Before Hurricane Katrina, teaching in New Orleans was more than a job. It was a pathway to the middle class; a profession led by veteran Black educators with deep roots in the city and protected by one of the South’s most powerful teachers’ unions. The United Teachers of New Orleans had fought for higher pay, stronger benefits, and job security. But those protections also made it hard to remove ineffective teachers and left principals with little control over who worked in their buildings.

After the storm, the entire teaching force was dismissed. More than 7,000 educators lost their jobs in a single stroke, many learning the news from the evening broadcast. 

The layoffs wiped out decades of experience and dealt a heavy blow to the city’s Black middle class. Some of those educators came back, determined to reopen their schools under extraordinary conditions. At Warren Easton Charter High School, staff taught on the second and third floors while the first floor remained under water. Still, the majority of dismissed educators never taught in the city again.

Into the gap came a wave of new recruits, many in their twenties, many white, and often from outside Louisiana. Programs like Teach For America promised energy and results. Principals could now hire quickly, replace teachers just as fast, and push for immediate improvement. 

Some schools thrived under the new flexibility. Others struggled with constant turnover and cultural gaps between teachers and the communities they served.

Today, the city’s teaching force is more diverse and more local than it was in the years after the storm. Yet a new challenge looms: how to attract and keep enough teachers willing to do the hard, often unglamorous work of helping students succeed. In the third episode of Where the Schools Went, you will hear from veteran educators, school leaders, and newcomers about how the city rebuilt its classrooms, what was gained, what was lost, and why the question of who teaches still shapes the future of its schools.

Listen to episode three above, and watch for the next chapter debuting Sep. 2. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with The 74 and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

As the largest school improvement effort in U.S. history matured, so did the energetic transplants. Wanting kids of their own and more sustainable jobs, many moved back home, bringing their experiences to bear in classrooms in places where life is easier.

Patrick Dobard has been there the whole time. He was born in New Orleans, grew up in the city and cut his teeth there as a teacher. In the years before Hurricane Katrina, he worked for the Louisiana Department of Education, trying to figure out how to address the decay of New Orleans’ schools — beloved but crumbling, scandal-ridden and some of the lowest-performing in the country. 

In 2012, Dobard became head of the Recovery School District, the state agency that took control of most of the city’s public schools in the wake of the flood and steered their overhaul. There, he oversaw the district’s conversion to the nation’s first all-charter school system, as well as the return of the schools to the control of the local school board starting in 2016.

In 2017, he became CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the district’s nonprofit partner. Today, he is a partner at the City Fund, which helps districts engineer their own school turnarounds. 

What follows is a conversation in which Dobard reflects on the first two decades of the largest — and most controversial — school improvement effort in U.S. history, and outlines his hopes for the next 20 years. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Among education wonks, discussions about public education in New Orleans can feel like a Rorschach Test. Some people are laser-focused on academics, some on policy innovations that might transfer to other school systems and still others on privatization conspiracy theories. Locally, though, one of the most enduring conversations involves popular perceptions of a takeover of a Black-led school system by white outsiders who valued test scores more than the city’s culture. This is true — but also not the capital-T truth. Can we start there?             

I started as a classroom teacher in New Orleans in 1989 at Gregory High School, which was a junior high school, grades 7 through 9, located in what at the time was a pretty middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood, Gentilly. Most high schools then started at 10th grade. Junior highs were extremely important as athletic and band pipelines. 

The workforce for the most part at Gregory represented how the workforce across the city’s schools looked at that time: predominantly Black middle- to upper-middle-class individuals teaching kids. 

The schools that had really stringent enrollment criteria, like what was then named Lusher [now the Willow School] and Ben Franklin High School, more white students went to those schools. They had majority white staff.

By 1999, the state had created an accountability system under which a large number of the schools in the city — I believe about 60% — were identified as academically unacceptable. At that point, I was working at the state Department of Education. 

There was a lot of corruption in the air in New Orleans. There were conversations about the district being bankrupt. There was a Federal Bureau of Investigations [probe] going on. 

In 2003, the state created an agency called the Recovery School District. In the spring of 2005, the initial plan was for it to take over about three schools in New Orleans. We didn’t really know what that was going to look like. But then Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005, and all those plans were put on hold. 

We were getting phone calls weeks and months after Katrina from teachers trying to get a hold of their teaching certificates so they could work other places. There was just mass displacement of teachers.

And that’s where I think people’s knowledge of what happened gets told in different ways. The district was bankrupt. There wasn’t a way for it to pay teachers, so it was forced to lay them off. The state didn’t step in to try to offset that. So it was the district that had to fire the teachers and not the state. 

People were setting up the modular trailers and all the things people did after Katrina to get their lives back on track. There were schools — mostly the selective-enrollment schools that I mentioned earlier — where people were able to come back a little bit more quickly. Those schools were bringing teachers back and hiring.

The Recovery School District was trying to recruit back New Orleans teachers, but a lot of the Black middle class didn’t have the ability or the wherewithal to come back to New Orleans those first few years. 

Once the state decided that they were going to try the chartering model, the RSD started to recruit from Teach For America. A large number of TFA folks from all around the country wanted to come help. A number of those individuals were white. They didn’t look like the kids that ultimately were in front of them in schools.

I have no inside knowledge of this, but I don’t think TFA leadership at that time had lots of conversations strategically thinking about race. They were just functioning the way they normally functioned. 

Data shows having kids in front of teachers that are really strong and that look like them helps make for much better educational progress for young people. Once John White came in [as state superintendent in 2012], we were hearing a lot about the lack of diversity in the teaching force. 

John and I talked to TFA leadership about diversifying. While the number of Blacks and other minorities in TFA increased, it didn’t match the number of teachers of color that were there before the storm. 

Seven or eight years ago, I brought that awareness to the teacher work that we were doing at New Schools for New Orleans [where Dobard was then CEO]. We wanted to help schools build a corps of teachers that reflected the kids in the classrooms. Schools just took that on. They owned up to where they fell short, and then they actively recruited to make sure those numbers improved. 

I don’t think anyone had intentional ill will. It was a series of unfortunate circumstances that folks were reacting to after Katrina: the bankruptcy of the district and the uncertainty of people coming back to the city at different times, which was skewed to more white and affluent Blacks coming more quickly than others. 

And yet the narrative persists. 

Yeah, the narrative persists. I think what’s been missing is no one from the Orleans Parish School Board who was part of the decision to lay off the teachers to my knowledge has ever publicly acknowledged the firings. Or apologized for having to do that. Or for what transpired in the years before 2005, with the FBI having to be there and how bad it was. 

There’s no closure. There should be a moment of healing. The times that the district leadership over the years was approached, nobody really wanted to acknowledge it that way. Some felt like it was on the state for not stepping in. So maybe the state leadership at that time should apologize.

It feels like in terms of the school governance experiment, you’re at an inflection point. There’s continued improvement, but there are also tensions over whether an accountability-driven system is still something the community is lined up behind.

I think the governance contract is working well. Around 2016, I was leading the work on behalf of the Recovery School District. School leaders and advocates like the Urban League, New Schools for New Orleans and a number of other groups were working together on what the unification structure would look like. A number of legislators at the time helped to codify in law the governance construct that was created over the years as Act 91. 

It’s no longer an experiment. It’s really how schools function in New Orleans. The district has fully embraced it, maintained it and actually improved upon it. It’s a different role than any other school board in the country, but it’s also an extremely important one that’s proven to have spurred tremendous gains.

Yes, there are some people who would like to see the district go back to the way it functioned prior to Katrina. But I don’t think those individuals are but a small minority who are for the most part consistent and persistent in their viewpoint. 

When things are working well in New Orleans, you don’t hear from people. Nobody’s going to say, “Hey, the governance structure of this school that my kids have been at for the last 15 years and my grandchildren have gone through is great.” When I was state superintendent, I used to ask kids and parents, “Do you know if this school is run by the Recovery School District or by Orleans Parish?” And they’d just look at me, like, “No.”&�Բ�����;

The average citizen, what they want to know is, is my child getting a good education? Do we have good extracurricular activities? Does the transportation work well? 

I’ll tell you one quick story. Dana Peterson, who now is the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, was involved in some sessions with parents. He had this parent who was just railing against charter schools. Like, “We need to go back to what was before.”&�Բ�����;

Dana was like, “Do you realize your kid’s in a charter school?” The parent was at a loss. She was happy with where her child was, but she was indoctrinated that charter schools are bad. I think for some of the critics, that’s what it is. 

If you don’t really know what the governance construct is, at the end of the day it’s all about who’s working with the kids. There’s more proximity when it’s a charter network, with the urge to improve all the time so they can continue to have the privilege to teach kids. Versus a bureaucracy that’s expected to do it but that doesn’t have strong accountability to make sure it’s not year-after-year failure.

And that’s what it was before 2005. 

Reams have been written about the rapid academic improvements, the all-charter model and, more recently, the racial upheaval. What about the fact that you had to rebuild — as in, rebuild the buildings — 85% of the schools?   

Prior to Katrina, the buildings said to our kids and families, “We don’t care about you.” Those dilapidated buildings are no longer there. That’s something worth celebrating. 

Being a young boy that grew up in New Orleans, I’m extremely proud of the facilities. The price tag came to a little over $4 billion, if I’m remembering correctly. About a billion came from the disadvantaged business enterprise program that we started at the Recovery School District.

My first months as superintendent, there was an article in The Times-Picayune where they followed me as I rode the bus the first day of school with some kids to see what their experience was. I met the kids across the street from Dooky Chase’s Restaurant on Orleans Avenue. 

I was talking to the kids and a mom, and I pointed to Dooky Chase and right behind Dooky Chase there was a school. It was [what is now] Phyllis Wheatley Community School. There was a debate whether or not to rebuild it. 

I said, “We’re going to rebuild this school right here. And if we did, would you have your kid come here?” She’s like, “Absolutely I would.” We demolished the building and built new.

I’m extremely proud of that because my father was a part-time electrician and I could remember when I was a young boy, him getting work with one of his friends who was a subcontractor on large jobs. As I got older, I understood how important it was to be able to have subcontractors that were often minorities to work on large construction projects.

When I took over the RSD, New Orleans didn’t have a disadvantaged business program. And once I realized what that was, I felt it was important that we try to implement one. I was told that state agencies couldn’t have a DBE component. 

But we had legal take a look into it, and they advised me that the law was silent. It didn’t say whether you could or you couldn’t. I felt like it was important for us to at least try. And if we were challenged in court, we would see what a judge would say.

Once we launched it, I received maybe one or two emails from, like, the carpenters union saying we couldn’t do that. But they never followed up. We generated over $10 billion of revenue for local businesses and I’m extremely proud of that.

To this day, every now and then if I look at the placards on the front of a school I see my name and those of the folks on my team that helped make that happen. It brings me a great sense of pride and joy to know we played a small part in making sure that we have facilities where, when children and families walk in, they say to themselves, “This district really cares about me.”&�Բ�����;

Do you have a wish for the next 20 years? 

I wish that we continue to build upon the foundation that’s been laid. I would love for us to eliminate all D-rated schools, to have a true system of good-to-excellent schools. 

That we would have a much more robust early childhood system where 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds are entering kindergarten and first grade on grade level. Today, we still have kids that enter all grades not reading on grade level, so schools have to keep almost starting over with kids. 

The last thing that I would hope for is that the school board in New Orleans more vocally embrace the structure that’s been created. To be unambiguous about its power in being a manager of a system of schools, versus being a traditional school district. That they fully understand and embrace that role and lead the way on that evolution. 

If you had a do-over, what would you change?

I would have intentionally built the next generation of leadership to think more about the system as a whole and to prepare for inevitable transitions — everything that we did 15 or so years ago. We had this rare confluence of strong leadership at almost every level: the schools, the state.

We leveraged everything in our power. For every metric evaluated by external entities, the growth was really powerful. We virtually eliminated F-rated schools. The on-time graduation rate is hovering close to about 80%. It was about 54% around 2005.

I wish we would have started to build that next cadre of leadership in real time. But it’s hard to be in the midst of something so unique and try to think 15, 20 years ahead. I was literally trying to think eight hours, one week, one month ahead. Things were just always coming at us, and we were constantly building and adjusting. 

We get these great leaders, and they do great work — almost like a meteorite or something that comes and then goes away just as quickly. People move on. 

The work is so hard. This is generational work.

Disclosure: The City Fund provides financial support to The 74.

To better understand that disconnect, I spent months in New Orleans interviewing more than 50 people about their experience over the past two decades. I heard from both critics and champions of the city’s Katrina recovery reforms: parents, students, teachers, principals, administrators, activists, academics, and common citizens. Their stories are important and illuminating. I even created a whole podcast about them, called Where the Schools Went. 

But it’s easy to fall into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms. So let’s start with the data instead. Hard numbers are more useful than speculation. And the hard numbers from New Orleans are overwhelming.

There’s no one better at parsing the data than Doug Harris, who chairs Tulane’s economics department and directs the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Harris has spent years analyzing these outcomes with the kind of methodological rigor that usually prevents education researchers from ever saying anything definitive about anything. His team of advisors includes both reform advocates and skeptics, yet when I spoke with him, Harris offered something virtually unheard of in education research: . “If you look at any of the typical things that we measure — test scores, high school graduation, college going, college persistence, ACT scores — all of those things are not just better, but quite a bit better than they were before.”

The fine print is striking. When Katrina hit in 2005, roughly 60% of New Orleans schools were by the state. Today, that number is zero. High school graduation rates have soared from 54% to 78%. College enrollment has jumped by 28 percentage points. Students across all demographics — Black, white, low-income, students with disabilities — have that would be the envy of almost any school system in the country.

Harris’s team anticipated and tested the obvious objection: that the student population must have changed after such a massive displacement like Katrina. Perhaps the student body became more affluent? Less needy? They worked with the U.S. Census to track who actually returned, and deflates the skeptics’ favorite excuse: “The demographics of the district changed for families that had school-aged children… almost not at all.” Even more compelling, when they tracked individual students who attended school both before and after Katrina, those same children were learning at faster rates in the new system.

Yet if you scan the national education discourse today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any major elected leaders talking about New Orleans. This represents a dramatic shift. A decade ago, President Barack Obama himself the city’s progress, telling a New Orleans audience in 2009 that “a lot of your public schools opened themselves up to new ideas and innovative reforms,” and that “we’re actually seeing an improvement in overall achievement that is making the city a model for reform nationwide.” 

But that early attention has given way to virtual silence. This silence isn’t accidental — it’s the result of a success story so politically inconvenient that it threatens the foundational beliefs of both sides of America’s education debate.

The Battle of Carver High

To understand why this success story became politically radioactive, look no further than . Originally built in the 1950s as one of the city’s first high schools for Black students, Carver embodied the flawed promise of separate-but-equal education. By the 1990s, it had become what historian Walter Stern called an “educational Soweto” — a in a neglected neighborhood with graduation rates hovering around 50% and repeated failing grades from the state.

Then Katrina destroyed both the school and its surrounding Ninth Ward community. Karl Washington, a Carver alumnus, remembered the aftermath: “That area received eight, nine feet of water. It wiped out everything: the community footprint, businesses, spirit.” But the alumni were determined to rebuild Carver. 

The state agreed, but then came the question of who would run it. The alumni community had their vision: a return to the Carver they remembered, with its proud traditions of football, marching band, and community connection.

The state had different ideas. Instead of awarding the charter to community leaders, officials chose Collegiate Academies, an organization founded by Ben Marcovitz, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had achieved remarkable academic results at his Sci Academy charter school campus. Marcovitz’s schools were data-driven, disciplined, and relentlessly focused on college preparation. They were also run primarily by young, white outsiders through programs like Teach for America.

This staffing approach was particularly inflammatory given what had happened to New Orleans teachers after Katrina. When the district ran out of money, all 7,500 employees — including every teacher in the city — were . Most were never rehired. Many of these teachers were Black women who had been pillars of the city’s middle class for decades. They had deep roots in the communities they served. To see them replaced by young, college graduates, many of them white, with minimal teaching experience (and no union contract) felt like salt in an open wound. I explore this painful history in Episode 3 of .

The backlash to the state’s Carver plans was immediate and fierce. Chris Meyer, a state official tasked with explaining the decision, recalled arriving to find “a human chain in front of the building” and protesters blocking the entrance. After managing to get inside, “I get two words, maybe three outta my mouth, and the whole meeting just erupts in chaos.” When Meyer left the meeting, he found his car windows smashed, with glass scattered across his child’s car seat.

Jerel Bryant, the Yale-educated principal chosen to lead the new Carver, walked into this firestorm. His team quickly produced strong academic results, posting some of the best algebra scores in the city. But the achievement felt hollow amid growing community resistance.

The breaking point came in December 2013, when 60 students . They were frustrated by what they saw as excessive discipline: having to walk on taped lines in hallways, getting suspended for chewing gum or wearing the wrong shoes. One student : “You get suspended for coughing. You get suspended for sneezing out loud.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center the school’s suspension rates. Three parents publicly withdrew their children, though the vast majority stuck with the program. Local newspapers published side-by-side graphics showing Carver’s academic gains alongside its suspension statistics, as if to ask: At what cost?

For critics of education reform, this was the perfect story: test scores rising through harsh discipline and cultural suppression. For supporters, it was proof that change inevitably faces resistance, even when it’s working. The battle lines were clear, the rhetoric heated, and the national media seized on the drama. The Atlantic ran not one but on Carver’s discipline policies. called it “the painful backlash against ‘no-excuses’ school discipline.”

But then something unexpected happened.

The Quiet Revolution

Had I visited Carver 10 years ago and stopped my reporting there (as many national outlets have), this would be a very different story — one that fit neatly into our national education wars. But over the past decade, something remarkable happened. 

By 2014, Carver’s principal and his team began to listen more carefully to their critics. “Even when I didn’t agree with their tone or tactics or priorities,” Bryant reflected, “I didn’t doubt that they wanted the school to be great. And finding that common ground—that’s the challenge, and the opportunity.”

The school began implementing what educators call “restorative practices”—mediations and healing circles instead of suspensions. They trained staff differently, built new programs, funded the marching band, and hired more teachers from the community. Most importantly, they connected these changes to their core mission rather than treating them as distractions from it.

This version of “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus is so powerful! George Washington Carver Highschool Marching Band from New Orleans level up! : dright.the.king.of.oneself

“Strong sports teams help with suspension rates,” Bryant explained. “Engaging lessons help with suspension rates. Connecting before you correct, that helps too. A kid has to really believe: I want to be part of this. Otherwise, we lose a powerful lever to change behavior.”

The results were dramatic. Suspension rates by nearly two-thirds in a single year. But rather than hurting academic performance, the changes seemed to enhance it. Last year, Carver for academic growth from the state and ranked second among all open-enrollment high schools in New Orleans for students achieving mastery on state exams. The year before, they had the highest academic growth in the state. Oh, and their boys’ basketball team? They’ve been to three straight state championship games and won in 2022 and 2023. 

When I visited the school this spring, the transformation was evident everywhere. The trophy case displayed sports trophies and homecoming photos alongside college acceptance letters. The staff was older, more rooted in the community, and included several Carver alumni who had returned as teachers and coaches. Even Sandra, who works in the cafeteria, glowed when talking about the school: “The teachers? Marvelous. The principal? Excellent. Everybody here is loving and kind.”

Eric French, the band director and Carver alumnus, broke down crying when describing what it meant to return to his alma mater: “It was like a dream come true. When I walked into the interview, I almost broke down. I knew if I could just get my foot in the door, it would be up from there.”

Nell Lewis, the school’s director of culture, had lived through the entire transition: “The community didn’t believe at first. They saw white folks, outsiders, people who didn’t understand. But now they see the results. We didn’t used to have academic success here. We had championships, but not college. Not like now.”

Of course, cafeteria workers praising their workplace and band directors getting emotional about their alma mater don’t generate the same headlines as student walkouts and community protests. Collaboration doesn’t click like conflict. Which helps explain why the current New Orleans story — technocratic problem-solving, gradual improvement and former adversaries working together — has been largely ignored by those who thrive on drama and division.

The Systemwide Evolution

What happened at Carver was part of a broader evolution occurring across New Orleans. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, the city had operated what could charitably be called an “anti-system” — dozens of autonomous charter schools with little coordination or oversight. This approach produced impressive academic gains but also created chaos for families trying to navigate wildly different enrollment processes, discipline policies and academic calendars.

By 2012, state leaders began implementing what they called “systems building.” They created , a centralized enrollment system that gave families one application for all schools citywide. They established common discipline policies and centralized expulsion hearings to prevent schools from pushing out challenging students. They developed a that sent more resources to schools serving students with greater needs.

Most importantly, they approached these changes collaboratively. Rather than mandating from above, the Recovery School District convened school operators to build consensus around shared systems. The result was something unprecedented in American education: a system that preserved school-level autonomy while creating citywide coherence around the functions that mattered most for equity and access. Schools could still choose their own curriculum, pedagogical approach, and staffing model. But they couldn’t cherry-pick students, ignore due process for discipline, or operate in isolation from families’ needs.

The Uncomfortable Truth

This evolution produced 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. It proved that choice and accountability could coexist with collaboration and local input.

Instead, it has been met with bipartisan silence.

For progressives, acknowledging New Orleans’s success would require confronting some uncomfortable truths. The Katrina recovery transformation was built on the elimination of teacher tenure, the dissolution of union contracts and the replacement of neighborhood school assignments with choice-based enrollment (subjects we cover at length in episodes 3 and 4 of Where the Schools Went). These are precisely the policies that national Democratic leaders now oppose.

President Joe Biden has called himself “.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren warns that charter expansion “strains the resources of school districts and leaves students behind.” The party has increasingly embraced a defensive posture that treats any deviation from the traditional district model or unequivocal support for teachers’ unions as an attack on public education itself.

But the old, pre-Katrina New Orleans had all the elements that progressives now champion as essential: a powerful teachers’ union, centralized administration, neighborhood school assignments and an elected school board. It also had some of the worst educational outcomes in the country.

For conservatives, the New Orleans model presents an equally uncomfortable problem. The city’s success came not through pure market forces but through a limited but aggressive government intervention. The state stepped in to close failing schools, coordinate enrollment, standardize discipline policies and redistribute resources based on student needs. They also relied heavily on government-mandated standardized testing to gauge school quality. This is hardly the small-government, laissez-faire approach that conservative education reformers typically champion.

Moreover, if more districts could become as responsive and effective as New Orleans, there would be less demand for the private school vouchers and education savings accounts that have become conservative orthodoxy. Why abandon public education if it can actually work?

The media, meanwhile, has moved on to more sensational stories. The current New Orleans narrative doesn’t generate clicks or cable news debates. It’s the educational equivalent of reporting on a well-functioning water treatment plant: critically important but insufficiently dramatic for our attention economy.

The Lessons We’re Ignoring

This silence comes at a significant cost. New Orleans offers genuine lessons for other cities struggling with educational inequity, not as a perfect model to replicate but as proof that dramatic improvement is possible when leaders are willing to experiment, listen and adapt.

The city’s approach suggests a middle path between the extremes that have dominated education debates: neither the rigid centralization that characterized many urban districts nor the unchecked autonomy that marked early charter experiments. Rather it demonstrates what former state superintendent John White called “coherence” — clear communication and a well-articulated philosophy around what government should control and what schools should decide for themselves. 

“You attracted some great people, many from within the system, many from without,” White explained. “You held them very accountable for doing their jobs. You resourced them proportionate to the challenges, and you set very clear boundaries around what you were gonna be involved with and what you weren’t gonna be involved with.”

This approach could work in districts with or without charter schools, with or without choice programs. It’s fundamentally about governance: being strategic about where to centralize and where to decentralize, building systems that support both equity and excellence, and creating space for both innovation and accountability.

A Model for Politics

Perhaps most importantly, New Orleans demonstrates something that feels almost impossible in our current political moment: the capacity for opposing sides to actually listen to each other and change course based on what they learn.

The reformers who dismissed community concerns about culture and representation gradually recognized that academic success without community buy-in was unsustainable and immoral. The community leaders who initially rejected any changes to traditional approaches came to appreciate that good intentions weren’t enough if children weren’t learning.

This wasn’t compromise for its own sake but genuine evolution based on evidence and experience. Today, many of the harshest critics of early reform efforts acknowledge the system’s improvements while continuing to push for better. Many reform leaders have become more sophisticated advocates for equity and community engagement.

As education advocate Chris Stewart, who grew up in New Orleans, put it: “We want to be transparent, but not loud. New Orleans should keep doing what they’re doing. They should keep winning and improving. But it doesn’t help to nationalize their story anymore.”

Perhaps Stewart is right that New Orleans benefits from flying under the national radar. But the rest of the country pays a price for ignoring what’s happened there. In an era when Americans seem incapable of finding common ground on any contentious issue, New Orleans offers a rare example of adversaries becoming collaborators, of ideology yielding to evidence, of a community choosing pragmatic progress over perfect ideological purity.

That’s a lesson worth learning, even if it makes everyone a little uncomfortable.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faced two urgent questions: Which schools would be rebuilt, and who would run them? In the Ninth Ward, few fights were as big as the one over George Washington Carver High School, a community anchor with deep history and proud traditions.

When the state chose Collegiate Academies, a high-performing charter network led mostly by people from outside of the city, the pushback was swift. Alumni rallied. Students staged a walkout during Collegiate Carver’s first year. The arguments weren’t primarily about academics, but about who gets to shape the future of a place like Carver, and whether a model built for results could ever feel like home to the people who had kept the school’s spirit alive. 

For many, the fight over Carver came to represent a larger fight over what kind of New Orleans would rise after the flood.

In time, the picture shifted. 

In this episode, you’ll hear from alumni, educators, and advocates about what can happen when people who once saw each other as opponents realize they’re fighting for the same thing. As Carver began pairing academic gains with a return to the traditions that had long defined the Green and Orange, something beautiful began to grow. “Episode Two: The Battle for Carver” traces that bumpy path and draws lessons that extend far beyond one school.

Listen to episode two above, and watch for the next chapter debuting on Aug. 26. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with The 74 and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans in August 2005, it destroyed homes and flooded neighborhoods. Eighty percent of the city was submerged, 1,800 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. It also upended a public school system already collapsing under the weight of decades of failure. 

In the years that followed, the system was not just rebuilt; it was radically reimagined.

The debut installment of revisits the years leading up to the storm and the questions New Orleans was already grappling with. Crumbling buildings, failing academics, and deep corruption had eroded trust with the public — so much so that the FBI had even set up shop inside the school district’s central office. The below episode explores the question: What happens when a public institution fails the people it was built to serve? 

And what should come next?

We hear the story from the people who lived it, like former school district employee Ken Ducote, who used code names and classic cars to pass documents to the FBI. We learn about the students who had to leave school to use the bathroom at Taco Bell, because the ones in their building were constantly broken. And we meet the valedictorian who was barred from graduating after failing the math exit exam — for the fifth time.

In episode one, we talk about what loss really meant after the storm and the rituals and routines that helped bind communities together. We hear from a child who couldn’t find his mother for more than a month, a teacher who sheltered with her family in a room in a church basement and the students who, even in new classrooms in new cities, hid under desks every time it rained.

But this isn’t just a story about what was lost or broken. It’s about what people built in the aftermath. Just days after the storm, a team of New Orleans educators reunited with their students in Houston, many of them living in the Astrodome, and opened a school for them. This new campus quickly grew into a community for kids who had lost nearly everything in their lives.

The episode doesn’t settle the debate about what came next. But it begins to unpack the competing beliefs surrounding New Orleans’ post-Katrina school reforms. Some hail the transformation as miraculous, a turnaround that turned one of the nation’s worst-performing districts into a national model. Others view it as a betrayal: a dismantling of community control, the displacement of Black educators, and the erasure of local identity. This episode is the first of five chapters that will help you decide which, if any, of those narratives is correct.

Listen to episode one above, and watch for episode two debuting on Aug. 19. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with The 74 and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

From community listening sessions to a plan for advertising the post, each step was standard operating procedure except one: An asterisk at the laying out a timeline stated that the board reserves the right to stop the process at any time and simply appoint someone. 

That note did little to quell concerns among leaders of the city’s schools — all but one of them independent public charter schools — who are still reeling from the fractious events that led up to the abrupt November departure of Avis Williams. The former superintendent resigned after a series of missteps that included an accounting error that obscured a deficit of at least $36 million.

Separately, district leaders have asked a court to enforce the terms of a $90 million settlement in a 2019 lawsuit filed against the city of New Orleans. The suit argues that the city illegally skimmed up to $150 million in taxes owed to schools. Among other things, at stake is an initial payment of $20 million, which district and board leaders planned to use to offset some of the $36 million budget shortfall. 

Williams became superintendent in the sixth year of New Orleans’s experiment as the nation’s only all-charter district. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the city had rebuilt its entire school system — at the time, one of the nation’s worst — into a totally new kind of system in which every school lived or died according to its performance contract. This autonomy-for-accountability bargain has led to , even as it remains controversial. 

A year ago, Williams — who had no prior experience with charter schools — mishandled a school closure, reversing her own decisions several times and leaving families scrambling to find alternatives. Critics argued the chaos was the result of her lack of understanding, two years into the job, of how NOLA Public Schools’ unique system worked. In the end, she solved the problems created by the botched process of revoking the charter of a failing school by replacing it with a traditional, district-run school — a move some board members had been pushing for. 

The challenges left unresolved — including the budget crisis, an overdue downsizing and longstanding problems with the district’s centralized enrollment system — will make the next superintendent’s job even more daunting, some members of the charter community say. They believe this makes it imperative that the next district leader is very familiar with the issues and the system’s capacity to address them.

Typically, the initial vetting of superintendent candidates is not done publicly. But two names circulating widely in New Orleans’s tight-knit education community potentially present a stark choice between a native of the city who helped to create the current system and a veteran administrator who was hired two years ago by Williams. 

The first, Sharon Clark, is a charter school network leader who played a prominent role in developing the city’s charter system and an elected member of the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. She is the principal of Sophie B. Wright High School, which had just become one of the city’s first charter schools when Hurricane Katrina hit. Clark was able to reopen the school within months, to serve the children of first responders. Last year, the high school earned a B overall on state report cards but an F for student performance on state exams. 

The second, NOLA Public Schools Interim Superintendent Fateama Fulmore, is a seasoned administrator who had little charter experience before being brought on by Williams two years ago. She has held top jobs in Omaha, Philadelphia and North Carolina, and last fall was a finalist for two other superintendencies. 

The members of the board that might or might not let the search play out have conflicting visions for the future of the school system. Some want the district to return to operating schools traditionally. Others are more concerned about downsizing and the financial crisis — uncovered last fall by charter finance officers — that threatens the schools’ ability to provide quality services. 

Board member Olin Parker has said Fulmore would be a very strong candidate to lead the district on a permanent basis. But Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, says Clark is a better pick, particularly given the urgent issues before the district. 

“We need someone with zero learning curve when it comes to relationships — community relationships, school relationships,” she says. “What is important now is to have someone from New Orleans.”

According to in The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, most community members who attended a January public meeting told the board they wanted a native of the city who grasps the complexities of the district’s decentralized structure. 

Outside of people who have worked in the schools, precious few truly understand the unique nature of New Orleans’s system. The NOLA Public Schools leader’s powers are limited by state law, so the superintendency is not a job for a conventional leader looking to make a mark. There are also complicated racial legacies. 

All this makes filling the district’s top job a tall order.   

When Williams was appointed in 2022, she was given contradictory mandates by board members and failed, despite repeated entreaties, to forge relationships with the charter network leaders who have long worked with the district to troubleshoot common issues. 

By law, the district is constrained from dictating how individual schools educate students. So NOLA Public Schools leaders have fewer, but more distinct, responsibilities than administrators in typical districts. They distribute local, state and federal funds, which schools may spend as they see fit, and they monitor whether individual schools are performing well enough to merit renewal of their charter. 

When Williams was hired, she was asked to tackle an ambitious list of novel problems that included figuring out how to downsize the district in the face of declining enrollment — a process that necessarily would require the cooperation of charter operators. She also was charged with fixing a centralized system for matching students with schools and confronting rising absenteeism and mental health issues. 

From the start, the New Orleans education community questioned whether Williams could make progress without collaborating with people whom traditional superintendents view as subordinates. Most of her daunting to-do list remains unfinished. 

A year ago, after a series of missteps involving the expected revocation of the ​​Lafayette Academy Charter School’s permission to operate, Williams ceded to pressure from then-board vice president Leila Jacobs Eames to open a traditionally operated school in its place — something the superintendent had previously said the district was ill-equipped to do. 

During an October meeting with district administrators, a number of charter school finance leaders realized NOLA Public Schools had miscalculated the amount of tax revenue it was set to receive from the city by what would later turn out to be at least $36 million. Williams resigned in November.

A month later, the broadcast outlet , via a public records request, that the board had approved a $335,000 settlement with Williams, which both parties had agreed not to disclose to the public.  

The CEO of Crescent City Schools, Kate Mehok helps coordinate the School Leadership Forum, a network of charter operators who have long met regularly to hammer out solutions to common problems. Many of New Orleans’s most effective innovations were hatched by the network.

Mehok says school leaders have told board members that they would like to meet with the candidates. “We’re hoping they choose to do this so that it’s clear to whoever becomes the superintendent that we’re an important constituent group,” she says. “Our thoughts about it matter, so we have asked to be formally included in giving feedback to the board.”&�Բ�����;

Dana Peterson, CEO of the school improvement and policy group New Schools for New Orleans, says he has told board members that they should spend time now clarifying what they want the next superintendent’s priorities to be. 

“Maybe [Williams] didn’t have the right set of experiences, maybe she didn’t have the right disposition towards our system,” he says. “But it was also true she was unclear on what direction the board wanted her to go on certain things.”

Applications for the position are open until March 16. Four days later, the board is scheduled to decide whether to interview any of the candidates. If finalists are selected and the process , public interviews could take place at board meetings over the following three weeks.

One thing is clear from the stories that populate this year’s list: Many of America’s schools are still grappling with the academic struggles that followed the pandemic – as well as the end of federal relief funds, which expired this fall. Student enrollments have yet to recover and many districts are facing – or will soon face – tough decisions about closures.

Meanwhile, some educators are testing innovative ways of teaching math, reading and science, hoping to gain back some of the academic ground lost since the COVID shutdowns. Technology is also playing a pivotal role in this post-pandemic world, with communities weighing the impact of cellphones and artificial intelligence on student learning and mental health.

November’s election – which featured debates over school choice, Christianity in public schools and the fate of the Department of Education – also made headlines here at The 74. And, as calls for cracking down on immigration grew even louder, we dug deep into the hurdles facing immigrant students and schools. 

Here’s a roundup of our most memorable and impactful stories of the year:

Exclusive: Thousands of Schools at Risk of Closing Due to Enrollment Loss

By Linda Jacobson

Long before districts close schools, enrollment loss takes a toll on staff and families, from combined classes to the loss of afterschool programs. This exclusive analysis by Linda Jacobson, based on Brookings Institution research, found that more than 4,400 schools lost at least one-fifth of their students during the pandemic — more than double the number during the pre-COVID period. The detailed look shows how the crisis is playing out at the school level and which districts face tough decisions about closures and cuts. 

Unwelcome to America’: Hundreds of U.S. High Schools Wrongfully Refused Entry to Older, Immigrant Student

By Jo Napolitano

The 74’s 16-month-long undercover investigation of school enrollment practices for older immigrant students revealed rampant refusals of teens who had a legal right to attend, shutting a door critical to success in America. Senior reporter Jo Napolitano called 630 high schools in every state and D.C. to test whether they would enroll a 19-year-old Venezuelan newcomer who had limited English language skills and whose education was interrupted after ninth grade. “Hector Guerrero” was turned down more than 300 times, including 204 denials in the 35 states and D.C., where high school attendance goes up to at least age 20. The 74’s investigation revealed pervasive hostility and suspicion toward these students in a particularly xenophobic era and a deeply arbitrary process determining their access to K-12 education.

Interactive: Which School Districts Do the Best Job of Teaching Kids to Read?

By Chad Aldeman

It’s not news that low-income fourth graders are years behind their higher-income peers in reading. But poverty is not destiny, and some schools and districts hugely outperform expectations. Working with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, contributor Chad Aldeman set out to find districts that are beating the odds and successfully teaching kids to read. From Steubenville City, Ohio, to Worcester County, Maryland, and across the country, click on their interactive map to find the highfliers in your state. 

Whistleblower: L.A. Schools’ Chatbot Misused Student Data as Tech Company Crumbled

by Mark Keierleber

In early June, a former top software engineer at ed tech startup, AllHere, warned Los Angeles district officials and others about student data privacy risks associated with the company’s AI chatbot “Ed.” The LA Unified School District had agreed to pay AllHere $6 million for the chatbot and the spring rollout of Ed was highly publicized, with L.A. schools chief Alberto Carvalho calling the chatbot’s student knowledge powers “unprecedented in American public education.” But, as Mark Keierleber reported, red flags soon began to emerge. The company financially imploded and its founder Joanna Smith-Griffin left the company. In November, federal prosecutors indicted her, accusing of defrauding investors of $10 million.

America’s Most Popular Autism Therapy May Not Work — and May Cause Serious Harms

by Beth Hawkins

Today, a child’s new autism diagnosis is frequently followed by a referral to a variation of an intervention called applied behavior analysis, or ABA, and four decades of pressure from parents and advocates has created a sprawling treatment industry. Yet, even as providers and lobbyists jockey to strengthen ABA’s dominance, autistic adults and researchers increasingly say there’s alarmingly little proof it’s effective — and mounting evidence it’s traumatizing. In an exclusive investigation, Beth Hawkins spoke with families, teachers and scholars about the growing controversy surrounding autism’s “gold standard” treatment. 

A Cautionary AI Tale: Why IBM’s Dazzling Watson Supercomputer Made a Lousy Tutor

by Greg Toppo

In 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer crushed Jeopardy! champions, raising hopes that it could help create a powerful tutoring system that would rival human teachers. But the visionary at the head of the effort watched as the project fizzled, the victim of AI’s inability to hold students’ attention. As new educational AI contenders like Khanmigo emerge, what lessons can they learn from the past? The 74’s Greg Toppo took a look at how IBM’s failed effort tempers today’s shiny AI promises.

State-by-State, How Segregation Legally Continues 7 Decades Post Brown v. Board

by Marianna McMurdock

Seventy years after the Supreme Court outlawed separating public school children by race, Marianna McMurdock sought to answer a pivotal question: How are some of the most coveted public schools in the U.S. able to legally exclude all but the most privileged families? Last spring, she spoke with researchers at the nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether, which published a report that examined the troubling laws, loopholes and trends that are undermining the legacy of Brown v. Board in each state. The researchers called for urgent legal reform to offset the impact that one’s home address has on enrollment, particularly as many districts have started considering closures.

Being ‘Bad at Math’ Is a Pervasive Concept. Can it Be Banished From Schools?

by Jo Napolitano

Are you bad at math? If you are, it’s likely that self-fulfilling seed got planted early. Many math education leaders are trying to uproot that thinking, arguing that any student can master the subject with the right accommodations and tutoring. Changing the bad-at-math mindset in U.S. schools, however, will not be easy, others warn. “We use math as a means to sort kids by who gets to be at the top and who gets to be at the bottom,” one math equity advocate told Jo Napolitano. 

Hope Rises in Pine Bluff: Saving Schools in America’s Fastest-Shrinking City

by The 74 Staff

Pine Bluff, Arkansas, earned the unwelcome distinction in the 2020 census of being America’s fastest-shrinking city, losing over 12% of its population in one decade. Amid this exodus of families, students and taxpayers, its school district had to navigate school closures, budget pressures and a state takeover. Throughout last winter, members of The 74’s newsroom embedded in Pine Bluff to report on the region’s trajectory. Here are some of the powerful stories they came back with: 

Kids, Screen Time & Despair: An Expert in the Economics of Happiness Echoes Psychologists’ Warnings About Tech

By Kevin Mahnken

A prominent economist has joined the growing chorus of experts warning against the dangers posed to youth mental health by screens and social media, reported Kevin Mahnken. New papers released by Dartmouth College professor Danny Blanchflower, a leading expert in the burgeoning field of happiness economics, suggest that the huge increase in screen time over the last decade has made the young more likely to despair than the middle-aged. 

Why Is a Grading System Touted as More Accurate, Equitable So Hard to Implement?

By Amanda Geduld

As educators push for more transparency in grading policies post-pandemic, some are turning to standards-based grading. When done correctly, it separates academic mastery from behavior and more accurately reflects what students know. But misunderstandings of the model, a lack of proper training, and a rush to adopt it often leads to messy implementation. Associate professor Laura Link told Amanda Geduld that as schools look to fix learning gaps, “standards-based grading is one that seems like it can be a quickly adopted effort. But it could backfire — and does backfire — very easily.”

Texas Seeks to Inject Bible Stories into Elementary School Reading Program

by Linda Jacobson

Last May, a sweeping redesign of Texas’ elementary school curriculum that used Bible stories to teach reading was unveiled. At the time, state education Commissioner Mike Morath described the changes as a shift toward a “classical model of education.” But the revisions raised questions about potential religious indoctrination and bias. Nevertheless, in November, the Texas Board of Education approved the new curriculum in a close vote. Linda Jacobson followed the story closely.

The Political War Over the Department of Education Is Only Beginning

By Kevin Mahnken 

Fresh from their November victories, Republicans are already working to help President-elect Donald Trump achieve his promise of abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. But research suggests that, while perceptions of the agency are mixed, the public is unlikely to back a sweeping course of elimination. “Saying you’ll get rid of it reads generically as being anti-education,” one political scientist told Kevin Mahnken. “That strikes me as a very heavy albatross to hang around your neck come the midterms.” 

18 Years, $2 Billion: Inside New Orleans’ Biggest School Recovery Effort in History

By Beth Hawkins

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed 110 New Orleans schools. Displaced families could not return until there were classrooms to welcome their kids, but no one had ever tried to rebuild an entire school system. While many of the buildings were moldering even before the storm, federal funds couldn’t be used to build something better. Some of the schools had landmark status and were of great historical significance. Eighteen years and $2 billion later, Beth Hawkins took a look at seven schools that illustrate how the district accomplished the task.

As Ryan Walters’ Right-Wing Star Rose, Critics Say Oklahoma Ed Dept. Fell Apart

By Linda Jacobson

Oklahoma state education chief Republican Ryan Walters has acted as a one-man publicity machine, a performance that’s earned him venomous foes and ardent fans who follow him with a near-religious fervor. But one casualty of his approach might be a functioning state education bureaucracy. Even Republican lawmakers have grown impatient, calling for a probe into how Walters handles state and federal funds. As Rep. Tammy West, a GOP incumbent running for re-election, told reporter Linda Jacobson, “Regardless of party, citizens want transparency, accountability and communication.”

AI ‘Companions’ Are Patient, Funny, Upbeat — and Probably Rewiring Kids Brains

By Greg Toppo

A college student relies on ChatGPT to help him make life decisions, including whether to break up with his girlfriend. Is this a future we feel good about? While AI bots and companions like ChatGPT, Replika and Snapchat’s MyAI, can offer support, comfort and advice, experts are beginning to warn of potential risks. The 74’s Greg Toppo talks to researchers and policy experts about what we should be doing to help make them safer.

Indiana Looks to Swiss Experts to Create Thousands of Student Apprenticeships

By Patrick O’Donnell

Indiana officials have turned to experts at the Swiss version of MIT for help in becoming a national career training leader by making apprenticeships available to thousands of high school students across the state. Indiana is the latest state to work with ETH Zurich — where Albert Einstein once studied — to develop ways to break down barriers between educators and businesses so that career training can be a large part of a reinvented high school experience, reported Patrick O’Donnell. 

Investigation: Nearly 1,000 Native Children Died in Federal Boarding Schools

By Marianna McMurdock 

Nearly 1,000 Native American children died while forced to attend government-affiliated boarding schools, according to a report published last summer by the Interior Department. The children are buried in 74 unmarked and marked graves, reported Marianna McMurdock, as tribes assess repatriation of remains. Nearly 19,000 children were estimated to be kidnapped, often at gunpoint, and enrolled in the schools with the aim of assimilation. “We [were] never called by our name, we were all called by our numbers,” said one survivor. 

The Nation’s Biggest Charter School System Is Under Fire in Los Angeles

By Ben Chapman 

The nation’s largest experiment with charter schools is no longer growing. These days, Los Angeles charter operators say they are just trying to survive. With tough new policies governing co-locations, falling enrollment, and a hostile district school board, charter leaders say they’ve never faced stronger headwinds, reported Ben Chapman. With enrollment plummeting across the district, some charter networks have recently announced closures while others have stopped submitting proposals for new campuses. “Now, particularly in L.A., our focus is not on growing,” said Joanna Belcher, chief impact officer for KIPP SoCal. 

Florida Students Seize on Parental Rights to Stop Educators from Hitting Kids

By Mark Keierleber 

Late last year, Florida senior Brooklynn Daniels was called to the principal’s office and spanked with a wooden paddle “that was thick like a chapter book.” Like in many enclaves that dot the Florida panhandle, Liberty County permits corporal punishment as a form of student discipline. But her flogging, the honors student said, went much further: She alleged sexual assault and filed a police report, reported Mark Keierleber. Daniels joined a student-led movement to change Florida law that has latched onto the GOP-led parental rights movement. 

Interactive: See How Student Achievement Gaps Are Growing in Your State

By Chad Aldeman

In 2012, then-President Barack Obama freed states from the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind in exchange for reforms related to standards, assessments and teacher evaluations. That relaxing of school and district accountability pressures corresponded with a decline in student performance across the country that is still being felt — achievement gaps are growing across subjects and all across the country. To illustrate these alarming discrepancies, contributor Chad Aldeman and Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, created an interactive tool that enables you to see what’s happening with student performance in your state.

Left Powerless: Non-English–Speaking Parents Denied Vital Translation Services

by Amanda Geduld

Flouting federal laws, K-12 public schools routinely fail to provide qualified interpreters to non-English-speaking families. Parents must instead rely on Google translate, their own kid or a bilingual staff member who isn’t a trained interpreter for issues as simple as their child’s absence for a day or as complex and intimidating as a special education meeting or a school disciplinary hearing. The problem is pervasive and vastly underreported, experts told Amanda Geduld. School leaders say they are trying their best, but lack the money and staffing to meet the need. 

Failed West Virginia Microschool Fuels State Probe and Some Soul-Searching

By Linda Jacobson

The West Virginia treasurer’s investigation into a microschool, funded with education savings accounts, offers a glimpse into an emerging market that has mushroomed since the pandemic. When the program shut down after a few months, parents were left demanding their money back and scrambling to find other arrangements for their children. The example, experts say, shows that it takes more than good intentions to provide a quality education program. As one parent told Linda Jacobson, “I should have seen the red flags.”

In the Rush to Covid Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners?

by Lauren Camera

The country’s youngest elementary school students suffered steep academic setbacks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – just like students in older grades. But new research shows that they aren’t catching back up to pre-pandemic levels in reading and math the way older students are. And when it comes to math, many are falling even further behind. “We were shocked when we first saw the data,” Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, told Lauren Camera.

Financial dysfunction is plaguing many city school districts.

is the most concerning. The district’s current $300 million budget gap is set to triple next year, which isn’t surprising since enrollment dropped 10% over six years as the district added staff. Now, it won’t close schools, won’t reduce the workforce and is being told by the mayor to give in to union demands for big raises. How would the math work? The mayor wants the district to take out a short-term, high-interest loan. Oh, and the city and district still need to work out how to .

is a close second. Two years ago, leaders agreed to a costly labor agreement that they admitted would require major cuts. But then they didn’t make those cuts. Instead, leaders exhausted all reserves and are borrowing money they’ll have to pay back by 2026. What’s the plan for the $100 million budget deficit? None yet. 

Why are financial crises suddenly common among large urban districts? Federal relief funds are part of the issue. Despite warnings that the money was temporary, many city districts used those one-time funds for salary raises and new staff hires.  

Some never had a plan for what would happen next. For example, when the federal relief funds ended, leaders in seemed surprised by a glaring $143 million hole in their budget forecast.

Of course, it’s never easy to cut labor. But avoidance makes it worse over time. In a recent hostage-like negotiation, the superintendent demanded $10 million from the city within 24 hours or the district would start issuing pink slips.

Falling birth rates are another factor. Over the long term, fewer kids means fewer dollars and a need for fewer schools. Closing schools is tough work, and many city districts especially aren’t up for it. In , schools are down to capacity. After pressing pause on its school closures, now has until Dec. 15 to come up with an alternative or face a potential .

Sometimes it’s basic financial mismanagement. For months, , inadvertently overpaid its staff, which, not surprisingly, has created a drain on the budget.

got behind on filing its financial reports and ended up with a state-imposed “corrective action plan” that involved repayment of $43 million. After the state imposed an external financial audit, the district has since .

In , where Las Vegas is located, “miscalculations” keep shifting the budget gap by tens of millions. And because New Orleans dragged its feet on surfacing a $20 million miscalculation of local tax revenue, each of its schools must cut some six or more staff midyear.

In St. Louis, the issue appears to be an unwarranted spending spree by a newly hired — and now fired — superintendent.

All these financial messes are leaving kids in the lurch. The dysfunction destabilizes the district, often leaving little time to make consequential decisions like staffing cuts or school closures. Employees are demoralized. Trust in the system erodes. Families with means pursue other options. Most of all, the financial upheaval takes all eyes off the district’s primary responsibility: student learning.

What is it about city school systems that predisposes them to such financial dysfunction? One obvious factor is that leaders are underprepared to manage complex financial operations that can involve upward of a billion dollars — or more — in public funds. Coming off a that outpaced inflation, few of today’s leaders have any experience with making hard budget tradeoffs. As forecasts change, leaders ignore the signs, stall or, in the case of , pass off major budget-cutting to a task force of 40 volunteers.  

Another reality is the intense, unbalanced political dynamics common in today’s urban centers. Powerful labor groups make unaffordable demands. Vocal parents resist program reductions or school closures. Some elected board members reverse planned cuts, imagining they’re defending constituents from the heartless bean counters in the district’s finance office. The good finance leaders flee the turmoil. Eventually, the district runs out of beans.

Strong district leadership should be an antidote. Leaders need to be , sharing options and explaining financial tradeoffs. They need to make hard choices, laser-focused on what’s best for students. They need to safeguard their schools’ financial integrity, ensuring that today’s decisions don’t erode the education of tomorrow’s students.

Missing in action are states. Typically, legislatures throw up their hands and bemoan local control. Many are wary of state takeover policies in part because of their of impacts on students.

But there are . Requiring multi-year budget forecasts and minimum levels of fiscal reserves are a start. States can then adopt policies that get triggered when districts overspend and deplete those reserves, each with the goal of helping the district get back on track. With some 80% to 90% of expenses going to personnel, states could mandate that labor contracts be reopened for renegotiation. They could appoint a financial auditor to communicate honestly about district finances. Also triggered could be a requirement that the board and leaders undergo finance training and hold more frequent meetings until budget gaps are addressed.

Standing by while finances erode further in these urban districts is unfair to the many students who depend on their leaders to manage the billions being deployed for their education. Continuing to look the other way will make things worse. City kids need the adults to figure this out.

On Nov. 8, Orleans Parish School Board leaders informed school leaders that the projected deficit had grown to at least $36 million and could still increase in coming months. To offset the shortfall, which comes to at least $1,000 per student, district leaders hope to tap reserves to loan schools some $15 million. On Nov. 14, Superintendent Avis Williams announced her resignation, effective Dec. 1. 

Three months into the academic year, New Orleans school leaders have learned that because of a series of miscalculations by district officials, their funding will drop dramatically, starting with their October payment.

The early back-of-the-envelope math is alarming, according to financial consultants who help the city’s schools manage their budgets. The initial estimate is that annual funding will fall by at least $20 million.

NOLA Public Schools leaders say they are working with city officials, who collect the taxes that help support what was until recently an all-charter district, to pin down the exact amount. But so far, there has not been an official calculation of how big the error is.

In the meantime, school administrators say they have only rough, varying estimates of how much lower their actual payments will be, no idea how long the shortfall may affect their budgets or whether their allotments will continue to decrease as the district reworks its ledgers. 

“The impact of $700 to $900 per pupil for a school of 500 students could translate to the loss of six or seven teacher positions,” says Joe Keeney, founder of 4^th Sector Solutions, a consulting firm that provides charter schools with financial and administrative services. “It could be upward of $400,000 for some [individual] schools.” 

The timing makes the red ink especially problematic. New Orleans schools, like many throughout the country, are struggling to survive the so-called fiscal cliff, the one-two punch of enrollment declines — which translate to less state funding — and the end of federal pandemic recovery aid.

“We are a quarter of the way into our school year,” says Rhonda Kalifey-Aluise, CEO of the city’s largest charter network, KIPP New Orleans Schools. “There is no way to say, ‘Okay, I have to cut $500-$800-$1,000 a kid.’ It’s impossible to do. These numbers are so big.”&�Բ�����;

At an Oct. 22 school board meeting, Superintendent Avis Williams said she is researching options. “I do for this happening because it was on the district’s watch,” she said.

NOLA Public Schools typically tells its 67 charter schools in March how much money they can expect to receive for the following school year, including local property and sales tax revenue. They use those estimates to draw up their budgets for the year. Schools get the funds in monthly payments, and near the end of the academic year, small expected differences between projections and actual revenue are reconciled.

For fiscal year 2024, the district’s finance team projected an 18% increase in income from property taxes and a 3% hike in sales tax revenue. But it based those estimates on the full calendar year, instead of the fiscal year starting in July. Property tax collections actually rose by slightly less than 9% while sales taxes fell 1%. 

District leaders didn’t disclose the until an Oct. 9 meeting attended only by a handful of charter finance leaders, according to Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, and some of those present. 

“Moreover, the district’s limited information was presented without any definitive statements about how this would impact schools, why the over-projections occurred or what actions they should take, leaving schools to speculate on the next steps,” Roemer wrote in an Oct. 17 to district leadership. “Finally and significantly, the district has yet to formally notify all school leaders of this urgent matter.”

In response to questions from The 74, a district spokesperson said the discrepancy in revenue projections was identified earlier this month: “As soon as we realized the variance between the projected and actual revenues, we began working with our auditors and the city of New Orleans to verify the data and make necessary adjustments.”&�Բ�����; 

But at the Oct. 22 board meeting, Comptroller Nyesha Veal said NOLA Public Schools staff began receiving monthly updates from the city in May indicating the March projections were incorrect. At the board meeting two days later, Veal said she had not realized that no one communicated the shortfall to school officials until she met with them Oct. 9. 

At a meeting Oct. 23 with board members and school leaders, district staff blamed the mistake on a “personnel issue” they refused to describe, according to association staffers present. They also said the unspecified issue should have triggered a review.   

In her , Roemer wrote that there were similar discrepancies last year: “Last spring, the district also alerted school finance directors that the district made over-projection miscalculations for the 2023 fiscal year and erred in how they presented and utilized the 2023 fiscal year audited actuals of revenue collected in the 2022 fiscal year.”

District officials dispute this, but KIPP New Orleans CFO Katie Walmsley and other school finance chiefs say they have been told multiple times that discrepancies from past years persist. Most recently, at the Oct. 23 meeting, Veal again told the CFOs there were miscalculations for fiscal year 2023. A district report due to the state at the end of the calendar year will contain audited totals, Walmsley says.

Among the examples Walmsley cited were miscounts of different groups of students who receive extra per-pupil funding. “District staff have confused themselves by not being extra-precise,” she says. “It’s only coming to light because us CFOs have asked questions such as, ‘Why did the number of over-aged students double year-over-year?’ ” 

Reacting to the news at public meetings held Oct. 22 and 24, members of the Orleans Parish School Board called for the district to hire a , form a working group of outside experts and school leaders, come up with a plan for communicating with school administrators and produce a report explaining what went wrong. 

“As a board, we are focused on getting to the root of the problem, finding a solution going forward and communicating with all stakeholders,” says Olin Parker, chair of the board’s finance committee. “What I have pushed the superintendent on is that if there is ultimately a negative impact, we also need to bear some of the brunt of this.”

The lack of communication, Roemer wrote in her letter, is just the latest of a series of episodes in which the district — which hired Williams as superintendent in July 2022 — has not engaged school leaders about citywide issues. This is a major departure from past practices in what was an all-charter school system from 2017 until this academic year.  

The former chief of Selma City Schools in Alabama, Williams had no experience with charter schools when she took the reins in New Orleans. Before her appointment, district and charter community administrators had met frequently to troubleshoot common problems. 

Policies crafted with the input of charter leaders, who operate independently of the district, include processes for enrolling and disciplining students and holding schools accountable for academic and financial performance. 

Roemer and others have said Williams has not engaged with school leaders on . “Recent failures by district staff and systems have caused major issues,” Roemer wrote in her Oct. 17 letter, including problems with enrollment, absenteeism, accidental data breaches, funding for student support programs and “misinformation about laws applicable to charter schools.”&�Բ�����;

During a board meeting last winter, Roemer complained about poor communications regarding a series of decisions Williams made on the fate of an underperforming school that by law was likely to lose its charter. The superintendent ultimately chose to open a new, traditional, district-run school in the failing charter’s building.

The move came after months of confusion as to how the district planned to deal with declining enrollment. In February, its nonprofit partner, New Schools for New Orleans, warned that its 4,000 vacant seats had . 

On average, each of the city’s K-8 schools had space for 550 students but enrolled 484, leaving a funding gap of $625,000. In opening a new school, Williams missed an opportunity to lower the overall vacancy rate through attrition, critics charged. 

“In short,” Roemer wrote, “this district has yet to properly or successfully execute many of the functions they are directly responsible for as a school itydistrict — and functions that had previously worked until now.”

Schools do their own budget projections involving state and federal aid but depend on the district for local tax calculations. Because Louisiana, like many states, sends extra aid to districts with low property taxes — and because discrepancies from fiscal year 2023 are still being tallied — the mistake will also cost schools an as-yet unknown amount of state aid. 

In addition, schools that enroll large numbers of children with profound needs will suffer disproportionately large losses because New Orleans apportions money based on a long list of weights — extra funding intended to offset the cost of educating students with disabilities, who are learning English, are over-aged and have been suspended or involved with the criminal justice system, among other challenges. 

Because the combination of enrollment declines and the end of one-time COVID aid could put schools on shaky financial footing, 4^th Sector Solutions had already urged its clients to shift from annual budgets to multiyear plans, says Jonathan Tebeleff, vice president of the firm’s New Orleans finance team: “We’ve been working to put them in a position where they won’t sail over that fiscal cliff.”&�Բ�����;

Some older schools or those in large networks have built up reserve funds that may help cushion the blow, but newer, standalone charter schools don’t, says Kalifey-Aluise. Even for those schools that have rainy-day funds, spending down savings can leave them vulnerable in emergencies. 

“KIPP has a board policy of putting money away every year, but some of that is literally reserved for disasters, like hurricanes,” she says. “The conversation we haven’t had is whether there is a systemwide way to make people whole?”

Unlike a traditional district, which can move money from one budget line to another when need be, NOLA Public Schools has relatively little financial wiggle room. Its main source of revenue is the 2% of each school’s allotment it receives as a charter authorizer. Because the schools operate autonomously, there are relatively few central office staff.  

In order to pay for district assistance with issues such as teacher recruitment, student mental health support and specialized staff training, New Orleans charter schools contribute to a . It’s not clear whether that account can be tapped to help make up the tax shortfall.

Also unclear is how the red ink will impact schools slated for charter renewal in the next couple of years. By law, fiscal health is a large part of the evaluation that is used to determine whether a school’s charter will be renewed or rescinded. 

In an Oct. 25 letter, New Schools for New Orleans CEO Dana Peterson told city school leaders that the organization — which serves as the school system’s research and policy partner — had agreed to pay for an outside expert to help the district improve its finance operations. School leaders will meet with him in early November to discuss the impact of the shortfall.    

At the Oct. 24 board meeting, district finance officials said they hoped to have hard numbers by Oct. 30, so schools can begin planning how to make up the deficit.

The 2005 hurricane and subsequent flood destroyed or severely damaged 110 of the 126 public school buildings operating at the time. Bringing them back was a linchpin of efforts to rebuild the city. Displaced families could not return until there were classrooms to welcome their kids. 

The logistical challenges of the $2 billion effort were unprecedented. No one had ever tried to rebuild an entire school system. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was mostly in the business of repairing or replacing houses and residential buildings, and was notorious for doing so excruciatingly slowly. 

Federal law specifically prohibited taking advantage of a disaster to build something better than what had been destroyed. Decades of official neglect, however, had left most New Orleans schools moldering long before the storm. Students sat in classrooms that didn’t meet fire and electrical codes, lacked window panes and were inaccessible to people with disabilities. 

Adding to the challenge were New Orleanians’s passionate attachments — some generations old — to the legacies of individual schools, as well as the city’s racialized education history. Strict historic preservation rules protected elements of devastated buildings that needed wholesale upgrades. Officials would have to decide how to handle dozens of buildings that were the sites of important firsts — the first school for Black children, the first named for a Black community leader, the first to be forcibly integrated. 

Officials quickly realized they would need to rebuild in three overlapping phases. First, on a ridiculously compressed timeline, they needed to construct or rehab a handful of schools so neighborhoods could start to revive. Then, they would have to determine which buildings should be torn down and which — and how many — replaced. Finally, they would have to figure out which could simply be refurbished and which historic — and often protected — landmarks merited a painstaking rebirth.    

It was a massive, hydra-headed puzzle — but also a milestone. “For years, people have commented on the unacceptable physical condition of our schools,” then-Louisiana Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek said in 2007, as he announced the rebuilding plan. “We want these schools to stand as a symbol of the value we place on our children and their education — and as a symbol of what’s possible for the future of our city.”&�Բ�����; 

Here are the stories of seven buildings, each illustrating a different aspect of the 18-year effort.  

Click the arrows for details on each building.

McDonogh 35

New Orleans’s first public high school for Black students is still its crown jewel

For decades, New Orleans’s location made it an ideal slave-trading hub, allowing a particularly aggressive enslaver named John McDonogh to become very rich. When he died in 1850, he willed the fortune he had amassed buying and selling hundreds of people to the city, decreeing that it be used to do the unthinkable: finance the creation of public schools open to children “of both sexes of all Classes and Castes of Color.”&�Բ�����;

The schools opened with his money all bore his name, distinguished from one another by sequential numbers. Opportunities for Black children came and went, though, until 1917 — when a group of African Americans persuaded school leaders to convert McDonogh 13, whose white students were being moved into a new facility, into the first public high school for Black students. McDonogh 35, as the building was rechristened, became — and remains — the city’s crown jewel, boasting generations of graduates who rose to prominence in politics, civic leadership and the arts. 

The basic bargain — moving Black children into a dilapidated facility when white children were given a new one — persisted for the better part of a century. During that time, McDonogh 35 occupied four buildings. Each bore the same name and number — an unusual and historically significant protocol that persisted until the racial upheaval that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020.  

The original McDonogh 35 building was destroyed by Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Classrooms were then set up in an old courthouse. In 1972, it got a new, squat cement block building erected using a Tulane University design for bunkers.

The third McDonogh 35 came through Katrina in decent shape — which made the building an essential part of the reconstruction campaign. It reopened within a few months. But as the Orleans Parish School Board and the state Recovery School District began making a master plan for rebuilding the entire school system, planners realized the best use of the windowless facility was as a swing space — temporary quarters for a succession of schools whose own buildings were being replaced or rehabbed. 

In 2015, McDonogh 35 got a gleaming, modern facility of its own. In 2020, the school board — which has the power to rename the buildings, though not the schools they house —  dubbed the new building 35 College Preparatory High School. But McDonogh 35’s historic name remains because of its importance to the community. Today, it is the only school left that bears the enslaver’s name.

Finally, the architects and engineers turned their attention to the fate of the school’s old, bunker-like building. As it happened, the onetime home of the first Black high school would be the site of the last of 89 reconstructions.

L.B. Landry High School

A gleaming, not entirely practical, palace — built around an old magnolia

Displaced families could not move back to New Orleans until there were classrooms for their children. Because the flood had decimated many neighborhoods, the first few schools needed to be reopened in different portions of the city, so that as many communities as possible could welcome residents back home. In 2007, local and state education officials announced a plan to reconstruct five schools — one in each of the city’s electoral wards — as quickly as possible. With classrooms to welcome children distributed throughout the city, refugees from Katrina could begin returning to New Orleans.  

L.B. Landry High School was not originally among the first five. Even before the storm, its neighborhood, Algiers, had more schools than it needed. Controversially, the “new” New Orleans was projected to be smaller. The building, which was moldering even before Katrina and dealt a death knell when FEMA used it as a staging ground, was unsalvageable. 

Enraged, Landry’s alumni fought fiercely to bring back the school — the city’s second high school for Black students, the first on the west bank of the Mississippi and named for a revered Black physician. They won. 

It took three years of pitched public battles, but a plan emerged, and it was clear the new Landry had to be a lot of things. It had to echo the layout of the old Landry. In contrast to the ugly, squat building it would replace, it had to be sleek and modern, a down payment on a different future. 

Its design had to be complete in five months. After that, construction had to start right away and could last no longer than 20 months. It had to be hurricane-proof, its electricals and other critical infrastructure housed on the third floor — far above any floodwaters — and protected by exterior cladding able to withstand 125 mph winds.

Finally, because the community was determined to salvage something from Landry’s old campus, it had to be built around the only thing spared by the wrecking ball: a magnolia tree. 

Completed in 2010 at a cost of $55 million, the new school is a soaring three-sided U built around an enormous magnolia. Inside is space for a health clinic, a community theater and classrooms that could be used by a local community college or university to hold classes in the somewhat isolated neighborhood. 

At the back of the courtyard, three stories of windows illuminate a soaring atrium. They reveal a sweeping staircase leading up to a broad hall painted with social justice quotes in yellow and orange. Catwalks cross overhead, connecting the wings of the schools. The space glows, signaling the importance of the school to the community. 

It’s beautiful, but dogged by design flaws, the school’s leaders say. It is impossible to get a mechanical lift onto the staircase’s landings, for example, so changing the bulbs that cast the golden light requires building a temporary two-story scaffolding, which can cost $12,000. 

As Landry was being reopened, officials still needed to address the neighborhood’s excess school capacity. In 2013, the state Recovery School District combined a rival high school, O. Perry Walker, located just a mile away, with Landry in the new building. The district renamed the building housing the consolidated schools Lord Beaconsfield Landry-Oliver Perry Walker College and Career Preparatory High School. 

Landry boosters howled again, but this time to no avail. That changed in 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd racial reckoning, when the district redesignated 27 schools that had been named for Confederate leaders and enslavers. Noting that Walker had been a district superintendent who reinforced segregation, the school’s operator changed its name back to L.B. Landry High School. 

Andrew Wilson Elementary

Seamless wasn’t the goal in joining old with new

One of the first five schools rebuilt, Andrew Wilson Elementary originally consisted of five structures located in the Broadmoor neighborhood, a designated National Register Historic District. The main building was the only part of the school not too damaged during Katrina to rehab. 

Deemed to have architectural significance, the facility was beautiful — but without its outbuildings, nowhere near large enough to meet the demand from returning families. Officials decided to restore the original building and to add onto it. 

Opened in 1922, the original L-shaped building is a mashup of styles, drawing on Spanish Colonial, Classic Revival and Italian Renaissance designs that incorporate copper gutters, ornate rafter tails and high ceilings atop transom windows.  

As was typical of New Orleans schools designed at that time, the main entrance was in the middle of the front façade, on the second floor. (The first floor is often referred to as the basement.) To reach the double doors, students walked up two staircases that fan across the front of the building in an inverted V shape. At its top, the front door opened onto a wide hallway leading to the office, located behind an expanse of mullioned windows. 

Today, visitors walk past the façade, lovingly restored, and around the corner to a new, modern main entrance that sits at the place where the old building meets the new one. To the left of the new entry, an interior staircase climbs up what had been the old building’s end wall. From the landing at the top, two hallways branch off at right angles. 

The old one, a wide path of polished wood, leads to the main office and sun-drenched classrooms beyond. The other is a long terrazzo hall that passes through a new L-shaped building, past a library, gym and lunchroom, among other modern spaces. The joined structures — one with a red tile roof and one corrugated steel — form a rectangle that surrounds a courtyard.

Both wings are beautiful and functional, but the places where Andrew Wilson is most visually interesting are the seams. At the top of the new stairs that lead to the office, where the addition meets the original structure, the ornate, curved wooden eaves of the old building extend out into the new space, covered by the roof of the newer wing.

The space covered by the old and new roofs is bridged by three stories of windows that look out onto the new courtyard. On the second floor, it houses a cozy, sun-drenched reading nook. Opposite is the door to a spacious, modern library. 

The windows that previously let light into the rooms at the end of the old building now frame an illustrated timeline of the surrounding community dating to the 1500s, tracing Louisiana’s admission to the Union, America’s 1815 defeat of the British in the Battle of New Orleans and Broadmoor’s slow evolution from a lake to a diverse, middle-class neighborhood that prizes its education legacy.

McDonogh 19 Elementary

In the shadow of a breached levee, a civil rights icon turned her school into a museum

Six years after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, a frustrated federal judge gave a recalcitrant Orleans Parish School Board a deadline for taking a first step toward integration: Nov. 14, 1960.

That morning, federal marshals escorted four Black first graders — born the year Brown was decided — into two all-white elementary schools. Most famously, Ruby Bridges was led into William Frantz Elementary School, in the Upper Ninth Ward. 

Simultaneously, in the Lower Ninth, 6-year-olds Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost were walked past a mob hurling epithets and rotting fruit, up 18 steps and through the front door of McDonogh 19. As the , their white classmates left, never to return. 

The McDonogh 3, as they would come to be known, attended school alone for a year and a half — joined only by the U.S. marshals protecting them and the protesters who showed up every day. For their safety, the windows were papered over and recess was held in the auditorium. 

Desegregation orders notwithstanding, in 1962 the school board declared McDonogh 19 “for the exclusive use of Negro children.” The girls went on to integrate another elementary school, and then different middle and high schools. For 50 years, whites continued to leave for suburbs and private schools. 

Katrina’s floodwaters first breached levees perilously close to McDonogh 19, which had just closed to students because of changing demographics. The storm devastated the neighborhood, which has yet to recover. Eventually, it became clear there was no real possibility McDonogh 19 would reopen as a school. It did, however, have tremendous value as a historic landmark. 

After the storm, Tate, set out to buy the building, name it after herself and her classmates and turn it into a civil rights memorial. However, the Orleans Parish School Board was prohibited from selling it. Undaunted, Tate formed a foundation and spent nine years .

The district eventually transferred ownership to the city housing agency, which was able to sell it to Tate and a community development group that specializes in the “adaptive reuse” of historic sites. The agreement called for creating 25 affordable senior apartments on the second and third floors. 

To generate the $16 million needed to buy and renovate the building, Tate pulled together 60 funding sources, ranging from corporate donors to affordable housing tax credits. The TEP Center — TEP for Tate, Etienne and Prevost — opened in May 2022. 

Visitors now enter not via the iconic staircase the girls and their marshals used, but through a door at its base. One flight up, the original main entrance is ringed with artists’ renderings of what the hallway will look like once Tate has raised the $5 million needed to complete the museum portion of the property. The intent, she says, is for visitors to feel what it was like for a first-grader to walk into the school. 

The halls branching off from the school’s office are behind glass walls. Everything in front of the dividers is protected by the landmark’s 2016 inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. Behind the walls are classroom doors, which actually open onto apartments. A mural on the back of the building depicts the McDonogh 3 as both girls and women.

Downstairs, the classroom where the girls spent their days contains a single, child-sized wooden desk. It’s not original — the flood spared nothing inside the building. It’s placed there as a stark visual suggestion of what it felt like to be one of the three first graders, day after day.

Booker T. Washington High School

A new school built around an auditorium where history was made

In the early 1900s, with just a handful of Black public schools in existence, New Orleans’s African-American residents began a decades-long push for a vocational school. Fearing job competition, whites objected. Despite securing a $125,000 grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund — a philanthropy backing construction of Black schools throughout the South — the district stalled. For decades. 

Thanks to the federal Works Progress Administration, Booker T. Washington Senior High School finally opened in 1942, built on a toxic dump. It quickly became a crucial venue where groups pushing for a better education for Black children could meet.

For years, its 2,000-seat auditorium — designed by the architect who drafted the eclectic plans for Andrew Wilson Elementary — was the largest space in the city for Blacks to congregate, making it an epicenter of the community’s artistic and political lives. Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles and Dizzy Gillespie were among the artists who performed at the school. Martin Luther King Jr. preached there. 

A history of the school compiled by the African American High Schools in Louisiana Before 1970 blog catalogues numerous in the auditorium, including the 1945 annual assembly of the NAACP’s local chapter. 

“With nationally known figures in attendance, the organization delivered a powerful message to the community in which it outlined its goals for the Blacks in America,” the history notes, quoting the Times-Picayune newspaper. 

“Specifically, at this meeting the NAACP called for ‘the right of franchise, better housing conditions, equal education and economic advantages, and opportunities to serve community police and fire departments’ for all New Orleans’ African-American residents.”&�Բ�����;

Despite having fallen into disrepair, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. Within two years, however,  enrollment had dwindled from 1,600 to fewer than 400 students, and Booker T. posted the lowest test scores in the state.

After Katrina, the building sat vacant and decaying for seven more years before everything but the historic performance space was torn down. In 2015, alumni backed by the KIPP charter school network lobbied to have a new high school built around the auditorium. 

Figuring out how to construct a state-of-the art facility without running afoul of historic preservation rules took years. The school’s alums, who refer to themselves as Washingtonians, had to work with multiple bureaucracies, including the National Park Service, to iron out everything from cleaning up the old dump to installing modern technology in the auditorium without disturbing its protected features. Completed in 2020, the new Booker T. Washington cost $55 million. 

The renovated theater includes a sweeping, two-tier balcony covered by a gently curved ceiling punctuated by ornate tile. The tile reappears in the lobby — which doubles as a student health and dental clinic during the school day — and in the original entry vestibule, where Art Deco scrollwork has been preserved.

Because of quirks in how the rules are written, the auditorium by itself no longer qualifies for historic status. Even the smallest details were faithfully restored, in accordance with preservation guidelines. But the loss of the surrounding building meant the school no longer met the National Register’s requirement that the site’s “context” also survive. 

Boosters still say the decision to replace everything but the auditorium was the right one. At the end of the process, the alumni association, state Recovery School District and KIPP produced a documentary detailing the school’s history. 

Martin Behrman Charter School

Bringing a school into the 21st century when nearly every detail is untouchable

The restoration of what is now called Martin Behrman Charter School Academy of Creative Arts and Sciences was one of the hardest of the rebuilding campaign. Individual elements of the structure ranging from huge, multi-paned windows to teacher mailboxes are specifically protected. 

Because of this, the renovation was expensive — at $40 million, it cost more than many of the district’s completely new schools — and painstaking. The complexity is one reason that the restoration was the second-to-last completed, with the school reopening to students in January 2023. 

Located a stone’s throw from Landry, Behrman’s Spanish Colonial Revival building might be the most beautiful of the renovations. Built in 1931, it was heralded as one of the city’s finest facilities, with then-cutting edge spaces such as laboratories and equipment for home economics courses. Now, it serves students from preschool through eighth grade. 

By the time Katrina hit, its modern sheen had faded. The building was too small to house everything needed by a contemporary school. 

The renovation challenges are visible from the street. To one side of an ornate, three-story entrance is a bell tower. Though no one seems to remember why, the clock was dismantled during World War II, rebuilt in 1997 and in disrepair when the renovation began. To restore it, the renovators called on White’s Clock and Carillon, a company that specializes in restoring clock towers. 

To get inside, visitors pass through a security gate in a tiny vestibule — a sub-optimal design decision forced by the original floor tile inches beyond it, which can’t be touched. Nor can the detailed plasterwork in the lobby — or, for that matter, the plain plaster on the walls. 

Also protected: huge wooden windows, tile mosaic floors on the second and third stories and ornamental molding in an auditorium that rivals Booker T. Washington’s. A balcony adjoins a spacious room that teachers use for breaks and prep, but it’s uncomfortably hot most of the year and there is no allowable way to put up an awning or pergola for shade. 

There was no way to create the spaces needed by the school’s early childhood education program, such as a tiny restroom in each classroom, in the protected building. So designers built an annex across the street that houses a gym, cafeteria and eight kindergarten and preschool classrooms. While the work took place, classes were held in one of the school system’s swing spaces, a school that was minimally functional but slated for permanent closure.

Martin Behrman’s leaders were ready to move in the second the last coat of paint was dry. Students went home for the 2022 holiday break from the school’s temporary home, the old Oliver Perry Walker facility that was merged with nearby Landry. When they came back a couple of weeks later, it was to two completely outfitted buildings.     

In 2023, the reconstruction project was recognized with the Louisiana Landmarks Society’s . 

Dr. Alice Geoffray High School/New Orleans Career Center

New Orleans’s last school rehab capitalized on a charmless bunker’s good bones

In total, between 2005 and 2023, the Orleans Parish School Board and the state Recovery School District constructed or rehabbed 89 buildings, 32 of them wholly new. Apart from the unprecedented engineering, architectural and equity challenges, officials had to figure out where schools would hold classes while their permanent homes were being rebuilt.

Sometimes that meant FEMA trailers. Other times, a school community would use a swing space — a building in good enough shape to be habitable but not a gem. The windowless cement box built in 1972 for the school system’s pride and joy, McDonogh 35, was one such space. As the end of the reconstruction campaign approached, planners turned their attention to its long-term fate. 

At the time of the building’s design, Hurricane Betsy’s devastation was still fresh. Accordingly, the structure was constructed using Tulane University plans for creating fallout shelters, which gave it a feature most people would not stop to consider: the sturdiest foundation in the district. That made it uniquely suited to house not a school per se, but a center that could provide career and technical education to students throughout the district. 

In addition to its literal strength, the school had a huge concrete courtyard, spaces big enough to accommodate heavy equipment and a decent electrical grid. With some work, it would make a perfect high-tech career training facility.

And so the old McDonogh 35 building became Dr. Alice Geoffray High School, home to the independent, nonprofit New Orleans Career Center. Louisiana has a high need for workers who have strong skills but not necessarily a four-year degree. Training programs for welding, robotics, health care and similar jobs are in great demand but too expensive for individual high schools to offer.

A wing dedicated to health careers has functional hospital beds, nursing stations and exam rooms. Welding bays have been built in a cavernous space on the ground floor. A spacious, second-floor commercial kitchen for culinary arts trainees is located near a service elevator so food can be delivered to a bank of walk-in coolers. 

Throughout the building, the mechanicals are exposed. Trainees, as students are called, can work on exposed water pipes, electrical panels, heating and cooling equipment and IT infrastructure. The central courtyard is still open, but it has a roof and a fan so would-be carpenters and other tradespeople-in-training get early exposure to working in Louisiana’s climate. 

Lastly, the bunker-like building got windows. Lots of windows. 

Layout by Eamonn Fitzmaurice and Meghan Gallagher

In August, New Orleans Public Schools will open a district-operated school named for Leah Chase, a late civil rights activist and revered matriarch of a culinary dynasty. The school will eventually serve 320 students from pre-K through eighth grade, with an emphasis on the city’s culture and history. Located in a historic building, it will replace the failing Lafayette Academy Charter School. 

As they hire Leah Chase’s teachers, pick its uniforms and curricula and arrange for transportation and lunches, district leaders are also creating the administrative jobs other school systems rely on to oversee individual buildings. These central office departments will make it easier for NOLA Public Schools to open more “direct-run” schools, Superintendent Avis Williams says.

You read that right: New Orleans’ love-it-or-hate-it, seven-year experiment as the nation’s first all-charter school system is coming to a close. Going forward, it will act both as a charter school authorizer and an old-fashioned school district.

In principle, the city’s charter school advocates are not opposed. 

“I am personally governance-agnostic,” says Sabrina Pence, CEO of FirstLine Schools, which runs five schools in the city. “We wish the district every success in direct-running its first school in a while.”&�Բ�����;

Head of the Louisiana Public Charter School Association, Caroline Roemer says she is confident Leah Chase will be well run.

Tulane University professor Doug Harris, who produced numerous school improvement studies that helped shape the unique system, says the decision to create the infrastructure to direct-run schools will give the district flexibility to respond to unanticipated challenges.

NOLA Public Schools’ decision to return to running schools could be a game-changing inflection point in one of the most closely watched school-improvement efforts in history. After Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005, the state of Louisiana seized control of most of the schools in what was then one of the lowest-performing districts in the country. 

In the years that followed, the state Recovery School District created a totally new kind of system in which every school lived or died according to its performance contract. Schools that don’t meet those standards lose the charters that allow them to operate — an autonomy-for-accountability bargain that remains controversial even as it has led to . The state returned New Orleans public schools to local control in 2016.

Two years ago, the Orleans Parish School Board appointed a new superintendent with a track record of success and no experience with charter schools. The board handed Avis Williams a formidable to-do list that included a dramatic downsizing to address enrollment losses and other sweeping decisions that would shape the next chapter of the school governance experiment. Progress has been halting.

In December, tensions surrounding the district’s future came to a head when Williams — under conflicting pressures from board members and seemingly without understanding the nuances of the system — decided not to renew Lafayette’s charter. What might in another moment have been missteps in timing and communications instead forced Williams’ hand on a number of consequential decisions.

Declaring charter schools a failed “experiment with children’s lives,” one school board member who had been pushing the district to return to a more traditional model demanded that Williams begin opening direct-run schools, starting with Leah Chase. 

The architects of the grand experiment may not be opposed — but they are eager for answers to some big questions. 

How will the prospect of opening new schools impact a lagging, three-year effort to address declining enrollment by closing others?

New Orleans faces a singular variation on a common problem. School systems throughout the country are facing the one-two punch of dramatic enrollment losses and the end of federal COVID recovery aid, forcing painful and overdue decisions about shuttering buildings and laying off staff. The politics of deciding how to meet the moment — playing out on steroids nationwide — is a frequent career-ender for superintendents and board members.

Locally elected school boards are easily overwhelmed by community ire and often either prolong the pain by taking piecemeal steps — such as closing two or three schools when there are 10 too many — or kick the can down the road by leaving the decisions for their successors. As resources dwindle in the remaining schools, student achievement typically falls, fueling further dips in enrollment. 

By contrast, in New Orleans, an eight-year-old law — Act 91 — spells out the process of replacing poorly performing schools with better ones. Under the law, the district authorizes individual charter schools, which may be operated by networks or standalone education groups. 

When a school has underperformed for a certain period of time or has run afoul of financial or regulatory requirements, the district board must revoke its charter. The district can give the charter to another operator or simply close the school. The only way to deviate from the process is by vote of a supermajority of the Orleans Parish board. 

But there is no provision for the board or superintendent to unilaterally decide to reduce the number of schools. Citywide, there are an estimated 4,000 empty seats.

In 2022, the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans, which serves as a research and innovation hub for the system, that schools citywide were nearing a tipping point in terms of enrolling enough students to pay for a full array of academics and services. Post-Katrina, enrollment peaked in 2019 at 49,000, and by some 4,000 students, the organization’s analyses have shown. Birth rates are also in sharp decline, so the number of students will continue to drop in coming years.

Because almost all state and federal per-pupil funding in New Orleans is distributed according to enrollment, each school sets its own budget according to its ability to attract and retain students. Too many empty seats in any school, New Schools warned, directly impacts its ability to pay for the staff and programs needed to serve kids well. 

On average, last year, New Orleans’ K-8 schools had space for 550 students but enrolled 484, which equals a funding gap of $625,000. In its reports, New Schools has provided examples of the number of educators and programs that would have to be cut to make up that amount.

“You can’t drain resources out of schools five or 10 students at a time,” says Pence. “Lose 10 kids, that’s a teacher, maybe an art teacher — that’s always soul-crushing.”&�Բ�����;

After New Schools’s , Pence’s FirstLine was one of four charter networks that teamed up to consolidate six underenrolled schools into three buildings, eliminating 1,500 empty seats. The required the charter school organizations to work together to figure out which schools were most accessible to families and which three networks would run the remaining schools.

Charter operator InspireNOLA merged two of its K-8 schools into one building, while ARISE Schools and Crescent City Schools combined a school from each network into a single building to be run by Crescent City. The Collegiate Academies network merged two high schools, Rosenwald Collegiate Academy and Walter L. Cohen Prep, in Cohen’s brand-new building.

The district can reduce some excess capacity by closing underperforming schools instead of giving their charters to better-performing networks. But that alone would be unlikely to address the oversupply. Even if it could, the district needs a master plan to locate high-quality options in modernized buildings in every quadrant of the city. This means establishing how many schools should exist going forward, and how to make closure decisions that are not driven by school performance. 

“There are questions of fairness,” says Harris. “Some neighborhoods don’t have good options.”&�Բ�����;

For example, a large swath of the city known as New Orleans East has lots of students but not many schools. “Performance is a good and important thing to start with, but you don’t want kids traveling 10 miles to school,” he notes. “You want high performers spread out around the city.”

What is to stop underperforming schools slated to lose their charters from lobbying to become direct-run schools?

New Orleans’s system was designed to insulate high-stakes closure decisions from political pressure. In 2015, Louisiana enacted a law spelling out limits on the Orleans Parish School Board’s power over charter schools and requiring it to step in when they underperform for long periods of time. 

Legal parameters in place, the state returned the schools to the district. In 2017, NOLA Public Schools found charter operators for its . 

Since then, a small but vocal number of residents have demanded an end to charter schools in the district. A group called Erase the Board has routinely protested closures and backed school board candidates who agree that the state constitution requires the Orleans Parish School Board to operate like a conventional district. 

They have an ally in state Sen. Joseph Bouie Jr., who has campaigned to overturn Act 91, the law codifying the district’s obligations to charter schools. For almost a decade, they had gotten little traction — not even after he equated the system to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment— with the exception of a change to state law to allow a board supermajority to overrule the superintendent’s recommendations.

Events of the last few months may, however, have allowed charter opponents to breach the firewall. When state report cards were , several New Orleans schools earned failing grades. In December, Williams recommended closing one and revoking the charters of two others, to be given to other operators. 

By the board’s January meeting, though, no network had stepped up to run one of the schools losing its charter, the 500-student Lafayette Academy Charter School, so Williams . The board approved her request, but angrily. 

In the past, to present an announcement about a closure or change in management with some certainty about families’ options, superintendents and charter network leaders would have talked beforehand about who should take over the charter and its building. Lafayette’s building was freshly renovated and in a desirable location, so normally the superintendent’s final recommendation to the board would have specified which of the district’s 67 schools should occupy it going forward.

Earlier, at that same board meeting, Williams had explaining why the central office was to run traditional schools. To do so, districts typically need departments focused on things like curriculum and instruction, human resources, food service and other tasks performed independently by charter schools.

To pay for its responsibilities as a charter authorizer, NOLA Public Schools receives 2% of each school’s per-pupil funding, which is not enough to pay for the staff needed to oversee conventional schools. How this will be resolved is unclear, though most local leaders say there is no way the operation of a single school justifies the expense of creating the centralized infrastructure.

Unconvinced that the district could not simply open and run schools, the board’s new vice president, Leila Jacobs Eames, chastised the superintendent, saying she had asked repeatedly for the district to do so.

“It makes my blood boil to hear these excuses,” Jacobs Eames said. “As a superintendent, you really should have come with a plan to direct-run in your back pocket.”

Jacobs Eames also said it was time to end the all-charter district. “I am asking from you for a plan on future direct [run] schools” she railed. “This experiment with children’s lives has failed.”

Williams clapped back. She often gets requests from individual members, the superintendent said, but she needs clear marching orders from the board as a whole. Consequently, her highest priority has been creating the portfolio plan the board requested at the start of her tenure, outlining what the district should look like in the coming years. 

“I do feel somewhat attacked by the suggestion I should have had [a plan to direct-run Lafayette] in my back pocket,” Williams replied. “Because at the end of the day, what I have had in my back pocket has been marching orders from the board that were very specific.”&�Բ�����;

Board President Katie Baudouin agreed, in part. “We have not, as a board, asked you for a plan for when, how and why you might direct-run a school,” she said. “We have been clear about the goals for district optimization.”

Finally, there was broad unhappiness with the district’s communications with families and board members about Lafayette’s future. Jacobs Eames was angry that she had learned about the closure several nights before, on the evening news. 

A few days after the January meeting, the superintendent reversed herself, saying she would shutter Lafayette and ask the board in February to approve the opening of Leah Chase. By then, however, the deadline for the next year’s enrollment lottery was just days away, and neither the prospective new school nor Lafayette was an option.

Confusing communications about the transition, as well as its unfortunate timing, have reverberated , but the concern the charter community is left with is whether schools’ performance contracts can remain a chief driver of accountability.

“I’m afraid that what happened with [the Lafayette decision process] is it opens the door to the politics of closure,” says Roemer. “I get concerned that from now on, if a charter school is not operating at the level we want it to, the Orleans Parish School Board can step in and direct-run it.”

What happens now? How does the superintendent reshape a district still made up primarily of schools she doesn’t control — and hold the one she does to high standards?

In May, Williams previewed her for the board, which is scheduled to see the comprehensive version in August. To date, it does not detail an optimal number of schools or map where they should be located. 

Right now, half of New Orleans students attend a school that has an A or B rating on state report cards. Under the plan, the goal is for 80% to be enrolled in a high-performing school by 2028 — a rate that must be reflected in every part of the community. At the same time, segregation and racial and economic disparities must be reduced. 

Other factors, the superintendent said in an interview with The 74, include the need to offer a variety of curricular themes and models, such as Montessori and arts-focused programs, as well as contend with shifting demographics. The number of English learners in the city is increasing quickly, as is demand for offerings like language-immersion schools and programs focused on the arts. 

“We do know that some of those models lend themselves to smaller classrooms or to schools being a certain size,” she said. “When we think of district optimization, it’s not a linear thing where all we consider is the number of seats.”

Any proposal for future direct-run schools will be considered against the same criteria and priorities outlined in the portfolio plan, Williams said. District-operated programs are subject to the state quality standards that govern all traditional Louisiana schools. 

“I do see where people might be concerned, maybe even confused, about what this looks like for a district-run school in terms of accountability compared to charters,” she said. “But the accountability measures and standards will certainly be there. This includes financial audits and compliance monitoring for special education and for English learner services.”

Williams also acknowledged the concerns raised by creating a new direct-run school to replace a chronically underperforming charter. “It’s very similar to what’s happening now with the Leah Chase school,” she said. “It’s not the goal. I want us to be intentional and use data points to make those decisions and not as a workaround.”

Her goal is not to weaken accountability, Williams continued. “I also don’t expect this to be our answer to schools not on track to be renewed or schools that are not meeting the mark in terms of academic outcomes,” she said. “We’re dealing with children and families, and they deserve high-quality schools.”

Like other system leaders, Pence says she has no doubt this is the goal — and one shared by the city’s charter operators. “If the district wants to run schools, great, but we’re going to have to take some offline,” she says. “Closing schools, no matter what, is really hard. Everyone loves their school.” 

Correction: The combined ARISE and Crescent City school will be run by Crescent City.

Disclosure: The City Fund provides financial support to Collegiate Academies, New Schools for New Orleans and .

As she prepares to enroll at Spelman College in Atlanta, here are five things to know about Shepherd:

How she did it: Shepherd sent her bona fides — which include the publication of a book titled “Thirteen,” seats on the New Orleans mayor’s and superintendent’s youth advisory councils, and extensive community service — to every college or university she could find that waived the application fee. She also submitted her application to , an online portal that offers direct admissions to colleges whose criteria students meet. 

About those scholarships: KIPP New Orleans leaders believe Shepherd has received more scholarship offers, or nearly so, than any graduate, ever. Because of unprecedented delays caused by problems with this year’s FAFSA, her total tally is likely to keep rising as colleges and philanthropies continue processing awards. All told, so far her senior class has earned $26 million in scholarships.  

Where she’s headed: Shepherd is waitlisted at an Ivy she’d prefer not to name, but it wasn’t her first choice. She’s had her eyes on Spelman College for years — even if it wasn’t always clear how she’d get there: “My mom always told me to play my role and everything else would fall into place, and that’s exactly what happened. (They did also give me a full ride .)” Shepherd texted in response to The 74’s questions. “So I’ll be going to my dream school for free!”

After that: Shepherd plans to follow a political science degree with law school, after which the two-time winner of KIPP New Orleans’s Black Lives Matter writing contest plans to tackle some societal issues. “I want to be on the Supreme Court because I want to be a part of change to make a more fair, just and equitable society, and what better way to do that than from inside.”

Her inspiration: Shepherd was in kindergarten when her father died. More recently, she lost both of her maternal grandparents to COVID. “Education meant everything to them, so I didn’t really have a choice but to do well in school,” she says. When her grandmother passed, Shepherd channeled her grief into making her proud. “It made me feel like everything I do moving forward .”&�Բ�����;

When I went to work at the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans, I was proud to be a part of an organization dedicated to expanding and providing those resources. I was also proud that NSNO deferred to educators on how best to use them. Over the last five years, we’ve landed on an effective, but little-used practice: leveraging federal grants, such as matching grants, to bring in philanthropic dollars. 

Nonprofits and funders like NSNO understandably shy from applying for federal grants. They can be bureaucratic, difficult to win, and full of earmarks and constraints. Some people don’t even know these grants exist, and not every team has the capacity or time to complete complex applications on short deadlines.

But by embracing federal grants and pairing them with private funds, nonprofits can dramatically increase the resources provided to schools and ensure that their grant proposals are guided by the expertise of the philanthropic community.

At NSNO, we focused on finding federal grants to address one of our schools’ biggest priorities — strengthening the city’s teacher workforce.

Two years ago, NSNO won a $13 million Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program (TSL) grant to support teacher retention. We partnered with six of the largest charter management organizations in the city, which account for roughly 40% of the New Orleans teaching force. We then reached out to the Gates Foundation and earned an additional $900,000 in matching funds. With the foundation’s support, we set parameters for funding grounded in evidence-based best practices. Schools would need to offer performance bonuses for top teachers, for instance, establish new career pathways such as hybrid instructional coaching roles and offer targeted professional development for special educators. These priorities gave the schools autonomy to spend the funding as they saw fit.

Since then, schools that received TSL funds have increased their school leader retention from 82% to 88%. These schools have also outpaced non-TSL schools academically.

We’re now looking to expand these best practices to all the city’s public schools.

NSNO has also successfully managed a Supporting Effective Educator Development SEED grant, alongside Xavier University of Louisiana and Tulane University, to ensure the city has a diverse, effective teacher pipeline. The goal was to increase the percentage of Black teachers who were trained in culturally relevant practices — and then ensure that local teacher preparation programs got to decide how best to spend their funding.

The first SEED grant, in 2016, helped prepare 625 new educators, the majority of whom identified as teachers of color. Eighty-five percent of teachers who were trained or supported in SEED-funded programs stayed in their roles, far higher than the retention rates for both typical first-year teachers and the district overall. They also outperformed similarly experienced peers when it came to student achievement. This last year marked the end of year one of our second SEED grants. We surpassed our recruitment goal by bringing in 125 new teachers, roughly 75% of whom identify as Black.

As a result, the demographics of the teaching force now closely mirror the city’s population: The share of Black teachers rose from 53.5% in 2017-18 to 61.4% in 2021-22 in a city that is 58% Black.

Combined, these two grants provided our schools with a total of $30 million additional dollars, bringing hundreds of new educators into classrooms and implementing compensation strategies that have retained many more. This can serve as an example for other nonprofits in how to leverage the strengths of philanthropy and federal grants to maximize their effectiveness and create lasting change.