Published by The Washington Post (28th August, 2025)
After Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, the city began a long climb back that remains incomplete to this day. Yet one aspect of recovery began soon after the catastrophe and quickly gained speed: A new approach to public education was introduced. And in the five years after Katrina smashed into this fabled city, it progressed so far that Arne Duncan, education secretary in the Obama administration, declared the storm “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”
His words were crass, but a new study from Tulane University confirms, now two decades after the disaster, that they were true. For the winds and rain that lashed the city, and the crumbling levees that flooded it, shattered the systemic inertia and stifling bureaucracy that had betrayed generations of children, unleashing a schools revolution unmatched anywhere for its radicalism and scale.
Before Katrina, New Orleans had one of the worst-performing public school systems in America. Young lives were betrayed by low expectations, dreadful teaching, incompetent officials, crumbling infrastructure and corruption.
The city still struggles in one of the nation’s poorest states. It is shedding jobs in its biggest industries, including tourism, despite the throngs of visitors partying on Bourbon Street or munching beignets in the French Quarter, and its population remains significantly below its pre-Katrina level. Yet New Orleans offers important lessons about education involving parental choice, school autonomy and accountability that extend far beyond the Big Easy.
Surveying the devastation that left intact just 16 out of 128 schools and destroyed about a third of school buildings, state legislators took an enormous gamble: 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. This drastic move was backed by rigorous assessment of the schools’ and students’ performance. Over the following years, at least 50 of the remaining 75 schools were shut down or handed to new operators.
Now, Tulane University researchers have analyzed scores of studies of this bold experiment. They conclude that New Orleans’ daring act of liberation from local bureaucrats, converting all city schools into charter schools — publicly funded, but with the freedom and flexibility to set curriculums in line with contractually agreed goals — has been a remarkable success.
“It’s the largest, broadest and most sustained improvement we’ve ever seen in a U.S. school district with substantial improvement everywhere we have looked, from test scores and parental satisfaction through to college access and reduced involvement in crime,” Douglas N. Harris, the Tulane economics professor and director of the Education Research Alliance who headed the research, told me.
This sounds pretty definitive. Harris admitted that, when he started to study the reforms and track their outcomes with colleagues in 2012, he was a skeptic. But the data — which includes the value-added metrics vital for a city where almost one-third of children grow up in poverty — was persuasive. Before Katrina, New Orleans sat at the foot of most key rankings in Louisiana, the second-worst U.S. state for education. Almost two-thirds of its schools were judged as failing. And the city ranked near the bottom nationally in reading and math, with 19 of every 20 high school seniors testing below basic proficiency in English and math.
Yet things changed quickly. New Orleans has gone from being one of the country’s worst school districts, with graduation rates 18 percent below the national average, to middle of the pack. Graduation rates rose nearly 20 points in the scheme’s first decade. Improvements have since plateaued, but they have been sustained, dipping during the pandemic amid school closures before recovering sharply. “We’ve leapfrogged thousands of school districts,” Harris said, “which has never been seen before.”
As the professor points out, the reforms were courageous, controversial and “ugly” at times — imposed, as they were, by the state legislature. “It was not pretty to see them put in place on a majority-Black city in a majority-White state,” said Harris, pointing to the history of voting disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South. In a decade, the share of African American teachers fell to less than half, from 71 percent, before rebounding slightly — while the number of managers (and their pay) soared. Rehired teachers faced longer hours and lower salaries.
Initially, critics on the left said that “the rhetoric of reform often fails to match the reality” and predicted that advances would come at the expense of disadvantaged students. Then they claimed that the city’s undeniable improvements resulted largely from extra cash pouring into the system. The Tulane report acknowledges that money was a factor, but argues that the reforms fueled public support for higher spending on education because people could at last see the results. The researchers added that, before 2005, the notoriously dysfunctional system was “ineffective in converting school resources into improvement.” Increasing education spending without the post-Katrina reforms probably would have failed.
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.
Kleban was not alone. After Katrina, New Orleans became a magnet for ambitious educationalists, entrepreneurs and philanthropists seeking to improve the lives of disadvantaged children. Many teachers who lost out in the post-hurricane purge ended up returning.
Among them was Deanna Reddick, a single mother who was starting out on her teaching career when Katrina struck, prompting her to evacuate with her daughter to Baton Rouge. Today, she is the school leader in charge of almost 1,000 pupils at KIPP Morial — one of nine campuses in the city under the umbrella of the Knowledge is Power Program, a network of 278 public schools in 21 states. When hired by KIPP in 2006, the algebra teacher was struck by the atmosphere, vastly different from her previous school.
“You could tell when you walked in that everybody was on the same mission,” she said. “Everybody was working toward the same thing for every single student in that building. My lens expanded — I wasn’t just concerned with what was happening in my own classroom. There was a team dynamic. We are only as strong as our weakest classroom.”
Reddick admitted that she feels under constant pressure to deliver — knowing, if she stumbles, her school, which has a strong emphasis on creative arts, might close or be handed to a new provider. Yet she said she never wants to rest on her laurels. “I want to feel that sense of urgency when I walk in the building every day. We have no time to waste.” Her ambitious approach does deliver change. The Tulane report found that enrollment of non-White pupils increased in higher-performing schools, while — against expectations — the diversity of school options available for parents and pupils also increased.
Kleban left his three-school group in 2016 after winning an election to join the city’s school board. Seven years later, these schools’ charters were withdrawn. Curiously, such rapid churn in schools isn’t having the deleterious impact one might expect, and this suggests that the closure of underperforming institutions can be a wise move. In America “there is often strong local attachment to schools, yet if they’re not working they need to be replaced,” argued Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “Sometimes even parents stay loyal to a school failing their kids. But a school district has a duty to provide the best schools by whatever means it can.”
Harris and Hill said they believe the New Orleans experiment shows why the left should be much less beholden to teachers unions, and the right should be far more skeptical that vouchers alone can lift school standards. Indeed, the Tulane report suggests that Louisiana’s embrace of vouchers actually had a “negative effect on school outcomes.” It argues that they may have drawn students out of the city’s publicly run charter schools and into private schools perhaps not as good as generally thought, with “positive outcomes driven by the demographics of those who can usually afford them.”
Given its successes, should the NOLA experiment be replicated elsewhere? Even before Katrina, there were thousands of charter schools across America, including five in New Orleans. But no other district has been desperate enough to push the idea quite as far. (An elected school board took control again in 2018.) Sporadic attempts to mimic the New Orleans revolution have been made in New York, Chicago, Indianapolis and other places, but most have been experimental or pusillanimous — or have petered out with changes in political leadership.
Local politics in New Orleans remains messy, to say the least. This month, Mayor LaToya Cantrell was indicted on charges of wire fraud, obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury (she has not entered a plea) following an investigation into her alleged affair with a police officer who served as her bodyguard. The city has some of the worst urban poverty rates in America. But its radical school experiment offers hope. As Reddick put it, “I am a true believer that every one of my students — no matter where they come from, no matter where they live, no matter what trauma they might have suffered — that they can be successful.” Since Katrina, she said, there has been a new urgency around education. Echoing Arne Duncan’s blunt assessment from years ago, she said, “When I think about education — and it sounds horrible to say — Katrina was one of the best things that happened to New Orleans.”