Up First from NPR - How Katrina Transformed New Orleans Schools

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, state officials in Louisiana saw an opportunity to transform New Orleans public schools, many of which they considered "failing." Twenty years later, we look at one of the biggest experiments in U.S. public education and whether the move to charter schools was a success.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Aisha Roscoe, and you're listening to The Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. In some parts of the country, kids have already been back in school for weeks. My kids are going back to school tomorrow. Thank goodness. I need some space. Good morning. That's Fantasy Williams Elementary in New Orleans. In early August, staff greeted students on their first day back as their parents pulled up to the curb. See, you got consia on service, baby. Inside, second graders got motivated for the coming year. There's nothing that I can't do.

I can overcome anything. Now, Fantasy Williams, like almost all of New Orleans public schools, is a charter school. In fact, all but one of New Orleans public schools are managed by independent charter operators. And that's because of major reform state officials in Louisiana began making to the school system more than two decades ago. 20 years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The levees failed and the city flooded. In the aftermath, state officials transformed the city's public school system. system, a school system that at the time was considered by some to be one of the worst in the country.

Today we look at one of the biggest experiments in public education to happen in the U.S., the circumstances, the results, and where things go from here. Joining me now is Aubrey U.S. She reports on education for member station WWNO in New Orleans. Hi, Aubrey. Hey, Ayesha. Before we get into what happened to New Orleans schools after Katrina, let's start with the storm. I mean, Katrina really devastated everything, right? Yeah, I mean, Aisha, for people who weren't here, myself included, it's really hard to imagine just how sweeping the damage was. About 80% of New Orleans flooded when the city's levees failed.

And 20 years later, Hurricane Katrina is still the most expensive disaster in U.S. history. Hundreds of people who weren't able to evacuate died. It was just this absolutely horrific event. And it was weeks, months, years even, before people were able to return home. And recovery was slow. And some people never came back. I can imagine that rebuilding and the question of rebuilding would be something that people would wonder, like, can it even be done when the destruction has been so all-consuming? Right. And should you rebuild if there's a chance that this could happen again?

Yeah. But, you know, if you've ever been to New Orleans or you know someone from New Orleans or really know anything about New Orleans and its history, then you know there was never really a chance people would abandon this city. It's just too old and magical for people to give up on it. After Katrina happened, obviously everything came to a standstill. And I would think that schools also had to come to a complete stop at that point. Yeah, I mean, it was the start of the school year when Katrina hit. And then after the storm, teachers and students were scattered across the country because they had evacuated. But, you know, as soon as people started talking about rebuilding the city, the schools became a major priority. Because without them, you can't really expect families to come back for parents to go to work. Like, there's a reason why schools are such an essential part of any community. Before Katrina, New Orleans schools were, they were struggling, what problems were they dealing with?

Yeah. The schools have been declining for decades for a lot of reasons. You know, they face the same problems as other urban school districts, white flight after integration, loss of resources, intensifying poverty. You know, it was just they had a lot of things working against them. But then there was also a lot of corruption and mismanagement within the system. so much so that the FBI set up a desk inside the school district's offices in the early 2000s because they had so many open cases of potential fraud, bribery, theft, all of that stuff. Carlos Luis Zervagon attended New Orleans public schools in the 70s and 80s and taught in them in the 90s. He's seen like every phase of this system over the last, you know, 50 years. And he told me school buildings and the school system overall were in really bad shape back when he was a student. You know, with asbestos falling off the pipes and the heat not working, the bathroom's not working. We didn't have proper supplies.

The teachers were so poorly paid. Zervigon says by the time he was a teacher, if you had to get a district official to sign off on something, it just didn't happen. You know, textbooks weren't ordered. Teachers couldn't get their certifications renewed. It really felt to him like the school system had reached the end of its life. You had good people working in a system that no longer properly functioned. And all of these problems obviously. impacted students. Test scores in New Orleans were among the lowest in Louisiana when Katrina hit, and only about half of students graduated from high school on time.

Well, I mean, were there efforts to improve the school system? Yeah, internally, the district was trying to make changes, but things had been so bad for so long that, to Zervigant's point, it really felt like the district couldn't turn things around on its own. By the time Katrina hit, the state was already moving in to take over the city's schools. And after the storm, elected leaders got together and made a series of quick decisions that would eventually transform New Orleans school system. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

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To find a provider near you, visit DignityMemorial.com. There's a lot of news happening. You want to understand it better, but let's be honest, you don't want it to be your entire life either. Well, that's sort of like our show, here and now anytime. Every weekday on our podcast, we talk to people all over the country about everything from political analysis to climate resilience, video games. We even talk about dumpster diving on this show. Check out Here and Now Anytime, a daily podcast from NPR and WBUR. We're back with the Sunday story.

So, Aubrey, how did the state take over New Orleans public schools? Yeah, so here's where politics comes into play. One key figure in the state's takeover of New Orleans schools was Leslie Jacobs. At the time, she was an appointed member of the state's Board of Education. Jacob's idea was to take over failing schools in New Orleans and put them in a state-run recovery school district. The legislation she wrote to make this happen was passed in 2003, so a couple years before Katrina. and, you know, they had already started to try to do this in a small way. The state had taken over a handful of New Orleans schools that were among the lowest performing in the state.

Jacobs spoke with NPR about a month after Katrina, and she said the storm offered New Orleans schools a unique opportunity. Well, for one thing, the schools are empty. It is very hard to turn yourself around while you're operating schools. It is an opportunity to pick your best principals, your best teachers, get training done, rethink the delivery of curriculum and instruction. But Jacobs didn't think the city school board was moving quickly enough. Well, we are five weeks since Katrina hit.

The board has met once. It was clear she wanted state officials to act. So going into the storm, thanks to Jacobs, the state had already had this sort of infrastructure to kind of take over. And the storm, did it just jumpstart that? Yeah, exactly. they had to rewrite some additional laws to make everything work, but they did that pretty quickly. How did people in New Orleans feel about state officials wanting to take over their schools? They definitely didn't like it at first. Here's Zervagan, the former New Orleans teacher again.

The idea of someone, the state coming in taking over the schools, was very offensive to us. This is our system. You know, and then Baton Rouge is often very hostile to New Orleans, often with a racial bent to that. New Orleans is a majority black city. It's overall a progressive city, and the majority of lawmakers in Baton Rouge are not. Louisiana is a conservative state, so there's always been a tension between the two. But after watching the district declined for decades, Zervagon says he was really desperate for things to change. And I was like, okay, come on down. Give it your best shot. You think you can fix this thing. Show me.

You know, because I was like, I think there's no fixing it. So the state took over 100 schools, and their mechanism to try to fix things was to turn all of them into charter schools as fast as they could. But why charter schools? And can you remind us, like, how are charter schools different from regular public schools? Yeah. So back in the 2000s, charter schools, if you remember, were this popular bipartisan idea. These are public schools, but they're run by private boards, though they have to answer to local or state school boards. And in Louisiana and some other states, charter schools also have to operate as nonprofits. At the time, charter schools didn't have much of a track record, and people didn't know if they would actually produce better results than traditional schools. But that didn't stop education reformers from going all in.

And really what they were doing was decentralizing this public education system. They were empowering individual schools to make their own decisions and empowering parents to decide where to send their kids, inserting competition into public education. So for New Orleans, it meant freeing schools from a system a lot of people felt was barely functioning. I mean, you know, new ideas, experimentation. That could be promising, especially if you're trying to upend an existing system. Yeah, and it was exciting to a lot of folks. The federal government even chipped in $44 million that first school year just for New Orleans charter schools. And Aisha, this new system had another component that isn't always a given when it comes to charter schools.

and that's really strict accountability, mainly based on test scores. Basically, charter groups are given a contract to operate a school for a few years. And if they don't meet the mark, they aren't renewed. The school closes and the state tries again until someone gets it right and keeps getting it right because you're never really safe. You know, if your scores dip too low, you could be open for 20 years and still be closed. I mean, so there were incentives, but also kind of like carrots and sticks. There were also threats to perform well.

What did the school leaders and teachers think about this? Because they're the people who are supposed to be getting more power with charter schools, right? There were some school leaders who were excited by the idea of charter schools because they wanted to break free from the larger system. But most of these schools did not become charters with the support of their teachers and families. You know, there was definitely a disconnect. And a lot of educators saw the charter movement as a direct attack on them, this effort to kind of sweep them out as part of this major transformation. So were these fears founded? Were veteran educators kept out of charter schools? You know, it really depended on the school. Some charter groups, especially those that started in New Orleans, knew the value of people who were teaching before Katrina.

But others wanted to go in a new direction. Zervagon told me there was a kind of bias against veteran educators. There was a feeling that the problem in education were educators. And I've heard advocates talk about, no matter what reform you try to do, if you bring in educators, they'll ruin it because they are the problem. I mean, that seems pretty unfair. Yeah. Let me introduce you to Stacey Gilbert. She'd been teaching special education for almost two decades when Katrina hit. And I can still remember that particular Friday and just thinking, okay, we're going to evacuate, but we'll be back Monday.

day. But, you know, they weren't. Gilbert was gone for months and so were many other teachers. Schools, you know, had shut down. They placed teachers first on unpaid leave, then they laid them off. And when the state started opening schools again, they made veteran teachers like Stacey Gilbert reapply for their jobs and take a proficiency exam. And that was really a slap in the face. Like, wow, to get my job, you want me to take a test? Ultimately, less than a third of pre-Katrina teachers returned to the system. And another 20% like Gilbert got teaching jobs elsewhere in the state. Well, but who filled the teaching jobs? I take it you've heard of Teach for America? Yeah, so that's that public service program where, you know, they would take the college graduates and they would put them in public schools around the country. You're totally right.

Teach for America or TFA was active in Louisiana before the storm. But after the storm, they really expanded their operation. They signed a contract with the state to start bringing in a lot more teachers. And at its peak, they were bringing in hundreds of new teachers each year. Lauren Jewett was one of those people. She moved to New Orleans to teach special education through TFA in 2009. My mom was a little worried about the weather. At the time, Jewett says she had no idea how the city's old teachers had been treated.

I just kept hearing like the thing about the underperforming of, of schools or students, and that idea that there was vacancies. Before the storm, the majority of New Orleans teachers resembled Stacey Gilbert. They were black women who were certified to teach, and on average had about 15 years of experience. But by the time Jew had arrived, the percentage of white teachers was growing quickly, and many were out of towners who were brand new to teaching. These younger teachers were given a lot of responsibility. You know, responsibility they were not always.

prepared for. Jewett got a job as the director of special education at a charter school after she'd been teaching special ed for just two years. By 2013, the majority of New Orleans teachers had been on the job less than five years, and turnover had doubled. In some schools that really relied on TFA, like it was a two-year placement, there was this revolving door of teachers. I can't imagine that's good for the students because kids benefit from having, like, seeing the same teachers in their school, right? Like having that consistency. Right. So much of being a good teacher is relationship building, not just with students, but with families. And before the storm, like, teachers had really deep roots in their communities. Fortunately, charter schools realized that

they needed to start prioritizing, hiring local experienced teachers again. And today, New Orleans Teaching Force looks more like it used to. But there were long-term consequences. People who were teachers and lost their jobs after the storm, they told their kids not to go into the profession because of what had happened. The city had a strong teachers union that lost its power in the move to charter schools because they're difficult to organize. So because of all of this, we have a number of groups and programs that are still trying to build back the city's teacher pipeline today. It sounds like early on, part of the issue was that the operators of these charter schools were trying to start from scratch

and they weren't really trying to utilize what was already in New Orleans and what might have already been working. Yeah, I mean, you had the situation where, like, the message they were getting was that the system before had been failing and that they should come in and do things differently, but you can't just leave the past behind

and in any difficult situation, there are good things. As charter operators took over buildings, some treated them as new schools without legacies. They changed the names on buildings, which outraged alumni and other locals. Many of the schools had really strict discipline, and some people said they felt like prisons. Music and art programs were cut because there was such a strong focus on test scores. And I mean, this is New Orleans. Like people love Mardi Gras.

They love their marching bands, and that disappeared for a little bit. And all of this, obviously, was incredibly painful for communities. People felt like, you know, they lost their homes after the storm. and then they had their schools ripped away from them. Eventually, charter operators who, you know, were doing these things, realized that it was hurting their relationship with communities, so they walked a lot of these things back. And it was an experiment, right?

Like, they were figuring out this new system as they went. What about the state? They were the ones in charge. Did they make any changes to how, they were doing things? Yeah, I mean, state officials had to make changes, too. One thing they saw in the early years was that because charters were under so much pressure to perform, some schools were pushing out students they thought would bring test scores down.

So the state had to bring some things back in house. They re-centralized the enrollment system. They created a hearing office for expulsions. And they did other small things, too, to try to get schools to do the right thing. So talk to me about those numbers, because the charter school model was designed that way. It's very fixated on hitting certain marks. Did the numbers, the test scores, did they get better? Yeah, I mean, in the first decade, it was really significant.

Before Katrina, just 6% of New Orleans students tested at the mastery level on state exams. And by 2015, more than 30% were at mastery. And while those numbers have fluctuated some, they still look pretty good today. In terms of the graduation rate, it went from about half to more than 80% of students graduating on time. Okay, I mean, that sounds like a big deal. Yeah, I mean, some researchers like Doug Harris of Tulane University attribute those gains to what we were talking about earlier. The district's willingness to close low-performing schools.

If you close low-performing schools, students end up in better schools, and they do better, which sounds really obvious when you put it that way, but I think is not how it typically happens in most places. By 2018, the state had returned all of the schools it had taken away back to the city. and local officials now run a nearly all charter system. But Ayesha, while there are a lot of people who see this system as a success, there are other people who say it's a failure. After the break, we'll take a look at how two different charter schools

and the district as a whole are rethinking the way they define success. We'll be right back. This message comes from the Kresgey Foundation. Established 100 years ago, the Kresge Foundation works to expand equity and opportunity in cities across America. A century of impact, a future of opportunity. More at Kresge.org. We're back with the Sunday story. So, Aubrey, before the break, we were talking about how charter schools were set up in New Orleans

and this huge focus on the numbers. Test scores, graduation rates, all of those went up a lot in New Orleans. over the past 20 years. But when you think about what makes a good education for kids, there's a lot beyond just test scores and whether they graduate. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you definitely want kids to, you know, pass the test and graduate. But you also want to be thinking about,

are we setting kids up for long-term success? So how do you measure that kind of long-term success? I mean, the one thing that's kind of the easiest thing to measure is, like, are kids going to college and are they graduating from college? So there was this really strong emphasis on higher education, especially in the early years of the charter school movement here. This college for all push. And there was one charter school group after Katrina in New Orleans that really epitomized this idea, so much so that they even had an anthem for it that they taught all their kids to sing.

Got re-papering! Go to golly! You got re-pavery. Geraldine Stewart was nine years old when Katrina hit. hit. Afterwards, she ended up at KIPS schools. Power is freedom and along it. KIP stands for the Knowledge is Power Program. It's a national charter school network, and in New Orleans it serves mostly black, low-income

students. Back when Stewart was a student, Kip's goal was to get all of its students to and through college. Stewart made it to college, but says she didn't have the support or the resources to make it through, and she ended up dropping out far from a college degree. Now, my struggle is being 28 with three kids and not knowing what's my purpose. Today, New Orleans has a higher college going rate than the state overall, which is pretty remarkable. But our college persistence, our college graduation, that hasn't really improved since Katrina.

Kip New Orleans CEO has said that they're still committed to the idea that college is the best path out of poverty. But the organization has really mellowed with its college for all push. And they've started to offer more access to technical fields like cosmetology, nursing, building traits. Stewart now has kids who go to a KIP school. I wish they drilled what they're doing now to those kids and to us because I feel like we probably would have been better off. Yeah, I mean, it is very tricky to define long-term success. in terms of college completion, because, I mean, as we all know, even having a college degree doesn't in and of itself mean that you're going to get a job and a career. Right.

Just doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that just makes me think, like, part of our system, the idea behind giving schools freedom is that they can innovate. They can adjust to do what makes sense for their particular students. But it's hard to give schools enough freedom to truly innovate. when you are also holding them accountable. And that makes me think of a school that doesn't exist anymore

because it got shut down last year. And it was called Living School. The school's slogan was learned by doing. Students tended banana trees in biology and started their own businesses. I talked to one living school parent, Danielle Smith. Learning as you go was something different. Her daughter, Kyla, attended living school.

Kyla had learning disabilities, and Smith says she had really struggled in other schools. But at Living School, you know, everyone was learning at their own pace. And Smith says Kyla really thrived. She developed a strong sense, a strong sense of confidence. Living School's charter was up for renewal Kyla's junior year. The school's scores had recently dipped. It received a failing grade from the state.

And local officials started talking about closing the school. At a school board meeting, the district superintendent, Avis Williams, gave her recommendations. Living School, non-renewal, And same reason, an F as an F. That night, more than two dozen people asked the board to reconsider, including current and former students, Genesis Batiz Boutis Bustillo, Rekal Hoker, and Rio Valdez. Without this school and the teachers that actually care about your learning, I would fail math so fast. I promise you I would not be in college right now. I probably would not have graduated.

In response, longtime board member Nolan Marshall acknowledged one of the biggest flaws in the city's school system. You are judged by test scores. more than anything else. We all know that that's unfair, but it is the system that we have. And that day, the school board voted to close living school. I mean, that sounds like a real loss to the community and to those students who seem to really love this school.

For sure. You know, Danielle Smith felt like this was really disruptive. Her daughter had to go to a new school. Her senior year was really kind of ripped away from this community. that had become their family. And she just felt like the things that the school board was looking at, that it didn't tell the whole story. The only thing I heard was dad is in numbers.

Datas and numbers. No one never once mentioned what can we do to help the keys. And Tulane's Doug Harris, he sees that this is not a long-term strategy either. One way to think about it is that we went from being an F to a C, but I don't think this strategy gets you from a C to even a B. in terms of the quality of the district. New Orleans still trails the state on most measures. Since the early years, growth has not been as swift,

and that really kind of raises the question, you know, if the system wants to get better, does it have to try something different? So looking ahead, it sounds like maybe even school board members are questioning this approach that's so focused on just test scores. Yeah, I mean, something that we saw, happen around the time of living school closed was they started weighing student growth more heavily. So placing greater emphasis on, you know, how much test scores per particular student are growing year

over year over just is that student hitting the mark. And the board is also trying to be more diverse than the things that it considers, you know, looking at course offerings, extracurriculars, career pathways, the kind of things that we know students need, and rethinking what we mean when we say whether or not a school is successful. And Aisha, you know, the district is also looking at doing something else that just a couple years ago kind of felt impossible. And what's that? Running some schools themselves. Last year, the school district opened its own school. So it now runs one elementary school directly. So kind of maybe going back a little bit to a more traditional system. Yeah. I think when I started covering schools five years ago,

the all charter felt really locked in. It was something that people were afraid to waver from. And now we're at a point where people in the school board, people in the community are really saying charter schools are about choice and we want another choice. We want parents to be able to pick a more traditional direct-run school. So, I mean, ultimately, was this charter school experiment a success? I have asked so many people that question over the last year or so. It's a tough one to answer because it really depends on what do we mean by? success, which we've talked a lot about today, I think there are some very obvious wins, right? More kids are graduating from high school. More kids are reading and doing math on grade level. But there is a lot of mistrust because of how this was done to New Orleans. And there are a lot of people who just don't see the system as better, but different. It's complicated. It doesn't work for all families. And there are winners and losers. You know, New Orleans school system, has gone through an incredible amount of change in the last 20 years.

The people running schools have learned a ton and they've made a lot of changes to try and make things better. Carlos Luis Zervagon, the former teacher, is now a member of the city's school board. And he says that kind of self-reflection and self-correction is now a part of the way things are done here. Trying new things, sometimes going back on them. That's built into the system now. And I'd say it's guided by the principle that we believe if it works, do it.

If it don't work, stop doing it. If it needs changing, change it. Well, I mean, it seems like it's going to keep you very busy as an education reporter. Aubrey, thank you so much for your reporting. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Ayesha. That was Arbori U-Hoss. She reports on education for member station WWNO in New Orleans.

This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Irene Noguchi, mastering by Robert Rodriguez. Sarah Carr contributed reporting. Nicole Cohen edited this reporting for NPR's education desk. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo, Jenny Schmidt, and our senior supervising producer, Leanna Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe.

Up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. Thank you.