What to know about New Orleans’ post-Katrina charter school boom : NPR

When charter schools began replacing public schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary was one of the city’s holdouts.

“I was so against charter schools. I thought it was the pits,” says Mary Haynes-Smith, the school’s longtime principal.

Haynes-Smith didn’t like what she’d heard from parents — that they felt shut out by the private organizations hired to run the charter schools.

But as New Orleans crept closer to becoming the country’s first all-charter system in the 2010s, the handful of traditional schools left, including Bethune Elementary, started feeling more pressure.

“It was a forceful thing,” she remembers. “You’re gonna do charter. Everybody’s gonna do charter.”

Haynes-Smith fought it until 2017, when she formed a charter group so she could continue leading the school. She was approved, and to her surprise, found she loved the arrangement.

“It’s the best thing that could have happened.”

Under the old system, Haynes-Smith says district officials often made decisions for the school that didn’t make sense. They bought computers when what Bethune needed was more teachers. Now, as a charter school CEO, she has the freedom to make most decisions on her own.

“I know what’s best because I’m here, living it every day,” the 77-year-old says, sitting in her office during the first week of school in early August.

When people ask her about her plans to retire, Haynes-Smith answers, “When I wake up one morning and the Good Lord says, ‘Mary, that’s it.’ “

Today, New Orleans’ public school system looks almost nothing like it did before Katrina hit 20 years ago: All but one of the schools are charter schools, and they all enroll kids from across the city, rather than specific neighborhoods.

There are also fewer students — from more than 65,000 in 2005 to less than 44,000 last school year — and most buildings have been renovated or rebuilt thanks to more than $2 billion in funding from FEMA and other sources.

People in New Orleans have strong opinions about whether the move to charters has been good or bad, but Doug Harris, an education researcher at Tulane University, says the data is hard to argue with.

“Test scores, high school graduation rates, college-going, everything improved, and everything improved a lot,” he says.

He attributes those improvements to the move to charters — and officials’ willingness to close schools that didn’t meet their standards.

Schools before the storm

Before the storm, though a few schools excelled, the district was struggling overall. Only 56% of students graduated on time in 2005, and, according to Harris, 1 in 10 were picked up for skipping school.

In his book, Charter School City, Harris says deteriorating social and economic conditions played a role, but the school system was also at fault.

In the decade prior to Katrina, Harris writes, the average superintendent lasted less than a year. The federal government threatened to cut off funding due to mismanagement, and the FBI had so many investigations involving the city’s schools that it had its own office at the district’s headquarters.

Many schools lacked basic resources such as air conditioning and toilet paper.

“The school system was from my vantage point at its end — nothing worked,” says Carlos Luis Zervigón, who attended the city’s public schools in the 1970s and ’80s and taught in them in the ’90s.

Meanwhile, officials in the state’s capital were eyeing a takeover.

Zervigón didn’t like the idea of Baton Rouge controlling the majority-Black city’s schools. But by then he says he had “given up hope” the city could fix itself.

A charter boom

After Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans in 2005 and the levees failed, the city and most of its school buildings flooded. Teachers and students were displaced, and schooling in the city came to a complete stop.

With schools closed, more than 7,000 people, including more than 4,000 teachers with an average of 15 years of experience, lost their stable, middle-class jobs. The city’s teachers’ union, once the strongest in the South, lost most of its power almost overnight.

In the pause, state officials quickly moved in, took over as many schools as they could (100 out of 117) and hit reset.

The plan wasn’t to run them — at least not for long — but to turn them into charter schools: publicly funded, privately run nonprofit organizations that have to answer to state or local school boards.

By 2015, state officials were operating 50 charters and no traditional schools.

Charters were a bipartisan idea when the storm happened. They empowered individual school leaders to make their own decisions and parents to decide where to send their kids. The idea was to insert competition into public education.

For New Orleans, it meant freeing schools from a system many people felt was barely functioning.

Zervigón says in the early years, operators, especially those from outside the city, made a lot of mistakes.

Some relied heavily on uncertified teachers. And Zervigón says operators were hesitant to invest in things that didn’t directly correlate with higher test scores, including music and art programs, and football teams and marching bands.

When they took over school buildings, charters sometimes treated them as new schools without legacies, changing the names on buildings and upsetting alumni.

Some charters also followed a model, popular at the time, known as “no-excuses” discipline, which researchers have tied to higher suspension rates. Parents complained that schools felt like prisons.

Zervigón says he believes charter founders and teachers — who were often from white, affluent backgrounds — thought they were coming in to save the city’s children.

“That is a missionary attitude, and I would argue it’s fundamentally racist,” he says.

It also didn’t sit well with families.

“There were a great number [of charter schools] who failed and are just gone, because this recipe was not a recipe for success,” says Zervigón.

“And there are others who then moved about radically changing the way in which they do things.”

Over the course of the 2010s, officials also stepped in to address systemwide issues.

Charters were renewed or closed based, in large part, on test scores. From 2011 to 2017, when the first charter schools were up for renewal, more than a dozen charter operators weren’t renewed, and their schools closed or changed hands.

That pressure to perform led some schools to push out students they thought would bring down their scores, including by expelling them. So officials created a central enrollment system, taking away charter schools’ ability to pick their own students, and they created a hearing office for expulsions.

And after families filed a lawsuit alleging special education violations at some charter schools, a court order in 2015 led to regular reports from an independent monitor.

Patrick Dobard, a New Orleans native, was in charge of the city’s state-run schools from 2012 to 2017. He says the problems he helped correct existed before the storm, but were “magnified” in the charter system.

“In a way, that was a blessing,” says Dobard, because the state had to respond.

The state’s fixes weren’t always “perfect out the gate,” he says, “but the intentions were really good.”

By 2018, local officials were on board with charters, and the state returned control of the schools to the city’s school board.

The next year, New Orleans’ last traditional school, McDonogh 35 Senior High School, became a charter, making the city the first in the country to have an all-charter system.

The research showed results

New Orleans’ student test scores were among the lowest in Louisiana in 2005. By 2015, they had increased substantially. And in the 2024-2025 school year, scores were much closer to the state average than before the storm.

Around 80% of students now graduate from high school on time, up from 56% before the storm.

And the percentage of parents who think the city’s school system is on the right track has generally grown since 2014, according to Vincent Rossmeier, policy director at the Cowen Institute at Tulane University, which regularly surveys families.

But opinions are still mixed. Last year, respondents were pretty evenly split when asked whether they thought public education was getting better or worse, and the highest percentage, 35%, said it had stayed the same.

Rossmeier says satisfaction is pretty high among parents overall, but “of course, it is contingent upon whether or not their student gets into the school they want to go to.”

He says, “Socioeconomic status is really driving parents’ ability to navigate the system, to get into the schools that they want, and then also their satisfaction level with the quality of the education that their kids are getting.”

Higher-rated schools tend to be located in wealthier parts of the city — and those schools are also more likely to stay open. That’s because, like state officials before them, New Orleans’ school board doesn’t hesitate to close underperforming schools.

After studying the charter system for over 10 years, Doug Harris says officials’ willingness to close schools has helped drive a lot of the city’s most impressive gains over the last two decades.

“If you close low-performing schools, students end up in better schools and they do better,” Harris says. “While that may sound obvious, that’s not what happens in most places.”

That’s because, even when school closures make sense, they’re painful, and something elected officials tend to avoid.

“There’s definitely a limit to how far you can go with this strategy,” says Harris. “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.”

After two decades, Harris says, the system needs to try something different if it wants to keep getting better.

Why school closures are so painful

In recent years, New Orleans’ school board has closed an average of about two charter schools a year.

Danielle Smith’s daughter, Kyla, went through two school closures in five years before she graduated from a New Orleans high school in May.

The second closure happened in 2024, after Kyla’s junior year at Living School. The school’s slogan was “learn by doing:” Students tended banana trees in biology and started their own businesses.

“I felt that was interesting because learning as you go was something different,” Smith says.

Kyla has learning disabilities, and Smith says she didn’t always get the support she needed at school. But at Living School, many students had disabilities or were learning English; everyone was learning at their own pace, and Smith says Kyla thrived.

“She developed a strong sense, a strong sense of confidence.”

But when Living School’s charter came up for renewal, local officials started talking about closing it. Its test scores had recently dipped, and as a result, it received a failing grade from the state.

The school board considers a number of factors when deciding whether to close a school, but test scores carry the most weight. At a school board meeting in December of 2023, the district’s superintendent recommended the charter not be renewed.

That night, more than 20 people, including current and former students, asked the board to reconsider.

“Without this school and the teachers that actually care about your learning, I would fail math so fast,” said student Genesis Batiz-Bustillo.

“I promise you, I would not be in college right now,” said recent graduate Re’Kal Hooker, who had just finished their first semester at the University of New Orleans.

At the meeting, longtime board member Nolan Marshall acknowledged one of the biggest flaws in the city’s school system: It was supposed to accommodate innovation so schools could help students. That’s what Living School was doing, he said, but based on the district’s standards, it had failed.

“You are judged by test scores more than anything else. We all know that’s unfair. But it is the system we have,” said Marshall.

The district now weighs student growth more heavily. But that change came too late for Living School.

Ultimately, the board voted to close it.

Danielle Smith says she and her daughter were devastated.

“That sense of peace was gone,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, where we gonna go now?’ “

What’s next for New Orleans schools

Carlos Luis Zervigón is now a member of the city’s school board. He says now that the benefit of closing schools isn’t as strong, it’s time for a change.

“We’re not going to close our way to improvement anymore,” he says.

Like many of his fellow board members, he thinks the district should run some schools directly when it makes sense, so it can be less reliant on charters to make sure the city’s kids get a good education.

Last fall, for the first time since Katrina, the school district opened a new school of its own, and board members have asked the superintendent to think about what it would take to run more schools.

But not everyone thinks that’s a good idea.

Henderson Lewis Jr. was in charge of the city’s schools from 2015 to 2022, when the state gave back the schools it had taken away and the system went all-charter.

Lewis says the system the city has is “still a baby” and leaders shouldn’t split their focus between holding charters accountable — their main responsibility — and running their own schools.

“I think the system has to continue to work to become the best regulator,” he says, while being prepared to run schools temporarily when needed.

Zervigón points out that charter schools in New Orleans are more closely regulated than they were in the beginning, and they have far fewer freedoms than charter schools elsewhere.

He says the fact that lessons have been learned, and problems corrected, in the last 20 years is evidence of the system’s larger strength.

“It is 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.”

He says the willingness to change means there is always potential — hope. Something Zervigón says he had lost before the storm.

“It’s always a work in progress.”

Edited by: Nicole Cohen