nation’s leading advocates of choice–the Walton Foundation and the City Fund–gave REACH $1 million “to jointly support a three-year research project on the system-level effects of charter schools at the national level. The goal is to learn how charter schools improve student outcomes and better understand the role of policy in fueling these changes.”

After Katrina, the state converted New Orleans into an (almost) all-charter district. All of the district’s teachers were fired, and their union dissolved. Charter chains and TFA poured into the district as did funding by the federal government and major foundations. About one-third of the students never returned after the hurricane.

Linda Darling-Hammond and her Stanford colleagues Frank Adamson and Channa Cook-Harvey studied the charterization of New Orleans in 2015. Unlike most other studies, they looked closely at student experiences as well as data. They concluded that the district was not only highly segregated by race and class, but was “one of the lowest-performing districts in one of the lowest-performing states in the nation,” not a model to be replicated.

Rutgers’ scholar Bruce Baker examined the advocates’ claims in 2019 and concluded that they overlooked or minimized two significant factors: one, demographic changes (a reduction in concentrated poverty), and two, a huge infusion of external funding.

But Birrell is not an education journalist so he seems not to have looked for views that countered the charter enthusiasts.

Gary Rubenstein, former member of TFA and career high school mathematics teacher, did the research that Birrell failed to do. He explained why there was no “miracle” in New Orleans:

It has been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina wiped out the New Orleans schools system causing it to be replaced with all charter schools. And it has been over 15 years since former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, based on what he considered early evidence of the success of those charter schools that Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” And it has been also about 15 years since educational researchers have been continuously debunking the New Orleans educational miracle.

So I was quite surprised to see that The Washington Post just published an opinion piece with the headline “‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution — Twenty years after the hurricane, taking stock of the miracle in New Orleans Schools.”

Reading this Op Ed was a strange experience for me. Supposedly based on recent research, it basically trotted out all the old bogus claims that I hadn’t heard anyone claim in at least ten years. Since it was The Washington Post, I figured it had to be Jay Matthews who has been known to write puff pieces (and books) about KIPP and Michelle Rhee. But these talking points were so antiquated that it would have been odd even for him to use them. No, this anachronistic Op Ed was not from any of the usual suspects but from a name I had never seen before: Ian Birrell.

Reading up on the biography of Ian Birrell, things made a bit more sense. Ian Birrell is a British journalist who has mainly written about international affairs. I’m sure he is a very competent journalist but this is his first foray into education reporting. So he heard about the New Orleans ‘miracle’ for the first time, got a totally biased ‘research’ report from Doug Harris supporting the miracle and, not knowing 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. So, thinking he has discovered something incredible, of course he wants to write something about it. But what he writes is completely naive since he doesn’t know the right questions to explore to get to the truth. It’s kind of like if I decided to become a nature reporter and wrote a thing about Big Foot based on just photoshopped images and unreliable first hand accounts.

The New Orleans Miracle is pretty easy to debunk if you know the right questions to ask.

So the first thing to look at is the Louisiana AP scores. Even though AP tests and the way they are sometimes misused, are not the only thing that matters in looking at a state’s education quality, colleges do look at AP scores so it is a bit of a measure of ‘college readiness.’  From the College Board website, it can be seen that Louisiana has the third worst AP passing rate in the country.

In the Washington Post Op Ed, Birrell describes the interventions after Katrina as follows: “They fired all 7,000 teachers, sidelined unions, invited ambitious experts to run the schools and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children.”

If he knew the full history of this he would know that the “ambitious experts to run the schools” included KIPP, the famous charter chain created by two Teach For America alums. So to measure the size of the miracle twenty years later, just check to see how the KIPP Booker T. Washington High School students are doing academically. For this I went to the recent US News & World Report data.

So the gold standard charter network in the miracle city of New Orleans has an 11% Math proficiency, a 21% Reading proficiency, and a 10% Science proficiency.

As far as AP scores at the top charter chain in the miracle city of New Orleans, the exam pass rate is just 2%.

But maybe you think I am cherry picking a KIPP school that was never mentioned in the Op Ed. In it Birrell writes about a specific ambitious expert “Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage 20 years ago was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me in a 2010 interview how, soon after the disaster, at age 26, he moved to the city from New York to set up a school, starting in a refurbished building with 120 pupils ages 11 to 15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests and won a national medal for its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents.” He explained how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.”

So I looked up Ben Kleban to see how his school was doing. It is a little confusing but it seems like the entire charter chain he created was shut down in 2018 except maybe one school which is called Walter L. Cohen High School. For them, there are no AP passing scores reported. For their test scores, they are a little better than KIPP for math and reading but lower on science.

So what evidence did Birrell see that convinced him that the New Orleans miracle was authentic? Doug Harris has some nice graphs that shows test scores in New Orleans scores now compared to test scores in New Orleans 20 years ago. But of course this is not the proper comparison to make. The way a scientific experiment works is that if you want to measure the impact of an effect, you try to take a group and split it in half and apply the impact to half of the subjects and make the rest the ‘control group.’ So in this situation, had they not made all the New Orleans schools into charter schools but instead randomly picked half the schools and made them charters and left the other half under local control, then you could compare the results of the two groups after 20 years and, as long as the groups continued to be randomly distributed, that could be a useful way to make a comparison.

But that is not what happened since unfortunately there is no control group to compare to. It is quite possible that the scores now are lower than they would have been had Katrina never happened and the New Orleans charter experiment had never happened. But even without anything to compare to, the data from that one gold standard KIPP is, in my opinion, pretty good evidence against the miracle. Just like the way you can check the temperature of a Thanksgiving turkey by putting a meat thermometer into one spot of the Turkey, looking at what is supposed to be the best charter school is a good measure of all the schools since the KIPP is surely better than the average school there.

I thought I’d never have to debunk the New Orleans miracle again, but I guess I’m going to have to every five or ten years for each milestone anniversary of “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”

My view: Gary Rubenstein is a national treasure. The major editorial boards should check with him before they publish stories about a “miracle” school or “miracle” district.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Louisiana, New Orleans

Peter Greene: A Tribute to 6-Year-Old Ruby Bridges

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2024 //
10

Peter Greene reminds us of an important anniversary that we should have commemorated: the arrival of 6-year-old Ruby Bridges at the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, where she was the first Black child. She had to walk through crowds of screaming whites, mostly women, who didn’t want her to integrate the school. She integrated the school, but the white children were gone. She was the only child in her class, and she developed a close relationship with her kind teacher.

He writes:

Things got busy here at the Institute this week, so I missed posting about this anniversary on Thursday. But I don’t want to overlook it for another year.

On November 14, Ruby Bridges was six years old, three months younger than the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. Six years old.

She had attended a segregated kindergarten in New Orleans. The district gave Black children a test to see if they would be allowed to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School. Six passed. Two decided not to go through with it. The three other girls were sent to a different all-white school; Ruby Bridges would be the only Black student desegregating William Frantz.

Her father was not sure he wanted to put her through that. Her mother argued it had to be done for her daughter and “for all African-American children.”

This was three years after the Little Rock Nine were escorted into school by the National Guard. Conditions in the South had not improved. A crowd came out to hurl insults and threaten a six year old child. 

“What really protected me is the innocence of a child,” Bridges said at an event last Thursday.“Because even though you all saw that and I saw what you saw, my 6-year-old mind didn’t tell me that I needed to be afraid. Like why would I be afraid of a crowd? I see that all the time.”

But it is still shocking to see pictures of the protests. They made a picture of a coffin, with a Black baby in it, and paraded it around the school. Along with a cross. Bridges was the only child in her class– white parents pulled their children out, and many teachers refused to teach. The boycott was eventually broken by a Methodist minister, but Bridges still was shunned, her father fired, her family barred from some local businesses. 

It’s Ruby Bridges portrayed in the Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With.” one of his first works after he left The Saturday Evening Post. It earned him sackfulls of angry mail, calling him, among other things, a “race traitor.”

This week, many schools celebrated a Ruby Bridges Walk To School Day in schools all around the country.  

There is a common narrative, that in the sixties we pretty much settled all the racial issues in this country and that demands for equity ever since have just been a political ploy to grab undeserved goodies. “We fixed that stuff,” the argument goes, “so we shouldn’t need to be talking about it now. You sure you don’t have some other reason for bringing it up?” It’s the narrative that brings us to a President-elect who claims that since we fixed racism in the sixties, it’s white folks who have been the victims, and who need reparations.

But here’s what I want to underline– Ruby Bridges is alive. Not even old lady alive, but just 70. Presumably most of the children gathered around that coffin and cross are also alive, probably a few of those adults as well (Bridges’s mother died in 2020). 

This is not some episode from the distant past. It’s not about some form of schooling that belongs to some dead-and-gone generation. The anniversary is a reminder to do better, to be better, a reminder that it really wasn’t very long ago that a whole lot of people thought it was okay to threaten a six year old child with abuse and violence. White folks don’t need to hang their heads in shame and embarrassment, but neither should they say, “That was people from another time, long ago and far away,” as a way to feel better about the whole business. It can happen here. It just happened here. Pay attention and do the work to make sure it isn’t happening tomorrow.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Extremism, Louisiana, New Orleans, Racism, Segregation, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Shame

“All-Charter No More!”: New Orleans Opens Its First Traditional Public School in 20 Years

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2024 //
10

You remember, I hope, the saga of the New Orleans Public Schools District: Abandoned by white families, underfunded by a overwhelmingly white Legislature and Dtate School Board, the public schools were segregated and held in low regard. Then came Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which severely damaged most of the schools; the students scattered. The state stepped in and created the Recovery School District, whose job was to get the schools rebuilt and reopened under new management. To get rid of the union, the entire teaching staff (mostly Black) was fired, and teachers were allowed to reapply for their jobs.

When school opened again, most of them were privately managed charter schools, many of the newly hired teachers came from Teach for America, and the district for a time enjoyed a large infusion of funds from the federal government and large foundations, all committed to the success of the charter model.

The Hechinger Report tells the story of a new school that opened this fall. For the first time in two decades, it is a district-run public school instead of a charter school.

Be skeptical of claims about dramatic improvements in student outcomes when comparing pre-Katrina to the present. The enrollment in 2004 was nearly 70,000, and is now about 40,000.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Louisiana, New Orleans, Parents, Privatization
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